It’s all dried up now, but in the first 50 years of its life Playboy was the slickest of the slicks for science fiction, publishing many of the genre’s masters. Here is every story you should read.
Let’s start with the bad news. Playboy didn’t publish a lot of science fiction. I looked through every edition from its first issue in 1953 to the end of its print run in 2020 and I found less than 100 stories that could even feasibly be claimed for the genre. More than half of these are in the list below.
Hugh Hefner may have harbored liberal and intellectual aims for his men’s magazine, but it was actually a deeply conservative publication, using sexual freedom as camouflage for a slavish devotion to traditional values and affluence: witness its long streak of Trump-worship. You can tell a readership by the advertising, which in Playboy’s case runs the gamut from golf and fine watches to military paraphernalia and the bric-a-brac of American pride.
For all that the magazine seemed to target ordinary teen boys, cheap thrills for the college locker room, its audience was actually the wealthy and the would-be wealthy. It was middle aged and somewhat staid from the start. Playboy was a mirror held up proudly to white male privilege. Its kinks were safe kinks. It talked about sex but it was the most repressed magazine on its shelf.
Before you think there was some thrill in plowing through crumpled stacks of about 700 back issues, I have to tell you that the old joke about reading it for the articles is right. The nudes bore me sexless. An odd form of titillation for men who presumably could get the real thing on demand, they were always the least interesting of Playboy’s ploys, a waste of ink and gloss. The women are as interchangeable as robot parts, all the same age and shape, all the epitome of grey-haired corporate desire.
Did anybody really buy it for the breasts? Not if you understood what you were getting, no, but I guess the kids who shoved it under their mattresses knew no better.
In the 1980s Playboy shifted toward a younger, hipper market, chasing the success of a host of fresher, less self-absorbed rivals. It also began to feature more than its token colored and exotic models, desperate to attract wealthy blacks. But it was never what you could conceivably call woke, and now it’s just another of your grandfather’s knee tremblers online.
There’s one more thing to note about Playboy. Though it did publish a whole strand of breathlessly optimistic articles about the future in 1962, the magazine had a recurring anti-technology bias that doesn’t really make it the magazine for science fiction buffs. Where is the science undergrad’s magazine with literate tech and centerfolds?
Fiction was a huge part of Playboy’s remit, at least in the early days. Though the first few issues struggled to fill more than a handful of pages (it soon ballooned into editions of 300 pages or more), it managed to fill space with a three-part distillation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in March, April, and May 1954, even though Ballantine had already published the novel in 1953. I presume it was intended as a broadside against censorship. If so, it was a blunt instrument: the story took up all of 44 pages.
Bradbury was a standard feature. He even got his name as first-line feature on the front cover of the March 1961 issue, an extremely rare thing. But that doesn’t mean science fiction. Once Playboy stopped reprinting old stories — ‘The Concrete Mixer,’ ‘A Sound Of Thunder’ — Bradbury soon realized that the slick was an easy target for mainstream stories, and shifted largely to that style. Playboy meanwhile seemed far happier printing spy adventures, ghost stories, and sexual fantasies than science fiction.
In fact you could argue that it was late to adopt the genre. It hardly published notable science fiction at all until the late 1970s, when Alice K. Turner became fiction editor. Under her stewardship, the genre became a fixture in the 1980s and 1990s, way after the rest of the slicks had moved on. My suspicion is that Playboy did this purposefully in response to OMNI (created by its Penthouse rival, Bob Guccione), but let’s not be picky. Turner gave us, in particular, an outlet for a rush of Robert Silverberg’s later work. But when OMNI expired so did Playboy’s interest in the genre, and when Turner moved on the stories largely ceased for good.
Besides, by this point it had new obsessions: New Yorker style fiction and horror by the likes of Stephen King and Chuck Palahniuk. In recent decades Playboy became interested in publishing only those authors its reviewers had heard of, and by the 2000s there were very few science fiction authors that anybody outside the genre bubble knew enough to make them worth the word rate.
Playboy’s small body of science fiction has been anthologized a couple of times, most notably in Turner’s The Playboy Book of Science Fiction (1988), but it’s always better to read stories in their original form, and all you need to get rummaging is in the list below.
Please note a couple of self-imposed restrictions. I include only stories that were published first in Playboy. Reprints are not allowed. Neither are excerpts from novels. My list also excludes some of the short-shorts (one pagers or less) that the magazine published, though I do include a couple of its better one-beat jokes.
