PULP ROBOT COVERS 1940s - 1950s

THE LOOK OF THE FUTURE - PULP ROBOT COVERS

1940s - 1950s

Pulp magazines struggled once World War II started and never recovered. Wartime restrictions meant that even the cheap pulp paper they were printed on was hard to come by. Worse, the publishing world had discovered the mass market paperback format. These literally pocket-sized books used far less paper yet delivered more wordage from bigger name authors for the same quarter. Pulp publishers tried lowering their prices in response but that left them bereft of the inflow to hire top-tier authors to replace the grind-'em-out specialists who filled thousands of pulp pages.

F&sf made virtually no inroads into the paperback market, so the genre pulps theoretically had the market to themselves. They ran into an unmovable obstacle in the person of John W. Campbell, Jr. As editor of Astounding Science-Fiction from 1937 on (and, for a few years, Unknown Fantasy Fiction), he so thoroughly dominated the market for quality f&sf that none of his many competitors could thrive. The short-lived publications ran stories by teenage friends of the teenaged editors and swiftly ran the genre's reputation farther into the ground than the gaudy superscience of the 1930s had.

Campbell saw the future first. Astounding converted into digest format in 1944. Two major competitors finally emerged at the end of the decade. The Magazine of Fantasy in 1949, adding and Science Fiction the next year just before Galaxy Science Fiction launched. Both were digests. A few pulps continued to hit newsstands, mostly from pulp companies trying to amortize costs with additional titles, but pulps were dead by around 1953. They were silent movies in a Cinerama world.

Oddly, Campbell never ran a robot cover on a pulp Astounding (except for one early issue probably using up old inventory), so the selections on this page are a melange of lesser magazines, chosen more to feature as many titles as possible and as many different takes on robots. No attempt to be comprehensive is implied. Information about the covers is from ISFDB.com.