The Seed of Earth

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The science fiction world of the late 1950's was an odd place, a kind of fallen empire that had collapsed into eerie provincial decay. There had been a big publishing boom in s-f from about 1949 to 1953, with dozens of new magazines founded, the first rush of paperback science fiction, and even some activity on the part of large hardcover houses like Doubleday and Simon & Schuster. Then most of it fell apart. The magazines died in droves, because there simply weren't enough readers to go around.

(In 1953 alone there were 39 s-f magazines, which was about 35 too many.) The paperback houses, having madly overextended themselves in their first hectic period of expansion, sent hundreds of millions of unsold books to the pulping machines and cut back drastically. And the hardcover people who had dabbled in science fiction found that sales were trifling; Doubleday stayed in the business, but nearly all the others dropped out.

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