Planet Stories
Planet Stories did not pay well enough to regularly attract the leading science fiction writers of the day, but occasionally obtained work from well-known authors, including Isaac Asimov and Clifford D. Simak.
Brackett's best-known work for the magazine was a series of adventures featuring Eric John Stark, which began in the summer of 1949.
[4] A contemporary market survey records that in 1953, payment rates were only one to two cents per word; this was substantially less than the leading magazines of the day.
The results were unremarkable, but Reiss was energetic, and was able to improve the quality of fiction in succeeding issues, though he occasionally apologized to the readers for printing weak material.
Fourteen more were written by Ray Cummings and Ross Rocklynne; and Leigh Brackett was also a regular contributor, with seventeen stories in total published over the lifetime of the magazine.
[11] Despite the focus on melodramatic space adventure, the fiction in Planet Stories improved over the next few years, largely due to the work of Brackett and Bradbury.
Brackett's writing improved during the 1940s from formulaic pulp adventure to a more mature style, and she became the most accomplished writer of planetary romances of her day.
[9] Her work had a strong influence on other writers, in particular Gardner F. Fox, Lin Carter and Marion Zimmer Bradley,[12] Brackett later argued that "the so-called space opera is the folk-tale, the hero-tale of our particular niche in history".
[9] Also arguing in support of Planet Stories, science fiction critic John Clute has commented that "the content was far more sophisticated than the covers".
[9][12] His stories for Planet demonstrate his reservations about the advance of technology, in particular "The Golden Apples of the Sun" (November 1953), and "A Sound of Thunder" (January 1954, reprinted from the June 28, 1952 issue of Collier's Weekly).
[9][notes 2] Bradbury's work in Planet Stories is regarded by one pulp historian, Tim de Forest, as "the magazine's most important contribution to the genre".
[14] Several other well-known writers appeared in Planet Stories, including Isaac Asimov, Clifford Simak, James Blish, Fredric Brown and Damon Knight.
[15][notes 3] Jerome Bixby, who took over as editor in 1950, was a published writer and was knowledgeable about sf, though he had primarily written western fiction.
In his short tenure he did much to improve the magazine, persuading the established writers to produce better material and finding unusual variations on the interplanetary adventure theme such as Poul Anderson's "Duel on Syrtis" in March 1951, about an Earthman tracking an alien on Mars, and Theodore Sturgeon's "The Incubi on Planet X", about aliens who kidnap Earth women.
[16] After Bixby's departure in 1952, Planet Stories' major contribution to the genre was the discovery of Philip K. Dick, whose first sale, "Beyond Lies the Wub", appeared in the July 1952 issue.
[2] Critic and sf historian Thomas Clareson has commented that "Planet seemed to look backward towards the 1930s and earlier", an impression that was strengthened by the extensive use of interior artwork by Frank Paul, who had been the cover artist for the early Gernsback magazines in the 1920s.
[9] The cover artwork generally emphasized sex as well, with what sf author and critic Harry Harrison sardonically referred to as "sexual dimorphism in space": heavy, functional spacesuits for the men, and transparent suits through which bikinis or swimsuits could be seen for the women.
[22] Artist and sf historian David Hardy has described Leydenfrost's black and white illustrations as "almost Rembrandtian in his use of light and shade".
