Showing posts with label Algis Budrys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Algis Budrys. Show all posts

Friday, May 18, 2018

FFM: FANTASTIC STORIES, August 1976, edited by Ted White; THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, August and September 1976, edited by Edward Ferman

Where were you in the summer of 1976? In June, my family and I were moving from Connecticut to New Hampshire; I was reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was definitely on a Mark Twain jag, reading the Tom/Huck/Jim fictions in order of publication, so there's a good chance I read Tom Sawyer Abroad and "Tom Sawyer, Detective" in late June or July. I turned twelve in August. I had read stories by Avram Davidson and Algis Budrys, the headlining writers in the issues under discussion, in Robert Arthur's Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies by then, but they hadn't yet become among the most important writers whose work I would read, at very least to me. I had read some back issues of Analog, Vertex Science Fiction and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but had not yet sought out new issues. I had all but given up on standard comic books--maybe an issue of Weird War Tales or two, more nostalgically than otherwise, purchased that year; most of my newsstand investment was in Mad and one or two issues of National Lampoon, while mostly reading paperbacks and the odd library hardcover or discard/booksale/secondhand item in boards, aside from what my parents brought home...

Meanwhile, on small budgets, working out of their houses, Ed Ferman in Cornwall, in exurban northwestern Connecticut, and Ted White in the DC suburb Falls Church, Virginia, had both produced impressive issues which were sitting on some newsstands around the world.


  • Publication: Fantastic, August 1976
    (View All Issues) (View Issue Grid)
  • Editors: Ted White
  • Year: 1976-08-00
  • Publisher: Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc.
  • Price: $1.00
  • Pages: 134
  • Binding: digest
  • Type: MAGAZINE
  • Title Reference: Fantastic - 1976
  • Cover: Stephen Fabian; column headers: J. Michael Nally
  • Notes: Vol 25, No 4. Page count includes advertising insert for Max cigarettes. Page 66 precedes the ad and page 69 follows it. "Steven Utley" on toc but "Steve Utley" on title page.
    [--and, actually, both August issues had the same stiffened full-color ad for Max cigarets on one side, True cigarets on the other; other ads in the Fantastic include a back cover ad for four tabletop historical war games from Conflict Games, and interior ads for Alternate Worlds Records (at that point with only four fantastic-fiction spoken-word LPs available: one each of Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, and Harlan Ellison reading their own fiction, and Ugo Toppo reading Robert E. Howard) and house ads for back and future issues; the F&SF issues include back cover ads for Harlequin's short-lived sf-adventure Laser Books line (September) and F&SF t-shirts (August); along with the interior house ads, there are display ads for the Science Fiction Book Club (one page in each issue), a full-page ad for TSR's Dungeons and Dragons game sets and a quarter-page ad for Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison's Hell's Cartographers. Both magazines also have regular back pages of classified ads. TM]
In the Fantastic, we have the first of Davidson's Jack Limekiller stories to be published, a series fondly remembered by those fortunate enough to have read the stories as they appeared, mostly in F&SF (the frequency with which writers published in both magazines was high), and as collected in the small press volume ¡Limekiller! (exclamation points probably unfortunate). Limekiller lives in British Hidalgo, which somewhat resembles the British Honduras then, and Belize now, where Avram Davidson and Grania Davis and their son Ethan lived for a period, after moving from Mexico (and thanks to Dennis Lien for pointing out in comments below that I had relocated them to Guyana, for reasons only of Middle-Aged Moment). British Hidalgo does seem to have rather more indisputable supernatural occurrences in it, however...one could choose to use the term magical realism to describe these stories, if that wasn't just a cop-out label for well-grounded fantasy fiction set in the otherwise "real world" ...Grania Davis has a story in the issue as well; she, who died in that sudden run of losses of some of the best women writers in fantastic fiction last year, had long since divorced Davidson, but they had remained friends, and even occasional collaborators on fiction, up to co-authoring Davidson's last novel published during his lifetime (and serving as the co-editor of his posthumous collections and longer fiction publications). "Dennis More" (sic)/Keith Taylor might've had a broader following than he has, had he published more novels in the '70s and '80s...perhaps being Australian didn't help, at least in terms of promotion; more recently, chronic illness has been keeping him from work. Steven Utley was another example of a writer who probably should have reached a larger audience than he did, with consistently good and occasionally brilliant fiction much-appreciated by cognoscenti, but not terribly widely-read beyond the more literate Members of the Community...even such peers as George Alec Effinger seem to have reached a slightly larger readership, even if in the latter's case too much of it after his early death.

