My mistake. It did appear in the June 1956 edition of Playboy, but that was four years after it had appeared in Colliers. I was unaware of its earlier appearance. It was also in Planet Stories for January 1954.
I haven’t read Playboy in a long time, but when I did, the interviews were really good, the Adviser was interesting (if sometimes wrong), there was always pretty decent fiction, and there was even some pretty smart social/political journalism.
They may have marketed the brand as glamour & nude women, but there was a really good, smart magazine under there once. By comparison, Maxim was too many bullet points and kind of lowbrow.
Interesting thing – if you look it up on the Internet Speculative Fiction Data Base, Playboy has a listing for every single year from its founding in 1953 until 2002. It has had at least one issue every year – and generally many more than one – in which a piece of speculative fiction has appeared. Most of these are original, although they’ve reprinted, as with a Sound of Thunder above. They also published Fahrenheit 451 in three parts, but it was after the book publication.
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?10978
There are entries for several later years, too:
2006
2008 - 2011
It’s sad that the SF entries peter out and then stop. I assume it’s because Hefner stopped editing, and his influence wore off. There’s only one entry for 2011 – it’s by Margaret Atwood (!), but it’s an essay on the covers of weird Tales, not fiction.
In any event, at least it had a good run. Playboy Press published six anthologies of SF stories in 1971, and a couple of earlier ones in the 1960s. I’ve got some of these.
Playboy’s marketing was perfect. It had just enough top-quality material that you didn’t feel embarrassed buying it or have guest see it in your magazine rack, but it had enough nudity to attract men for that reason. It was the ‘acceptable’ porn of its era.
But Playboy eventually got serious competition from the likes of Maxim, which was ‘acceptable’ by providing enough frat-boy and gearhead content that you could plausibly buy it for that. That ate into the portion of Playboy’s audience that prefered Ferraris to Norman Mailer.
But the real killer has been the availabilty of embarassment-free porn and titillation of all varieties on the Internet. So I can kind of understand the desire to change the direction of the mag. I guess that wasn’t working for them.
Band name!
Fascinating fact: The ‘uninterrupted by tits’ era is ending next month, see the link below. I remember there was a lot of odd science fiction and some other fiction that got published in old playboy, there really were reasons to read it for the articles.
Well FWIW it looks like Slate is not getting any better either.
Their first album could be called “Brassiere, My Dear” or “La-Di-Bra”.
And Playboy should be what it was founded to be: A lifestyle magazine for straight men aspiring to be intellectual, cultured, and well-rounded, which stakes out a specific kind of pornography curated to maintain a certain tone. There’s a difference between curated and sorted, after all: A perfectly sorted collection can vary wildly in quality and style, whereas curation implies a strong editorial voice. That’s rarer, and is precisely the value a magazine should add.
Maybe “Elastic Ladyland” or “Boobs Next.”
“In Her Cups” or “UnderWiFi” or “Hooked On Her”
I heard a couple days ago his health had taken a turn for the worse. He’s 86. I can’t imagine being that funny for that long.
Nuts.
Oddly, I read them because they’re bad enough that I get annoyed by their writing and go read the real story they link to to ‘prove’ them wrong, it actually gets me to read real news that I’d otherwise find boring.
-‘Wall Street Journal’ Reintroduces Nudes After Failed Yearlong Experimentlink spoilered because WSJ nudes possibly NSFW:
That’s not that clever, but I still laughed.
I was going to say that of course it doesn’t seem realistic because WSJ doesn’t publish photos. But–huh. I remember when WSJ didn’t print photographs at all. I guess the internet changed things.