Showing posts with label Barry Malzberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barry Malzberg. Show all posts

Friday, December 22, 2017

Guest FFB: Barry N. Malzberg on ANATOMY OF A KILLER by Peter Rabe

Just finished this, one of 16 Rabe novels I ordered from Stark House in fulfillment of an ancient sense of obligation (I had never read a word of Rabe...read his divorced wife Claire [Rabe, initially as by "Anna Winter"]'s Olympia Press novel FLESH AND BLOOD when it was published with mine and five others in 1969 in a series of "the inaugural American Olympia hardcover novels" all of which bombed ferociously...it was quite good). This is one of the craziest, most disjointed, most fascinatingly implosive and explosive novels I have ever read; as I just observed to my patient spouse "When you are turning out books for $2500 advances in two or three weeks because you are trying to make a living you can't go back and get it right, but if he had had that unlikely opportunity this could have been a breakthrough work". Even so, I have never read existential fragmentation and individual psychic breakdown merged the way that Rabe manages in the final 15,000 words. That was my off again, on again shtick and in the fourteenth and final novel of THE LONE WOLF [series published as by "Mike Barry"] I might have gotten close but Rabe was on another planet. It's on a level with the last chapters of LOLITA and Rabe does not for better or worse allow linguistic virtuosity to get in his way.

This guy was (as Carter Scholz wrote of me 35 years ago) synchronously the best and worst writer going, sometimes in the same damned paragraph. A stunning broken talent. And a beacon toward the horrible time in which two thirds of a century later we now exist. 

I feel driven to make this observation public, just for the record.  As you were, ladies and gents.

--BNM, reprinted with permission from Rara-Avis.




Posted by at 3 comments: Links to this post
Labels: , , , ,

Friday, June 17, 2016

FFM: Silver Anniversary Issues of F&SF, edited by Edward Ferman (Mercury Press, October 1974) and FANTASTIC, edited by Ted White (Ultimate Publications, June 1977)


Aside from being magazines which shared the same rack spaces for almost three decades, and being the primary "openly" mixed fantasy and sf markets for short fiction in the US during most of those years (and with not a little interplay between their editorial staffs...for example, Ted White had served as assistant editor with Ed Ferman and Ferman's predecessor Avram Davidson at F&SF in the 1960s; White's Fantastic predecessor Barry Malzberg would co-edit with Ferman three impressive anthologies of new fiction, including the famously-tampered-with, by the publisher's editor in its first edition, Final Stage), one of the more obvious differences between The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Fantastic Stories was in how they treated their anniversaries... F&SF was careful to note every anniversary with a special issue of one sort or another, while Fantastic all but resolutely ignored their anniversaries, at least officially (while Fantastic's older stablemate Amazing, perhaps because it was the first and oldest no-bones-about-it sf magazine in the world, was careful to mark at least the five-year increments with some sort of note). Even given the banner across the top of this issue of Fantastic, no mention is made anywhere in the issue that this marks 25 years of publication...but it did.

And it's somewhat telling to compare the lineups between the two issues...even given there was no official "special" status given to the Fantastic, the contributors are a not-atypical mix of relative up-and-comers (James Sallis, Lisa Tuttle, Brian Lumley), established writers as well-known for their work at Fantastic and Amazing as anything else (Ted White, Robert F. Young), notable veterans with long relations with the magazine (Barry Malzberg, Lin Carter), and rather older veterans making some relatively rare appearances in the magazine (Marvin Kaye, Robert S. Richardson as "Philip Latham")...and the legend, columnist Fritz Leiber. While the F&SF issue is filled with veteran writers, most at least verging on legendary status, and having long, close associations with the magazine; Gordon R. Dickson perhaps the least so...and perhaps more indulgence given to allow for the old friends to stop in, such as running an Asimov "Black Widowers" story with the weak justification that J. R. R. Tolkien was key to the unfantasticated mystery involved, and a prose-poem vignette by Judith Merril (given both magazines' reputation for fostering the work of women writers, if even more so under respective earlier editors Anthony Boucher and Cele Goldsmith Lalli, interesting how they here have one woman contributor each).

