become a question of a small FB or no FB at all". The lack of a reliable distributor continued to be a problem; Crawford commented in the fourth issue that he had still not obtained reliable nationwide distribution for the magazine. The remaining issues were all in digest format, except for issue 6, which shrank to a small digest size. The eighth and final issue appeared in January 1951. Contents and reception Crawford still had in inventory stories he had acquired for Marvel Tales over a decade earlier, and "People of the Crater" by Andre Norton (under the pseudonym Andrew North), which appeared in the first issue, was one of these. There was also a story by A. E. van Vogt, "The Cataaaa", and Robert Bloch's "The Black Lotus", which had first appeared in 1935 in Unusual Stories. Crawford's budget limited the quality of the artwork he could acquire—he sometimes was unable to pay for art—but he managed to get Charles McNutt, later better known as Charles Beaumont, to contribute interior illustrations to the first issue. Wendy Bousfield, a science fiction historian, describes his work as "strikingly original", and considers the first issue to be the most artistically attractive of the whole run. The next two issues featured covers by Lora Crozetti on the de luxe editions; sf historian Mike Ashley considers both to be "appalling", and Bousfield describes them as "crude and uninspired". Van Vogt appeared in both issues, with "The Ship of Darkness" and "The Great Judge", and the second issue featured the first installment of The Machine-God Laughs, by Festus Pragnell, which was serialized over three issues. The fourth issue saw the beginning of another serial: Black Goldfish, by John Taine (a pseudonym for the mathematician Eric Temple Bell); it ran for two issues. Bousfield describes both serials as "among the weakest stories FB published". A third serial, Journey to Barkut, by Murray Leinster, began in the seventh issue and was left incomplete when the magazine ceased publication. It subsequently appeared in full in Startling Stories in 1952. L. Ron Hubbard, shortly to become the founder of Dianetics, the precursor of Scientology, contributed "Battle of the Wizards" to issue 5, and the sixth issue saw two notable stories. One was "The Little Man on the Subway", by Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl, under the pseudonym "James MacCreigh"; Asimov had rewritten Pohl's first draft and submitted it to