Lin Carter's usually dire attempts at "posthumous collaboration" with Robert Howard on Conan stories (which at least had the effect of boosting Fantastic's sales) are not notably improved upon by his attempt at doing so with a Clark Ashton Smith fragment...particularly given how much more elegantly Decadent Smith's prose was, elegance not Carter's strong suit. I always enjoyed Richard Lupoff's intentionally parodic pastiches published as by Ova Hamlet, in distinction, even when I hadn't yet read the targets (in this case, the Doc Savage series of stories). L. Sprague de Camp, Carter's senior collaborator on new and "posthumous" Conan stories, had a bit of renaissance of his own short-fiction writing in the mid '70s, not least with the amiable Willy Newbury fantasies in both magazines here and in other issues. 

And the book reviews of Fritz Leiber, Algis Budrys and Barry Malzberg, among the other rotating set of reviewers (wit a few exceptions) in F&SF, were particularly key reading for me in the years when I was gathering these as back issues...Lupoff would also pop up with book reviews in White's Fantastic, Davidson in Ferman's F&SF along with Joanna Russ, and not a few others of note (Judith Merril was the first book columnist during Ferman's editorship, then James Blish was the primary book reviewer until he couldn't continue, and Budrys took on the bulk of the reviewing for a decade-plus). I tended to enjoy Pacifica Radio dramatist and bookstore owner Baird Searles's multimedia reviews as well, as I've mentioned elsewhere on the blog, and Isaac Asimov's science essays, even if Searles (the most consistently-contributing a/v reviewer to date in the magazine's history) has had such predecessors and successors as Charles Beaumont, "William Morrison", Samuel Delany, Harlan Ellison, Kathi Maio, Lucius Shepard and David Skal to shine as brightly as he did or even a bit more so. 


These issues feature the novel Michaelmas, perhaps a bit shorter than the text of the not terribly fat novel as published in hardcover and paperback by Berkley/Putnam, the first edition later in 1977. It was Budrys's first novel in a decade, though he had already published a novella about Laurent Michaelmas, and would publish another afterward (and had hoped to publish yet another). Also, Budrys was perhaps dreaming big for this novel, somewhat jocularly referring to the potential interview with Johnny Carson (who in the mid-'70s would still tuck interviews with the occasional writer into the last half hour of his 90-minute Tonight Show). Not sure how much juice Berkley put behind the book (not so very much, as far as I know), but it wasn't a breakout for Budrys beyond his pre-existing audience, even if it did well for him (without the kind of revised awkward title Fawcett Gold Medal had blessed his previous two novels with). 

F&SF throughout its run has often featured work by writers who would drop in to fantastic fiction only occasionally, whether this was true of their writing generally or simply in the fantastic-fiction field. Richard Frede, best known for his 1960 novel The Interns, was one of the busy writers who only on occasion would contribute a speculative fiction, while such others as Liz Hufford, Don Trotter, and musician and songwriter Tom Rapp were examples of the relatively non-prolific (at least in terms of prose or non-lyrics poetry). On the other end of the spectrum, within fantastic fiction and without, Jane Yolen, Curt Siodmak (even given his best-remembered work is in film), Herbie Brennan (at least as well-known now for his books about spiritualism and his work in role-playing games), and three relative non-favorites of mine, Michael Coney (tended toward goofy concepts), Raylyn Moore (tended toward relatively trite fantasies flavored heavily with hostility to feminism; the Phyllis Schlafly of fantastic fiction), and Robert F. Young (who tended toward trite ideas handled only mildly less heavy-handedly than Lin Carter, and with even less wit...at least Carter's more lighthearted pastiches, such as his quasi-Doc Savage fiction, had a certain bounce). Barry Malzberg, occasional book-reviewer and more-common fiction-contributor (and later honoree with an F&SF special issue) as well as Ted White's predecessor as editor of Fantastic, and regular fiction and occasional nonfiction contributor there, was also notably engaged as Edward Ferman's co-editor on some impressive anthologies in the 1970s; he likes Davidson's The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy far less than I do. But, given everything, he's allowed to be incorrect in this. 