 R. Bretnor's Papa Schimmelhorn story was the first in F&SF since the early 1950s, and only the second published since then, and as such, it's relatively easy to take, not quite as imbued with the clumsy "good-natured" "satirical" misogyny as the next two stories published in the sequence...the apparently irresistible aging, married lecher was still somewhat improbably magnetic to young women, while essentially spurning those of his own age (whether Bretnor suffered from Hefner Syndrome himself is a good question, particularly given the blatant attitudes toward women in the next two stories). However, Bretnor's extension of the basic schtick of Henry Kuttner's "Gallagher" stories, only with Schimmelhorn not so much needing to be drunk to invent as to allow his subconscious to take over to create the magic-science, is still capable to inspiring some humorous incidents, in this story set primarily in the time of Genghis Khan's conquering of most of the world known to him. 

 Also set in (albeit earlier) medieval times is probably the best-remembered story in the F&SF, the "posthumous collaboration" where Frederik Pohl completed a fragment from the papers of his old friend and writing partner C. M. Kornbluth, who'd died young in the late '50s...a story about a man with no sort of formal education, and of course before literacy was easily available to the peasantry, thinking in terms that anticipate science fiction and related speculation, but utterly unable to record them, or even share them with anyone who'd begin to understand...a story with built-in appeal to sf readers particularly back before social media could keep almost anyone from being less virtually lonely, at very least.  

 Jack Vance's "The Seventeen Virgins" was incorporated much later into the novel Cugel's Saga, the second Cugel novel and the third in the Dying Earth sequence of somewhat episodic novels, "fixed up" from linked short stories that were in part published separately before each novel was presented to the public. The Ellison story is probably the next-best-remembered story in the book, one of the more intensely personally ones he was writing in the '70s; the Dick story one of those collected in his last great selection of short fiction published during his lifetime, The Golden Man. The F&SF has no book review column for this issue, but the regular film (Baird Searles) and popular science (Asimov) columns, and Gahan Wilson's cartoon, are joined by a relatively rare editorial from Ferman. 

 In the Fantastic, the lead-off novella is the second of Marvin Kaye's "Incredible Umbrella" stories about the not quite hapless J. Adrian Fillmore, who with the magical bumbershoot finds himself passing through  various fictional "universes," often rather charmingly mixing characters from the likes of Dracula and the Sherlock Holmes stories. Modeled in part on the somewhat similar fantasies about Harold Shea by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp, they are a bit less subtle than their model at its best, but, like the Bretnor, the short novel makes for a reasonably diverting read. De Camp himself is profiled in this issue, in a pendant to the series of profiles of fantasy writers he himself had been contributing to Fantastic beginning in 1971, leading to, among other things, his somewhat controversial biographical and critical writing about H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Instead of the usual terrible Carter sword and sorcery story in the issue, Brian Lumley's brief, unreprinted series has its second entry; much more promising were the relatively early stories by Lisa Tuttle and James Sallis, and the well-populated if somewhat brief reviews by Fritz Leiber, often dealing with Lovecraftiana in one way or another (Leiber being one of the last as well as one of the most important writers to join the correspondents in the "Lovecraft Circle"); Ramsey Campbell was one of the great "discoveries" of Lovecraft's great acolyte, and publisher, August Derleth, and Frights one of the most important of the early all-original horror fiction anthologies.
  • Fantastic, June 1977
    (View All Issues) (View Issue Grid)
  • Editor: Ted White
  • Year: 1977-06-00
  • Publisher: Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc.
  • Price: $1.00
  • Pages: 134
  • Binding: digest
  • Cover: Steve Fabian
  • Notes: Vol 26, No 2. Page count includes a stiff-paper cigaret advertising insert. Page 66 precedes the ad and page 69 follows it. "Miracle Elixir" is listed as "The Miracle Elixir" in the table of contents. "The Earth Books" is not listed in the table of contents. The Circulation Statement on p. 55, filed 10/01/1976, gives an average total paid circulation of 19,630.
For today's books, and perhaps some more magazines and other sorts of literature, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

The oddly early 24th annish of Fantastic and the regularly scheduled F&SF  24th might've been Even Better, even given the unimpressive covers...

