Super Science Stories - Contents and Reception

Contents and Reception

Because of the low rates of pay, the stories submitted to Super Science Stories in its first year had generally already been rejected elsewhere. However, Pohl was a member of the Futurians, a group of science fiction fans that included Isaac Asimov, C.M. Kornbluth, Richard Wilson and Donald Wollheim; the Futurians were eager to become professional writers and were eager to submit stories to Pohl. The Futurians were prolific; in Pohl's first year as an editor he bought a total of fifteen stories from them for the two magazines. Pohl contributed material himself, usually in collaboration with one or more of the Futurians. Particularly after his marriage to Doris Baumgardt in August 1940, Pohl realized that his salary covered their apartment rent with almost no money left over, and began to augment his income by selling to himself as well as to other magazines. The first story Pohl ever published that was not a collaboration was "The Dweller in the Ice", which appeared in the January 1941 Super Science Stories. All of the stories Pohl bought from himself were published under pseudonyms, though in fact Pohl used pseudonyms for everything he wrote until the 1950s.

The first issue, dated March 1940, contained "Emergency Refueling", James Blish's first published story, two stories by John Russell Fearn (one under the pseudonym "Thornton Ayre"), fiction by Frank Belknap Long, Ross Rocklynne, Raymond Gallun, Harl Vincent and Dean O'Brien; and a poem by Kornbluth, "The Song of the Rocket", under the pseudonym "Gabriel Barclay". Blish's most notable contribution to the magazine was "Sunken Universe", which appeared in the May 1942 issue under the pseudonym "Arthur Merlyn". This later formed part of "Surface Tension", one of Blish's most popular stories. Other writers whose first story appeared in Super Science Stories include Ray Bradbury, Chad Oliver, and Wilson Tucker. Bradbury's first sale, "Pendulum", was bought by Norton, and appeared in the November 1941 issue; Tucker's writing career began with "Interstellar Way Station" in May 1941, and Oliver's "The Land of Lost Content" appeared in the November 1950 Super Science Stories. Asimov appeared four times in Super Science Stories, starting with "Robbie", his first Robot story, under the title "Strange Playfellow".

Although most stories submitted to Super Science Stories were rejects from the better-paying markets such as Astounding Science Fiction, Pohl recalled in his memoirs that John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding, would occasionally pass on a good story by a prolific author because he felt readers did not want to see the same authors in every issue. As a result Pohl was able to print L. Sprague de Camp's Genus Homo, in the March 1941 Super Science Stories, and Robert Heinlein's "Let There Be Light" and "Lost Legacy" in the May 1940 and November 1941 issues: these were stories which, in Pohl's opinion, "would have looked good anywhere". Pohl also suggested that Campbell rejected some of Heinlein's stories because they contained mild references to sex. A couple of readers did complain, with one disgusted letter writer commenting "If you are going to continue to print such pseudosophisticated, pre-prep-school tripe as "Let There Be Light", you should change the name of the mag to Naughty Future Funnies".

The second run of Super Science Stories included some fiction that had first appeared in the Canadian reprint edition, which outlasted the U.S. original and printed eleven stories that had been acquired but not printed by the time Popular shut Super Science Stories and Astonishing down in early 1943. These included "The Black Sun Rises" by Henry Kuttner, "And Then – the Silence", by Ray Bradbury, and "The Bounding Crown" by James Blish. From mid-1950 a reprint feature was established. This led to some reader complaints, with one correspondent pointing out that it was particularly galling to discover that Blish's "Sunken Universe", reprinted in the November 1950 issue, was a better story than the original material in the magazine. The magazine also reprinted stories from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, which Popular had acquired from Munsey Publishing in 1941.

Some of the original stories were well-received: for example, Ray Bradbury's "The Impossible", which appeared in the November 1949 issue, and was later included in Bradbury's book The Martian Chronicles, is described by sf historian Raymond Thompson as a "haunting ... comment on man's attempts to realize his conflicting hopes and dreams". Thompson also comments positively on Poul Anderson's early story "Terminal Quest", in Super Science Stories's final issue, dated August 1951; and on Arthur C. Clarke's "Exile of the Eons" in the March 1950 issue. John D. MacDonald also contributed good material.

The book reviews in Super Science Stories were of a higher standard than elsewhere in the field, and historian Paul Carter regards Astonishing and Super Science Stories as the place where "book reviewing for the first time began to merit the term 'literary criticism'", adding that "it was in those magazines that the custom began of paying attention to science fiction on the stage and screen also". The artwork was initially amateurish, and although it improved over the years, even the better artists such as Virgil Finlay and Lawrence Stevens continued to produce cliched depictions of half-dressed women threatened by robots or aliens. H.R. van Dongen, later a prolific cover artist for Astounding, made his first science fiction art sale to Super Science Stories for the cover of the September 1950 issue.

Sf historian Mike Ashley regards Super Science Stories as marginally better than its companion magazine, Astonishing, adding "both are a testament to what a good editor can do with a poor budget". According to sf critics Brian Stableford and Peter Nicholls, the magazine "had a greater importance to the history of sf than the quality of its stories would suggest; it was an important training ground".