And the latter F&SF issue features one of David Hardy's cover paintings involving the adventures of Bhen, the BEM (or Bug-Eyed Monster), an occasional series starting in the 1970s, and often, not exclusively, involving Bhen hanging around NASA probes. (Primarily writer) Greg Bear and Stephen Fabian do notably good work on their covers, above, as well. 

Where were you in the summer of 1976, I'll ask again?

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for today's books (and possibly other magazine issues)...

I like the cover of this Spanish edition of Michaelmas better than the Anglophone editons' covers...such as the Berkley paperback, with the same cover painting as the hardcover first edition, with blurbs pasted over, below:

The Limekiller collection...another uninspired cover, alas:

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Friday, October 20, 2017

FFM: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1976, edited by Edward Ferman (Mercury Press 1975)

Stories by Joanna Russ, Kit Reed and Stuart Dybek, and the best columnists in the fiction-magazine field.

 This was the first issue of F&SF I ever held in my hand. It might not've been the first issue to appear on the newsstand of the Hazardville, CT, drug store where I bought my comic books, then running at an industry standard of a quarter apiece, except for the fatter ones. I had bought a very few paperback books off the spinner rack next to the comics, including a copy of Harry Harrison's anthology of new fiction (and an Alfred Bester memoir) Nova 4 as a birthday gift for my father. That edition was a Manor Book, a reputedly mobbed up outfit that seemed overrepresented on the paperback spinner rack, even as there was never any lack of Charlton Comics in the comic-book spinner (similar accusations). Considering the degree to which magazine distribution in the '70s was often a great source of legit business and money laundering for certain entrepreneurs, it might've been almost surprising how many DC and Marvel and Archie and Gold Key comics were also on the racks, though I'm sure the distribution mobsters weren't going to lose any legit profit just to make their brothers in paperback or comics publishing happier or richer. 
    Meanwhile, the little magazine rack had some items of interest from time to time...I bought an issue of National Lampoon there, I think a bit earlier or later since I road my bike over to do so, less likely in December. My mother confiscated and returned it to the store, and got a refund, delivering a ukase to me and a bored clerk never to attempt a similar transaction again. (I think my father, a Playboy subscriber for some years, must've bought the other two or three issues around the house. I assume my mother bought the Playgirls, or Dad bought them for her...possible she ordered it through Publisher's Clearing House. She never believed you could win their sweepstakes without buying something.)
    And I had certainly been aware of digest-sized fiction magazines. The earliest reading I remember vividly includes a science-fiction pulp reprint magazine, which one I still haven't rediscovered, and a DC sf comic book, likewise; I loved my few copies of Humpty Dumpty and Children's Digest magazines when four and five and six, and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which for some reason was stacked in the young readers' section of the Enfield Library in 1974-76, and a few Analogs were around the house from my father's haphazard collecting. But I'd never seen this title before...and might not've seen it again at the drugstore. What was almost certainly true is that I probably had 50c or 90c on me, rather than a dollar, so I knew I couldn't afford this magazine even as I flipped through it. I was even familiar with the magazine by name, and as a source of stories I had read read in various anthologies and collections. 
First US collections from each writer to include these stories.
    So it was another couple of years before I caught up with it again, through a 1971 back issue in the Londonderry Junior High library, and then the March 1978 issue. Winter's boon, fiction magazines for me in those years, clearly...I'd started buying new AHMMs with the January 1978 issue. And after falling in love, I ordered a box of back issues from the magazine, which never arrived. The Fermans & co. were kind enough to send a replacement...and among those warehoused items, smelling fascinatingly of wood and ink after sitting on palette stacks for a couple of years, was a copy of this issue, so I could read it in, if I'm not mistaken, the autumn of 1978.
resembles Trump.
    Three stories within made the strongest impression. "My Boat" by Joanna Russ was a fascinating meld of Philip Roth-esque discussion between two Jewish men of a certain age, the protagonist relating the adventures of his and two adolescent friends' (a girl and a boy) from decades earlier, and their sort of modified Peter Pan-esque experience, with an overlay of Lovecraftian flavors. 
    Kit Reed's "Attack of the Giant Baby" involves an experiment that goes awry, and an infant with a passion for Malomars who is enlarged (along with a favorite toy), and what can result from that. The attention to wryly sketched-in detail is what made the story both grounded and hilarious, far more so than, say, the film Honey, I Blew Up the Kid...which I believe faced some legal questions for its similarity in certain aspects to this short story.
    Stuart Dybek's "Horror Movie" is an urban nightmare...a young adolescent, not quite raising himself but coming close and having more traumatic events than usual go down in this particular day, has to deal with various sorts of predator including an apparently supernatural one...the basic Geist of horror, a fiction (or other narrative) which is in large part about learning to cope with the terrors we all face, though some of us more than others, was very explicitly spelled out by this story from fairly early in my reading. 
    The other stories were pleasant but minor--a slight "Black Widowers" story by Isaac Asimov, one of several rejected by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine but with some tangential relevance to fantastic fiction, so they were good-enough reasons to have Asimov's name on the cover aside from citation of his monthly pop-science column. Gary Wolf's cover story, or at least the cover by David Hardy, might also have been a(n admitted) literary ancestor of Bender the robot in the television series Futurama (though I don't trust my faint memory of this, and should Go Check)...Wolf's clever, amiable work would eventually include the literary adventures of Roger Rabbit, the rather more sophisticated source for the mixed animation/live action film.
    And I must admit I haven't yet sought out the issue to reread the stories by Haskell Barkin (an old friend of Harlan Ellison and an occasional fantasist) or Michael Coney (a Canadian writer prone to sometimes goofy, sometimes quietly effective work), neither of which made a strong impression (or at least a lasting one). Good examples of Asimov's
science column and Baird Searles coping as best he might with one of the poor 1970s ER Burroughs film adaptations are joined by a cute, grim Gahan Wilson cartoon, one of F&SF's infrequent letters columns, and Algis Budrys's fine assessment of the work of, and reminiscence about, two of the more distinctive older writers in the field, "Lester Del Rey" (actually Leonard Knapp, but known to all his friends and spouses as Del Rey), who had been a mentor to Budrys early in the latter's career, and R. A. Lafferty, who had begun writing and publishing in middle age in the latest '50s, in part to keep himself away from alcohol, and had already cleared his own distinctive path through little and fantastic-fiction magazines...and of another veteran, one who came up in the same years as Budrys himself, if a half-dozen earlier, Poul Anderson. 