Yellow not always the best default color choice.

 Note early James Lincoln Warren story at bottom, left.















Posted by at 8 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Friday, May 13, 2016

FFB: NIGHT FREIGHT by Bill Pronzini (Leisure Books 2000)

Bill Pronzini is another writer I've been reading for nearly all my literate life...I've reviewed some of his books as we've gone along here, mostly as an editor, since he's been impressively prolific and consistently good to brilliant in that capacity as well as in being a writer and critic/historian since starting out professionally with a sale to Shell Scott Mystery Magazine in 1966, of a story he disparages as merely a bad pastiche of Hemingway, and makes a point of Not including in this volume ("You Don't Know What It's Like" and no, I don't, and apparently won't till I find that 11/66 Shell Scott issue). But his second published story, in SSMM's more durable stablemate Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine in 1967, is the title story for this collection, a story he introduces with a mixture of diffidence and pride, wondering in his headnote to the story if he should rewrite it for inclusion here, as he'd updated it for inclusion in anthology, and deciding that its "rough edges" add to its vigor (Bill Crider is among those who approve of the No Tamper/No Update policy for good writers looking back at their early work). Pronzini's early stories were among the standouts of the Harold Masur and Robert Arthur Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies I read when very young, and the first back issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine I picked up around the same time (1974), first from the public library (ah, a public library that subscribed to and circulated fiction magazines; I cue Crider again: "I miss the old days"). Through one or more of these venues, I first read "The Pattern," which Pronzini feels might be overrated among his work; I'm fonder of it than he.

 Among what's notable about Pronzini's work is how transparent his style usually is; he rarely goes out of his way to draw attention to the way he's relating his narrative, which is almost always in the most straightforward and lucid prose he can offer; his protagonists usually have sharp observations about what goes on around them, but only rarely do they get to expound on the nature of life or otherwise make a pitch for a philosophical outlook in the course of whatever relatively tense business they're about in their stories. He does have his fun, including such memorable comic work as "Another Burnt-Out Case" (Fantastic, October 1978, in collaboration with one of his frequent partners, Barry  Malzberg); his most sustained set of work is about the not-really Nameless Detective, who eventually finds himself, in the late works of the series, addressed as "Bill"...but that bit of self-referential detail took a while to emerge (amusingly, he and his wife, writer Marcia Muller, have patterned their most prominent characters after themselves in many ways, and have enjoyed collaborating on stories where those characters interact). 

 The  stories in this volume, packaged in the Leisure horror line (Leisure being one of the last paperback houses to maintain a horror line, and seeking to gain a bit of attention thus, even to the extent of offering a book club subscription service) are an interesting mix, not shrinking from collecting again some of Pronzini's most brilliant work, such as "Strangers in the Fog," even when they'd appeared in one of his too-infrequent previous collections (in that case, his first, Graveyard Plots from 1985); while it's at least as much a collection of suspense stories with no supernatural horror content, and leads off with one of the few stories of his own Pronzini is willing to allow is a hardboiled crime fiction ("Stacked Deck," a short novella from The New Black Mask, 1987), and as a collection was put up for the Horror Writers of America Stoker Award (this year's about to be awarded this weekend as I write). I was surprised at how many of these stories I'd managed to miss, one way or another, over the years before picking this up...Pronzini's work has been too often, if not taken for granted, at least been issued by houses that have had some tough times staying afloat...Leisure is a mere shadow of an imprint now, having been a marginal firm throughout its decades, many of his Nameless novels saw their first paperback editions from the quickly-doomed Paperjacks line, etc....and while it's not been difficult in the online era to find his work, he hasn't been as prominently published, nor as recipient of awards as he might be, over the course of his career. (He mentions having been on the jury that considered his "Strangers in the Fog" for the Edgar Award for best short story of its year, and feeling he had to vote for its most prominent rival, denying himself an Edgar...an award he wouldn't receive for some time later, a few years after the first publication of this book.) This, of course, hasn't stopped sophisticated readers of crime, western or his other fields of fiction from seeking his work out...and, of course, it shouldn't stop you, either. This volume, and Graveyard Plots, and The Best Western Stories of Bill Pronzini collection, among others, await you, particularly if you're mostly familiar with his Nameless stories or not at all, and I recommend you take them up sooner rather than later.

