Imaginative Tales was an American fantasy and science fiction magazine launched in September 1954 by William Hamling's Greenleaf Publishing Company.

It was created as a sister magazine to Imagination, which Hamling had acquired from Raymond A. Palmer's Clark Publishing.

Imaginative Tales began as a vehicle for novel-length humorous fantasy, early issues featuring stories by Charles F. Myers and Robert Bloch.

After a year, Hamling switched the focus to science fiction and it became similar in content to Imagination, publishing routine space operas.

[3] One of these new titles was Imagination, launched at the end of 1950 by Raymond Palmer, who had recently left Ziff-Davis, where he had edited Amazing Stories.

These were humorous stories about a man and his beautiful imaginary girlfriend, Toffee,[14] with what sf historian Joe Sanders calls an "exaggerated pose of naughtiness": nakedness was implied but never directly described, and sex was only hinted at.

[15][16][17] The first six issues included novels in the same vein by either Charles Myers or Robert Bloch,[18] and short fiction soon began to appear.

[18][7] Hamling obtained stories from Edmond Hamilton, who Sanders considers "the most readable of the novelists",[7] but he also printed Raymond Palmer's "The Metal Emperor"—"a dreadful Shaveristic adventure" according to Ashley,[6] and "possibly the worst story published in either of Hamling's magazines", according to Sanders.

With the title change to Space Travel, science articles by Henry Bott and Guenther Schmidt were added.