Planet Stories - Contents and Reception

Contents and Reception

Fiction House apparently made the decision to launch Planet Stories so quickly that there was little time for Reiss to obtain new stories, so he worked with Julius Schwartz and other authors' agents to fill the first issue. The results were unremarkable, but Reiss was energetic, and was able to improve the quality of fiction in succeeding issues, though he occasionally apologized to the readers for printing weak material. The magazine was exclusively focused on interplanetary adventures, often taking place in primitive societies that would now be regarded as "sword and sorcery" settings, and was aimed at a young readership; the result was a mixture of what became known as space opera and planetary romances—melodramatic tales of action and adventure on alien planets and in interplanetary space. Planet relied on a few authors to provide the bulk of its fiction in the early years, with Nelson Bond providing eight lead stories, some of them novels. Fourteen more were written by Ray Cummings and Ross Rocklynne; and Leigh Brackett was also a regular contributor, with seventeen stories in total published over the lifetime of the magazine.

The letter column in Planet was titled "The Vizigraph"; it was very active, with long letters from an engaged readership. It often printed letters from established writers, and from fans who would go on to become well known professionally: Damon Knight's letters are described by sf historian Mike Ashley as "legendary"; and Robert Silverberg commented in a letter in the Summer 1950 issue that Ray Bradbury "certainly gets some original ideas, if not good ones". The editors put a good deal of effort into keeping the letter column friendly and lively; contemporary writer and editor Robert Lowndes recalls that "Reiss was sincere and urbane; Wilbur enjoyed taking his coat off and being one of the crowd".

Despite the focus on melodramatic space adventure, the fiction in Planet Stories improved over the next few years, largely due to the work of Brackett and Bradbury. Both writers set many of their stories on a romanticized version of Mars that owed much to the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Brackett's writing improved during the 1940s from formulaic pulp adventure to a more mature style, and she became the most accomplished writer of planetary romances of her day. She wrote a well-received series of stories featuring adventurer Eric John Stark, which began in the Summer 1949 Planet with "Queen of the Martian Catacombs". Her work had a strong influence on other writers, in particular Gardner F. Fox, Lin Carter and Marion Zimmer Bradley, Brackett later argued that "the so-called space opera is the folk-tale, the hero-tale of our particular niche in history". Also arguing in support of Planet Stories, science fiction critic John Clute has commented that "the content was far more sophisticated than the covers".

Bradbury's work for Planet included two of the stories that he later incorporated into The Martian Chronicles, including "The Million Year Picnic"; only one other story in the series had appeared before this. He also collaborated on a story with Leigh Brackett, "Lorelei of the Red Mist", based on an idea of hers, which appeared in the Summer of 1946. His stories for Planet demonstrate his reservations about the advance of technology, in particular "The Golden Apples of the Sun" (November 1953), and "A Sound of Thunder" (January 1954, reprinted from the June 28, 1952 issue of Collier's Weekly). Bradbury's work in Planet Stories is regarded by one pulp historian, Tim de Forest, as "the magazine's most important contribution to the genre".

Several other well-known writers appeared in Planet Stories, including Isaac Asimov, Clifford Simak, James Blish, Fredric Brown and Damon Knight. Asimov's story, originally titled "Pilgrimage", appeared in 1942; Asimov had been unable to sell the piece elsewhere, and rewrote it numerous times for different editors, adding a religious element at John Campbell's request, and removing it again when Malcolm Reiss asked for further changes. Reiss bought it but changed the name to "Black Friar of the Flame".

Jerome Bixby, who took over as editor in 1950, was a published writer and was knowledgeable about sf, though he had primarily written western fiction. In his short tenure he did much to improve the magazine, persuading the established writers to produce better material and finding unusual variations on the interplanetary adventure theme such as Poul Anderson's "Duel on Syrtis" in March 1951, about an Earthman tracking an alien on Mars, and Theodore Sturgeon's "The Incubi on Planet X", about aliens who kidnap Earth women. After Bixby's departure in 1952, Planet's major contribution to the genre was the discovery of Philip K. Dick, whose first sale, "Beyond Lies the Wub", appeared in the July 1952 issue. Dick went on to sell another four stories to Planet over the next two years, including "James P. Crow", in which a human suffers discrimination in a world of robots.

Planet Stories clearly targeted a young readership, and the simultaneous launch in 1939 of Planet Comics may have been instrumental in attracting young readers to science fiction, but Ashley suggests that it is more likely that Planet Stories attracted experienced readers of the genre who "still yearned for the early days of sf". Critic and sf historian Thomas Clareson has commented that "Planet seemed to look backward towards the 1930s and earlier", an impression that was strengthened by the extensive use of interior artwork by Frank Paul, who had been the cover artist for the early Gernsback magazines in the 1920s. Paul's distinctive style was strongly associated with the early years of the field. The cover art was also melodramatic, with beautiful women—sometimes human, sometimes princesses from other planets—and threatening aliens. The subheading on the cover read "Strange Adventures on Other Worlds – The Universe of Future Centuries" until the end of 1946.

Although almost every story that appeared in Planet could be described as space opera, there was some variety of approach to the basic themes. Earth was sometimes threatened, but more often the action took place on other worlds, bringing Earthmen into local conflicts. This often involved beautiful native princesses, though the romantic storylines were stereotyped: in one story, Carl Selwyn's "Venus Has Green Eyes", which appeared in Fall 1940, the Venusian princess is dissuaded from her hatred of humans when the hero seizes her and kisses her; she slaps him, but succumbs to his charm. Some respite from these depictions of women was provided by Leigh Brackett, who described her own heroines as "usually on the bitchy side—warm-blooded, hot-tempered, but gutty and intelligent" (with "bitchy" intended as a compliment). During World War II, it was in Planet Stories that a reader was most likely to come across a female character who could fight, instead of merely being fought over. Sex itself had long been taboo in the pulp magazines, but some stories in Planet depicted sexuality more directly than the competing magazines would. The readers were not always accepting; one reader in a letter in 1949 supported "jettisoning the taboos", but a letter writer in 1946 objected to "Lorelei of the Red Mist", saying that he needed "a pint of Listerine to wash the dirty taste out of my mouth". The cover artwork generally emphasized sex as well, with what sf author and critic Harry Harrison sardonically referred to as "sexual dimorphism in space": heavy, functional spacesuits for the men, and transparent suits through which bikinis or swimsuits could be seen for the women.

Hannes Bok contributed much of the interior artwork, and the covers were often by Allen Anderson during the early years. Later, Kelly Freas became a frequent cover artist. One of the best artists to work on Planet was Alexander Leydenfrost, whose work, according to Clareson, "epitomized much of what Planet Stories represented in the 1940s", though his cover artwork was less impressive than his black-and-white interior illustrations. Artist and sf historian David Hardy has described Leydenfrost's black and white illustrations as "almost Rembrandtian in his use of light and shade".