FFB: Terry Carr, ed: SCIENCE FICTION FOR PEOPLE WHO HATE SCIENCE FICTION (Doubleday 1966); Harry Harrison, ed: THE LIGHT FANTASTIC (Scribner's 1971)

--Redux post from 2012:

Missionary Work

Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction was Terry Carr's first solo anthology to be published, after a volume or two of his work with Donald Wollheim on their Best of the Year sf volume for Ace Books; The Light Fantastic: Science Fiction Classics from the Mainstream (sic: there is not now, nor has there ever been, a true mainstream of literature) was not Harry Harrison's first antho, but his first, as well, was an sf BOTY, in his case for Putnam/Berkley, with Brian Aldiss as increasingly co-editing junior partner in the first volume or so. Perhaps the same impulse that drives one to work on annual showcases makes putting together this kind of "instructional" anthology particularly attractive, even beyond the usual "this is important, or at very least interesting" thrust of nearly any anthology assembled with care,...in the cases of these two fine anthologies, the instructional thrust can be executively summarized as "Open your eyes." (The appended "fool!" is only occasionally barely audible, though almost impossible to completely suppress, as well.)

The Carr anthology brings together accessible, intelligent, (at the time) not terribly overexposed mostly sf stories (H.L. Gold's synesthesia tale "The Man with English" certainly is arguably fantasy, and Arthur Clarke's "The Star" introduces supernatural elements of the most widely accepted sort in Christendom)...Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" hadn't quite become common coin by the mid '60s, and the Damon Knight story, despite "To Serve Man" having become a much-loved Twilight Zone episode, was nearly as famous as Knight's other early joke story, and even more sapiently pointed). While "What's It Like Out There?" remains The cited example of What Else Edmond Hamilton could do aside from planet explosion, and the Wilmar Shiras a slightly odd choice in this set of encouraging the outlanders to try some of the pure quill. Algis Budrys, in reviewing this one at the time, noted that people who hate sf hate reading, and the only way to get them to take up this book would be for it to be socially necessary to have on their coffee-table or equivalent (as Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five and Stranger in a Strange Land and to a lesser extent at that time Dune and No Blade of Grass and The Child Buyer would be)...but the thoughtful reader who thought they hated sf somehow (probably more common in '66 than today, if not much moreso) could find some diversion here, at very least. Or, by the end of the decade, could enjoy making a joke about reading up on the topic in their Funk & Wagnalls paperback edition.

Harry Harrison attempts a slightly more double-edged trick, in getting the (presumably well-meaning ignorant) snobs against sf to consider reading the form, and to get similar snobs within the sf-reading community to look beyond the commercial labels for the pure quill wherever it's actually found. Harrison, too, gets in some work in this "sf" context that is arguably (the Cheever, the Greene) or almost inarguably (the Lewis, the Twain) fantasy rather than sf, though the sort of fantasy that sf people usually find agreeable, even leaving aside the time-travel paradox introduced in Anthony Burgess's "The Muse" (Burgess, of course, couldn't leave sf alone any more than C. S. Lewis could, and saw no more reason to do so than Lewis, I'm sure). And, of course, Gerald Kersh and Jorge Luis Borges had no qualms about being considered writers of fantasticated fiction, as long as no one insisted that was all they did or could do, and, happily, no one has...if anything, Kingsley Amis, that passionate advocate for sf so labeled, has seen his advocacy and contributions to the literature all but forgotten in favor of his Angry Young Man (and Older Man) satire, even when careful to have Lucky Jim a reader of Astounding Science Fiction magazine back when Analog was still called that.

It's a funny old world, and there's no shortage of ignorance of all sorts, but that's what this FFB exercise is here to combat, in its small and often nostalgic way. I liked both these anthologies a lot as a kid, and would still like them if I was first to open them today. What more could we ask?

Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction ed. Terry Carr (Doubleday LCC# 66-24334, 1966, $3.95, 190pp, hc); Also in pb (Funk & Wagnalls 1968).

7 · Introduction · Terry Carr · in
11 · The Star [Star of Bethlehem] · Arthur C. Clarke · ss Infinity Science Fiction Nov ’55
21 · A Sound of Thunder · Ray Bradbury · ss Colliers Jun 28 ’52
37 · The Year of the Jackpot · Robert A. Heinlein · nv Galaxy Mar ’52
79 · The Man with English · H. L. Gold · ss Star Science Fiction Stories #1, ed. Frederik Pohl, Ballantine, 1953
91 · In Hiding [Timothy Paul] · Wilmar H. Shiras · nv Astounding Nov ’48
135 · Not with a Bang · Damon Knight · ss F&SF Win/Spr ’50
143 · Love Called This Thing · Avram Davidson & Laura Goforth · ss Galaxy Apr ’59
157 · The Weapon · Fredric Brown · ss Astounding Apr ’51
163 · What’s It Like Out There? · Edmond Hamilton · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec ’52

