Searching for Canada's First Sci-Fi Magazine
To help introduce Tome & Space, we’d like to spotlight some of our predecessors and contemporaries. We are a sci-fi & fantasy genre magazine featuring short stories and comics. In particular, we’d like to put our own spin on being a combination of Asimov’s/Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Metal Hurlant, with some curveballs thrown in for good measure.
We think the format is perfect for the modern reader and scroller looking for some brain-healthy entertainment. For me, reading our stuff feels like a cooling balm after getting a rash reading “honestly, it’s not a roadblock, it’s a runway,” slop on LinkedIn.
Publications like ours have their roots in the pulp magazines of the early twentieth century (named for their cheap newsprint paper), typically sold for a dime and featuring thrills in a variety of genres and originating the iconic Cthulhu, Zorro, Tarzan, and Conan the Barbarian. As usual, Canadians primarily enjoyed magazines produced in the big place down south:
“If Canada seemed like an SF wasteland then, that is precisely what it was. The centre of professional magazines was the US and the various fulcrums of SF fandoms were located there too, so to engage in nationalistic SF activities in the late ‘30s in Canada was to engage in what Mark Twain politely termed onanism.” - Sam Moskowitz in Science Fiction Studies, and a former contributor to Uncanny Tales
A golden opportunity then arose from banning the import of non-essential goods during the Second World War, including the popular pulps. Some enterprising opportunists got around the restriction by importing the printing plates into Canada to print domestic knock-off versions. But Adams Publishing in Toronto set out to establish an original sci-fi pulp—Uncanny Tales.
Thomas P. Kelley, product of the beautiful Hastings, Ontario and self-proclaimed ‘fastest writer in the East’, had sold a multitude of stories and novels to pulps and contributed the lion’s share to the new magazine, giving it instant credibility among SF fans. Uncanny Tales was unfortunately short-lived (1940-1943), ending before the end of the war due to paper shortages on a break-even budget. It would be some time before Canadian-made sci-fi magazines would be revived, but let’s save that for another post.
Was Uncanny Tales any good? We know it didn’t foster anything quite as memorable as its counterparts, but its covers were elite—we’re a fan of yellow and black designs you might notice—and its description from the aforementioned contributor to the pulp makes it seem uncomfortably relatable.
“All in all, Canada’s most hopeful homegrown fantasy publication must, in the kindest parlance, be admitted to have been a fascinating but considerably flawed product run by men who could have been similarly characterized without any danger of contradiction” - Sam Moskowitz
Ouch. Well in any case, we’d love to write a review if we can track one down. If anyone has found a digital copy, please let us know, otherwise we will endeavor to read it at the Toronto reference library. A quest for another day.
In our new era of trade wars and combatting global fascism, please spare some time reading Canadian genre magazines featuring homegrown talents and other good folks from all over the world—even if its publishers are considerably flawed. With your help we can last a bit longer than Uncanny Tales without requiring a ban on non-Canadian genre magazines, because frankly, we want you to read them too.
P.S. The Canadian Science Fiction & Fantasy Association is a great resource for finding the work of Canadian sci-fi/fantasy writers and artists.