A couple of days ago—I’m writing this in the last weeks of 2004—I received the January/ February 2005 issue of our sister magazine Analog, in which Jack Williamson’s new novel, The Stonehenge Gate, began its three-part serialization. That issue reminded me of two things: that Jack Williamson has held a central position in science fiction longer than I’ve been alive, and that the serialization of novels once held a central position in science fiction also, but that is very definitely not the case any more.

Williamson first. He was born in 1908, his first story was published in 1928, and in 1934 he established himself as a star of the first magnitude in our firmament with his imperishable novel, The Legion of Space. (Serialized in Astounding Stories, as Analog was known then, in six parts.) Here he is, seventy-one years after the publication of Legion, with yet another serial in that magazine. Its first installment appears in Analog’s seventy-fifth anniversary issue. Williamson’s career as a science fiction writer is thirteen months older than Analog itself, and he is still writing top-flight material. The mind reels at the thought.

But the serialization of novels in our field stopped mattering a long time ago, and that’s a cause for some wonderment also.

Most science fiction novels now are launched as hardcover books, or, sometimes, as paperback originals. Nary a one of 2004’s Hugo-nominated novels began its life as a magazine serial. That was not the case in earlier times, when book publication of science fiction was extremely rare and nearly every SF novel of any significance was published first in one of the magazines.

The tradition of serialization was firmly established in the early decades of the twentieth century by Argosy, an all-fiction magazine issued weekly at a time when there were no paperback books or television and movies had barely begun. Each issue had three, four, even five serial novels running concurrently—westerns, tales of jungle adventure, fantasy, science fiction. Many of the early classic novels of SF and fantasy appeared in its pages: those of Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, Ray Cummings, Homer Eon Flint, George Allan England, and dozens of others.

When the first all-science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, was founded in 1926, it, too, began to run serials. Since it came out monthly rather than weekly, it couldn’t do as many at a time as Argosy did, or stretch them out in as many installments. But its first issue offered a pair of two-part novels, one by Jules Verne and one by G. Peyton Wertenbaker, and serials remained an important part of its makeup thereafter. One of its early great achievements was E.E. “Doc” Smith’s The Skylark of Space, in three parts starting in August 1928. Jack Williamson made his debut as a serial-writer in the March 1930 issue, with a two-parter, The Green Girl. More novels by Doc Smith, John W. Campbell, Jr., John Russell Fearn, and other big figures of the period followed.

Very few of those early serials are remembered today. But when John Campbell took over the editorship of Astounding in 1937 he focused on publishing novels, and over the next decade or so brought out dozens that are essential to any understanding of the science fiction of the twentieth century. Doc Smith was a big contributor of serialized novels (Gray Lensman, 1939, and Second-Stage Lensman, 1941-42), as were L. Ron Hubbard (Final Blackout, 1940), A.E. van Vogt (Slan, 1940, The Weapon Makers, 1943, and The World of Null-A, 1945), but the dominant writer of the time was Robert A. Heinlein, with If This Goes On—, 1940, followed by Sixth Column, 1941, Methuselah’s Children, 1941, and Beyond This Horizon, 1942. Isaac Asimov came along with his first serial in 1945, The Mule, a Foundation story done in two parts, and added another segment of the Foundation series four years later with the three-part . . . And Now You Don’t of 1949. Other important serial novels during the Campbellian golden age were provided by Fritz Leiber, the ubiquitous Jack Williamson, Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, and Hal Clement.

The reason why all these novels came out in magazine form is simple: there was no other market for them. The publication of SF in books did not really get going until 1946, and the early publishers were financially shaky semi-pro outfits (Shasta Publishers, Gnome Press, Fantasy Press, etc.) that concentrated mainly on reprinting the magazine serials I’ve just been discussing. Only when Doubleday entered the science fiction field in 1949, and Ballantine Books a couple of years later, did the regular professional publication of SF in book form begin.

Even then, most SF novels came out first in the magazines. In 1950, when the shiny new magazine Galaxy made its much-publicized arrival, it announced a policy of running three serials a year, and backed that up with an astonishing run of significant novels, all of which would find their way into book form not long afterward: first Clifford D. Simak’s Time Quarry (reprinted as Time and Again), then Isaac Asimov’s Tyrann (done in book form as The Stars, Like Dust), and Mars Child by C.M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril. The next couple of years saw Galaxy adding to its laurels with such memorable novels as Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s Gravy Planet (reprinted as The Space Merchants), Alfred Bester’s two masterpieces, The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, and Asimov’s The Caves of Steel.

