The Amazing Editorials by Ted White

(Ansible Editions, 2023)

Reviewed by Graham Andrews

Please bear with me for a few preliminary Down Memory Lane words, concerning Marshall’s newsagents in 1960s/1970s Belfast, Northern Ireland. It sold just about every American SF magazine then extant, including the otherwise unobtainable Amazing and Fantastic. Both these magazines had been in the doldrums for several years, and I generally gave them a miss. What attracted me back to reading them was the editorial policy of Ted White—and the editorials written by Ted White. BTW: I’m prone to reading the non-fiction contents of a magazine before getting round to reading the fiction.

Editorials in stf (White’s preferred contraction) magazines were nothing new by then, of course, with John W. Campbell of Astounding/Analog being the prime impersonally polemical example. In his Introduction (‘The Amazing Ted’), Mike Ashley avers that a magazine should have a distinctive personality: “That personality may in part be a product of the contributors but its chiefly created by the editor—of an editor who loves what they’re doing.” White followed the fan-friendly example of Raymond A. Palmer, who had also edited both Amazing and Fantastic, back in the mid-century day.

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Review from BSFA Review 22 - Download your copy here.