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Uncanny Tales (Canadian pulp magazine)

Uncanny Tales was a Canadian weird fiction and science fiction pulp magazine edited by Melvin R. Colby that ran from November 1940 to September 1943. It was created in response to the wartime reduction of imports on British and American science fiction pulp magazines. Initially, it contained stories only from Canadian authors, with much of its contents supplied by Thomas P. Kelley. Within a few issues, Colby began to obtain reprint rights to American stories from Donald A. Wollheim and Sam Moskowitz. Wollheim's and Moskowitz's later accounts of the relationship with Colby differ. Moskowitz reported that he found out via an acquaintance of Wollheim's that Wollheim had persuaded Colby to stop buying Moskowitz's submissions. Paper shortages forced the magazine to shut down after less than three years. Copies are now extremely rare.

Publication history and contents
Although science fiction had been published before the 1920s, it did not begin to coalesce into a separately marketed genre until the appearance in 1926 of Amazing Stories, a pulp magazine published by Hugo Gernsback. By the end of the 1930s the science-fiction magazine field was booming, with multiple new magazines launched in a short period. Most of the US publishers also printed versions of their magazines for the Canadian market, but with the outbreak of World War II, paper shortages and import restrictions reduced the availability of these magazines in Canada. Uncanny Tales was begun in response to these conditions; the editor was Melvin R. Colby, and the first issue was dated November 1940. The first issue was digest-sized, and was printed in green ink. Colby initially focused on weird fiction, with Thomas P. Kelley, a Canadian writer whose work had appeared in Weird Tales, a prolific contributor. In Wollheim's account, he happened to meet Colby early in 1941 in New York; Wollheim had been editing Cosmic Stories and Stirring Science Stories but both magazines had ceased publication at the time of the meeting. Colby, who worked for a Toronto newspaper, told Wollheim that he was editing Uncanny Tales to make extra money, and asked if Wollheim knew where he might be able to obtain stories at a low word-rate. Since Stirring and Cosmic had never been distributed in Canada, Wollheim was able to offer him Canadian rights to the stories in those magazines, and Colby agreed to pay a quarter of a cent per word, a low rate compared to most American magazines. The sixth issue saw a story by Wollheim appear, and in the seventh issue there were three by Wollheim and one by Robert W. Lowndes. In total, 37 stories from Uncanny Tales have been identified as reprints from either Stirring or Cosmic. Canadian writers continued to appear in the magazine, including C. V. Tench, who had sold a story to the first issue of Astounding Stories in January 1930. The stories of Canadian origin were generally unmemorable, according to science fiction historians Mike Ashley and Grant Thiessen, and in some cases the stories may have been plagiarized or rewritten versions of other works. == Bibliographic details ==
Bibliographic details
Uncanny Tales was published by Adam Publishing Co. of Toronto for the first 17 issues, and by Norman Book Co. of Toronto for the last four issues. A complete index by Dennis Lien of the contents of all issues can be found in issue 9 of Megavore, a science fiction and fantasy bibliography magazine. In the early 1950s an anthology titled Brief Fantastic Tales appeared from Studio Publications in Toronto; it consisted mostly of reprints from Uncanny Tales, and despite the difference in the name of the publisher it is likely it came from the same editor and publishers as Uncanny Tales. == Notes ==
Source: Wikipedia ↗
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