Future Science Fiction

Overview

Future Science Fiction was an American science fiction magazine published in two runs, from 1939 to 1943 and from 1950 to 1960, as part of Louis Silberkleit's Columbia Publications chain of pulps and digests. Edited for most of its life by Robert W. Lowndes, it was a modest-budget but durable title that survived wartime mergers, a seven-year suspension and the transition from pulp to digest format before finally closing in 1960.

The Silberkleit Chain

Future was one of several science fiction titles issued by publisher Louis H. Silberkleit under imprints including Blue Ribbon Magazines, Double Action Magazines and Columbia Publications. Silberkleit entered the science fiction field in 1939 with companion titles, sharing editorial staff and production resources across the chain. This economy of operation allowed the magazines to survive on smaller circulations than the market leaders, but it also made them vulnerable to paper shortages and shifting costs.

Launch Under Charles Hornig

The magazine began in November 1939 under the title Future Fiction, edited by Charles D. Hornig, a young editor who had previously run a fan magazine and worked for Hugo Gernsback. Hornig edited the first five issues. In 1940 the editorship passed to Robert W. Lowndes, a member of the Futurians fan group, whose name would become inseparable from the magazine for the rest of its existence.

Robert W. Lowndes and the Wartime Mergers

Lowndes edited Future through a complicated wartime sequence of mergers and retitlings. In October 1941 the magazine was combined with its sister title Science Fiction to form Future Combined with Science Fiction. It then appeared as Future Fantasy and Science Fiction before the chain's wartime economics forced suspension with the July 1943 issue. The mergers were typical of the period: combining two struggling titles preserved a single subscription list and newsstand presence when paper rationing made separate publication impossible.

Revival in 1950

Lowndes revived the magazine in May 1950, in the postwar boom that briefly supported dozens of science fiction titles. The revived Future appeared under variant titles — including Future Science Fiction Stories and Science Fiction Stories — and settled into the 1950s market at prices rising from fifteen cents in its pulp days to thirty-five cents as a digest. For its first years back it kept the pulp format, a survivor of a vanishing style, before converting to digest size with issue 28 in late 1955.

Format Changes

The magazine's physical history mirrors the industry's. As a pulp it ran 112 pages; wartime and postwar economies trimmed it to 96 pages at one point, and as a digest it reached 128 pages. Silberkleit's chain was slow to abandon the pulp format compared with rivals, and Future's mid-1950s conversion came as the pulp market collapsed entirely. The digest version carried the title through the remainder of the decade.

Editorial Character

Lowndes was known as an editor who made limited budgets go far. He bought from new writers as well as established names, published science articles and lively letter columns alongside fiction, and coordinated Future with the chain's other titles — Science Fiction Quarterly and, briefly, Dynamic Science Fiction — as an informal family of magazines. His long association with the Futurians connected the magazine to the fan culture from which much of postwar science fiction grew.

Final Years and Closure

By the late 1950s the American science fiction magazine market had contracted sharply, following the collapse of the American News Company distribution network in 1957. Columbia's chain, always operating on thin margins, could not sustain its titles indefinitely. Future Science Fiction ended with its April 1960 issue, closing a twenty-one-year, two-part history.

Place in Science Fiction History

Future was never the field's leading magazine, but its persistence — through mergers, suspension, revival and format change — makes it a useful lens on the economics of mid-century science fiction publishing. Under Lowndes it gave early opportunities to writers, maintained a loyal readership, and demonstrated how a small, tightly run chain could keep titles alive long after better-financed competitors had disappeared.

Future's bibliographic complexity — its mergers, combined titles and variant revivals — has made it a byword among collectors, but that complexity is itself the historical evidence. Each retitling records a decision forced by paper supply, distribution or price: the October 1941 combination with Science Fiction, the wartime suspension after July 1943, the 1950 revival as the market boomed, and the 1955 digest conversion with issue 28. The magazine's prices trace the era's inflation in miniature, from fifteen cents as a pulp to thirty-five cents as a digest, and its page counts — 112 pages, trimmed to 96, then 128 as a digest — record the same pressures in physical form. Lowndes's achievement was to keep a recognizable magazine alive through all of it, maintaining departments and a stable of writers that gave Future an identity independent of its current title. When the end came in April 1960, it came with the general collapse of the small-chain digest business after the American News Company's failure — the same event that closed most of Future's contemporaries.

For researchers, the magazine's two runs frame the classic period of American science fiction magazines: born in the 1939 expansion that followed the success of Astounding, suspended by war, revived in the postwar boom, and ended as the field consolidated around a handful of survivors and the paperback book.

Future's place in the Silberkleit system also shaped its editorial personality. Because Lowndes edited a family of titles rather than a single magazine, he could sort stories among them — a tale too long, too short or too unusual for one had a home in another — and readers of the chain encountered a shared fictional world built by a stable of regular contributors. Charles Hornig's five founding issues in 1939–40 belong to the magazine's prehistory, competent and conventional; the magazine that historians discuss is Lowndes's, from 1940 through the mergers, the seven-year silence and the decade-long second life. That a title could be suspended in 1943 and successfully revived in 1950 under the same editor, with readers returning to it, says something about the loyalty small science fiction magazines commanded in the decades before the paperback reorganized the field around books instead.

Future's editors also gave it a connective role in the fan community from which the professional field drew its strength. Lowndes, himself a Futurian, filled his magazines with letters, fan news and discussion to a degree the slicker titles disdained, and Future's pages accordingly document the conversation of 1940s and 1950s fandom alongside its fiction — one reason runs of the magazine are held in fan-history collections as well as in libraries.

The magazine's two careers also bracket the paper history of the field: launched as a pulp when pulps were the industry's growth stock, killed by wartime paper rationing, revived into the last pulp years, and converted to digest only when the pulp format's distribution vanished entirely. A title that experienced every format transition the mid-century industry underwent, under one editor's continuous care, offers historians a single thread through thirty years of trade history — which is the use to which Future's runs are now principally put in the scholarship of the genre.

Directory Facts

Future Science Fiction was a science fiction pulp and digest magazine published by Columbia Publications (the Silberkleit chain) in New York, New York, United States, running November 1939 to July 1943 and May 1950 to April 1960. Its principal editor was Robert W. Lowndes. The magazine is defunct.