The late 1960s and early ‘70s were peak sword-and-sorcery. The Lancer Conan Saga was at its zenith of popularity, eventually selling by some estimates upwards of 10 million copies. Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock were seeing broad mass market paperback publication, Leiber with Swords and Deviltry and Swords Against Death (Ace, 1970) and Moorcock with the likes of the first Corum trilogy (Berkley Medallion, 1971). And as the ‘60s gave way to the ‘70s a struggling magazine was about to get a signal boost from S&S’s mightiest hero.

As Ted White found out during his tenure as editor of the digest-sized Fantastic Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories/Fantastic Science-Fiction/Fantastic Stories of Imagination, best known as Fantastic, the public appetite for Conan ran deep, and was not slaked by the Lancers.

Fantastic had a broad editorial palette, publishing science fiction, fantasy, and horror, both original fiction and reprints. In short, “fantasy” in its broadest possible term. Over its 28 year run (1952-1980) it published all the big names of SF and fantasy, including the likes of Asimov, Poul Anderson, Ursula Le Guin, Richard Matheson, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Bloch. But, this eclectic approach met with mixed commercial results. Fantastic was buoyed by a very successful launch thanks to an inaugural March 1952 issue that included striking cover art and stories by Raymond Chandler, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. While its near three-decade run is quite respectable, its story is mainly one of early success marked by a gradual decline, albeit broken up by peaks of circulation and bouts of excellent editorial work, particularly in S&S.

Cele Goldsmith was the first Fantastic editor to fully embrace S&S. Editor from Dec. 1958-June 1965, Goldsmith encouraged Leiber, who had largely abandoned his heroes for the greener fields of SF, to get back in the game with more stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Leiber complied with several classic F&GM tales and would later go on to pen a regular book review column for the magazine (when Fritz Leiber writes your book reviews you know you’re doing something right). Goldsmith also published the likes of L. Sprague de Camp, Roger Zelazny, Lin Carter, Avram Davidson, and others. John Jakes’s first stories of Brak were published during her tenure, notably the May 1963 issue featuring “Devils in the Walls” on its cover.

Goldsmith’s tenure is today regarded as a golden age of the magazine. But despite her best efforts sales continued to flag. After her departure Fantastic received a boost in sales when it reprinted several stories by big name authors, but it was an artificial spike that ended when the reprint well ran dry. New strategies and new ideas were needed.

Enter Ted White. White (editor from June 1969-January 1979) returned Fantastic’s focus to original fiction, with a renewed emphasis on sword-and-sorcery. The October 1970 issue featured a sword-and-sorcery novella by Dean Koontz, “The Crimson Witch,” which grabbed the cover. I wish I had better things to say about the story; S&S by the likes of Koontz, who went on to a wildly successful career in horror, seems to be made for awesome, but it’s fairly rote, with an incursion into our world the only element of note. Koontz never wrote S&S again, at least that I’m aware of. Still a cool footnote though. Far more successful from an artistic viewpoint was Leiber’s “The Snow Women” (April 1970 Fantastic)—not everyone’s cup of tea but a story at least I find brilliant, Fafhrd’s origin story in the cold Northern wastes of Nehwon.

Circulation remained flat, but White finally got the boost he was looking for when he began publishing stories of S&S’ mightiest hero: Conan, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, was about to tread the digest size pages of Fantastic under his sandalled feet, in the form of four new stories by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp.

White was not the first Fantastic editor to reprint Robert E. Howard. Former editor Joseph Wrzos had reprinted "The People of the Black Circle" in 1967 (that same year saw Fantastic publish “Battle in the Dawn” by Manly Wade Wellman). But because White focused on original stories over reprints, he turned to de Camp and Carter who had penned original stories and finished Howard story fragments for the Lancers. The de Camp/Carter collaboration “The Witch of the Mists” grabbed the cover of the 20th anniversary August 1972 Fantastic, with art by Jeff Jones and additional interior art by Harry Roland. Conan sold. In an editorial in the July 1973 Fantastic, White wrote that for the first time Fantastic surpassed its SF counterpart Amazing SF in sales. Wrote White:

CONAN AND RELATED TOPICS: Customarily this magazine sells fewer copies than its sister magazine, AMAZING SF. This, in turn, seems to be a reflection of the fact that fewer readers are interested in fantasy than in science fiction, and this sales difference has been a constant throughout most of the twenty-year history of this magazine, and, indeed, for the thirteen-year career of its predecessor, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, as well. We are, for the most part, resigned to it.
But our August, 1972, issue reversed this position: it sold not only the best of any issue of FANTASTIC which we published in 1972, but better than any issue of AMAZING published last year as well.
Significantly better.

