Captain Future (magazine)

Captain Future was a science fiction pulp magazine launched in 1940 by Better Publications, and edited initially by Mort Weisinger. It featured the adventures of Captain Future, a super-scientist whose real name was Curt Newton, in every issue. All but two of the novels in the magazine were written by Edmond Hamilton; the other two were by Joseph Samachson. The magazine also published other stories that had nothing to do with the title character, including Fredric Brown's first science fiction sale, "Not Yet the End". Captain Future published unabashed space opera, and was, in the words of science fiction historian Mike Ashley, "perhaps the most juvenile" of the science fiction pulps to appear in the early years of World War II. Wartime paper shortages eventually led to the magazine's cancellation: the last issue was dated Spring 1944.

Although science fiction (sf) had been published before the 1920s, it did not begin to coalesce into a separately marketed genre until the appearance in 1926 of Amazing Stories, a pulp magazine published by Hugo Gernsback. By the end of the 1930s, the field was booming.Better Publications, a pulp magazine publisher which had acquired Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1936, launched three new magazines as part of this boom. The first two were Startling Stories, which appeared in January 1939, and Strange Stories, which began the following month; both were edited by Mort Weisinger, who was also the editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories.Edmond Hamilton, an established science fiction writer, met with Leo Margulies, Better Publication's editorial director, in early 1939, and they subsequently planned the launch of a new magazine with the lead character of Curt Newton, a super-scientist who lived on the moon and went by the name "Captain Future". Margulies announced the new magazine at the first World Science Fiction Convention, held in New York in July 1939, and the first issue, edited by Weisinger, appeared in January of the following year. Captain Future's companions in the series included an enormously strong robot named Grag, an android named Otho, and the brain of Simon Wright, Newton's mentor. Joan Randall, Newton's girlfriend, was also a regular character. Better Publications followed up the magazine launch with a companion comic, Startling Comics, which appeared in May 1940; Captain Future was the protagonist of the lead story. Weisinger left in 1941 to edit comics following the adventures of Superman, and was replaced by Oscar J. Friend.

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