Steve Davidson, the publisher who rescued Amazing Stories from the remainder bin of history and gave it a second century, died on 4 November. He was 67. The news was announced by the magazine itself, in an obituary written by Kermit Woodall, who now takes over as publisher. No cause of death has been given.
The timing is the cruel part. Amazing Stories was launched by Hugo Gernsback in April 1926, the first magazine given over entirely to what he called “scientifiction”, which is why the genre’s best-known award carries his name rather than, say, the name of whoever came up with the word “sci-fi”. This year it has been one hundred years old. Libraries have mounted exhibitions, NPR has run features, and the University of Liverpool has been marking “Science Fiction at 100”. Davidson spent the better part of fourteen years making sure the birthday boy was still alive to blow out the candles.
He came to it by an unusual road. Before science fiction publishing, Davidson was a competitive paintball player, good enough to be ranked among the Top 100 Paintball Players of All Time. Having spent years getting shot at for fun, he evidently decided that buying a famous but dormant pulp title was the natural next step. In 2012 he acquired the Amazing Stories name and relaunched it as an online magazine and blog, with a large stable of contributors. In 2018 a Kickstarter campaign brought it back into print. Anyone who has tried to keep a genre magazine solvent will understand that this is roughly the publishing equivalent of resurrecting a dinosaur and then having to feed it.
Davidson’s revived print editions also brought back an old friend. Allen Steele, remembering him on File 770, recalls that the relaunched magazine’s first issues carried his novella “Captain Future in Love”, returning Edmond Hamilton’s interplanetary hero to the kind of pages he grew up in. It was a very Davidson move: not nostalgia for its own sake, but a reminder that the pulps are a living tradition rather than a museum exhibit.
He was the brother of Andy Davidson, and according to the obituary he had been steering the magazine towards book publishing, with new imprints and anthologies. Amazing Stories will carry on under Woodall.
Here at SFcrowsnest, which started up in 1991 and therefore counts as a mere sprog by these standards, we have a particular fondness for people who keep old titles alive. It has been a curious week for it, with Starlog returning as an annual and Worlds of IF publishing its 180th issue. Davidson got there before most of them, and did it the hard way. A century is a long time for any magazine to survive. It helps enormously when somebody is willing to carry it.
Sources: Amazing Stories; File 770.
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