Encouraged by the impact of the mighty-thewed Cimmerian, White ran a second Conan story with a big splash on the cover of the July 1973 Fantastic. “Conan is Back!” declared the issue, which featured another de Camp/Carter original “Black Sphinx of Nebthu,” the cover illustration by Roland.

The message? Just as high fantasy is forever associated with Tolkien, sword-and-sorcery will always exist in the shadow of the mighty Cimmerian. Conan sells. White realized this, but reassured Fantastic’s readership that that magazine was not going to become an REH or de Camp/Carter organ. Again in the July 1973 editorial:

Will this issue sell as well as the August, 1972, issue did? Only time will tell. But it is my conviction that, under Conan’s herald, fantasy is enjoying a great popular resurgence today and that it is the function—indeed, the duty—of this magazine to join forces with the times.
By this I do not mean to turn FANTASTIC into a captive vehicle for Conan stories and similar fantasies to the exclusion of everything else. But quite obviously powerful adventure-fantasy has an important place in these pages and we will continue to publish it here.

White did. While still far beneath its inaugural issues and mid-’60s peaks, sales of Fantastic rose slightly from 1971-73. White continued to champion S&S in the following years, publishing additional new Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, new Elric (“The Sleeping Sorceress” in February 1972), Thongor, and more four-color heroes. De Camp contributed with a regular “Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers” column during this period, mining heroic fantasy’s past with features on its seminal authors including the likes of Lord Dunsany, William Morris, T.H. White, and others. These would later be collected in an Arkham Press volume of the same name. Conan made additional cover appearances, including “Red Moon of Zembabwei” in the July 1974 issue, and in the February 1975 issue with “Shadows in the Skull,” both again by de Camp/Carter. The latter featured a splendid cover painting by Stephen Fabian.

All four of these de Camp/Carter Conan collaborations would later be collected in Conan of Aquilonia (1977, Ace), which inaccurately trumpeted on its cover “First publication anywhere!” To be generous, these were intended to appear in the Conan Saga (Carter and de Camp were contracted by Lancer in 1971 to write the stories), but bankruptcy caused the authors to shop them elsewhere.

Sword-and-sorcery peaked in the magazine with the publication of Sword and Sorcery Annual/Fantastic Stories Special, a companion magazine published in 1975. White again leaned into Conan hard, putting the tagline “Thrilling Adventures of Conan the Cimmerian” as the tagline. Fabian returned on the cover, and the issue led off with the classic “Queen of the Black Coast.” The rest of the issue also punched way above its weight, despite being reprints. Here is the star-studded lineup:

Michael Moorcock, “Master of Chaos”
Fritz Leiber, “The Cloud of Hate”
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Masters”
Roger Zelazny, “Horseman”
John Jakes, “The Pillars of Chambalor”
Robert Arthur, “The Mirror of Cagliostro”
Sam Moskowitz, “L. Sprague de Camp: Sword and Satire” (non-fiction)

That same year Fantastic went so far as to adopt S&S in its masthead, relabeling itself from Fantastic: Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories to Fantastic: Sword & Sorcery and Fantasy Stories. White went on to publish the likes of David Drake, Gardner Fox, Karl Edward Wagner (the Kane short story “Two Suns Setting” in May 1976), and Glen Cook. Unfortunately, neither Conan nor S&S could save Fantastic’s slow downward spiral. Circulation continued to decline and White ultimately parted ways from the magazine in early 1979. Fantastic limped along a couple more years, publishing a few more S&S stories from Carter, Keith Taylor, and Darrell Schweitzer before ceasing its run with the Oct. 1980 issue. It, and S&S, were headed for a fall.

With a sharper, tighter focus and more consistent editorial leadership, Fantastic could have been better. The S&S fan in me wonders what could have been had it embraced the subgenre from its inception; easy for me to say when in 1952 it was on life support, and science fiction clearly ascendant.

But what we do have in Fantastic is a legacy of uniqueness, creative quirks, and interesting missteps. At its worst it was a cheap reprint vehicle, but at its best Fantastic was … well, fantastic, and its legacy is fondly remembered.

References

This is a fantastic recap of the Ted White years in Fantastic (as usual I’m indebted to S&S historian GW Thomas for his work): https://www.michaelmay.online/2014/12/ted-whites-fantastic-short-heroic.html

Fantastic’s ISFDB entry is a glorious way to spend some idle hours: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?8935

Brian Murphy is the author of Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery (Pulp Hero Press, 2020). Learn more about his life and work on his website, The Silver Key.