The Light Fantastic ed. Harry Harrison (Scribner’s, 1971, hc)
· Introduction—The Function of Science Fiction · James Blish · in
· The Muse · Anthony Burgess · ss The Hudson Review Spr ’68
· The Unsafe Deposit Box · Gerald Kersh · ss The Saturday Evening Post Apr 14 ’62
· Something Strange · Kingsley Amis · ss The Spectator, 1960; F&SF Jul ’61
· Sold to Satan [written Jan 1904] · Mark Twain · ss Europe and Elsewhere, Harper Bros., 1923
· The End of the Party · Graham Greene · ss The London Mercury Jan ’32
· The Circular Ruins [1941] · Jorge Luís Borges; trans. by James E. Irby · ss Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962
· The Shout · Robert Graves · ss The Woburn Books #16 ’29; F&SF Apr ’52
· The Door · E. B. White · ss The New Yorker, 1939
· The Machine Stops · E. M. Forster · nv Oxford and Cambridge Review Nov ’09
· The Mark Gable Foundation · Leo Szilard · ss The Voice of the Dolphins, and Other Stories, Simon & Schuster, 1961
· The Enormous Radio · John Cheever · ss The New Yorker May 17 ’47
· The Finest Story in the World · Rudyard Kipling · nv Contemporary Review Jul, 1891
· The Shoddy Lands · C. S. Lewis · ss F&SF Feb ’56
· Afterword · Harry Harrison · aw

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

FFB: HARRY HARRISON! HARRY HARRISON!: A MEMOIR by Harry Harrison (Tor 2014); DAVID G. HARTWELL: IN MEMORIAM edited by Kevin J. Maroney, Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer (NY Review of Science Fiction/ICFA 2016)

The image is of a small stainless-steel rat, a
reference to HH's most sustained fictional series
character, and his unflattering nickname...

I've mentioned Harry Harrison's memoir here some weeks back, in the course of describing his brief editorial career at the Ultimate Publishing Co., when he edited Fantastic Stories and Amazing Science Fiction Stories in 1967-68; its perhaps too adorable title is a harkening to one of the most famous novels in Harrison's career, Make Room! Make Room!, adapted poorly for film as Soylent Green. Reading it through, one is struck by how obviously it was a first draft, as it is presented here...passages are redundant or unclear, and a large part of the book, not quite the latter half, is devoted to essay drafts that Harrison had intended to more seamlessly blend into the narrative of the book, devoted to his relation with John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor essentially the most important to Harrison emotionally and, for some of his early fiction-writing career, financially (even if Damon Knight and Hans Stefan Santesson were also to play major roles for Harrison similarly), and to the circumstances around some of HH's most important books. I was also impressed by how little of the main narrative of the book is about writing or his writing process, or even his

Harrison's third novel, and first crime-
fiction (and ghosted) book.

interaction with fellow writers, editors and fans in the science fiction and related communities, even though they are touched on as events warrant, as opposed to the adventures Harrison, his wife Joan and their children (eventually) have in living abroad and coming back to the States, as well as the formative experiences of Harrison's childhood and mostly unpleasant experiences as a draftee into the World War II US Army (Harrison doesn't let us forget how much he hated his military experience and the military mindset, among other sorts of officiousness). It's definitely memoir rather than autobiography, as certain matters are elided altogether (Harrison's first wife, Evelyn, is not mentioned anywhere in the text), and others are dealt with only as much as necessary (such as Harrison's career as a comics artist and writer, and eventually packager for some of the lower-rent comics publishers of the early 1950s). We do learn a fair amount about how the Harrison family was able to make do, sometimes comfortably and sometimes less so, as voluntary expatriates in the 1950s in Mexico, Italy, Denmark and the UK, and about Harrison's partnership with Brian Aldiss in a number of projects (including the anthology Hell's Cartographers, which includes a shorter but more polished memoir by Harrison, among five other autobiographical essays by sf writers including Aldiss's).  His passions, not least his love and admiration for his second and lifelong wife, are marked, as are such enthusiasms as for Esperanto and how they might help from time to time. The similarities to such other late memoirs by Harrison's colleagues as I. Asimov and the also to-have-been-rewritten entries in Frederik Pohl's The Way the Future Blogs (named in its turn for Pohl's much earlier memoir) are there, though Harrison maintains in this book a lot of the circumspection that one finds in Pohl's The Way the Future Was and to some extent in Asimov's earlier two-volume autobiography; Pohl in his blogging and Asimov particularly in his third autobiography, written as he was going into his final months, were often more plainspoken. This was clearly not quite the book Harrison hoped to publish, but it remains valuable and engaging.

