Introduction

When a large run of American Science Fiction came up for sale on eBay at the end of 2001, the Tasmanian dealer (eBay name Lupercal) described them as follows.

"A publication which went through a variety of name changes during its run of around 50 issues. Published in Sydney Australia by The Malian Press in the early to mid 1950's, these slim, booklet format pulp magazines took novellas from American SF pulps and presented them as standalone publications - generally this was the first and often only appearance of these titles in such a format.
The format is 34 pages of dense, double columned print, with no advertisements, no editorials, no reader's pages, and usually no date. About the only thing that seems familiar from a regular pulp is the rear cover blurb for next month's issue. Some issues have a short story at the end to fill up the page count..... The artwork for these magazines is by Australia's greatest SF illustrator Stanley Pitt, who is still kicking and was guest of honour recently at Comic Fest 2001."

Both Tuck and SFFWF identify 41 issues published between 1952 and 1955 and give the page count as 36. And in fact most of the issues had one or more stories in addition to the main title novella, 29 out of the 41. The title of the magazine started as "Famous American Science Fiction" for the first issue, plain "Science Fiction" for the second and third, became "American Science Fiction" with no 4, acquiring and losing the word "Magazine" several times over later on in its life. The magazine title was never featured very prominently, in fact; it was always the title of the lead story that dominated the cover.

SFFWF gives the artist for most covers as Stanley Pitt and credits Safone Jais with the covers of #3 and #5, but according to Tuck, this is in any case a pseudonym for Pitt. Pitt's signature is clearly visible on most of these covers; if you compare the corresponding letters in the two signatures, you can see close similarities. It may be difficult to see this in the relatively low-resolution images shown here, but it can be seen at higher magnification.

In the thumbnail index, the magazines are showed in numerical and date order. However, no dates or numbers are shown on the magazines themselves. Those ascribed here are those given in SFFWF, which in turn is based on the work of Graham Stone. Tuck also supplies numbers and dates; though his numbering is the same, his dates differ in several cases by a month or so. Since your main means of identifying the magazine is by the title on the cover, that of the lead story, the alphabetic table below will help you identify which magazine in the series you have.

Source of images

Most of the images of this title, more than 30 of them, are from the collection offered for sale on eBay mentioned above. Others were also offered for sale at various times, and one or two are from the Galactic Central web site courtesy of Phil Stephensen-Payne. Several are of rather poor quality and better images would be welcome.