Sometime in the late 1950's, Fantasy House, now Mercury Publications,publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, moved to this bland modern building at 527 Madison Ave. It then moved again to what appears to be a largely residential building at 347 E 53 St. Finally, the magazine moved to what I assume must have been a garage in Connecticut but by that time it had ceased publishing any worthwhile, entertaining fiction and I ceased buying the magazine. By the 1980's, the authors who had learned their trade in the pulps were either dying off or publishing less frequently. Pulp authors knew that their primary purpose was to entertain. I assume that the new authors learned their craft in college creative writing courses. Like many college teachers, these probably set their standards to theoretical "higher" levels. Being entertaining, I suspect, was low on their order of priorities. There are still first class authors, like Turtledove and Flint, but they confine their output to books, bypassing the magazines entirely.
My friend Tom Drucker read this posting yesterday and told me that many of his friends stopped reading SF magazines about 25 or 30 years ago because they found the stories being printed being distinctively less entertaining than they had experienced previously. This coincides with my assessment that magazine SFdied around 1980 in the sense of consistently entertaining stories being published.
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