Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: Captain Future Winter 1941

The Magazine of the Week is the Winter 1941 issue of Captain Future, with cover story "Captain Future and the Seven Space-Stones" by Edmond Hamilton (cover art by Earle K. Bergey).

Captain Future was the only strictly science fictional hero pulp, if you don't count Flash Gordon magazine, which lasted only one issue. The lead story of every Captain Future magazine was by Edmond Hamilton, a respected Golden Age SF author (and husband of another respected Golden Age author, Leigh Brackett, best remembered today for writing the first draft of the screenplay for Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back). Hamilton's lead story always starred our hero Captain Future, but each issue was filled out with stories by other authors not involving Captain Future. Notably, one of the filler stories in the Magazine of the Week is "Not Yet the End," the first published story by Fredric Brown, one of my favorites (discussed in the August 16 Magazine of the Week).

We are nearing the end of our introduction to the pulp magazines. There are many other genres and important authors from the pulp era we have yet to discuss, but I have to cut this history off somewhere. However, there is one more figure from the pulps I cannot resist mentioning. Next week's Magazine of the Week will feature one of the most prolific of the pulp authors, someone who certainly was not the best of the pulp writers but may end up having the greatest impact, because he founded a religion that has hundreds of thousands of followers today.