Venture Science Fiction
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Digest-sized science fiction magazine, a companion to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF) and its crime fiction stablemates at Mercury Press when launched with the January, 1957 issue. Edited by Robert P. Mills, who was Managing Editor of F&SF and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as well as handling Mercury Mystery and some of their other book-magazine projects.
Venture was notable in a crowded field of latter-1950s sf magazines on at least three counts: it was the first magazine to feature a regular science-fact-popularization column by Isaac Asimov, which would move over to F&SF upon Venture's folding; a regular book-review column by Theodore Sturgeon (who would later serve in a similar capacity for magazines as diverse as National Review, Galaxy Science Fiction, and Hustler), wherein Sturgeon apparently first put in print his widely-paraphrased "Sturgeon's Law" (usually given as something like, 90% of science fiction may be undistinguished, but 90% of everything is undistinguished — Sturgeon himself didn't call it a "law"); and the widely-hailed quality of its fiction, much of which was more sexually sophisticated than most magazine sf of the time (not least Sturgeon's own stories, such as "Affair with a Green Monkey").
After incorporation of the U.S. edition of Venture into F&SF in 1958, the UK version continued as that country's edition of both Venture and F&SF into the mid-1960s. In 1969, Edward L. Ferman and Joseph W. Ferman as editor and publisher revived Venture, with Ron Goulart as book reviewer and a policy of running a short, sophisticated adventure novel in each issue. This version was reincorporated into F&SF in 1970.
