Fantastic Fiction: Star Stellar Starlight

The text Fantastic Fiction against a retrofuturistic design of a rounded triangle shape with a gold swirl pattern.

Frederik Pohl’s 1953 Star Science Fiction anthology was not just the first of a string of noteworthy anthologies. His series inspired other editors to assemble similar series. The latest such work was released close to half a century after Pohl’s first anthology was published.

Fantastic Fiction: Fantastic Four Premieres and the Marvel Age Kicks Off

The text Fantastic Fiction against a retrofuturistic design of a rounded triangle shape with a gold swirl pattern.

With Seattle Worldcon 2025 coming up and Marvel films still in fashion, let’s look back on the premiere of one of the most important comics ever published. Fantastic Four #1 was released to newsstands just weeks before Seattle’s last Worldcon in 1961. This comic heralded Marvel’s emergence as the most popular line of comics in the world.

Fantastic Fiction: Village of the Damned

The text Fantastic Fiction against a retrofuturistic design of a rounded triangle shape with a gold swirl pattern.

Visitors to Seattle’s first Worldcon, in 1961, would have been voting in one of six Hugo Award categories for the best dramatic presentation of 1960. With Halloween on the way, why not get in the mood with one of the year’s strong contenders: Village of the Damned, an adaptation of John Wyndham’s chilling novel The Midwich Cuckoos. The movie brings the story to cinematic life through believable performances and clever special effects.

Fantastic Fiction: Knights versus Aliens: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson

The text Fantastic Fiction against a retrofuturistic design of a rounded triangle shape with a gold swirl pattern.

Science fiction often begins with a question of “what if”? And in 1960, Poul Anderson asked just such a question: What if aliens attempting to invade the Earth encountered a troop of medieval knights? And what if the knights won the ensuing struggle and took to the stars? This is the premise of The High Crusade, one of the most offbeat and entertaining science fiction novels of the early 1960s…

Fantastic Fiction: French SF in Translation in F&SF (1961)

The text Fantastic Fiction against a retrofuturistic design of a rounded triangle shape with a gold swirl pattern.

The early years of the 1960s brought a number of French science fiction stories into English, thanks in a big way to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This kicked off decades of French science fiction in English, including several Pierre Boulle novels (like Planet of the Apes), that in turn inspired major films, introducing American readers to a more expansive view of SF.

Fantastic Fiction: The Amazing and Fantastic Cele Goldsmith

The text Fantastic Fiction against a retrofuturistic design of a rounded triangle shape with a gold swirl pattern.

By the 1950s, Amazing Stories and its sister magazine Fantastic were deep in the doldrums. But all that changed when a young Vassar graduate named Cele Goldsmith found herself at the helm of both magazines and turned their fortunes around. In only seven years, she discovered many new writers who went on to great careers, helped to revive the all-but dead Sword and Sorcery genre, and won a Hugo, too.