Typical of many science fiction pulps, the cover of the July, 1950 issue of Super Science Stories features art that has no relationship to the magazine’s content. But, Lawrence S. Stephens‘ (“Stephen Lawrence’s”) painting does catch one’s attention. Certainly our startled interstellar explorer, staring through the observation window of his spacecraft, has had his attention caught!
Like other content in Super Science Stories (and quite unlike Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction) the magazine’s stories – at least, those published during 1950 – were typically accompanied by only one illustration, and that always appearing on or adjacent to the story’s title page.
For the issue of Super featured in “this” post, artist’s names are listed in the table of contents as having been Paul Callé, “Paul”, Stephens, and H.R. (Henry Richard) Van Dongen, the last of whose compositions frequently appeared in late 50s – early 60s issues of Astounding. However (and, here’s the tricky part!), unlike Astounding and Galaxy, where the surname of the artist appeared directly in association with the story title (albeit in a font substantially s m a l l e r than that used for the author’s name), Super Science Stories seemed to have a “thing” about anonymity: As shown in the pieces below, the artist’s logo is absent from the illustration, and, is equally absent from a story’s title page.
Which, by definition, makes it a little challenging to figure out who did what.
But that’s not an unsolvable quandary, since – well, at least in this issue! – the artistic styles of the interior illustrations are utterly distinct from one another.
“Stepping back”, there’s irony in the fact that the quality – the style, symbolism, and even originality – of interior art within such titles as If – Worlds of Science Fiction, Startling Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories (and the many other “second-tier” science-fiction / fantasy / horror pulp magazines published from the 40s through the mid-60s) equals and sometimes easily outshines that featured in the leading genre magazines of the period. (Digressing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction eschewed interior art from its 1949 “get go”, but, an exception was made during the late 1950s in the way of story art by Edmund “EMSH” Emshwiller and (just once?) Frank Kelly Freas. During the same time frame, TMF&SF featured a delightful abundance of examples by Emshwiller of “space filler” / “page filler” / “story end filler” art which – light-hearted and symbolic; whimsical and highly original; diminutive and intriguing – gave the magazine a nicely high-browish, New Yorker-ish air. Maybe that’s for another post…?)
And, so: Here are four examples of interior art from Super Science Stories. Like the cover image above (and unlike – ! – the overwhelming majority of images at this blog, which have been scanned from books and magazines in my own possession), all images in this post were extracted and edited from a PDF of the July, 1950 Super Science Stories, downloaded from the Pulp Magazine Archive, at, Archive.org.
(A caveat: I haven’t actually read any of these stories. Yet.)
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King of the Stars
“A single, sprawling entity that covered half a planet, the Thing knew the destruction that the stars had ordained for it … and all the hopes of that immortal Titan rested with the quarrelling, short-lived scourge called man!”
“King of the Stars” was one of the few stories written by academic and physicist William L. Bade, whose small literary oeuvre appeared between 1948 and 1955.
Like the illustration for “Escape to Fear” (scroll down just a little), I’m certain this composition (on pages 48 and 49) – by virtue of bold contrast between light and dark without intervening shades of gray; its lack of intricate detail; its spaceship (in the right panel) emphasizing shape over technical detail, is by Paul Callé, whose artistic style was extraordinary versatile.
“They set their fuse to that frozen world, and quickly departed.”
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Last Return
“They were waiting, just outside the chill border of space … waiting to annihilate Earth’s billion lives in their cruel jaws …and Kane’s doomed countrymen would not, could not – understand the terror-laden message he brought!”
“Last Return” (starting on page 62) was penned by Roger Dee Aycock (a.k.a. “Roger Dee”), who was active as a writer between the late 40s and early 70s.
I’m uncertain about this one. Definitely; obviously not by Paul Callé, It m i g h t be by Henry Richard Van Dongen, given the intricacy of detail.
“He had to land safely … he had to live long enough to warn the world.”
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Escape to Fear
“Relentless as death itself, the alien destroyer followed them through every twist and turn in the gray half-world of superspace … toward a grim rendezvous to which, no matter how they struggled, all roads led!”
“Escape to Fear” (starting on page 72) appeared under the authorship of “Peter Reed”, a pen name for John D. McDonald, whose work spanned the late 1940s through the mid 1960s.
The resemblance between this composition and “King of the Stars” is immediate and obvious, one point of similarity between the bulbous style of the astronaut’s space-helmets. Note the striking use of black and white, and the way that rendering the background – via closely spaced parallel lines – is identical to the appearance of the darkness of space in the former painting. Paul Callé, once more.
“In that moment of shock, seven years of training paid off …”
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A Bit of Forever
At seven o’clock that morning, five minutes dropped out of the universe – and Will Henning, a little man with a big ambition, began the trail that led to the thing his soul longed for – the dread immortality of – “A BIT OF FOREVER”.
Possibly (possibly!) by Van Dongen…
The plot of Walter James Sheldon’s (“Walt Sheldon’s”) “A Bit of Forever” (starting on page 84) is based on the implications of an interval of time (a short interval, at that) vanishing or being extracted from the universe. Though I haven’t read the story, a brief perusal of the text suggests a resonance with the writings of Charles Fort, connoting the sense that “what is perceived to be real is actually unreal”, or part of “something” vast and not perceivable to man, akin to the Twilight Zone Episode “And When The Sky Was Opened“. The story also parallels Robert Sheckley’s “The Impacted Man“, where the “world” as seen and understood by men is a mere facet of a much larger, multi-dimensional reality beyond human perception.
The illustration depicts a story’s themes and symbolic elements, rather than a specific events or characters. In this case, a diminutive man stands in awe, in the foreground; an hourglass connotes time in the background; a bolt of lightning between these two elements suggests a break with “reality” as well as transcendent and power emanating from a place unknown and inaccessible.
On a far more quaint side, Sheldon, having been a Philadelphia resident, sets the story within that Pennsylvania city: “Oh yes, a quarter past seven and it must be morning because there, outside, on Walnut Street, is the sound of a trolley going by, and this is Philadelphia, mid-twentieth century, and soon the city will come to life, and – “
…and the first manned lunar landing and EVA, during Apollo 11 on July 16 and 20, respectively (issued on September 9, 1969).
