Quality not Quantity

With only six surviving US sf magazines it would have been only right to expect that quality would improve. Now there were no longer the opportunist publishers who thought sf would provide a quick profit and who had little interest in the field. The markets could pick the cream of the material available. It was going to be harder on the new, upcoming writer, but good editors should always be on the lookout for rising talent, and therefore quality would prevail.

In fact the market was even smaller than six, because there were only four editors in the United States and one in Britain. At the close of 1960, the four were John W. Campbell, Jr, at Analog, Horace L. Gold (soon to be Frederik Pohl) at Galaxy and If, Robert P. Mills (soon to be Avram Davidson) at F&SF, and Cele Goldsmith at Amazing Stories and Fantastic. In Britain, it was John Carnell at New Worlds, Science Fantasy and Science Fiction Adventures.

The big three remained Astounding, Galaxy and F&SF. Some measure of their dominance of the field can be assessed from the Hugo awards, given at the annual World Science Fiction Convention. Although they had first been awarded in 1953, they did not settle down to a consistent basis until the 1958 convention in Los Angeles. That year saw the award for best magazine go to F&SF, while both the winning novel and short story, Fritz Leiber's ‘The Big Time’ and Avram Davidson's tale of aliens incognito, ‘Or All the Seas With Oysters’, came from Galaxy. With the Detroit convention in 1959 the picture became more concrete. Hitherto the awards had been decided by a straight vote. Now stories were first nominated and then a selection of the nominations were put forward to a final ballot. In the novelette and short story categories there were a total of 18 stories nominated.

The tally by magazine gives seven each to Astounding and F&SF, and one each to If, Venture, Vanguard and the anthology Star SF 4. The winners, ‘The Big Front Yard’ by Clifford Simak and ‘That Hellbound Train’ by Robert Bloch (which was really a fantasy rather than sf), came from Astounding and F&SF respectively.