David G. Hartwell was the editor for this and other Harrison books at Tor, among the many editorial posts and valuable work Hartwell had contributed over his half-century in and around the fantastic-fiction field (as noted previously on this blog, among his projects had been The Little Magazine, a notable journal for poetry particularly and not at all restricted to the fantasticated). Hartwell fell while carrying bookshelves on a stairwell, and never regained consciousness, earlier this year, and the suddenness of his death was not a little of what one feels in the remembrances in this special issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction, made available, at least temporarily, for download without charge; NYRSF is one of the literary children of Hartwell's, which he co-founded, and -edited for almost three decades. While he wasn't the only progenitor of the more literate work published in the fields over that time, he might've been the most consistently on-hand, and his interests ranged from keeping oral traditions alive on through to keeping an editorial hand in with all the media through which fiction is offered, not least being one of the editors of the short-fiction forum Tor.com. It is through one of the remembrances here, for example, that one might learn why Harry Harrison doesn't mention his first wife Evelyn at all in his book; their brief marriage was marked by her acting out sexually in ways that were rather extreme even for the rather bed-hopping community that the sf community could be in the early 1950s.  What the various and impressive set of celebrants in the special issue do get across more importantly is the depth of the loss, personally and professionally and in terms of scholarship, the death of Hartwell creates in the field. This will probably not be the final form of this memorial, but it's an excellent start for the kind of task no one looks forward to taking on, except for the opportunity to say what should be said.

For more of what should be said about today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: new links to reviews, citations and more

Below we have this week's crop of books and other literary expression deserving (and, infrequently, not so much deserving) more attention than they are currently getting. If I've missed your or someone else's FFB review, please let me know in comments...thanks to all the contributors and all you readers. Least-forgotten book this week is probably either the Steinbeck or the Grisham...two each from Stout and Hunter...

Next week, the list will be hosted again by Patti Abbott at her blog, and will have a special emphasis on the humorous crime fiction of Richard S. Prather. Be there (if you choose! And you should.). Aloha. 

Walter Albert: Murder Between the Covers by Elaine Viets

Mark Baker: C is for Corpse by Sue Grafton

Elgin Bleecker: Dick Francis's Gamble by Felix Francis

Ben Boulden: Breakfast at Wimbledon by Jack M. Bickham

Lucy Brown: favorite books read in 2015

Brian Busby: The British Barbarians by Grant Allen

David Cramner: three short stories by Haruki Murakami

Bill Crider: The Jungle Kids by Evan Hunter

Scott A. Cupp: The Will to Kill by Robert Bloch

William Deeck: The Broken Vase by Rex Stout

Martin Edwards: Death in the Dusk by Virgil Markham; Case for Three Detectives by "Leo Bruce" (Rupert Croft-Cooke)

Barry Ergang: Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (hosted by Kevin Tipple)

Curt Evans: Christmas Mourning by Margaret Maron

Barry Gardner: Scent of Evil by Archer Mayor

Jay Gertzman: Down There by David Goodis

Ed Gorman: Cut Me In by "Hunt Collins" (Evan Hunter, reissued as by Ed McBain)

"John Grant": While I Was Gone by Sue Miller

Rich Horton: Falcons of Narabedla & The Dark Intruder and Other Stories by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Jerry House: Mutiny (issue #2, October 1954) published by Aragon Magazines; Batman: Second Chances by Max Allan Collins, Jim Starlin and Jo Duffy

2016 Caldecott winner

Sam Juliano: Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear by Lindsay Mattick and Sophie Blackall

Tracy K: Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout

George Kelley: Worst Contact edited by Hank Davis

Margot Kinberg: A Time to Kill by John Grisham

Rob Kitchin: To Steal Her Love by Matti Joensuu; The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Kate Laity: The Devil's Mistress by J. W. Brodie-Innes

B. V. Lawson: The Killings at Badger's Drift by Caroline Graham

Steve Lewis: The Law of Second Chances by James Sheehan; Say Goodbye to April by Ken Pettus

Todd Mason: Fantastic and Amazing Stories as edited by Harry Harrison, and Great Science Fiction and Thrilling Science Fiction as Not edited by HH...(please see below)

Carol Matic: Spider Sparrow by Dick King-Smith

John F. Norris: The Case of the Phantom Fingerprints by Ken Crossen

Mathew Paust: Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (and others) by Robert Stone

Mildred Perkins: They All Love Jack by Bruce Robinson

J. Kingston Pierce: Xmas vixens

James Reasoner: Honkytonk Brand by Walker A. Tompkins

Richard Robinson: gift books

Gerard Saylor: X-Files: Trust No One edited by Jonathan Maberry

Steve Scott: The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper by John D. MacDonald

Wicked Women; courtesy Rex Parker

Jack Seabrook: A Butcher's Dozen of Wicked Women edited by Lee Wright, and the mystery of Emily Neff...

"TomCat": The Pleasure Cruise Mystery by Robin Forsythe

Prashant Trikannad: 2015 reading

A. J. Wright: Stephen Gresham's novels



Todd Mason on 
Harry Harrison's editorial work at Ultimate Publications, 1967-1968

Harry Harrison is one of the more protean figures in the history of sf; much as with his friend Mack Reynolds (I believe...I still need to pick up his memoirs volume , Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!), he was a world traveler who often would write lighthearted (or very grim) but always intelligent adventure fiction, such as the Stainless Steel Rat series (or the Deathworld series), and was closely allied with John W. Campbell, Jr. artistically and sentimentally (editing Campbell's collected editorials from the latter's time at Astounding Science Fiction and Analog) while also willing to foster the most surreal and/or nonlinear narrative in speculative fiction as an editor, in such venues as the British  SF Impulse magazine and perhaps even more in selecting for (with increasing input from Brian Aldiss, who soon became co-editor) the Best SF annual for Berkley and Putnam from 1968-1975. Harrison first became an editor of fiction magazines in the 1950s, not too long after the 1950 sale of his first short story, "Rock Diver," to Damon Knight at Worlds Beyond Science-Fantasy magazine, briefly taking over the surviving titles that Lester Del Rey had been editing (the first magazine to be titled Science Fiction Adventures and the soon-folded Rocket Stories) in 1953...while still a relatively new fiction-writer, he was already a veteran packager and artist in the comics field.  While both were living in Europe (Harrison in Denmark) in the mid '60s, Harrison and Aldiss had put together two

