Fantastic Universe was a U.S. science fiction magazine which began publishing in the 1950s. It ran for 69 issues, from June 1953 to March 1960, under two different publishers. Main editors were Leo Margulies and Hans Stefan Santesson. The magazine became known for printing much UFO-related material.
About Fantastic Universe in brief
Fantastic Universe was a U.S. science fiction magazine which began publishing in the 1950s. It ran for 69 issues, from June 1953 to March 1960, under two different publishers. The main editors were Leo Margulies and Hans Stefan Santesson. The magazine became known for printing much UFO-related material. A collection of stories from the magazine, edited by Santesson, appeared in 1960 from Prentice-Hall, titled The Fantastic Universe Omnibus. The first issue included stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury. Circulation figures for Fantastic Universe are unknown, since at that time circulation figures were not required to be published annually, as they were later. The last issue of Fantastic Universe was the March 1960 issue, and it was the last one to be serialized in a book form, with the serialization beginning in that year’s issue of The Mind Thing. It was published by King-Size Publications, which also produced The Saint Detective Magazine, which was popular, so Fantastic Universe enjoyed good distribution from the start.
In late 1959 the magazine was sold to Great American Publications and the size was significantly redesigned, although the magazine still bound rather than saddle-stapled, and the stories were introduced except for small illustrations and diagrams. The final issue was the May 1961 issue, with a story by Fredric Brown’s “The Mind Thing” The magazine was published in digest format, and was priced at 50 cents. It also had the highest page count in the field at the time, with 196 pages. It is thought that the magazine kept a fairly high quality through Merwin’s departure after a year, and through the subsequent brief period of caretaker editorship by Beatrice Jones. According to Donald Tuck, the author of an early SF encyclopaedia, the magazine’s quality is thought to have fallen during Santesson’s period at the helm.
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This page is based on the article Fantastic Universe published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
