Cirrus@Austlit

Australia's first pulp science fiction magazine, Thrills Incorporated published stories of low literary quality. Many were written to order and the stories were accompanied by advertisements for sex-education books, suggesting a target audience of teenage boys. In his introduction to Australian Science Fiction Index 1925-1967, Graham Stone (q.v.) makes the following assessment of the collection of books and magazines of which Thrills Incorporated was a part: 'At their worst, publishers neither knew nor cared what Science Fiction was all about or what readers expected, and yet they somehow expected the suffering public to support their miserable apologies for magazines.'

Some overseas writers such as Clifford Simak and Ray Bradbury appeared; however, Thrills Incorporated was forced to apologise for pirated versions of overseas stories published under other names. Australian contributors included G. Clive Bleek, Alan Yates, Norma Hemming, D. K. Garton, and Russell Hausfeld (qq.v.).

Hemming, Australia's first serious female science-fiction writer, found Thrills a particularly fertile ground: barring a single short story in Vertical Horizons (April 1952) the magazine was almost the sole output for her fiction between October 1951 and its final issue in June, 1952, in what Sean McMullen calls 'a very strange and murky interlude' in her career.

In McMullen's analysis, Hemming was 'the only "serious" SF writer' to contribute to Thrills, which put her in an awkward position:

Their house writers--including Hemming after issue 16, October 1951--had to write to formula, but she must have done her work well as her stories appeared in every subsequent issue. Hemming trod a fine line between being too intellectual for the publishers and too facile for the reader.

Hemming's stories included three of the 'cover stories' that dominated the magazine after the change in publishers with issue 13: 'Amazons of the Asteroids' (issue 17, Nov. 1951), 'Peril of the Sea Planet' (issue 22, May 1952), and 'Rocketeers at Bay' (issue 23, June 1952).

The last issue of Thrills Incorporated appeared in June 1952.

Further Reference

McMullen, Sean. 'Sean McMullen's Australian Content: From Science Fantasy to Galileo'. Eidolon 10 (October 1992), pp.34-39.

http://www.eidolon.net/old_site/issue_10/10_sean.htm (Sighted: 22/7/2011)

From the novel's introduction:

'The invention of the "Kay-ray" had opened up unlimited fields by which to benefit humanity; but this was not to be. The inventor's gruesome murder and the capture of the Kay-ray by a ruthless and diabolically clever gang gives rise to a reign of terror which catches millionaires, bankers and ordinary people in its grip. To combat these unprecedented crimes, private detective Clinton Forder and the young scientist Bayne Mandeville need cunning equal to that of their enemies and escape a horrible death by a hair's breadth.'