Fantastic featured more reprints still during
Harrison's year than Amazing would, and was
at least as afflicted by the cheap European cover
images Cohen had bought rights to for both.

impressive issues of a critical magazine, SF Horizons; when Harrison and his family returned to the US after some years abroad, among the first work Harrison took up part-time was as editor of Fantastic and Amazing Stories, as they were published by Sol Cohen, who did much of the putting together of the magazines from his house (and his wife would mail out the subscription copies from a desk in their basement, one reason Cohen never pushed too hard for subscriptions with the magazines while he owned them). The remarkably small stipend Cohen was paying his first editor, schoolteacher Joseph Wrzos, who went by Joseph Ross for convenience's sake in his editorial work, was perhaps not enough to keep Ross in the job by the end of 1967, after about two years of putting the magazine together on a micro-budget. Nonetheless, Ross's

magazines had presented some remarkable new fiction, such as a short version Avram Davidson's The Phoenix and the Mirror and Roger Zelazny's "For a Breath I Tarry", as "salvage markets" that mixed the few new stories in with reprints selected initially by Ross, long-term fan and assistant Arnie Katz, and Cohen. Cohen had bought the magazines from Ziff-Davis because ZD had for decades been buying all serial rights to the stories they published, and Cohen was thus legally able to reprint, without any further payment, any story from the back issues of the magazines whose inventory he'd also purchased..a practice which made him rather unpopular with the new Science Fiction Writers of America and with other writers, jointly and severally. When Harrison, who already had been writing a book-review column for several issues of Amazing, accepted the post of editor for Amazing and Fantastic, Cohen not only continued to publish a fair amount of reprinted fiction in the magazines, but had also started several more, often irregularly-issued and frequently-retitled magazines completely devoted to reprints, such as Great Science Fiction and The Most Thrilling Science Fiction Ever Told

(which would rather quickly become simply Thrilling Science Fiction). With Harrison, already a "name" writer in the field, taking on the two older titles, Cohen (according to Harrison in correspondence with historian Mike Ashley) offered to phase out the reprints in those magazines if Harrison would allow his name to be put on the covers of the reprint-only magazines as editor, and write a brief editorial or so. Harrison took the deal, and the issues with Harrison cover-bannered as editor are Not Bad, certainly not the haphazard collections of yard goods Cohen would often throw together in later years of the reprint magazines, but were in no way actually edited by Harrison. And Cohen didn't keep his end of the bargain...the reprints continued in Fantastic and Amazing, and soon Harrison left Ultimate Publications, with the advent of his annual Best-of, and, beginning 1970, an anthology series devoted to new fiction, Nova. (Meanwhile, Barry Malzberg had an even shorter term as editor of F & A, and Ted White came in 1969, to stick with the magazines for a decade and to eventually see, in 1972 issues, the end of the reprints...Cohen by that time finally relented and had started making token payments to writers for reprints in the surviving reprint-magazines.)(Harrison notes in his memoir that he'd suggested Malzberg as a temporary substitute for him, and Cohen decided to fire Harrison rather than accept a leave of absence.)

Harrison's first Amazing was the December 1967 issue. his first Fantastic the January 1968. He would edit five issues of each. The Spring and Summer 1968 issues of Great SF and the Summer '68 Most Thrilling were attributed to Harrison. His first Amazing featured the second installment of Frank Herbert's The Santaronga Barrier, begun in Ross's last issue, and also new stories by notable veterans Kris Neville and Charles Harness, and Soviet writer Gennady Gor in translation...and Harrison's editorial noting the death of Amazing founder Hugo Gernsback, and a new essay by Gernsback that Cohen apparently hadn't gotten around to publishing previously. The issue was topped off with reprints from Mack Reynolds, Lester Del Rey and Ray Bradbury...an impressive lineup. Less impressive, perhaps, was a reprint from the Gernsback Amazing, vintage 1928, by Charles Cloukey. The first issue of Great SF attributed to Harrison has a good set of contributors, as well, with the mild exception of Albert Teichner. These are the two issues I have before me at the moment, purchased some months ago at a community booksale to benefit the Pennsylvania SF Society. 

indices courtesy ISFDB:
Amazing Stories, December 1967

• Editor: Harry Harrison
• Year: 1967-12-00
• Publisher: Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc.
• Price: $0.50
• Pages: 148

