Other Worlds Science Stories
Overview
Other Worlds Science Stories was an American science fiction magazine founded by Raymond A. Palmer in Evanston, Illinois, in November 1949. Palmer, the former editor of Amazing Stories, used the magazine first as a respectable science fiction title publishing authors such as Ray Bradbury and A. E. van Vogt, and later — in a striking transformation — steered it toward flying-saucer material, retitling it Flying Saucers from Other Worlds in 1957 and continuing it as a UFO publication until 1976.
Raymond Palmer After Amazing Stories
Palmer had edited Amazing Stories from 1938 to 1949 and had become a controversial figure for promoting Richard Shaver's "Shaver Mystery" stories. When he left Ziff-Davis, he set up his own Clark Publishing Company in Evanston and launched Other Worlds in November 1949 as his flagship. The new magazine let him publish science fiction on his own terms, with Bea Mahaffey serving as his co-editor and managing editor during much of the first run.
The First Run, 1949–1953
The magazine's first incarnation ran until 1953, producing 31 issues. It was a digest-priced at thirty-five cents and carried serious science fiction by leading writers. Its most famous story was Ray Bradbury's "The Way in the Middle of the Air", part of the sequence that became The Martian Chronicles. A. E. van Vogt's "The Enchanted Village" also appeared in its pages. Financial difficulties, common to Palmer's small operation, forced the magazine's suspension in 1953.
Related Ventures
During the interruption, Palmer's publishing interests continued through associated titles. Universe Science Fiction and Science Stories, issued by Bell Publications in 1953 under Palmer's editorial direction, carried the venture forward briefly; Universe published Theodore Sturgeon's celebrated story "The World Well Lost" in June 1953. Palmer also founded Fate magazine, devoted to anomalous phenomena, which proved the most durable of his publications and foreshadowed Other Worlds' later direction.
Relaunch in 1955
Other Worlds returned in May 1955 under Palmer Publications. The relaunch experimented with format — beginning as a digest and converting to pulp size in November 1955, against the industry's current. The revived magazine continued to publish science fiction, but Palmer's interests were visibly shifting toward the flying-saucer phenomenon he had helped popularize since 1947.
Transformation into Flying Saucers
In June 1957 the magazine was retitled Flying Saucers from Other Worlds, and its content completed the transition from fiction to UFO reporting and speculation. The change reflected both Palmer's convictions and his judgment of the market: saucer material sold. Under shortened titles the publication continued, increasingly as a nonfiction UFO magazine, until 1976 — far outliving most of its science fiction contemporaries by ceasing to be one.
Editorial Character
Under Palmer and Mahaffey, the early Other Worlds had a more personal character than the big New York magazines. Palmer wrote editorials and engaged directly with readers; Mahaffey's role in selecting and producing the magazine was substantial. The magazine's willingness to mix imaginative fiction with fringe speculation made it unpredictable — a quality its admirers valued and its critics questioned.
Historical Significance
Other Worlds occupies a unique position between two cultures: professional science fiction and the postwar UFO movement. Palmer was a pivotal figure in both, and the magazine's mutation from a Bradbury-publishing digest into a saucer journal physically embodies the connection. Historians of science fiction treat its first run as a legitimate, if eccentric, professional magazine; historians of UFO culture treat its second life as a primary source.
Legacy
The magazine's early issues are collected for their Bradbury and van Vogt contents and their place in Palmer's biography. Its later incarnation is remembered as one of the longest-running vehicles of American saucer enthusiasm. Few magazines in any field have lived two such different lives under one continuous title lineage.
The two halves of Other Worlds' career illuminate each other. The 1949–53 magazine was a genuine professional science fiction title: thirty-one issues at thirty-five cents, co-edited by Bea Mahaffey, carrying Bradbury's "The Way in the Middle of the Air" and van Vogt's "The Enchanted Village" — stories any editor of the period would have been proud to buy. Its 1953 suspension was financial, not editorial, and Palmer's interim ventures (Universe Science Fiction and Science Stories, through Bell Publications in 1953, with Universe publishing Sturgeon's "The World Well Lost") kept his hand in. The 1955 relaunch even reversed the industry's format current, moving from digest back to pulp size in November 1955. But Palmer's center of gravity had shifted to the saucer audience he addressed in Fate, and the June 1957 retitling as Flying Saucers from Other Worlds simply made the magazine's contents match its publisher's convictions. That it then survived to 1976 — outliving nearly every science fiction magazine of 1949 — suggests Palmer read his market correctly, however much science fiction historians regret the transformation.
Other Worlds is therefore catalogued twice in the literature: in science fiction references for its first life, and in UFO bibliographies for its second. Few magazines require both.
Palmer himself is the thread on which both lives hang. At Amazing Stories from 1938 to 1949 he had been the field's most provocative editor, and the Shaver Mystery had made him famous and notorious in equal measure; Other Worlds was his declaration of independence, proof that he could run a magazine to his own design. The design changed as he did — from the respectable science fiction of 1949, through the financial improvisation of the Bell Publications interlude in 1953, to the saucer conviction of 1957 — and the magazine followed him each time, because at Clark Publishing and Palmer Publications the editor and the owner were the same man. Bea Mahaffey's co-editorship gave the early magazine much of its professional polish, a contribution fan historians have worked to restore to the record. Few magazines embody their publisher so completely, which is why Other Worlds remains indispensable to any biography of Palmer and to any history of the borderland where science fiction and UFO culture meet.
For collectors, the two incarnations are pursued for different reasons: the 1949–53 issues for their fiction, covers and Palmer–Mahaffey editorial apparatus, and the Flying Saucers issues as primary documents of the saucer movement's second decade, when Palmer's was among the few national platforms the subject possessed. The continuous run from 1949 to 1976, across the retitlings, is rarely assembled complete, and institutional holdings of the full sequence are correspondingly valuable to researchers of both fields the magazine inhabited.
Mahaffey's editorial presence deserves the emphasis recent scholarship has given it. As managing editor through the first run, she handled the magazine's production and much of its story selection while Palmer's name fronted the enterprise, and the professional steadiness of the 1949–53 issues — regular appearance, respectable contents, a coherent identity among larger rivals — bears the mark of that partnership. The history of Other Worlds is incomplete told as one man's story; it was, in its best years, a two-editor magazine operating from Evanston with a fraction of the New York titles' resources.
Directory Facts
Other Worlds Science Stories was a science fiction magazine published in Evanston, Illinois, United States, by Clark Publishing and later Palmer Publications, running November 1949 to 1953 and May 1955 onward; it became Flying Saucers from Other Worlds in 1957 and continued as a UFO magazine until 1976. The magazine is defunct.
