Fantastic Fiction: The Amazing and Fantastic Cele Goldsmith

Cover of Amazing Stories, June 1963. A blonde white man with a yellow shirt, black pants, and metal belt and wrist cuffs lies on a blinky-light computer console; he is perforated with punchcard slots. Behind him is a blonde white woman in tight white leotard, also on a blinky-light computer console and perforated with punchcard slots. Cover story is The Programmed People by Jack Sharkey.By the 1950s, the once venerable Amazing Stories, the oldest science fiction magazine, and its sister magazine Fantastic were deep in the doldrums. Both magazines were bottom-tier markets, publishing formulaic stories by the same handful of authors under various pen names.

All this changed in 1955, when a young Vassar graduate named Cele Goldsmith arrived at Ziff-Davis Publishing to work as an assistant to Howard Browne, the editor of Amazing and Fantastic, and his successor Paul Fairman. When Fairman left in 1958, Cele Goldsmith found herself editor of two ailing SFF magazines at the age of only 25.

Cover of Amazing Stories, May 1963. An Easter Island stone figure head stands behind an alien in spacesuit and clear helmet with a head identical to the Easter Island heads. Cover story is Jobo by Henry Slesar.When she started working at Ziff-Davis, Cele Goldsmith had no experience with speculative fiction and therefore no preconceptions about what sold and what didn’t, what was trendy, and what was hopelessly passé. What she did have was an eye for good stories and talented writers, both new and established. And so Cele Goldsmith turned the fortunes of Amazing and Fantastic around, luring back established writers like Isaac Asimov and Fritz Leiber, and discovering new talents like Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, Thomas M. Disch, Keith Laumer, Sonya Dorman, Phyllis Gottlieb, and Piers Anthony.

Cele Goldsmith was willing to take a chance on stories other magazines would not touch, such as David R. Bunch’s proto-Cyberpunk Moderan stories, now considered classics of the New Wave. She also had a soft spot for the still nameless Sword and Sorcery genre, which had been dead since its brief heyday in the 1930s and early 1940s. Fantastic not only provided a new home for Fritz Leiber’s lovable rogues Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, who’d been homeless since the demise of Unknown 15 years before, but also introduced characters like Roger Zelazny’s Dilvish the Damned and John Jakes’ Brak the Barbarian. Even Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné put in an appearance.

Cover of Fantastic, March 1965. A blonde white man in a loincloth, a dark-haired white woman in an orange dress and flowing white cloak, and a man in ornate robes stand in the desert between two tall pink pillars either made up of or carved with numerous nude figures. Cover story is The Pillars of Chambalor, a Brak story by John Jakes.Conservative readers were not always happy with Cele Goldsmith’s choice of stories, but she quickly gained the respect of both fans and writers. Her work at Amazing and Fantastic was rewarded with a special Hugo Award at Chicon III in 1962.

The tenure of Cele Goldsmith Lalli, as she was known since her marriage in 1964, came to an abrupt end in 1965, when Amazing and Fantastic were sold to Sol Cohen’s Ultimate Publishing. Cele Goldsmith Lalli elected to stay at Ziff-Davis and became editor of Modern Bride, where she remained for the rest of her career.

Cover of Fantastic, June 1965. A blonde white woman in a pink dress lies bound on a stone altar as a figure in a purple robe faces her, one arm raised and the other wielding a sword, as imps scamper around. Cover story is Thelinde's Song by Roger Zelazny.Cele Goldsmith Lalli died in a car crash in 2002 at the age of 69. Most obituaries focused mainly on her work at Modern Bride. But though she edited Fantastic and Amazing for only seven years, she had a lasting impact on the SFF genre.

Bring your thoughts about the legacy of Cele Goldsmith Lalli and the authors she discovered and championed with you to Worldcon. Do you have more tales of foundational figures whose contributions should be better remembered—and perhaps would be, if not for circumstances of gender or national origin? We’ll continue the conversation in Seattle.

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