• 4 • Continuity • [Editorial (Amazing Stories)] • essay by Harry Harrison
• 6 • The Forest of Zil • shortstory by Kris Neville
• 7 •  The Forest of Zil • interior artwork by Jeff Jones
• 11 • The Million Year Patent • shortstory by Charles L. Harness
• 12 •  The Million Year Patent • interior artwork by Jeff Jones
• 24 • The Smile • (1952) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• 24 •  The Smile (reprint) • (1952) • interior artwork by Lawrence [as by L. Sterne Stevens]
• 30 • An Unusual Case • shortstory by Gennady Gor (trans. of Необычайная история 1966) [as by Gennadiy Gor]
• 34 • Santaroga Barrier (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Frank Herbert (book publication as The Santaroga Barrier 1968)
• 45 •  Santaroga Barrier (Part 2 of 3) • interior artwork by Gray Morrow
• 67 •  Santaroga Barrier (Part 2 of 3) [2] • interior artwork by Gray Morrow
• 88 • Stacked Deck • (1952) • shortstory by Lester del Rey
• 88 •  Stacked Deck (reprint) • (1952) • interior artwork by Ed Emshwiller [as by Ed Emsler]
• 102 • Luvver • [Luvver] • (1950) • shortstory by Mack Reynolds
• 102 •  Luvver (reprint) • (1950) • interior artwork by uncredited
• 113 • Sub-Satellite • (1928) • shortstory by Charles Cloukey
• 126 • Science Fiction that Endures • essay by Hugo Gernsback
• 141 • The Future in Books (Amazing Stories, December 1967) • [The Future in Books] • essay by Harry Harrison
• 141 •   Review: The Best of Amazing by Joseph Ross • review by Harry Harrison
• 142 •   Review: Space Gypsies by Murray Leinster • review by Harry Harrison
• 143 •   Review: Spectrum V by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest • review by Harry Harrison
• 143 •   Review: The Universes of E. E. Smith by Ron Ellik and Bill Evans • review by Harry Harrison
• 143 •   Review: An Illustrated History of the Horror Films by Carlos Clarens • review by Harry Harrison
• 143 •   Review: Chthon by Piers Anthony • review by Harry Harrison

Great Science Fiction, Spring 1968

• Publisher: Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc.
• Price: $0.50
• Pages: 132

• 2 • It's Easy to Be Great • (1968) • essay by Harry Harrison
• 4 • I-C-a-BeM • (1961) • novelette by Jack Vance [Vance's title for this is "The Augmented Agent" TM]
• 4 •  I-C-a-BeM • (1961) • interior artwork by Dan Adkins
• 22 •  I-C-a-BeM [2] • (1961) • interior artwork by Dan Adkins
• 35 •  I-C-a-BeM [3] • (1961) • interior artwork by Dan Adkins
• 46 • Entrance Exam • (1956) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
• 47 •  Entrance Exam • (1956) • interior artwork by uncredited
• 58 • Control Group • [Marco 4] • (1960) • shortstory by Roger Dee
• 70 • The Forelife Myth • (1963) • shortstory by Albert Teichner
• 70 •  The Forelife Myth • (1963) • interior artwork by Lee Brown Coye
• 84 • Made in Archerius • (1960) • shortstory by Neal Barrett, Jr.
• 84 •  Made in Archerius • (1960) • interior artwork by Mel Varga [as by Varga]
• 101 • The Hero • (1956) • shortstory by Milton Lesser
• 103 •  The Hero • (1956) • interior artwork by Dick Shelton
• 116 • The Red Telephone • (1960) • shortstory by John Jakes
• 116 •  The Red Telephone • (1960) • interior artwork by Grayam

Harrison apparently notes in his memoirs that John W. Campbell, Jr., after their long working relation in the 1960s and Harrison editing his editorials collection, wanted Harrison to succeed him as editor (Algis Budrys mentioned in writing that Campbell had made the same desire known about and to young Budrys in the latter 1950s, when they were working closely); Harrison edited the memorial anthology for Campbell, Astounding, but one suspects that Conde Nast, in looking for a new editor upon Campbell's sudden death, preferred as smooth a transition and as little change in the magazine as possible, as Frederik Pohl, also a candidate to succeed Campbell, noted in his memoir The Way the Future Was. Pohl's work at the Galaxy group of magazines, if less decidedly than Harrison's with the Best SF series, was rather more diverse and less engineer-stroking than JWC's magazine had  remained, and Ben Bova, the eventual editorial replacement, managed to both broaden and improve Analog, but less abruptly than the veteran editors would've (perhaps less thoroughly, as well, but that would not necessarily be the opinion of long-term Analog readers). Harrison's career as a (to paraphrase) slow, therefore necessarily commercial, writer, continued fruitfully until his death in 2012.

FFB redux: BEST SF '71 ed. by Harry Harrison & Brian Aldiss (Berkley 1972); YEAR'S FINEST FANTASY ed. by Terry Carr (Berkley 1978)

Redux, due to attendance to a funeral and prepping the house for guests, at this link. Back with new next Friday.