 The ISFDB index:
The earlier UK collection (1978 vs. 1981)
For more of today's books, and mostly actual books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, January 29, 2016

Friday's Forgotten Books: TEENSPELL edited by Betty M. Owen (Scholastic Book Services 1971); BENCHMARKS REVISITED by Algis Budrys (Ansible Editions 2013); Damon Knight issue, F&SF, November 1976

The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards...among the training programs for the young creative and/or intellectual aspirant, there have been worse batting averages. Actress Frances Farmer won for an essay in 1931; the next year, Robert McCloskey and Bernard Malamud were among the winners, after the founding of the contest in 1923; in the period of 1954-1956, awards went to Roger Zelazny, Robert Redford, Peter Beagle, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Steiner; Redford's award was for a painting. (Earlier in the decade, Alan Arkin won with a sculpture; the next year, abstract filmmaker Stan Brakhage won with a short story.) 1947 was a bumper year: Edward Sorel, Sylvia Plath (rather less traumatically than her Mademoiselle win); Langston Hughes was one of the judges. And Scholastic has published with fair frequency collections of the awarded work, though in the 1970s the volumes weren't annual as they have been of late, after the 2005 folding of Literary Cavalcade, the flagship Scholastic Magazine (albeit one of a handful) for the awards for a half-century. 

