Beyond Fantasy Fiction

Beyond Fantasy Fiction was a US fantasy fiction magazine published from 1953 to 1955. The first issue featured Theodore Sturgeon, Damon Knight, Frank M. Robinson, and Richard Matheson. Other writers who appeared in the magazine included Jerome Bixby, John Wyndham, James E. Gunn, Fredric Brown, Frederik Pohl, Philip José Farmer, Randall Garrett, Zenna Henderson, and Algis Budrys.

About Beyond Fantasy Fiction in brief

Summary Beyond Fantasy FictionBeyond Fantasy Fiction was a US fantasy fiction magazine published from 1953 to 1955. The last two issues carried the cover title of Beyond Fiction, but the publication’s name for copyright purposes remained as before. A selection of stories from Beyond was published in paperback form in 1963, also under the title Beyond. The first issue featured Theodore Sturgeon, Damon Knight, Frank M. Robinson, and Richard Matheson. Other writers who appeared in the magazine included Jerome Bixby, John Wyndham, James E. Gunn, Fredric Brown, Frederik Pohl, Philip José Farmer, Randall Garrett, Zenna Henderson, and Algis Budrys. Five of the ten covers were surrealist, which was an unusual artistic choice for a genre magazine. The magazine was not commercially successful: at that time circulation figures were not required to be published annually, as they were later, so the actual circulation figures are not known.

Its demise after less than two years can be attributed in part to the decreasing popularity of fantasy and horror fiction. It was a fantasy-oriented companion to the more successful Galaxy Science Fiction, which launched in 1950. The publication contained no book reviews, and only the first issue carried an editorial. It is often cited as being the successor to the unusual fantasy tradition of Unknown, a fantasy magazine that ceased publication in 1943. Author James Gunn said that Beyond was the best of the new fantasy magazines of the 1950s. Not everyone thought the magazine was completely successful, however; P. Schuyler Miller, in a 1963 review, commented that the stories were most successful when they did not try to emulate Unknown.