And be warned: writers either tailored their stories to what they perceived as the Playboy style, or believed (correctly, it seems) that Playboy was more likely to publish their work if it was sexual in nature. So some of these stories are more sexually explicit than would be the case in dedicated science fiction magazines. I omitted a few of the worst offenders, but this is certainly Terry Bisson’s understanding of the brief, and I let a couple of his pass.
I omit anything that is too clearly fantasy to attract science fiction fans, though this is naturally a matter of personal opinion. I also omit anything that doesn’t have enough genre signifiers to count. For this reason, quite a few of Playboy’s best known and beloved “genre” stories — Richard Matheson’s ‘Button, Button’ for example — are not included, and I have no truck with magical machines like Stephen King’s ‘The Word Processor.’
Finally, there are two ways to gauge the importance of the fiction in Playboy, and neither of them are to do with word count. The magazine had space to fill as cheaply as it could.
The first is whether the author got his or her name on the front cover. If you’re not on the front — and Playboy buried its contents page inside — readers won’t buy it because of you. In the list below, I reproduce the front cover only if the author’s name is on it, and be aware that occasionally the name might be there for a different reason, such as a forum or article.
The second is the illustration. Mostly these were quick and cheap, another form of space filler, but a handful of authors were gifted superb illustrations, even tri-fold spreads. As the most bankable name in the genre, Arthur C. Clarke soon warranted these.
Robert Sheckley ‘Love, Incorporated’
September 1956
As I mentioned above, early Playboy was heavy on reprints. The odd thing is that even though Ray Bradbury was its first star, he was not the first science fiction author to publish an original story for the magazine. Bradbury didn’t publish an original story in Playboy until ‘The Machineries Of Joy’ in December 1962.
The honor goes to Robert Sheckley, with Richard Matheson close behind. However, like Bradbury himself most of Sheckley’s and Matheson’s stories are not science fiction. In fact, I would argue that Matheson never published a science fiction story here — there’s none by him in my list.
Sheckley was featured five times between 1955 and 1960, and continued to publish for the magazine into 1986 — a total of 13 stories. Matheson had nine stories published between 1956 and 1971, including ‘No Such Thing As A Vampire,’ ‘Prey’ (both of them horror), ‘Button, Button,’ and ‘Duel.’
Robert Sheckley ‘The World Of Heart’s Desire’
September 1959
Fredric Brown ‘Puppet Show’
November 1962
Fredric Brown had stories published in four issues, all long before his death in 1972. His first work for the magazine was a reprint of three short tales in March 1957.
Fredric Brown ‘It Didn’t Happen’
October 1963
Arthur C. Clarke ‘The Shining Ones’
August 1964
You wouldn’t credit just how important starchy old Arthur C. Clarke was to Playboy. The two were made for each other. His first story for the magazine was in the February 1958 issue, and he notched up a total of 17 appearances for fiction into 1998, mostly between 1964 and 1972.
Not all his stories were science fiction. The second, in May 1960, was a confabulated autobiography ‘I Remember Babylon.’ ‘The Shining Ones’ was his first story of note.
Several science fiction authors published articles in the magazine, most notably Clarke who continued to write them into the 1990s. His first article was a very long and detailed academic treatise ‘Rocket To The Renaissance’ about how space would open new cultural horizons in the July 1960 issue. In his second, ‘Machina Ex Deux’ in July 1961, he argued that our intelligent machines would eventually replace us.
Clarke published five articles in Playboy in 1962 for a strand titled An Arresting Inquiry Into The Limits Of The Possible, together creating something akin to a scientist’s blog, meticulously reasoned and written in a style that modern readers wouldn’t tolerate. Can you image today’s Playboy releasing a lengthy article titled ‘From Lilliput To Brobdingnag: Exploring The Dimensional Extremes Of Life’? This type of work, too, eventually switched to OMNI, after which it largely disappeared from popular human culture.
After 1962 the articles became more sporadic, but of note is a beautifully illustrated conversation with Alan Watts in 1972. By the end of his association with the magazine, Clarke had sadly fallen in line with its shifting editorial policy — witness his December 1992 article ‘Eros In Orbit’ (tagline: “The dean of science fiction writers imagines the weightless wonders of lust in space”).
Arthur C. Clarke ‘Dial “F” For Frankenstein’
January 1965
Arthur C. Clarke ‘Maelstrom II’
April 1965
Avram Davidson ‘The Invasion’
July 1965
This was Davidson’s only story for the magazine.
