Future Science Fiction, October 1959

A pulp science fiction magazine from the tail end of the genre's golden age. The cover features dramatic black-and-white artwork of a man in dark clothing cradling a woman against a backdrop of radioactive devastation. Bold yellow and red typography announces stories including Robert Silverberg's "The World He Left Behind" and Ed M. Clinton Jr.'s "Tomorrow's Brothers." By 1959, pulp magazines were declining as paperback novels and television expanded, but they continued delivering the imaginative scenarios—post-apocalyptic survival, time travel, alternate worlds—that would influence the emerging comic book industry. The lurid imagery and sensational cover lines were standard marketing for a format that built devoted readerships through affordable thrills and speculation about humanity's future.