At the start of the 1950s there were few sf magazines outside the Englishspeaking world, and those that did exist mostly featured reprints from American or British sources. Yet by the end of the sixties there would be a thriving international sf community. This appendix plots, albeit briefly, the growth and development of the sf magazine around the world. For simplicity I shall follow it country by country, but I also wish to make connections between countries as sf developed. Consequently this appendix is not in alphabetical order by country, but follows an approximate chronological/ geographical sequence.

Before following that thread, however, there is a pertinent question to consider. Although the dozen or so countries covered below have all developed a number of professional sf writers, few of those have become recognized beyond their own country. The writers who did begin to establish an international reputation, such as Stanislaw Lem and Boris and Arkady Strugatski, came from countries that did not develop a science-fiction tradition or have any significant sf magazines. This suggests that the argument levied against American and British sf – that the sf magazines ghettoized science fiction and thereby reduced its standing – has some grounding. As I have explored in these first two volumes, and will bring to a conclusion in the third, the answer is not as simple as that. In looking at sf in the former Soviet Union and Poland we are faced with quite different socio-political cultures from those of America and Britain. In fact it can be demonstrated that science fiction was developing in the Eastern Bloc in much the same way as it had developed under Gernsback in the United States, but varying factors, not least political oppression and the social status in these countries, limited writers’ ability to develop.

Yet, when they had the opportunity, it was invariably to the scientific and technical journals that they turned. Stanislaw Lem's very first novel, ‘Czlowiek z Marsa’ (‘A Man from Mars’), was serialized in the Russian magazine Nowy Swiat Przygót (New World of Adventures) in 1946. Russian science- fiction stories had appeared from time to time in such magazines as Round the World, World Pathfinder and World of Adventures before the revolution, and even in the comparatively enlightened twenties, Krasnaja Nov serialized the original version of Alexei Tolstoi's Aelita in 1922.