The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines, Volumes 1-3 by Mike Ashley
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Overview: Mike Ashley is the author and editor of more than 60 books that in total have sold over a million copies worldwide. A noted authority on the science fiction genre, the three-volume The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines is a recast version of his earlier (1974, 1975, 1976, 1978) four-volume work, The History of the Science Fiction Magazine. The initial volumes were anthologies that contained lengthy critical introductions to the stories. The stories were dropped in the later volumes and Ashley concentrated on the historical aspects of the genre.
Genre: Fiction > Sci-fi/Fantasy
Volume 1: The Time Machines: The Story of the Science Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (2000):
This is the first of three volumes that chart the history of the science fiction magazine from the earliest days to the present. This first volume looks at the exuberant years of the pulp magazines. It traces the growth and development of the science fiction magazines from when Hugo Gernsback launched the very first, Amazing Stories, in 1926, through to the birth of the atomic age and the death of the pulps in the early 1950s. These were the days of the youth of science fiction, when it was brash, raw and exciting: the days of the first great space operas by Edward Elmer Smith and Edmond Hamilton, through the cosmic thought variants by Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson and others to the early 1940s when John W. Campbell at Astounding did his best to nurture the infant genre into adulthood. Under him such major names as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon emerged who, along with other such new talents as Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, helped create modern science fiction. For more than forty years magazines were at the heart of science fiction and this book considers how the magazines, and their publishers, editors and authors influenced the growth and perception of this fascinating genre.
Volume 2: Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970 (2005):
When we think of science fiction, we think primarily of movies and television shows, but this assumption belies the fact that the genre’s initial rise to prominence came in pulp magazines. With lurid covers and titles like Galaxy, If, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, the science fiction pulp magazines created the visual and thematic vocabulary that continues to animate today’s science fiction blockbusters. In Transformations, the second volume in his acclaimed three-volume history of science fiction magazines, science fiction historian Mike Ashley brings his unparalleled knowledge to bear on the period from the beginning of the Cold War through the end of the 1960s, an era of tremendous change in the writing of and the marketplace for science fiction. Ashley begins his story with the decline of the pulp magazines at the end of the 1940s and their replacement by new digest-sized and glossy magazines. That switch, and the increased respectability that came with it, coincided with a true golden age of science fiction writing in the early 1950s, with such giants of the genre as Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, and Harlan Ellison all publishing regularly in a wide range of such magazines. As Ashley shows, by the end of the decade, sales had slumped, all but six of the science fiction magazines had folded, and the future looked bleak–until the surprising rebirth of the genre through the work of British writers Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard. Ashley also considers how the popularity of Star Trek and the movie version of 2001: A Space Odyssey influenced the future of the science fiction magazine.
Volume 3: Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazine from 1970-1980 (2007):
In the 1970s science fiction exploded into the popular consciousness, appearing everywhere along the cultural spectrum—from David Bowie’s alien stage persona to the massively successful global juggernaut that was Star Wars. With the American involvement in Vietnam reaching its bitter conclusion, the Apollo moon program ending, and awareness of humanity’s destructive impact on the environment increasing, our planet began to seem a smaller, lonelier, more fragile place—and the escapist appeal of science fiction grew.
Corresponding with these tumultuous events was a period of significant American economic decline, and, as Mike Ashley shows in Gateways to Forever, the once-enormously-popular science fiction magazines struggled to survive. The third volume of this award-winning series chronicles the publications’ most difficult period so far. The decade began with the death of John Campbell Jr., the man who launched the magazine Astonishing, and with it science fiction’s prominence as a genre. The widespread popularization of sci-fi imagery reflected a newly diversified market—new anthologies, fanzines, role-playing games, comics, and blockbuster films all fought for the attention and money of sci-fi fans. Ashley shows how the traditional magazines coped with these setbacks but also how they, as always, looked to the future, as the decade closed and the earliest precursors to the Internet emerged.
Mike Ashley’s groundbreaking history is a monument to science fiction’s evolution. As the genre continues to infiltrate mainstream literature, Gateways to Forever is essential reading for anyone interested in seeing how it all began.
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