About Marvel Science Stories

Marvel Science Stories

Marvel Science Stories was an American science fiction pulp magazine published in New York in two separate runs, both edited by Robert O. Erisman and both issued by companies owned by the brothers Abraham and Martin Goodman. Fifteen issues appeared in total: nine between August 1938 and April 1941 under a shifting series of titles, and six more between November 1950 and May 1952. The magazine is remembered less for literary distinction than for two historical distinctions — it was the first Goodman publication to use the word "Marvel" in its title, a year before Marvel Comics appeared from the same stable, and its first run became notorious for sexual content unusual in science fiction of the period.

The Goodman Pulp Empire

The Goodmans ran a publishing company with multiple imprints, based in New York and Chicago. Their earlier ventures at the edge of science fiction included a Tarzan imitation launched in 1936 that lasted three issues and contained some borderline science fiction content. From 1937 they built a line of "weird menace" pulps — a genre built on sex and sadism, in which heroines were placed in danger by threats that seemed supernatural but were ultimately revealed as the work of human villains. Titles in that line appeared in August 1937 and March 1938. Marvel Science Stories followed, edited by Erisman, and was intended as a science fiction magazine rather than a weird-menace title. The habits of the rest of the list, however, shaped it from the start: authors were sometimes asked to add more sex to their stories than was usual in the science fiction field at the time.

The First Issue and the Kuttner Controversy

The first issue was dated August 1938 and reached newsstands in May of that year. Its lead novel, by Arthur J. Burks, was well received by readers and contained no sexual content. But the issue also carried work by Henry Kuttner, a regular contributor to the Goodmans' other magazines, whom Erisman and the Goodmans had asked to spice up his submissions. Kuttner obliged, in the first issue and again in the second, both under his own name and under pseudonyms. Science fiction historian Mike Ashley describes the first of those stories as including scenes of aliens lusting after unclothed Earth women. Reader reaction was strongly negative. A typical letter came from William Hamling — later a science fiction editor and publisher himself — who wrote that he had been about to congratulate the magazine when his eye fell on Kuttner's second-issue story, which he urged the editors, in the future, to dislodge from the magazine as trash. Between the two issues, four Kuttner stories in this vein confronted the magazine's earliest readers.

From Marvel Science Stories to Marvel Tales

After five issues the title changed to Marvel Tales, and at the same time the number of stories advertised as "passionate," or featuring characters described in the cover blurbs as sin-lost or lust-crazed, sharply increased. Historian Joseph Marchesani notes that while some stories contained little to match the titillating advertising, others did deliver content of that kind with uninventive frequency. Isaac Asimov, recalling the period in 1969 without naming the magazine, described how for half a dozen issues or so in 1938–39 a magazine published spicy stories about the passion of alien monsters for Earthwomen, with clothes perpetually being ripped off, before dying what he called a deserved death. A 1960 Playboy article surveying the pulp era drew heavily on Marvel for its material, according to Asimov. The first run's bibliographic record reflects the drift: five issues as Marvel Science Stories, two as Marvel Tales, and the last two as Marvel Stories, all in pulp format at 15 cents — the first four issues at 128 pages, the remaining five at 112. The intended bimonthly schedule was never achieved, and publication ceased with the April 1941 issue, as the Goodmans increasingly concentrated on the growing comic-book market they had entered in 1939.

The Name "Marvel"

The magazine's most consequential legacy may be a single word. This was the first time "Marvel" appeared in the title of a Goodman publication; the following year it was used for Marvel Comics, the first comic book from the company that would eventually become Marvel Comics. Why the word was chosen is not certain. One suggestion is that it was meant to appeal to advertisers whose products used the name, including a home utilities company and a brand of motor oil; another is that Martin Goodman simply liked the name because it resembled his own. Whatever its origin, a word first placed on a short-lived science fiction pulp in 1938 became, through the comics line launched the next year, one of the most recognizable names in American popular entertainment.

The Postwar Revival, 1950–1952

In 1950 a boom in science fiction magazines persuaded the Goodmans to revive the title. Erisman, still working for the company, was listed as editorial director of the new version, while much of the editorial work was done by Daniel Keyes, credited as editorial associate on the 1951 issues. The first issue of the new series was dated November 1950. The revival ran on a more regular quarterly schedule for six issues, priced at 25 cents and 128 pages throughout. After two issues in pulp format, Erisman switched the magazine to digest format for three issues, but the final issue, dated May 1952, returned to pulp form. The title reverted to Marvel Science Stories for the first three issues of the series and changed to Marvel Science Fiction for the last three. The publisher of record was a further Goodman company, Stadium Publishing of New York.

Contributors of the Second Run

The postwar issues published stories by some of the most celebrated names in science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Richard Matheson, William Tenn, Jack Vance, Lester del Rey, and L. Sprague de Camp among them. By the standards of names alone, it was a far more distinguished roster than the prewar magazine had assembled, which had included Kuttner, Burks, and Jack Williamson. Yet historians judge the stories themselves to have been only of average quality. Marchesani's assessment is that Erisman and Keyes improved on the material of the prewar Marvel Tales, but that the field had grown more sophisticated in the intervening decade, and the writers who sold to Marvel were by then publishing their best work elsewhere — in the new, higher-quality magazines against which the revival could not compete.

British Reprints and the Skyworlds Echo

The second series circulated beyond the United States in a limited way: a British reprint of the February 1951 issue was published by Thorpe & Porter, dated May 1951, and one bibliographer has listed five further British reprints, though no copies of those are recorded by more recent bibliographers. The magazine's fiction had one more afterlife a generation later. In 1977 the Goodmans launched a digest science fiction magazine whose contents were drawn almost entirely from reprints of the second series of Marvel Science Stories. Mike Ashley judged that 1970s title, without qualification, the worst science fiction magazine of its decade — a final, faint echo of a title that had twice failed to find a durable place in the field it helped, however awkwardly, to shape.

Assessment

The two runs of Marvel Science Stories frame a transformation in American science fiction publishing. The first belonged to the late pulp era, when a genre title could be steered by the sensational formulas of a publisher's other magazines, even over the recorded objections of its own readers. The second belonged to the postwar magazine boom, when famous bylines were no longer enough to sustain a title against better-edited competitors in new formats. Fifteen issues across fourteen years is a modest total, and no historian ranks the magazine among the field's best. Its place in the record rests instead on documented firsts and connections: the debut of the Marvel name, an editorial staff that included Daniel Keyes, and a contributor list in its final incarnation that reads like a roll of the genre's postwar masters, publishing work they themselves would soon surpass elsewhere.