page_title: Satellite Science Fiction
section_title: Contents
hierarchical_section_title: Satellite Science Fiction / Contents
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover, Satellite Science Fiction, February 1959
context_page_description: Satellite Science Fiction was an American science-fiction magazine published from October 1956 to April 1959 by Leo Margulies' Renown Publications. Initially, Satellite was digest sized and ran a full-length novel in each issue with a handful of short stories accompanying it. The policy was intended to help it compete against paperbacks, which were taking a growing share of the market. Sam Merwin edited the first two issues; Margulies took over when Merwin left and then hired Frank Belknap Long for the February 1959 issue. That issue saw the format change to letter size, in the hope that the magazine would be more prominent on newsstands. The experiment was a failure and Margulies closed the magazine when the sales figures came in.
  The novels included the original version of Philip K. Dick's first novel, The Cosmic Puppets, and well-received work by Algis Budrys and Jack Vance, though the quality was not always high. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and L. Sprague de Camp were among the short story contributors.
context_section_description: Paperbacks were a growing share of the science fiction (sf) market in the mid-1950s; they were successful partly because they offered novels, which most readers preferred to short stories.  Margulies decided to combat the threat from paperbacks by including a novel in every issue of the magazine.  This was a strategy that had been used by pulp sf magazines like Startling Stories, for which Margulies had been editorial director.  It was not common in digest magazines, where a story as short as 15,000 words might be listed as a novel on the contents page, but Margulies acquired true novel-length works, with an average length of about 40,000 words, for Satellite.  Margulies used the slogan "The Magazine That Is a Book!" in advertisements for the magazine, and the tagline "A Complete Science Fiction Novel in Every Issue!" appeared on many of the covers.
  The first two issues featured Algis Budrys's novel "The Man From Earth", and Philip K. Dick's debut novel, under the title "A Glass of Darkness".  Both were revised and appeared as paperbacks in the next couple of years, titled Man of Earth and The Cosmic Puppets, respectively.  The high standard of these two issues could not be maintained, and in the opinion of sf historians Malcolm Edwards and Mike Ashley the magazine's quality declined thereafter.  Hal Clement's "Planet for Plunder", which appeared in the third issue, was told from the point of view of an alien on a mission to Earth.  It was too short to fit Margulies' policy of publishing a lead novel, so Merwin wrote additional chapters from the human perspective, and alternated the two points of view in the published version.  Ashley speaks highly of Clement's original novella, which was eventually published without the additions in 1972, and comments that Merwin's additions serve as "an object lesson in how to ruin a good story".  Edwards and Ashley single out two other novels as worthy of mention: J. T. McIntosh's One Million Cities (in the August 1958 issue), and Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao (December 1957), described by sf critics Peter Nicholls and David Langford as "one of the most intelligent uses in genre sf" of the Whorf hypothesis – the theory that the language one speaks determines one's perception of reality.  Frank Belknap Long's novel Mission to a Distant Star (February1958) was at one point considered for publication as the first novel in the planned Renown Books line.
  The novels in the first five issues were all original, but in August 1957 the lead novel was a reprint: John Christopher's The Year of the Comet, which had been published in the UK in 1955, but had not yet appeared in the US.  More reprints followed, including Charles Eric Maine's Wall of Fire, E. C. Tubb's The Resurrected Man, and Noel Loomis's The Man With Absolute Motion.  Each had been published in the previous few years in the UK, but not in the US.
  Since the word count for the whole magazine was only about 53,000 words, there was little space for other stories or for non-fiction features, and as a result the accompanying stories were usually very short expositions of an idea or joke; in Michael Shaara's "Four-Billion Dollar Door", the first manned trip to the moon lands successfully but discovers that the door has frozen shut and cannot be opened.  Arthur C. Clarke and Dal Stevens were frequent contributors of short fiction, and there were appearances by other well-known writers such as Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp.  Margulies was aware that a couple of pages of H. G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine had been omitted from every printing of the novel since its original serialization in 1894–1895 in The New Review, so he paid for a library search and was rewarded by the discovery of the magazine containing the missing pages in the New York Public Library, across the street from his office.  The omitted material, which dealt with a far future where humans have degenerated to small, rabbit-like creatures, was reprinted in the August 1958 issue.
  Sam Moskowitz began a book review column in February 1957 that quickly turned int
caption: The first letter-sized issue, dated February 1959; the cover is by Alex Schomburg.[19]
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