 Betty M. Owen edited two of those volumes from the 1970s, this one collected work from the turn of the decade, and it demonstrates a lot of promising work. Not any of it first rate, but there are glimmers of what these youngsters will eventually be able to do, if they kept at it...Joyce Maynard, perhaps the most consistent award-winner in the contest's history (picking up an award for every year from 1966-1971 except for 1969; Stephen King won in '65, Carolyn Forche in '67), offers the best single story here, "Do You Wanna Dance?"; she gets her New York Times Magazine essay and extended date with Salinger in '71, and goes on from there. Most of the fiction, essays and to some extent the poetry is reminiscent of what Joanna Russ once described in a critical essay as one of several species of mechanical rabbit...those by young amateur writers being rabbitoids with pieces obviously missing, but put together with endearing earnestness. And occasionally there's a telling line, such as in Michele Kitay's "Wings" (about a younger college-student son visiting his aging parents on their farm after the elder, farmhand-by-necessity son was killed in an accident), at their first reunion dinner together: "Everywhere you looked, there was that empty chair." Aside from Maynard, I'm not aware of any of the 1967-71 contributors to this volume (Forche is not included) having had a sustained literary career (though Kitay might be the Kitay listed in LinkedIn). 

 The Russ essay appeared in the special Damon Knight issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is about as good as transition as there is to considering the second collection of Algis Budrys's similar review essays for that magazine; Russ was stepping away from F&SF reviews at this point (though she'd return with four columns in 1979-80) even as Budrys was coming out of retirement from his half-decade of Galaxy columns in 1970 to begin his decade and a half as a Knight-influenced essayist for this somewhat less unstable magazine (F&SF continues publishing today; Galaxy folded, with weak attempts at revival to follow, in 1980).  David Langford and Greg Pickersgill, the proprietors of Ansible Editions or at least the joint presenters of this project with help from several others, did us all a great service in taking on the project of reprinting all of Budrys's F&SF review essays, in three volumes titled in recognition of the collected Galaxy essays, Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf (SIU Press 1985).  Budrys, in a footnote:

 'There was never such a thing as one "pulp fiction"; the standards of fiction would vary from medium to medium and genre to genre and sometimes from issue to issue, and the famous hack of folklore has been vanishingly rare, but never mind; if we don't simplify these matters, we'll be here all day in the hot sun."

 Re-reading these, since I would read them as they appeared in the magazine, is revealing in part because of how much they nudged my own thought along, how much his challenge to all sorts of conventional thought about speculative fiction and all sorts of other matter suited me down to the ground.  You can see the beginning, in this volume, of what drew the Scientologists to hire him to administer the Writers of the Future contest and edit the anthologies from it (Budrys, who was never afraid to note how popular if not always good Hubbard was as a writer in the 1940s, took the opportunity to review together the new, deeply-flawed novels by Hubbard, Asimov  and Clarke--Battlefield Earth, Foundation's Edge and 2010: Odyssey II--and noting how their flaws and strengths were more similar than one might at first think)--among the most controversial things Budrys did during his career, even if it can be seen as taking some of the CoS's money and putting it to a useful (and Scholastic-esque) purpose. (The first Writers of the Future anthology featured the fledgling writers Karen Joy Fowler, well before Sarah Canary much less The Jane Austen Book Club, Nina Kiriki Hoffman and David Zindel, among others; Budrys didn't shrink from describing its assembly in one of the columns.) Conversely, younger hands such as George R. R. Martin and Stephen King have their work similarly sapiently anatomized and assessed, as do the then very new, such as Zoe Fairbarns, and the not so new at all, including particularly useful essays on the memoirs of Lloyd Arthur Eshbach and Jack Williamson, and a then-new translation of Zamaytin's We that marked a vast improvement on previous attempts. (Because her review was appended to one of Budrys's essays, the YA lit specialist and then associate editor of F&SF, Anne Jordan, gives us a fine review of  a notional volume by Hildebrandts mixing fantasy illustration and some fictional content with cookbook recipes.) The third volume, Benchmarks Concluded, carries some of the last, relatively tired columns written when Budrys was feeling the burn-out that had also afflicted him while turning out the last Galaxy columns, but not so much here, when his essays were appearing nearly every month and at times last such length as to make this one of these essentially 250ish pp. volumes the one which covers the shortest period of time. They are frequently brilliant, and one can mostly regret not being able to ask Budrys the next question when he is just a bit vague (when so, usually intentionally so, though not always--these were written to publishing deadline) or referring to something just a bit beyond the periphery of the eyepiece he provides. They are always worth reading.

