Sat 10 Jan 2026
SF Diary Review: FANTASTIC UNIVERSE SCIENCE FICTION February 1956.
Posted by Steve under Diary Reviews , Magazines , Science Fiction & Fantasy1 Comment
FANTASTIC UNIVERSE SF – February 1956. Editor: Leo Margulies. Cover art: Kelly Freas. Overall rating: **½.
EDMUND COOPER “The End of the Journey.” The captain is the only survivor of a voyage testing a new experimental space drive. (3)
ROBERT ABERNATHY “Grandpa’s Lie Soap.” One man is capable of telling lies is a world he made incapable of interpreting falsehoods. (3)
THEODORE PRATT “Shades of Davy Crockett.” Davy comes back to dicover the commercial success of his name and fame. (2)
ROGER DEE “The Man Who Had Spiders.” Extraterrestrial spiders have advantages, but wants spiders around all the time? (4)
SAM MERWIN, JR. “Passage to Anywhere.” Novelette. Matter transmitter fails on Earth, but does make space travel feasible. An argument for world government. (2)
ETHEL G. LEWIS “The Vapor Horn.” An international healing device contains other worlds. (0)
ROBERT SILVERBERG “A Woman’s Right.” A psychometrist, hired by a man to help his wife and save their marriage cures the man;s psychosis instead, (3)
F. B. BRYNING “For Man Must Work.” The marital problems of an engineer of a space station: his wife wants to return to Earth. (3)
FRANK BELKNAP LONG “Young Man with a Trumpet.”How animals carried on after the departure of man. (3)
JOHN JAKES “The Cybernetic Kid.” A boy genius competes against the latest electronic marvels (3)
January 11th, 2026 at 12:10 pm
FU (I always felt guilty calling it that, even back then) was a lower-tier magazine, although never at the bottom of the pile. Despite making occasional valiant efforts it could never make it to the top of the field, nor indeed outshine its mystery magazine stablemate, THE SAINT DETECTIVE/MYSTERY MAGAZINE. FU began with veteran editor Sam Merwin at the reins with Leo Margulies as publisher, a winning combination for THRILLING WONDER a few years earlier. Merwin dropped out after three issues, then following a brief editorship (two issues) by Beatrice Jones (who dat? evidently she worked at one time for popular publications), Margulies took over as editor. He sold out in 1956 and Hans Stefan Santesson took over as editor; Santesson pushed the mag slightly toward a UFO-centric readership, lowering the quality and doing little favor for the typical science fiction fan of the day, but at least it wasn’t the Shave Mystery. The magazine was sold in the fall of 1959 and spent its last six issues as trimmed pulp under the editorial directorship of Sheldon Wax (who dat? the editorial director for two issues of FEAR, 1960, the US edition of NEW WORLDS, five issues, 1960). FU went from (in the first issue) featuring work by Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Eric Frank Russell, Fletcher Pratt, A. Bertram Chandler, E. Hoffmann Price, August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, and Milton Lesser to (in its final issue) Wenzell Brown, Robert f. Young, Claus Stamm (who dat?), and Robert Bloch, with vignettes by Shalom Cohen, Adrian Coblentz, and George O. Smith, with articles on UFOs (by del Rey), “The Abominable Coalman (by Ivan Sanderson), and the “Two Man Space Cabin” (uncredited), as well as a fan column by Belle C. Dietz (who dat?), and the first half of an unfinished serial, Fredric Brown’s THE MIND THING a few semi-precious gems among a lot of dross.
As to this issue, the Abernathy may be the best of the lot; he published about forty stories over a fifteen-year period an this was one of his best. Cooper was a prolific British writer, perhaps best known for his early novels from Ballantine Books; his later work brought his reputation to a low ebb, however. Pratt seldom ventured into the SF field; he published more than thirty novels and may be best known for MR. LIMPETT (the basis of the Don Knotts movie) and THE TORMENTED (a study in nymphomania which was turned down by 34 publishers before selling over a million copies). “Roger Dee” (Roger D. Aycock) was a capable author who published over fifty stories from 1949 onward; Wildside Press issued a “Megapack” containing 14 of his stories in 2016. Merwin was a well-known editor and writer of science fiction and mysteries; he is [probably best known as a writer for hi alternate world novels THE HOUSE OF MANY WORLDS and THE THREE FACES OF TIME; near the end of his career he was writing paperback sex novels as “Carter Sprague.” Ethel G. Lewis (who dat?) published four stories in FU — this was the second; she did have one story (from EPOCH) that made it into Martha Foley’s BEST AMMERICAN SHORT STORIES 1951. Silverberg was always a capable professional no matter what he wrote; I don’t think this tale has ever been reprinted. Long was another capable writer, but he ended up publishing a lot of dreck; he was best know for his horror stories and his friendship with Lovecraft; he wrote several of the “Ellery Queen, Jr.” mysteries when they were farmed off by the regular ghostwriter for the series without the knowledge of “EQ.” Jakes published anything and everything before he hit it big with his historical novels. Bryning was a popular /Australian science writer in the Fifties.
I have not read all the stories in this issue, but I think I can safely say that ASTOUNDING, GALAXY, and F&SF had little to fear — for the most part, this issue seems competently minor.
The cover, BTW, was by Kelly Freas and seems to lack his usual flair.