Satellite Science Fiction

Overview

Satellite Science Fiction was an American science fiction digest magazine published by Leo Margulies' Renown Publications in New York from October 1956 to April 1959. Its distinguishing policy was to devote each issue to a complete novel, supported by short material, in an attempt to compete with the booming science fiction paperback book. Despite respected editors and strong contents, the experiment could not survive the late-1950s collapse of magazine distribution.

Leo Margulies and Renown Publications

Leo Margulies was one of the most experienced editors and publishers in the pulp field, long associated with Standard Magazines' science fiction titles such as Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. With Renown Publications he attempted to build his own magazine group in the 1950s. Satellite, launched in October 1956, was his science fiction flagship, designed around an idea he believed could rescue magazine sales from the paperback competition.

The Novel-in-Every-Issue Policy

Each issue of Satellite carried a full-length novel as its centerpiece, with shorter fiction and features around it. The policy answered a real market problem: readers were increasingly buying paperback novels instead of magazines, so Margulies offered the novel inside a magazine, at a magazine price. Issues ran 132 pages at thirty-five cents, making the lead novel a substantial part of every issue's value.

Editors

The magazine's first two issues were edited by Sam Merwin Jr., a veteran of the Standard magazines. Margulies then took editorial control himself, assisted later by Cylvia Kleinman. For the final issues, from February 1959, the editor was Frank Belknap Long, the noted author of weird and science fiction and a member of the original Lovecraft circle — an appointment that connected the young magazine to the field's founding generation.

Notable Fiction

Satellite's novels included the original version of Philip K. Dick's "The Cosmic Puppets", and book-length work by Algis Budrys, Jack Vance and John Christopher, whose "The Year of the Comet" appeared in its pages. Alongside its fiction, the magazine ran Sam Moskowitz's series of articles on the history of science fiction — scholarship that Moskowitz later developed into his book "Explorers of the Infinite" (1963), one of the foundational histories of the genre. In 1958 the magazine also reprinted an excerpt of H. G. Wells's "The Time Machine" that had been omitted from the standard book editions, a genuine bibliographic curiosity.

The Letter-Size Experiment and Closure

In February 1959, in a bid to win display space and attention, Satellite changed to a large letter-size format. The experiment failed commercially, and the magazine folded with its April 1959 issue, less than three years after its launch. Its death coincided with the general contraction of the American science fiction magazine field following the American News Company liquidation, which had destroyed distribution for dozens of titles.

Assessment

Satellite is generally judged one of the more creditable failures of its period: its novel-per-issue concept was rational, its editors were capable, and its contents were strong. Its short life illustrates how little room for experimentation the late-1950s market allowed. Even a well-conceived magazine, backed by a veteran publisher, could be ended by distribution economics rather than by any failure with readers.

Moskowitz's History Series

The magazine's most lasting contribution may be Sam Moskowitz's historical articles. Written for a general magazine audience, they documented the early decades of science fiction fandom and publishing while participants were still alive to be interviewed. Their later expansion into book form gave Satellite an afterlife in scholarship disproportionate to its brief run.

Legacy

Collectors seek Satellite for its Dick, Vance and Budrys novels and its striking experiment in format. For publishing historians, it marks Leo Margulies' final attempt to recreate the pulp-era magazine group under digest-era conditions — and demonstrates why so few succeeded.

Satellite's contents repay attention because they show what its novel-per-issue policy made possible. A digest of 132 pages that surrendered most of its space to one book-length work could publish fiction too long for rival magazines: the original version of Philip K. Dick's The Cosmic Puppets, John Christopher's The Year of the Comet, and novels by Algis Budrys and Jack Vance are not the contents of a careless magazine. Around the novels, Margulies placed shorter material and one feature of lasting value — Sam Moskowitz's historical articles, which treated science fiction's past as a subject worthy of documentation while its pioneers still lived, and which grew into Explorers of the Infinite, a book still cited in the field's scholarship. The 1958 reprinting of the omitted passage from Wells's The Time Machine belongs to the same editorial instinct: Satellite positioned itself as a magazine for readers who cared about the literature, not merely the sensation.

Its failure, then, cannot be laid on its pages. The February 1959 letter-size experiment — an attempt to win display prominence in a collapsing distribution system — consumed its remaining margin, and the April 1959 issue was the last. Satellite's three editors in thirty months (Merwin, Margulies himself with Cylvia Kleinman, and finally Frank Belknap Long) suggest a publisher improvising to the end; that the improvisation produced so respectable a magazine is the measure of Margulies's experience.

Satellite also illustrates the personal economics of the late pulp generation. Leo Margulies had spent the 1930s and 1940s running other men's magazine empires at Standard; Renown Publications was his attempt to own the business himself, and Satellite its flagship wager — that a magazine could beat the paperback at its own game by binding a novel into every issue. Sam Merwin Jr.'s editorship of the first two issues brought the old Standard professionalism; Margulies's own tenure, with Cylvia Kleinman, and the closing appointment of Frank Belknap Long — a writer whose career reached back to the Lovecraft circle of the 1920s — gave the magazine three distinct editorial weathers in under three years. That the results included Dick's Cosmic Puppets in its original form, work by Vance, Budrys and John Christopher, and Moskowitz's pioneering history series suggests the wager was editorially sound. It was the calendar that was wrong: a novel-a-month magazine needed the distribution system that disintegrated in 1957, and by the time of the desperate letter-size experiment of February 1959 there was no system left to win.

The magazine's short bibliography has one more distinction: it is among the very few science fiction magazines of its decade whose complete contents can be surveyed in an afternoon, and whose every issue contains something a historian would cite — a Dick novel, a Vance or Budrys book, a Moskowitz history installment, the Wells fragment. Density of that kind is the product of the novel-first policy, which forced each issue to justify itself with a major work rather than a miscellany, and it is why Satellite's reputation has grown as the field's historians have worked through the 1950s in detail.

Renown Publications' experiment also had a demonstration effect on its competitors: the novel-led digest did not disappear with Satellite, and later magazines repeatedly returned to the complete-novel format when paperback competition pressed them, usually with the same result. Satellite was simply the first and most deliberate of the attempts, made by the publisher who understood the pulp business as well as anyone alive — which is why its failure is read as the market's verdict rather than the magazine's.

Directory Facts

Satellite Science Fiction was a science fiction digest magazine published by Renown Publications in New York, New York, United States, from October 1956 to April 1959. Editors included Sam Merwin Jr., Leo Margulies and Frank Belknap Long. The magazine is defunct.