Theodore Sturgeon ‘The Nail And The Oracle’
October 1965
This was Sturgeon’s only story for the magazine, though later he would also provide fiction to Hustler.
Norman Spinrad ‘Deathwatch’
November 1965
This was Spinrad’s only story for the magazine.
Ray Bradbury ‘The Lost City Of Mars’
January 1967
Bradbury certainly had the right connections. Between 1954 and 1964 he had stories in all of 18 editions, after which his appearances were infrequent. He was still publishing for the magazine into 2000, by then in a fashionable horror style.
Curiously, Bradbury didn’t write much in the way of articles (and more curiously still, Isaac Asimov didn’t contribute anything to Playboy), but there was one interesting Clarke-style article in 1972, ‘From Stonehenge To Tranquillity Base’ (sic).
While we’re here, the only other article of note by a major science fiction writer in the magazine was Ian Watson’s ‘My Adventures With Stanley Kubrick’ in August 1999, documenting his involvement with the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 1990 and 1991, finally in production at the time of publication. (For more on this, see the Brian Aldiss entry at the very end of this list.)
Frederik Pohl ‘Speed Trap’
November 1967
Frederik Pohl had first appeared in the magazine as the author of an article in 1964. His first fiction was a triple-header special in December 1966 featuring stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas Disch, and himself, all on the subject of a sculpture the magazine had had made. Pohl published three more stories in Playboy, and Disch published one more in 1982 but it was not science fiction.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ‘Welcome To The Monkey House’
January 1968
Kurt Vonnegut was featured intermittently — five stories in all, with this his first — but of course little of it was science fiction. His September 1976 entry was an excerpt from Slapstick, which was published in October. His December 1997 entry was an excerpt from Timequake, which had already been published in September. In September 2009, two years after his death, Playboy published an unknown early story ‘Confido.’
J. G. Ballard ‘The Dead Astronaut’
May 1968
You might have thought Ballard was perfect for Playboy. He would certainly have given it the edge it needed to stay relevant. This was his second of just two sales to the magazine. The first was his drowned giant story ‘Souvenir’ in May 1965.
John Sladek ‘The Man From Not-Yet’
June 1968
This was Sladek’s only story for the magazine.
Damon Knight ‘Masks’
July 1968
The first of three Damon Knight stories. Sadly, both of the others were one-pagers in the 1980s, but one of them did make it into my list.
Ron Goulart ‘The Trouble With Machines’
August 1968
Ron Goulart published two stories in Playboy. The other, in 1969, was not science fiction.
Frederik Pohl ‘The Schematic Man’
January 1969
Robert Sheckley ‘Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?’
August 1969
U. K. Le Guin ‘Nine Lives’
November 1969
A little controversy accompanies the first of two Ursula K. Le Guin stories in the magazine — the other, in 1990, was not science fiction. Playboy decided not to give her full name, presumably to disguise her gender. She was nevertheless one of only a few female science fiction writers to make it into the magazine, and sadly none of the more feminist writers such as Joanna Russ either tried or were accepted. Nor, more sadly still, was James Tiptree, who might easily have made a fine living here.
Larry Niven ‘Leviathan!’
August 1970
This was Niven’s only story for the magazine.
Arthur C. Clarke ‘Transit Of Earth’
January 1971
The lovely fold-out spread is a Chesley Bonestell illustration.
Poul Anderson ‘More Futures Than One’
October 1971
This was Anderson’s only story for the magazine. It was actually billed as an “article” though it’s quite clearly a work of fiction.
Doris Lessing ‘Report On The Threatened City’
November 1971
This was Lessing’s only story for the magazine. I’m amazed she got it in since it’s one of the driest and least stimulating works of fiction it ever published.
Arthur C. Clarke ‘A Meeting With Medusa’
December 1971
After this, the majority of Clarke’s work for the magazine was excerpts from upcoming novels: part of The Fountains Of Paradise in January and February 1979, which likely means before book publication that January, 2010: Odyssey Two in September and December 1982, at least the first half before publication of the novel in October, and 3001: The Final Odyssey in March 1997, probably ahead of its publication the same month.
David Ely ‘Always Home’
August 1975
This was Ely’s only story for the magazine.
Joe Haldeman ‘Blood Sisters’
July 1979
This, the first of two Haldeman stories in the magazine, sure does sound like a reject from OMNI.
Walter Tevis ‘The Apotheosis Of Myra’
July 1980
This was Tevis’s only story for the magazine.