For that matter, one might as well make note of the November 1976 Damon Knight issue of F&SF for its totality, with its brilliant Knight story (and appreciation by Theodore Sturgeon), fine and notable stories by David Drake and Russell Kirk, a solid L. Sprague de Camp, and another of the series of stories by Philip Jose Farmer purporting to be written by Kurt Vonnegut characters.


  • 5 • I See You • shortstory by Damon Knight
  • 17 • Damon Knight: An Appreciation • essay by Theodore Sturgeon
  • 26 • Damon Knight Bibliography • essay by Vincent Miranda
  • 29 •  Cartoon: "... but then I realized in order to make it work I'd have to invent a socket and God knows what else." • interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
  • 32 • Saviourgate • [Ralph Bain] • shortstory by Russell Kirk
  • 48 • Children of the Forest • novelette by David Drake
  • 66 • Books (F&SF, November 1976) • [Books (F&SF)] • essay by Joanna Russ
  • 66 •   Review: The Clewiston Test by Kate Wilhelm • review by Joanna Russ
  • 70 •   Review: Millennium by Ben Bova • review by Joanna Russ
  • 70 •   Review: Starmother by Sydney J. Van Scyoc • review by Joanna Russ
  • 71 •   Review: Comet by Jane White • review by Joanna Russ
  • 72 •   Review: Cloned Lives by Pamela Sargent • review by Joanna Russ
  • 72 •   Review: Star Trek: The New Voyages by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath • review by Joanna Russ
  • 74 • Moses • shortstory by Ken Wisman
  • 95 • Films: See Logan Run • [Films (F&SF)] • essay by Baird Searles
  • 98 • The Coronet • [Incorporated Knight] • shortstory by L. Sprague de Camp
  • 109 • The Comet That Wasn't • [Asimov's Essays: F&SF] • essay by Isaac Asimov
  • 120 • The Doge Whose Barque Was Worse Than His Bight • [Ralph von Wau Wau • 2] • novelette by Philip José Farmer [as by Jonathan Swift Somers, III ]

    • Everyone's more prompt than I am with their reviews at Patti Abbott's blog.

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    Friday, January 22, 2016

    FFM: TRIQUARTERLY #49: SCIENCE FICTION edited by Jonathan Brent, David G. Hartwell, Elliott Anderson and Robert Onopa (Northwestern University Press 1980)

    TriQuarterly #49 was meant to be another of the series of adventurous theme issues the Northwestern University-based little magazine had been publishing through the latter '70s; Elliott Anderson and Robert Onopa had put together issues devoted to western fiction and "Love and Hate" and their immediate predecessor (with whom they'd served as assistant editors) had helmed an issue subtitled "Prose for Borges"...so putting together an issue devoted to sf didn't seem too outlandish a project, particularly since Onopa had already published an sf novel, The Pleasure Tube, which had been purchased for publication by Berkley Publishing by their then editor, David Hartwell, in 1978, though Hartwell had left Berkley to begin the Timescape imprint at Pocket Books by the time the novel had been published in 1979, and the new administration took as little care getting it into presentable shape as a publishing package as possible, with the almost comically inane blurb, "Beyond the Star Range: Infinite Sex and Ultimate Horror" plastered prominently across the shoddily-concocted cover of a seriously-intended and rather innovative novel that, among other things, had no part of itself taking place Beyond the Star Range, wherever that might reside. Hartwell, for his part, had been editing and publishing, with others originally as Quest, The Little Magazine for fifteen
    years, beginning a half-decade before he began contributing to the academic literature about sf in the early '70s, simultaneously embarking on his impressive editorial career in sf and fantasy fiction, which was abruptly terminated by his accidental death on 20 January of this year.  This would be Hartwell's only credit with the magazine, and Onopa would be separated from it after this issue, with Anderson and Brent both out the door as well by 1981 so that insurgent editor Reginald Gibbons could instead run the magazine into a Safe mediocrity with solemn promises never to do something so outlandish as a theme issue devoted to sf again.  But seeking this out at the University of Hawai'i library, while I was in high school down the street in Honolulu, was my first conscious interaction with the work of Onopa or Hartwell, though I'd seen some of the other books Hartwell had put together for Berkley, of course, including their edition of Fritz Leiber's Night's Black Agents. (Or nearly so, as I'd seen Hartwell's brief article in First World Fantasy Awards some years before; I was aware of his editorial work with Gregg Press and the quickly-folded magazine Cosmos, as well.)

