Review On The Free Sword and Planet Download - Cargo to Mars - Published In The Spring 1954 issue of Fantastic Story Magazine For Your Old School Science Fiction Campaign

Grab It Right Over
HERE

This story is a solid science fiction post Colonial Mars romp. It features the adventures of the Reliance and its Captain, its a pretty short and sweet tale whose background can be woven into a pretty interesting adventure for X plorers or Stars Without Numbers.
I've used to this story as source material my post apocalyptic Mars campaign and some of the factions in my game have come from this one. All in all its a nice little gem of a public domain download. 

The Fantastic Story Legacy


Fantastic Story Magazine had a heck of a linage of writers and artwork. Now mostly forgotten this was a major science fiction clearing house back in the Fifties.
According to wiki : 

Fantastic Story Magazine was a 1950-55 science fiction pulp magazine which merged pulp reprints with new stories.

It was published on a quarterly schedule by Best Books, a subsidiary imprint of Standard Magazines. Initially priced at 25 cents, the 160-page debut issue (Spring 1950) was titled Fantastic Story Quarterly, and it continued with that title for a year. Beginning with the Summer 1951 issue, it was known as Fantastic Story Magazine until it folded (Spring 1955), leaving a total of 23 issues.

The first editor, Sam Merwin, Jr., left with the Fall 1951 issue. His replacement, Samuel Mines, edited from the Winter 1952 issue until Fall 1954, when he was replaced by Alexander Samalman who edited the last two issues in 1955 (Winter, Spring).

Each issue featured a lead novel or novella and short stories. A. E. van Vogt's Slan was reprinted in issue #10, and Stanley G. Weinbaum'sThe Black Flame was reprinted in #9. In the first issue, Edmond Hamilton's novel The Hidden World was followed by "Trespass!", a short story collaboration by Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson, plus stories by Raymond Z. Gallun, John Russell Fearn and others. The second issue included stories by James Blish and Jack Williamson, with Eando Binder in the third issue and Eric Frank Russell in the fourth, followed by Damon Knight (#5), Henry Kuttner (#6), Chad Oliver (#7), L. Sprague de Camp (#8), Sam Merwin, Jr. (#9), Daniel Keyes (#10), Fletcher Pratt (#11), Walter M. Miller, Jr.(#12), Richard Matheson (#13), H. L. Gold and Carl Jacobi (#14), Murray Leinster (#15), Philip K. Dick (#16), Manly Wade Wellman and Otis Adelbert Kline (#17), John W. Campbell, Jr. (#18), Alfred Coppel (#19), Ray Bradbury and Ray Cummings (#20), Arthur K. Barnes (#21), Jack Vance (#22) and David H. Keller (#23).^[1]