Please see Patti Abbott's list of old and mostly new FFB reviews here.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: BEST SF '71 ed. by Harry Harrison & Brian Aldiss (Berkley 1972); YEAR'S FINEST FANTASY ed. by Terry Carr (Berkley 1978)

FFB: SF HORIZONS, edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison (1964 and 1965 issues; facsimile reprint in boards 1975, Arno Press)

 Here's Brian Aldiss in 1964:

I avoid the usual term "mainstream" which erroneously suggests two things: a) that all sf writers are equal in aim, attitude and ability, and b) that all other writers are equal in aim, attitude and ability, and that all their works are homogenous.

That this line appears in a footnote to an essay about the literary difficulties in writing good sf, using an early novel by Jack Williamson as a jumping off point (while making copious note of the similarities of too much of the work still being written and published in the early-mid 1960s), leaves open the question of how formative reading that in 1979 might've been for the 15yo me, or even more likely, how much I would've found it utterly apropos, an excellent and all but thrown-away statement of a point most people (as it turns out) won't even argue with, so ingrained in their worldview that there's an Us and a Them and the demarcations are clear (except when they aren't). (Romance-fiction fans and writers these days might be the most disturbing example of accepting a ghetto mentality, as Judith Merril might've been the first to put it in re: fantasy and sf, inasmuch as so many of them buy into the writer's guideline commercial notion that it Isn't Really a Romance if it doesn't have a Happily Ever After, or potentially HEA, ending. Romeo and Juliet ain't no romance, you fool...just look at that ending.)

This was an excellent project that probably didn't sustain itself financially, while its editor/publishers were trying to make a living from writing...Damon Knight and Lester Del Rey similarly, in the late 1950s, produced two issues of a Science Fiction Forum that calls out for reprint or posting online, but hasn't seen any yet, as far as I know, even though Knight revived the title for one of the publications of the Science Fiction Writers of America when he co-founded it in the mid '60s. Before SF Horizons, there was PITFCS and Xero; since, we've certainly had Monad and SF Eye, and others that have had a similar ambitious remit (a few, such as Richard Geis's Science Fiction Review/The Alien Critic, Andrew Porter's Algol/Starship, and Douglas Fratz's Thrust/Quantum, which have occasionally approached the same adventurous feel). Maybe Inside SF/Riverside Quarterly as well...if your magazine lasts any length of time, it has to change names (SF Eye began as Science Fiction Eye). 

If you pick up the facsimile volume, or the original issues, today, you'll have access to some of  James Blish's criticism (collected since in volumes from Advent: Publishers), but in its natural environment, cheek by jowl with an excellent interview with C. S. Lewis and Kingsley Amis conducted by Brian Aldiss, and a good one with William Burroughs conducted anonymously (but by someone, I'm told possibly James Blish, who met Burroughs at a meeting of the New York City-based Hydra Club, a periodical gathering of writers and fans that flourished in the 1950s into the '60s); Burroughs is quick to note how much he admires the work of Theodore Sturgeon, Eric Frank Russell (rather unsurprisingly) and (perhaps more surprisingly) C. S. Lewis, in whose work Burroughs sees a strong kinship with his own. I'm not sure the Aldiss essays here (as by him and by "C. C. Shackleton," a regular pseudonym of his often for more satirical writing) have all been collected elsewhere, but one hopes so (the long take on three contemporary UK writers--Lan Wright, Donald Malcolm and J. G. Ballard--is utterly engaging); the editorial in the second issue, attributed to both Harrison and Aldiss, is a particularly acute brief analysis of the great appeal of what has come to be known as the technothriller, albeit ranging as far as Advise and Consent in the then-current crop, and tracing their roots through John Buchan's espionage novels as well as Ian Fleming's incidentally tech-obsessed entries. Harrison's close reading of an F. L. Wallace novel, and issue-taking with Blish's criticism of Aldiss's "Hothouse" stories in the first issue, seems unlikely to have been reprinted elsewhere so far, and that's a pity. Okuno Takeo and Francesco Biamonti's short surveys of sf in Japan and Italy are useful snapshots (Biamonte notes that Umberto Eco had devoted a chapter in a then recent book to how he felt Italian sf should be developed), the kind of coverage that Charles Brown was later keen to continue in Locus magazine, in dealing with international sf and fantasy worldwide. 

For those who seek out the Arno Press reprint: be aware that the text pages are on acid-free paper, but for some reason the endpapers are not. That atop not reprinting the magazine covers in the book, for no obvious reason, and slapping on what I suspect is a slightly expensively embossed and cutesy cover, perhaps one used on all the Arno SF line at the time; their books were clearly meant for the library trade, and before recently purchasing this copy, I'd first read a copy I borrowed and reasonably promptly returned to the Hawaii State Library's central branch, all those years ago.