     So, a quick look at the contents of the issue that would so nettle some the subscribers to and defenders of the faith around TQ at Northwestern (courtesy ISFDB):


  • 4 •  Paradise Charted • interior artwork by Algis Budrys
  • 5 • Paradise Charted • essay by Algis Budrys
  • 76 •  On Science Fiction • interior artwork by Richard Powers [as by Richard M. Powers]
  • 77 • On Science Fiction • poem by Thomas M. Disch [as by Tom Disch--as he usually signed his poetry]
  • 80 •  Small Mutations (excerpt) • interior artwork by Vincent Di Fate [as by Vincent DiFate]
  • 81 • Small Mutations (excerpt from Blakely's Ark) • shortfiction by Ian MacMillan
  • 116 •  In Looking-Glass Castle • interior artwork by Carl Lundgren
  • 117 • In Looking-Glass Castle • shortstory by Gene Wolfe
  • 130 •  Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (excerpt) • interior artwork by Jack Gaughan
  • 131 • Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (excerpt) • shortfiction by Samuel R. Delany
  • 162 •  When They Find You • interior artwork by Michael Whelan
  • 163 • When They Find You • (1977) • novelette by Craig Strete
  • 178 •  Ginungagap • interior artwork by Don Maitz
  • 179 • Ginungagap • novelette by Michael Swanwick
  • 212 •  The Pressure of Time • interior artwork by Frank Kelly Freas [as by Frank Kelly Frease--a typo]
  • 213 • The Pressure of Time • (1970) • novelette by Thomas M. Disch
  • 258 •  The White Donkey • interior artwork by Rowena Morrill
  • 259 • The White Donkey • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • 262 • Contributors: • essay by uncredited
    • The long essay by Budrys is brilliant (and, as was his wont, not as kind to the general run of academic writing about sf as he could have been) and the fiction contributions, including the reprints by "Craig Strete" and Thomas Disch, as well as the new fiction by Michael Swanwick (his first story, and widely hailed) and such veterans of literate sf as Wolfe, Le Guin and Delany...and the novel excerpt by MacMillan, a fellow professor of Onopa's at the University of Hawai'i, who had already had a story from TQ in a The Pushcart Prizes volume, and would soon have another in the 1982 volume of The Best American Short Stories but hadn't yet been praised by Kurt Vonnegut as "the Stephen Crane of World War II"--that would happen after he published Proud Monster, his second novel, fixed up from a series of vignettes he wrote at Onopa's suggestion ("In the middle '70s, Bob Onopa and Elliott Anderson ran TriQuarterly, which was the best literary magazine of that decade" as Macmillan noted in a 1990 interview, in which he mentioned studying at the Iowa Writer's Workshop with R. V. Cassill and Vonnegut)...all an utterly creditable package. Onopa, having heard that I had already had a bad run-in with MacMillan, thought it best to shoo me toward the 600-level graduate writing seminar rather than take MacMillan's 400-level course after Onopa's 300-level, which I'd taken in my second semester as a freshman...the grad seminar had been set to be taught by humorist Jack Douglas, who'd tapped out, and Hawai'i-resident writer A. A. Attanasio had been recruited by Onopa to take it on (among much else, Attanasio had published poetry in the 1970s in The Little Magazine). Life can be full of improvisation, and last-minute, fateful decisions...and had been delivering not a few aggressively improvised decisions at the turn of the '80s to Robert Onopa's literary career...and I certainly benefited from some of his rather more benevolent professorial improvisations.

    For more of today's books rather than magazines, and more formal reviews than elegies, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

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