Marvel Science Stories

Marvel Science Stories was an American pulp magazine that ran for a total of fifteen issues in two separate runs, both edited by Robert O. Erisman. The publisher for the first run was Postal Publications, and the second run was published by Western Publishing; both companies were owned by Abraham and Martin Goodman. The first issue was dated August 1938, and carried stories with more sexual content than was usual for the genre, including several stories by Henry Kuttner, under his own name and also under pseudonyms. Reaction was generally negative, with one reader referring to Kuttner's story "The Time Trap" as "trash". This was the first of several titles featuring the word "Marvel", and Marvel Comics came from the same stable in the following year.

The magazine was canceled after the April 1941 issue, but when a boom in science fiction magazines began in 1950, the publishers revived it. The first issue of the new series was dated November 1950; a further six issues appeared, the last dated May 1952. In addition to Kuttner, contributors to the first run included Arthur J. Burks and Jack Williamson; the second run published stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Jack Vance, and L. Sprague de Camp, among others. In the opinion of science fiction historian Joseph Marchesani, the quality of the second incarnation of the magazine was superior to the first, but it was unable to compete with the new higher-quality magazines that had appeared in the interim.

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. After 1931, when Miracle Science and Fantasy Stories was launched, no new sf magazines appeared for several years. In 1936 Abraham and Martin Goodman, two brothers who owned a publishing company with multiple imprints, launched Ka-Zar, an imitation Tarzan magazine with some borderline sf content. It lasted for three issues, with the last issue dated January 1937. In addition to this marginal sf magazine, in 1937 the Goodmans began publishing several "weird-menace" pulps. These were a genre of pulp magazine known for incorporating "sex and sadism", with storylines that placed women in danger, usually because of a threat that appeared to be supernatural but was ultimately revealed to be the work of a human villain. The Goodmans' titles were Detective Short Stories, launched in August 1937, and Mystery Tales, which published its first issue in March 1938. These were followed up by Marvel Science Stories, edited by Robert O. Erisman, which was not intended to be a weird-menace pulp, but rather an sf magazine. The influence of the "sex and sadism" side of the Goodman's portfolio of magazines was apparent, however: authors were sometimes asked to add more sex to their stories than was usual in sf at the time. This was the first time that the word "Marvel" was used in the title of a Goodman publication. It went on to be used in other titles, notably Marvel Comics in the following year. The word may have been chosen to appeal to advertisers Marvel Home Utilities and Marvel Mystery Oil, or it may have been that Martin Goodman liked the name because it was similar to his own.

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