 From ISFDB:

  • Publication: Night Freight
  • Author: Bill Pronzini
  • Year: 2000-05-00
  • ISBN: 0-8439-4706-3 [978-0-8439-4706-9]
  • Publisher: Leisure Books
  • Price: $5.50
  • Pages: 345

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books, and I'll be gathering the links for the next two Fridays...please don't hesitate to let me know what I'll foolishly overlook in the course of compilation!
Posted by at 6 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday, April 29, 2016

FFM: Fritz Leiber, Jody Scott, James Sallis; Gary Jennings, Josephine Saxton, Samuel Delany, Judith Merril and Gahan Wilson; Ramsey Campbell, Robert Lowndes and Seabury Quinn: blue covers for some winter/spring fantasy magazines: FANTASTIC, February 1969, edited by Barry N. Malzberg; THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, February 1969, edited by Edward L. Ferman; STARTLING MYSTERY STORIES, Summer 1969, edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes


Three magazine issues, with blue covers. Why care about these first 1969 issues (even the January issue of F&SF would've been on the stands for Xmas '68) from these titles? Some impressive writers whose names you might be able to, and definitely cannot, make out on these covers: 

 Fantastic: Among the contributors of new fiction, Fritz Leiber, of course, but also James Sallis, Jody Scott, Pg Wyal (his first story), Robert Hoskins and others. 

 F&SF: Josephine Saxton, but also Gary Jennings (before the best-sellers such as Aztec), Samuel Delany (at this point the film columnist, even as the books are handled by Judith Merril and a set of Gahan Wilson's occasional horror/dark fantasy reviews, along with Wilson's cartoon and Asimov's pop-science essay), a recent translation of Yevgeny Zamyatin and another reprint, from (eventually) mostly tv-writer/producer Larry Brody.

SMS: The magazine which "discovered" Stephen King and F. Paul Wilson features in this issue original work by Ramsey Campbell, along with debut stories by the not so prolific Donna Gould Welk and Ken Porter, interspersed with reprints.

 There were more fantasy-fiction magazines publishing in the US than usual in 1969, not least because Sol Cohen, who'd left the Galaxy Magazine Group to buy Fantastic and Amazing from Ziff-Davis in 1965, and with the magazines he'd bought the unlimited serial (magazine) reprint rights to all the stories Ziff-Davis had purchased as a default for their magazine fiction since the late 1930s...as well as the legacy copyrights from earlier publishers of Amazing...Cohen was at the height of his issuing reprint magazines filled with fiction he didn't legally need to pay any royalties for, and a few of those titles he slanted toward fantasy fiction. Strange Fantasy was the first and the best of these (bettered only by a much later one-shot Sword and Sorcery Annual), and took over the volume and issue numbering for two years from Science Fiction Classics beginning in '69. Robert A. W. Lowndes added Weird Terror Tales to his growing line of no-budget, mostly-reprint magazines in '69 (Bizarre Fantasy Tales would begin its brief run in 1970); Arthur Landis got his new digest Coven 13 onto some newsstands, and while Joseph Payne Brennan produced no issue of his boutique project Macabre in '69 (and Lester del Rey's fully professional Worlds of Fantasy offered one issue each in 1968 and 1970 but none in '69), there was a second issue of W. Paul Ganley's Weirdbook among the little or semipro magazines, even if no others offering as impressive a set of contributors of fiction. But aside from Lowndes's Magazine of Horror, the elder sibling to the more psychic-detective- and borderline horror/suspense-oriented SMS, whose March 1969 issue I don't have to hand (it does contain a new R. A. Lafferty story, however) and which doesn't even have a blue cover (the nerve), the three most visible US fantasy-fiction magazines in early '69 were the three I discuss below. 