Philip K. Dick ‘Frozen Journey’
December 1980
Despite his possibilities, it’s surprising that this story, well into Dick’s VALIS/Exegesis period, was his only publication for the magazine. He died two years later. The story is better known as ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.’
Robert Silverberg ‘Gianni’
February 1982
Robert Silverberg didn’t manage to publish anything in Playboy in the first phase of his career. This was his first story for the magazine, but from here on he was the publication’s most prolific contributor: 14 stories in all, the last in 1993, creating a veritable golden age that dominates the rest of this list. For all that, Silverberg’s name never once appeared on the front cover.
Donald E. Westlake ‘Interstellar Pigeon’
May 1982
This was Westlake’s only story for the magazine.
Robert Silverberg ‘At The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party’
August 1982
Robert Silverberg ‘Needle In A Timestack’
June 1983
Ray Bradbury ‘The Toynbee Convector’
January 1984
Robert Silverberg ‘Tourist Trade’
December 1984
Frederik Pohl ‘The Saved’
February 1985
Joe Haldeman ‘More Than The Sum Of His Parts’
May 1985
Robert Silverberg ‘Symbiont’
June 1985
Howard Waldrop ‘Heirs Of The Perisphere’
July 1985
This was Waldrop’s only story for the magazine.
Damon Knight ‘Point Of View’
September 1985
The crux of this particular one-joke short is all but lost in the fold, I assume on purpose.
Robert Silverberg ‘Blindsight’
December 1986
Robert Silverberg ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’
June 1987
George Alec Effinger ‘Slow, Slow Burn’
May 1988
This was Effinger’s only story for the magazine.
Robert Silverberg ‘The Dead Man’s Eyes’
August 1988
Robert Silverberg ‘A Sleep And A Forgetting’
July 1989
Robert Silverberg ‘Hot Sky’
February 1990
Robert Silverberg ‘The Clone Zone’
March 1991
Robert Silverberg ‘It Comes And Goes’
January 1992
Robert Silverberg ‘The Way To Spook City’
August 1992
Joe Haldeman ‘Feedback’
March 1993
Terry Bisson ‘The Joe Show’
August 1994
Bisson’s work was largely frothy nonsense, but he did manage to publish five stories in Playboy between 1993 and 2000.
William Tenn ‘The Ghost Standard’
December 1994
This was Tenn’s only story for the magazine.
Terry Bisson ‘In The Upper Room’
April 1996
Stephen Baxter And Arthur C. Clarke ‘The Wire Continuum’
January 1998
This was Baxter’s only story for the magazine. I guess he wrote most or all of it, but his isn’t the name on the cover.
Terry Bisson ‘Lucy’
February 2000
Brian W. Aldiss ‘Supertoys: Play Can Be So Deadly’/‘Supertoys: What Fun To Be Reborn’
July 2001
You might also think Aldiss’s sexual and hallucinogenic work a perfect match for this forum, but this was his only appearance. There are two elaborations on his ‘Supertoys’ theme here, both obvious tie-ins with the A.I. movie.
And that’s it. The list of classic genre writers who never appeared is of course endless, but here are a few who did but are not mentioned above because their stories are not science fiction.
Those who managed solitary tales are: Fritz Leiber in 1961, Algis Budrys in 1965, R. A. Lafferty in 1972, Harlan Ellison in 1979, John Varley in 1992, and Dan Simmons in 1993. There was a single John Wyndham story in 1967 but it was a reprint.
Bernard Wolfe published three stories between 1966 and 1968. Michael Crichton appeared in the magazine four times, one time with a standalone occult story in 1971, and then with a three-part adaptation of The Terminal Man in March, April, and May 1972. The novel was published that March.
You might think Philip José Farmer perfect for Playboy, but he appeared only twice, in 1977 and 1979, neither of them science fiction. Both appeared in his anthology Riverworld And Other Stories. However, his 1981 novel The Unreasoning Mask claims that “portions of this book have appeared in Playboy magazine” so I might be missing something here.
Frank Herbert’s sole contribution was a condensation of God Emperor Of Dune in January 1981. The novel came out that May. Similarly, James Michener excerpted Space in October 1982, the same month as its publication.
In my opinion, none of Lucius Shepard’s five stories from 1986 onwards qualify as science fiction. And finally, prior to her sunset fame Margaret Atwood managed a couple of non-genre stories in the magazine, including ‘The Bog Man’ in 1991.
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