Avon Science Fiction Reader
Edited by Donald A. Wollheim
Avon Novels, Inc.
1951
1st Printing
Another wonderful Avon cover! I'd like to read the lead story based on the cover alone. Unfortunately, not many other readers did.
Avon Science Fiction Reader was a companion to the Avon Fantasy Reader, but was never as popular as the other series, and lasted only 3 issues. It featured "the most astonishing classics of imagination...taken from the hidden files of out-of-print volumes and the crumbling pages of treasured magazines.", the same formula that worked for the Fantasy Reader, and yet it failed to attract a viable audience. A number of factors could have contributed to this. A large amount of new science fiction was readily available when the Science Fiction Reader was released, featuring many of the cover-featured authors, but there was next to no competing fantasy material available, which might account for the popularity of one title over the other. Another possiblity is that the older science fiction did not hold up as well over time as did the fantasy tales from a similar period and the stories in the Science Fiction Reader, while enjoyable, did not have the timeless quality of the material in the Fantasy Reader. With no new material, readers may have bypassed this title for the all-new science fiction mazazines on the rack, or for the paperback books that were becoming even more popular.
The lead story by Hamilton first saw print in 1933 (having originally appeared in Weird Tales) and tackles the age old question of why men and women can't see eye-to-eye. The rest of the contents, aside from the authors listed on the cover, include stories by Frank Belknap Long and Sewell Peaslee Wright, and all date from the same period.
When Wollheim left Avon to go to Ace, the Science Fiction Reader and the Fantasy Reader were combined into the even less successful Avon Science Fiction & Fantasy Reader.