page_title: Fantastic (magazine)
section_title: Browne and Fairman
hierarchical_section_title: Fantastic (magazine) / Contents and reception / Browne and Fairman
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of October 1956 issue of Fantastic. Artist is Ed Valigursky. Copyright was either Valigursky, or more likely Ziff-Davis, who published the magazine.
context_page_description: Fantastic was an American digest-size fantasy and science fiction magazine, published from 1952 to 1980. It was founded by the publishing company Ziff Davis as a fantasy companion to Amazing Stories. Early sales were good, and the company quickly decided to switch Amazing from pulp format to digest, and to cease publication of their other science fiction pulp, Fantastic Adventures. Within a few years sales fell, and Howard Browne, the editor, was forced to switch the focus to science fiction rather than fantasy. Browne lost interest in the magazine as a result and the magazine generally ran poor-quality fiction in the mid-1950s, under Browne and his successor, Paul W. Fairman.
  At the end of the 1950s, Cele Goldsmith took over as editor of both Fantastic and Amazing Stories, and quickly invigorated the magazines, bringing in many new writers and making them, in the words of one science fiction historian, the "best-looking and brightest" magazines in the field. Goldsmith helped to nurture the early careers of writers such as Roger Zelazny and Ursula K.
context_section_description: The first issue of Fantastic was impressive, with a cover that sf historian Mike Ashley has described as "one of the most captivating of all first issues"; the painting, by Barye Phillips and Leo Summers, illustrated Kris Neville's "The Opal Necklace".  The fiction included some stories by well known names; in particular, Raymond Chandler's "Professor Bingo's Snuff" would have caught readers' eyes—the story had appeared the year before in Park East magazine, but would have been new to most readers.  It was a short mystery in which the fantasy element was invisibility, achieved by magical snuff. Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury also contributed stories, and the issue led with "Six and Ten Are Johnny", by Walter M. Miller.  The rear cover reprinted Pierre Roy's painting "Danger on the Stairs", which depicted a snake on a staircase; it was an odd choice, but subsequent back covers were more natural fits for a fantasy magazine.  The quality of the fiction continued to be high for the first year; sf historian Mike Ashley comments that almost every story in the first seven issues was of high quality, and historian David Kyle regards it as an "outstandingly successful experiment". Science fiction bibliographer Donald Tuck dissents, however, regarding the first few years as containing "little of note", and James Blish wrote a contemporary review of the second issue which found it lacking: Blish dismissed three of the seven stories in the Fall 1952 issue as being essentially crime stories written for the sf market, and commented that of the remaining four, only two were "reasonably competent and craftsmanlike".
  Other well-known writers appeared in the early issues, including Shirley Jackson, B. Traven, Truman Capote and Evelyn Waugh. Mickey Spillane had written a story called "The Woman With Green Skin", but had been unable to sell it; Browne offered to buy it on condition that he had permission to rewrite it as he wished.  This was agreed and Browne scrapped Spillane's text completely, writing a new story called "The Veiled Woman" and publishing it as by Spillane in the November–December 1952 issue.  The issue sold so well it was reprinted, with over 300,000 copies sold.
  The emphasis was on fantasy, and much of it was "slick" fantasy—the sort of genre fiction that the upmarket slick magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post, were willing to buy.  Some science fiction appeared as well in the first couple of years, including Isaac Asimov's "Sally", which portrays a world in which cars have been given robotic brains and are intelligent.  In 1955 it was decided to move the focus from fantasy to sf: in Browne's words, "Stories of straight fantasy were largely eliminated and straight science-fiction substituted, cover subject matter became of a scientific nature, the words "science fiction" appeared under the title, interior artwork was tightened up to replace the loose, 'arty' kind of drawing we had been using."  Sales rose 17% within two issues.  Browne was uninterested in science fiction, however, and the quality of the fiction soon dropped, with a small stable of writers producing much of Fantastic's fiction under house names over the next couple of years.  By the start of 1956 the fiction in Fantastic was, in the opinion of sf historian Mike Ashley, "[in] a trough of hack predictability", but there was some inventiveness evident from newer writers such as Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison and Randall Garrett.
  Although Browne had been unable to make Fantastic successful by specializing in fantasy, he was still interested in the fantasy genre, and experimented in the December 1955 issue with the theme of wish fulfilment.  He dropped the words "Science Fiction" from the cover, and published five stories, all of which dealt with male fantasies in one form or another.  The cover showed a man walking through a wall to find a woman undressing; the art was by Ed Valigursky and illustrated Paul Fairman's "All Walls Were Mist".  Reader reaction, according to Browne, was almost entirely favorable, and he continued to publish occasional stor
caption: The second wish fulfilment cover, for October 1956, by Ed Valigursky
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