Images and indices courtesy ISFDB:

• Publication: SF Horizons, No. 1
• Editors: Harry Harrison , Brian Aldiss
• Year: 1964-00-00
• 3 • A Statement of Policy • essay by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss [as by The Editors ]
• 5 • C. S. Lewis Discusses Science Fiction with Kingsley Amis • essay by Brian W. Aldiss and Kingsley Amis and C. S. Lewis (variant of Unreal Estates) [as byKingsley Amis and C. S. Lewis and Brian Aldiss ]
• 13 • Judgment at Jonbar • essay by Brian W. Aldiss [as by Brian Aldiss ]
• 38 • For the 1956 Opposition of Mars • (1962) • poem by Robert Conquest
• 39 • We Are Sitting on Our... • essay by Harry Harrison
• 43 • The Use of Language in SF • essay by G. D. Doherty
• 54 • Is This Thinking? • essay by James Blish
• 58 • "Give Me Excess of It, That Something Snaps..." • essay by Brian W. Aldiss [as by C. C. Shackleton ]

• Publication: SF Horizons, No. 2
• Editors: Brian Aldiss , Harry Harrison
• Year: 1965-00-00
• 1 • Megadunits • essay by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss [as by The Editors ]
• 3 • The Hallucinatory Operators Are Real • interview of William S. Burroughs • interview by SFH
• 13 • British Science Fiction Now • essay by Brian W. Aldiss [as by Brian Aldiss ]
• 38 • S.F.: The Critical Literature • essay by James Blish
• 48 • Other Critical Works: The Issue at Hand • essay by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss [as by The Editors ]
• 51 • Japanese SF • essay by Okuno Takeo
• 52 • Italian Science-Fiction: A Difficult Coming of Age • essay by Francesco Biamonti
• 55 • With a Piece of Twisted Wire... • essay by Harry Harrison
• 61 • "How Are They All on Deneb IV?" • essay by Brian W. Aldiss [as by C. C. Shackleton ]
• 64 • On the Atomic Bomb • poem by C. S. Lewis

Title: SF Horizons 
Authors: Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss 
Year: 1975 

Publisher: Arno Press

Notes: Photographic reprint of the two issues of the British journal/fanzine, originally published in 1964 and 1965.

Library binding on acid-free paper, less than five hundred copies printed.

No price or pub month in book.

Book cover artist not credited.

Please see a recollection of the first set of FFB links, and the rest of this week's ttiles, on this celebration of the first seven years of Friday Books at Patti Abbott's blog.

FFB: Redux (further memories of Frederik Pohl, Harry Harrison and other good people): HELL'S CARTOGRAPHERS edited by Aldiss & Harrison; WORLDS OF IF: A Retrospective Anthology, Pohl, Greenberg & Olander, ed. (Bluejay '86); TQ 20 (TriQuarterly 20y), Gibbons & Hahn, ed. (Pushcart '85); Terry Carr, ed: SCIENCE FICTION FOR PEOPLE WHO HATE SCIENCE FICTION (Doubleday 1966); Harry Harrison, ed: THE LIGHT FANTASTIC (Scribner's 1971)

Next week I hope to Rejoin the Blogging, if everyone hasn't forgotten about the memes I've been involved with...but Bill Crider's thoughtful review of HC did spur me to do at least a bit more to remind us all what we've lost with the passing of Frederik Pohl in recent months, and such other good people as Harry Harrison and Terry Carr over the years recent and too long ago...thanks for your indulgence, and all the kind thoughts recently commented on this blog and elsewhere...

Friday, April 22, 2011

FFB: HELL'S CARTOGRAPHERS edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss (Harper & Row/Wiedenfield & Nicholson 1975)

Among their collaborative projects in the 1970s, along with most notably the Best SF annual published by Berkley, Briton Brian Aldiss and US world-traveler Harry Harrison co-edited and -published the critical and literary-historical journal SF Horizons, an engaging and contentious magazine that was reprinted in boards by the late '70s so that I could find it at one or another Hawaiian library, and would make it's own even more obscure Friday Book...but among the offshoots of that effort was this anthology of autobiographical and procedural essays by six important writers in the sf field, including the editors themselves. And these essays, in their turn, were at least the seeds of Damon Knight's group memoir The Futurians and Frederik Pohl's personal The Way the Future Was, if not also of the longer or collected memoirs since published by Aldiss and Robert Silverberg.

Writers are rarely averse to producing autobiography at some length or in some format, but this was, I think, the first selection of autobiographical essays by sf writers to be published, at very least by large commercial publishing houses. I'd seen Alfred Bester's first, "My Affair with Science Fiction," for it appeared first in Harrison's anthology, otherwise given to first-publication of fiction,Nova 4 (1974), sadly the last of that fine series, and the paperback edition of which, from Manor Books of all people (and they did an unusually elegant job with it), was the first book I ever gave my father as a birthday gift, to his surprise. Bester, in his usual breezy style, takes us on a quick trip through his early writing experiences (his first published short story is repurposed at submission to win a contest at Thrilling Wonder Stories that Robert Heinlein was considering entering with his first published short story, "Lifeline," till Heinlein noted that selling the same story toAstounding Science Fiction, if he could, would make slightly more money than the contest prize; as Bester elsewhere recalls saying to Heinlein much later, "I won that contest and you made ten dollars more than I did."), how he came along with TWS editor Mort Weisinger when he moved over to DC Comics and worked with other writers on all but Batman "and Rabinowitz" scenarios for a few years, before breaking into radio-drama and nonfiction writing, particularly for Holiday magazine, all the while continuing to publish increasingly sophisticated and adventurous sf and fantasy (and how John Campbell's embrace of Dianetics helped chase Bester away from his magazine). Harrison followed a similar path, though he started professionally in comics, and sold his first short story to Damon Knight at Worlds Beyond in 1951; oddly enough, Knight also started professionally as much a visual artist and illustrator as he did writer, with his first professional publication being a cartoon in Amazing Stories in 1940 (among his more notable illustration jobs was for Weird Tales's reprint of Lovecraft's "Herbert West, Reanimator" in the March, 1942 issue, the same one that features Robert Bloch's "Hell on Earth," noted here recently; the HPL story had first appeared in the little magazine Home Brew).

