If (magazine) - Contents and Reception

Contents and Reception

The first issue of If, dated March 1952, went on sale on 7 January of that year. The lead story was Howard Browne's "Twelve Times Zero", a murder mystery with a science-fictional resolution; other stories were from Ray Palmer, Richard Shaver, and Rog Phillips, all writers associated with the Ziff-Davis magazines. Browne was the editor of Ziff-Davis's Amazing Science Fiction, a leading magazine of the time, and had given Fairman his start in the field in the late 1940s. Fairman was familiar with Ziff-Davis's stable of writers, and his preference for them was a reflection of his experience, though this did not necessarily serve the magazine well—he referred to the acquisition of Browne's story as "the scoop of the century" and spoke in glowing terms of him in an introductory note despite the fact that Browne was reputed to detest science fiction. In addition to the fiction and the editorial by Fairman, there was a letter column, a profile of Wilson Tucker, a selection of science news, a guest editorial by Ken Slater, a well-known British fan, and an approving review of the TV show Tales of Tomorrow.

After Quinn dismissed Fairman and engaged Larry Shaw, the magazine improved significantly, and published several well-received stories, including James Blish's "A Case of Conscience" in the September 1953 issue, later to become the first part of Blish's Hugo Award-winning novel of the same name, about a Jesuit priest on a planet of aliens who have no religion but appear free of sin. The dominant science fiction magazines of the 1950s were Astounding, Galaxy, and Fantasy and Science Fiction, but If was in the next rank in terms of quality: SF historian Frank M. Robinson, for example, describes If as the "most major of the minors". Well-known writers who appeared in If in the 1950s include Harlan Ellison and Arthur C. Clarke: the original short story version of Clarke's novel The Songs of Distant Earth appeared in the June 1958 issue. Isaac Asimov's widely reprinted story "The Feeling of Power" appeared in February 1958.

The period under Pohl is regarded as the magazine's heyday; the three consecutive Hugo Awards won from 1966 to 1968 broke a long period in which the award had been monopolized by Analog (the name to which Astounding changed in 1960) and Fantasy and Science Fiction. Frank Robinson commented that "Pohl was the only one who was surprised when he won three Hugos in a row for editing IF. It had been fun, and the fun had showed." Niven's "Neutron Star" appeared in 1967, and Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" appeared in 1968; both won Hugo Awards. Pohl also managed to secure a new Skylark novel, Skylark DuQuesne, from E.E. Smith; the series had been started in the 1920s and was still popular with readers. Pohl also bought A.E. van Vogt's "The Expendables"; the story was van Vogt's first sale in 14 years and attracted long-time readers to the magazine. Another coup was the serialization of three novels by Robert A. Heinlein, including the award-winning The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which ran in five parts from December 1965 to April 1966.

Pohl's policy of publishing a story by a new writer in every issue led to a series called "If-firsts"; the first one, Joseph L. Green's "Once Around Arcturus", about the courtship between a man and woman of different planets, appeared in the September 1962 issue. Several of the writers featured in the If-first series, which were published from 1962 through 1965, became well-known, including Alexei Panshin; the most prominent was Larry Niven, whose first story, "The Coldest Place", appeared in December 1964. Niven later remarked that the story was immediately outdated; the plot relied on the discovery that the dark side of Mercury was the coldest place in the universe, but space probes had recently discovered that Mercury did in fact rotate asynchronously. Gardner Dozois also made his first sale to If, with "The Empty Man", about a man possessed by an alien, in the September 1966 issue, and Gene Wolfe's "Mountains Like Mice", about an abandoned group of colonists on Mars, appeared in the May 1966 issue. Technically this was not Wolfe's first sale, as he had already had "The Dead Man" published in the October 1965 issue of Sir!, but "Mountains Like Mice" had been written earlier.

If's covers during the 1960s were typically action-oriented, showing monsters and aliens; and several of the stories Pohl published were directed at a younger audience. For example, Blish's Welcome to Mars, serialized under the title The Hour Before Earthrise in July to September 1966, was about a teenage genius whose antigravity device stranded him and his girlfriend on Mars. Ashley has suggested that If was attempting to acquire readership from the many new fans of science fiction who had been introduced to the genre through television, in particular via the popular 1960s shows Doctor Who and Star Trek. If also ran a friendly letter column, with more fan-oriented discussions than the other magazines, and between 1966 and 1968 a column by Lin Carter introduced readers to various aspects of science fiction fandom. These features are also likely to have appealed to a younger audience.