Super Science Stories
Popular gave Pohl a very low budget, so most manuscripts submitted to Super Science Stories had already been rejected by the higher-paying magazines.
Super Science Stories was an initial success, and within a year Popular increased Pohl's budget slightly, allowing him to pay a bonus rate on occasion.
After Pohl entered the army in early 1943, wartime paper shortages led Popular to cease publication of Super Science Stories.
The magazine was never regarded as one of the leading titles of the genre, but has received qualified praise from science fiction critics and historians.
Science fiction historian Raymond Thompson describes it as "one of the most interesting magazines to appear during the 1940s", despite the variable quality of the stories.
[5] Erisman did not have an opening for him, but told Pohl that Popular Publications, a leading pulp publisher, was starting a new line of low-paying magazines and might be interested in adding a science fiction title.
[6] On October 25, 1939, Pohl visited Rogers Terrill at Popular, and was hired immediately, at the age of nineteen,[7] on a salary of ten dollars per week.
[5] In Pohl's memoirs he recalls Harry Steeger, one of the company owners, breaking down the budget for Astonishing for him: "Two hundred seventy-five dollars for stories.
[7][13][notes 2] Super Science Stories sold well, despite Pohl's limited resources:[5] Popular was a major pulp publisher and had a strong distribution network, which helped circulation.
[5][notes 3] Pohl later commented that he was uncertain whether the additional funds really helped to bring in higher quality submissions, although at the time he assured Steeger it would improve the magazine.
Snipped elements of black and white illustrations were also reused to fill space, as multiple uses of the same artwork did not require additional payments to the artist.
[8][notes 4] In June 1941 Pohl visited Steeger to ask for a further raise, intending to resign and work as a freelance writer if he was unsuccessful.
[24] Paper was difficult to obtain because of the war, and Popular decided to close the magazine down; the final issue, dated April 1943, was assembled with the assistance of Ejler Jakobsson.
[1] Jakobsson later recalled hearing about the revival while on vacation, swimming in a lake, five miles from a phone: "A boy on a bicycle showed on shore and shouted, 'Call your office.'"
[25] The relaunched magazine survived for almost three years, but the market for pulps was weak, and when Knight left in 1950 to edit Worlds Beyond Jakobsson was unable to sustain support for it within Popular.
[30] The first issue, dated March 1940, contained "Emergency Refueling", James Blish's first published story, two stories by John Russell Fearn (one under the pseudonym "Thornton Ayre"), fiction by Frank Belknap Long, Ross Rocklynne, Raymond Gallun, Harl Vincent and Dean O'Brien; and a poem by Kornbluth, "The Song of the Rocket", under the pseudonym "Gabriel Barclay".
A couple of readers did complain, with one disgusted letter writer commenting "If you are going to continue to print such pseudosophisticated, pre-prep-school tripe as "Let There Be Light", you should change the name of the mag to Naughty Future Funnies".
[35][notes 7] The second run of Super Science Stories included some fiction that had first appeared in the Canadian reprint edition, which outlasted the US original.
These included "The Black Sun Rises" by Henry Kuttner, "And Then – the Silence", by Ray Bradbury and "The Bounding Crown" by James Blish.
This led to some reader complaints, with one correspondent pointing out that it was particularly galling to discover that Blish's "Sunken Universe", reprinted in the November 1950 issue, was a better story than the original material in the magazine.
[5][37] The artwork was initially amateurish, and although it improved over the years, even the better artists such as Virgil Finlay and Lawrence Stevens continued to produce clichéd depictions of half-dressed women threatened by robots or aliens.
[38] Sf historian Mike Ashley regards Super Science Stories as marginally better than its companion magazine, Astonishing, adding "both are a testament to what a good editor can do with a poor budget".
With the August 1942 issue the name was changed to Super Science Stories, and the numeration was begun again at volume 1 number 1; as a result the magazine is usually listed by bibliographers as a separate publication from the Canadian Astonishing, but in many respects it was a direct continuation.
The next issue, dated April 1944, contained several reprints from the US editions, but also included two original stories that had not appeared anywhere before—these had been acquired for the US magazine and remained in inventory.