 Barry Malzberg was never too happy during his short term as editor of the Cohen/Ultimate Publications versions of Fantastic and Amazing, though he had managed to get his last issue of Fantastic, this February issue, about half full of original fiction (and the balance an odd mix of relatively random 1950s reprints, including one story each from Clifford Simak, Kendell Crossen and the house
the third issue; contents below
name "Lawrence Chandler," who could've been in this case nearly anyone in a small stable of regular contributors, including founding editor Howard Browne). In fact, the precipitating argument that ended Barry's employment was over whether cover artist William Baker would be paid for his cover image, a not-extraordinarily good nor bad pastel that Cohen apparently hated (and not notably worse, I'd suggest, than the other minor work on the other covers). With the inclusion of Robert Silverberg's essay (though Silverberg had been a columnist for Amazing as edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli at Ziff-Davis), and fiction by such Malzberg favorites as (Ms.) Jody Scott and Robert Hoskins, Barry was clearly already starting to make his mark on the magazine, even if he wouldn't have much chance to do much more; Ted White would be installed as the new editor with the next issue, and Barry's inventory was probably exhausted with Ted's first issues of the two magazines. Poet Margo Skinner, Leiber's good friend after the death of his wife, wrote two of the reviews without credit in the table of contents, but a byline on the text. Barry's headnotes and "coming next month" are full of praise for the contributors, aside from the diffidence he employs in introducing his own work.
Edward Ferman and his family business (his father, Joseph Ferman, would still be publishing the magazine for the next few years) were readying themselves for the release of the revival of Venture Science Fiction, which would begin with an issue cover-dated May 1969. (Another, shorter-lived project, a magazine about proto-New Age matters, Inner Space, would soon follow.) However unkind fate might be to their other publications, F&SF continued to steadily appear on a monthly basis, and while it didn't have the kind of financial support Analog (as a publication of Condé Nast) had, it faced less instability than any of the other magazines in the fantastic-fiction field; the monetary inflation of the Nixon era, very much including that faced by publishers specifically in terms of paper and postage among other expenses, helped doom both the other titles, however.  This is a solid issue of the magazine, featuring a lead novella by the somewhat underrated James Schmitz, who nonetheless had allowed his fiction to fall into a bit of a rut by this point in his career, and featuring such F&SF frequent or at least repeat contributors as Gary Jennings, who published a string of short stories with the magazine in the 1960s and '70s well before becoming a bestselling novelist and for a while after; that only his series of Crispin Mobey stories from the magazine have
been collected (and they published under a pseudonym in book form as if a novel) is an odd sort of oversight, even if they might not appeal so readily to his novels' larger audience, and Vance Aandahl, Josephine Saxton, Doris Pitkin Buck (with a rather slight bit of verse, not one of the stronger poems she'd publish with the magazine), and Patrick Meadows (who like Schmitz came to F&SF from Analog, but Meadows only published a single story in John Campbell's magazine before placing a handful with Ferman over a short period). F&SF, like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine on which it was modeled, was never afraid to include interesting reprints, and this issue includes two from rather different sources: television writer Larry Brody provides a fantasticated spy story, reprinted from 1967 first issue of the comics fanzine Gosh! Wow! (both the story and the fanzine won Alley Awards for that year, then the comics equivalent of a Hugo Award)(Ferman notes a weakness for this kind of thing, and the previous Xmas issue had featured Harlan Ellison's send-up "Santa Claus vs. S.P.I.D.E.R."; Delany's review column is devoted to the film of Barbarella), and the enormously influential Soviet dissident writer Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1920 story "The Cave" is offered in a 1968 translation by consistent 1960s translator Mirra Ginsburg, with an introduction by Sam Moskowitz.  It's notable that both Fritz Leiber, in the 
Maybe the best # of this Ultimate
title, thanks to the Bloch reprint.
Fantastic, and Judith Merril have engaging takes on Clifford Simak's science-fantasy novel The Goblin Reservation in these issues; Samuel Delany's film column for the magazine was sadly short-lived, and their first since Charles Beaumont had conducted one in the late 1950s (with "William Morrison"/Joseph Samachson contributing a more occasional column on stage drama alongside Beaumont's); radio dramatist and bookseller Baird Searles would soon follow Delany at the magazine  for more than a decade, and be succeeded by Harlan Ellison, Kathi Maio and Lucius Shepard, sometimes in alternation. Gahan Wilson's cartoon was already a regular feature, one of Ferman's first innovations in the magazine, and it would appear in every issue till the two had some sort of falling-out in the early '80s...only Isaac Asimov, with his science column, was a more durable regular than Wilson and his cartoons in the magazine's history. 

