page_title: Fantasy Book
section_title: Contents and reception
hierarchical_section_title: Fantasy Book / Contents and reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover, Fantasy Book, v1n1
context_page_description: Fantasy Book is a defunct semi-professional American science fiction magazine that published eight issues between 1947 and 1951. The editor was William Crawford, and the publisher was Crawford's Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc. Crawford had problems distributing the magazine, and his budget limited the quality of the paper he could afford and the artwork he was able to buy, but he attracted submissions from some well-known writers, including Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, A. E. van Vogt, Robert Bloch, and L. Ron Hubbard. The best-known story to appear in the magazine was Cordwainer Smith's first sale, "Scanners Live in Vain", which was later included in the first Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology, and is now regarded as one of Smith's finest works. Jack Gaughan, later an award-winning science fiction artist, made his first professional sale to Fantasy Book, for the cover illustrating Smith's story.
context_section_description: Crawford still had in inventory stories he had acquired for Marvel Tales over a decade earlier, and "People of the Crater" by Andre Norton (under the pseudonym Andrew North), which appeared in the first issue, was one of these.  There was also a story by A. E. van Vogt, "The Cataaaa", and Robert Bloch's "The Black Lotus", which had first appeared in 1935 in Unusual Stories.    Crawford's budget limited the quality of the artwork he could acquire—he sometimes was unable to pay for art—but he managed to get Charles McNutt, later better known as Charles Beaumont, to contribute interior illustrations to the first issue. Wendy Bousfield, a science fiction historian, describes his work as "strikingly original", and considers the first issue to be the most artistically attractive of the whole run.
  The next two issues featured covers by Lora Crozetti on the de luxe editions; sf historian Mike Ashley considers both to be "appalling", and Bousfield describes them as "crude and uninspired".  Van Vogt  appeared in both issues, with "The Ship of Darkness" and "The Great Judge", and the second issue featured the first installment of The Machine-God Laughs, by Festus Pragnell, which was serialized over three issues.  The fourth issue saw the beginning of another serial: Black Goldfish, by John Taine (a pseudonym for the mathematician Eric Temple Bell); it ran for two issues.  Bousfield describes both serials as "among the weakest stories FB published".  A third serial, Journey to Barkut, by Murray Leinster, began in the seventh issue and was left incomplete when the magazine ceased publication.  It subsequently appeared in full in Startling Stories in 1952.
  L. Ron Hubbard, shortly to become the founder of Dianetics, the precursor of Scientology, contributed "Battle of the Wizards" to issue 5, and the sixth issue saw two notable stories.  One was "The Little Man on the Subway", by Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl, under the pseudonym "James MacCreigh"; Asimov had rewritten Pohl's first draft and submitted it to John Campbell at Unknown in 1941, who had rejected it.  The other was "Scanners Live in Vain", by Cordwainer Smith.  This was a pseudonym for Paul A. Linebarger, a professor of Asian politics and a military advisor, who had written the story, inspired by his knowledge of psychology, some years before; he tried to sell it to the leading SF magazines during the war, but had been rejected. The story was Smith's first sale, and is now regarded as a classic—SF critic John Clute describes it as "one of [Smith's] finest works", Pohl said that "it is perhaps the chief reason why [Fantasy Book] is remembered", and it was later included in the first volume of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthologies voted on by members of the Science Fiction Writers of America.  Jack Gaughan, later an award-winning artist in the field, provided the cover for issue 6; it was his first professional sale.  Bousfield considers it the only "truly outstanding" cover of the magazine's run.
  SF critics Malcolm Edwards and Peter Nicholls describe Fantasy Book as "generally an undistinguished and erratic magazine", but Ashley comments that small-press magazines such as Fantasy Book, by providing an outlet for stories that could not sell elsewhere, provided a valuable service to the genre.
caption: The first issue (1947); the cover is by "Milo"
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