Science Fiction in the 1940s

     To the American literary community--to the American arts establishment--the science fiction writers of the forties were invisible. There is no more graceful way to put this. There were, for the first half of the decade, almost no books at all: no anthologies, no reprints, no second-serial rights. Novels and stories were written for genre magazines of limited circulation, were published and went out of print, presumably forever.

Barry N. Malzberg, reprinted in Breakfast in the Ruins, 2007