 If Fantastic in those years had relatively randomly-selected reprints, and F&SF rather more carefully-chosen ones that usually ran to relatively recent but (to most fantasy/sf readers, probably) obscure sources, Robert A. W. Lowndes's magazines for the very marginal Health Knowledge Publications managed to get by through Lowndes combing through his collection of pulps and anthologies and collections of fantasy and other sorts of fiction, looking for public-domain items of various sorts and checking with the Copyright Office for records of renewals on the pulp items, often taken from such orphaned magazines as Strange Tales. 
The Magazine of Horror was the first of the fiction magazines Lowndes was able to launch at HK, which was mostly in the business of publishing imitations of the magazine Sexology and the like (after HK collapsed in 1971, Lowndes would be hired at that magazine, at Gernsback Publications). Startling Mystery Stories and Famous Science Fiction followed, and a small slew of others followed those, before the collapse...what distinguished SMS from its elder sibling, as noted above, was that it was devoted more to psychic detective stories, such as those of  Seabury Quinn, once the most popular contributor to Weird Tales (outpacing the likes of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and Edmond Hamilton by some distance during Farnsworth Wright's editorship), who retained quite a following among the more nostalgic readership of the MOH; SMS not only served as outlet for Quinn stories, so that not so many need appear in the elder magazine, but also served as a place to run stories by horror fiction aspirants whose work wasn't Quite what Lowndes wanted
Lowndes's '69 3rd fantasy title.
for the mothership title (hence the "first stories" by King and Wilson appearing in Startling Mystery rather than Horror; Terry Carr and Ted White's somewhat surreal "The Secret of the City" had appeared in an earlier issue). But aside from some engaging pulp (and earlier p.d. fiction) reprints, some first-rate originals appeared in SMS, as well, including this issue's "The Scar," one of the better early Ramsey Campbell short stories, marking his beginning to take on his own voice and becoming somewhat less simply a promising acolyte of H. P. Lovecraft, and one of August Derleth's most treasured discoveries thus. Much of the issue, as in part with all Lowndes magazines going back through the not quite as low-budget but still low-budget Columbia fiction-magazine days, was devoted to a long editorial (in this issue discussing Poe's contribution to mystery fiction, sparked in part by an article in an early issue of The Armchair Detective), a bibliography of Quinn's Jules de Grandin stories, a Lowndes book and magazine review piece, and a long letter column (free copy, aside from the time spent transcribing letters and answering them). 

 The ISFDB indices to these issues, slightly corrected:
the first issue, 1969
the 2nd, and only 1969, issue
For more of today's (actual) books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

 And...the contents of the third Strange Fantasy, "#10", pictured above (courtesy the FictionMags Index):

Posted by at 11 comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)