Satellite Science Fiction

Satellite Science Fiction was an American science-fiction magazine published from October 1956 to April 1959 by Leo Margulies' Renown Publications.

Sam Moskowitz wrote a series of articles on the early history of science fiction for Satellite; these were later to be revised as part of his book Explorers of the Infinite.

In 1958 Margulies tracked down the first magazine publication of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine from 1894 to 1895 and reprinted a short excerpt from it that had been omitted by every subsequent printing.

In 1952, Leo Margulies and H. Lawrence Herbert founded King-Size Publications, which published Saint Detective Magazine and Fantastic Universe.

[3] With the money from the sale he founded Renown Publications, launching Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine in September 1956, and the first issue of Satellite Science Fiction in October.

[9] In an attempt to make Satellite more visible on the newsstands, Margulies changed the format from digest-size to letter-size with the February 1959 issue, handing over the editorship to Frank Belknap Long at the same time, and switching to a monthly schedule.

[8] Paperbacks were a growing share of the science fiction (sf) market in the mid-1950s; they were successful partly because they offered novels, which most readers preferred to short stories.

[9] The high standard of these two issues could not be maintained, and in the opinion of sf historians Malcolm Edwards and Mike Ashley the magazine's quality declined thereafter.

[16] Edwards and Ashley single out two other novels as worthy of mention: J. T. McIntosh's One Million Cities (in the August 1958 issue), and Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao (December 1957),[9][17] described by sf critics Peter Nicholls and David Langford as "one of the most intelligent uses in genre sf" of the Whorf hypothesis – the theory that the language one speaks determines one's perception of reality.

[10] Since the word count for the whole magazine was only about 53,000 words, there was little space for other stories or for non-fiction features, and as a result the accompanying stories were usually very short expositions of an idea or joke; in Michael Shaara's "Four-Billion Dollar Door", the first crewed mission to the moon lands successfully but discovers that the door has frozen shut and cannot be opened.

[20] Arthur C. Clarke and Dal Stevens were frequent contributors of short fiction, and there were appearances by other well-known writers such as Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp.

[14] Satellite's artwork was unremarkable, in the opinion of Mike Ashley; he singles out Alex Schomburg's half-dozen covers for praise, but describes the interior art, much of it by Leo Morey, as "mediocre".

[24][25] A mockup of the cover for the July 1959 has survived, showing some of the planned contents; the two unpublished issues would have contained stories and articles by Arthur C. Clarke, A. E. van Vogt, and Frank Herbert, among others.