I was a teenage reader and aspiring writer in the early 1950s when all that was going on, and I remember indulging, when I was fifteen, in one of those fantasies that are permissible when you’re fifteen and merely nutty at any later age: that a time would come when I too would have a serial in Astounding or Galaxy, and, indeed, that for a whole year Galaxy would publish nothing but Silverberg novels. By the time I was twenty-two I had actually fulfilled the first part of that wild fantasy, when Randall Garrett and I collaborated on The Dawning Light, a three-part novel that John Campbell serialized in early 1957. Many years later, to my amazement, I even brought off something close to the really absurd Galaxy dream: my novel Downward to the Earth ran in four parts beginning in November 1969, Tower of Glass ran in three, starting in May 1970, most of the stories making up my book The World Inside were published as individual novelets in the latter half of 1970, and A Time of Changes was serialized beginning in March 1971. (For good measure I threw in Dying Inside in the July and August 1972 issues.) It was a heady, breathless time for me, and somewhere in the midst of it I recalled my wild teenage dream of filling the pages of Galaxy with my novels, even as Heinlein had done in Astounding between 1940 and 1942, and found myself flabbergasted that it had come to pass.

Poul Anderson had done a similar Heinleinesque stunt in Astounding earlier, with The Man Who Counts in the issues for February, March, and April, 1958, and then We Have Fed Our Sea in August and September, followed immediately in October and November with A Bicycle Built for Brew. Anderson also holds the distinction of being the author of one of the few unfinished serials in science fiction history: the first half of the novel that later would be known as Brain Wave appeared in the September 1953 issue of the short-lived Space Science Fiction under the title of The Escape, but Space expired with that issue and readers left dangling by Anderson’s cliffhanger ending to the first part had to wait until the next year for book publication of the complete text.

Cliffhangers, of course, were an essential feature of serializations: each segment of the book had to end with the universe in peril, at the very minimum, and most novels of that era were constructed with that requirement in mind. If you read them carefully today, you can still see where the serial breaks came. (The most common serial format was the three-parter, which required two interior climaxes, though, as I’ve shown, novels in two or four parts weren’t rare. As I said, Williamson’s Legion of Space ran in six installments, though. Decades later, Frank Herbert’s Dune was an epic eight-parter in Analog, although with an intermission, the first section running from December 1963 to February 1964, and the second in five installments beginning with the January 1965 issue.)

The great boom in SF book publishing that began in the 1950s brought into being more important novels than the magazines of the day could handle as serials. Thus such major books as Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 all appeared first as original books, though excerpts from them were published as magazine novellas. The magazines continued to run serials regularly on through the 1960s and 1970s, but only a handful of each year’s new novels now came out first in magazine form. The author of a science fiction novel no longer was faced with the choice between serial publication and no publication at all, and often it was more advantageous to go straight to a book publisher.

Today, SF novels in hardcover and paperback pour forth upon us by the hundreds every year. Few can hold the spotlight for more than a moment or two before being jostled aside by the oncoming hordes. The old days when a novel like Slan or The Demolished Man would be serialized in one of the leading magazines, immediately read and discussed by everyone who cared about SF, and promoted instantly to classic status, are gone.

Today’s magazines concentrate on shorter fiction and leave the novels to the book publishers. Analog still runs a couple of serials a year, but hardly anyone else does. Asimov’s has serialized just four novels in its entire history—one by William Gibson, two by Michael Swanwick, one by Robert Silverberg. “The amount of time between the serialization of and the actual appearance of the book on bookstore shelves had begun to shrink,” former editor Gardner Dozois told me recently, “so that sometimes only a month or two would go by between the end of the serial and the appearance of the book, and I began to think, why waste all that space, a huge chunk of at least three issues, to print something that everybody was going to be able to buy elsewhere a month later anyway?” If he were still editing now, said Dozois, he would consider serializing only those books that were “too weird or controversial to sell to the trade houses, so that the readers would be getting something they couldn’t get somewhere else later down the line.” But such books seem to be few and far between, and many were too long for serialization.

A vanished era, yes. And yet here is Jack Williamson giving us one more three-parter in Analog, seventy-one years after his serial The Legion of Space, seventy-five years after The Green Girl. Like the Great Pyramid of Gizeh rising above the Egyptian sands does Williamson endure. He is the most versatile of our writers, changing and growing with the decades. But, fresh and vigorous as his new novel is, it is, I think, one of the last of its kind, a relic of yesteryear’s publishing customs.