I had read Knight's and Pohl's books previously, so their essays were interesting mostly for the small counterpoints to the longer texts, but hadn't read too much autobiography at that point from the youngest contributor to the book, Robert Silverberg, nor from the only non-Yank contributor, Brian Aldiss, and so Silverberg's journeyman passage through the men's sweat magazines and similar markets rather than comics nor primarily the pulps (though Silverberg would contribute to many of the last of the pulps as that format of magazine faded with the passing of the 1950s, and their children the digest-sized fiction magazines flourished) is a counterpoint, as was Aldiss's early experience of American fiction magazines (in the post-war era, often dumped on the British equivalents of five and dime stores after serving as ballast in cargo ships, and comparable to the influence of American records on the young musicians in Britain of the '50s and '60s) and his career as someone just a bit to the side of the Angry Young Men but like them willing to explore every sort of literature if it looked at all interesting or fruitful, while particularly devoting himself to developing his work in sf...the title of this book echoes that of once Angry Young Man Kingsley Amis's collection of lectures recast as essays, New Maps of Hell, one of the important works of criticism about sf to arise at the turn of the 1960s, along with such collections of critical pieces as Knight's In Search of Wonder and James Blish's The Issue at Hand (and Blish would probably be in this book, but was in the process of dying from cancer and the effects of cancer surgery while it was being prepared; Aldiss notes that Michael Moorcock begged off, as the only requested contributor to do so out of what Aldiss considers excessive modesty...though perhaps insufficiently-cooled anger by the mid-'70s over what had happened to Moorcock's baby New Worlds magazine might also have played a part).

So, a key book in the history as well as about the history of the science fiction field, and good fun as well as touching and startling at times, and consistently illuminating.

For more of today's "forgotten" books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Friday, September 16, 2011

FFB: WORLDS OF IF: A Retrospective Anthology, Pohl, Greenberg & Olander, ed. (Bluejay '86); TQ 20 (TriQuarterly 20y), Gibbons & Hahn, ed. (Pushcart '85)

Nearly contemporary issues:

(sadly, with this many illustrations, a Blogger page looks much different even when viewed on such browsers as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and MS Explorer...accounting for some cropped, but expandable, images on Firefox, at least...)

Executive summary: Two impressive slices through the first two decades of two important, but not always sufficiently respected, fiction magazines. If, aka Worlds of If, ran from 1952-1974, with some weak attempts at revival afterward (at the end of 1974, it was merged into its longterm stablemate Galaxy, which itself staggered into folding and sporadic revival by 1980); even at its weakest points editorially under original publisher James Quinn, If was an elegantly-produced magazine, and while the later publishers at the "Digest Productions"/Guinn/Galaxy group and UPD Publications varied in their investment, it was often striking later as well. TriQuarterly began as a relatively modest physical production, though less so in content in 1964, and had made itself into one of the most visually as well as literarily impressive of little magazines throughout the 1970s thanks to founding editor Charles Newman and successors Elliot Anderson and Robert Onopa, the latter being rewarded by being unceremoniously dumped for daring to treat "popular fiction" as essentially no different from "literary fiction"; TQ never quite recovered its spirit, though it did continue, and is now a webzine.



What's good about these anthologies:Take a quick look at their contents, below. As the material about each magazine in their respective volumes makes clear, the not terribly well-measured consensus view about these two magazines was that they were very well in their way, but not the Serious Contenders that were, say, the hidebound 1969 Analog or The Hudson Review , nor even the resolutely lively contemporary issues of The Paris Review or Galaxy, when If and TQ had also been hitting their very comparable high-quality marks for some years, would continue in If's case till merger in 1975 and in TriQuarterly's case was allowed to continue doing so for another half-decade. Again, look below at the evidence. In addition to the good to great fiction in the If volume, you get a plethora of reminiscences by the writers and editors, some taken not long before these folks died or otherwise became incapable of comment (the book was also delayed for several years). The material about the magazine is less generous in the TQ, perhaps in part because the book's editors were also TQ's editors after the shameful putsch in 1980, but to help make up for that, the selection of poetry and artwork as well as fiction is even larger.

What's not so great about these anthologies: Don't let your book be the last Bluejay book nor the second Pushcart anthology of material the Pushcart folks didn't shape for themselves...because signs of haste and slipshoddery will be evident all over the productions, beginning with the covers. Both manage to have half-good covers, with some boldish graphics not employed quite properly...clearly the white space in the If was meant to hold some writers' names, and the TQ would work better if the cover gave a legible indication what "TQ" meant...the contributors' names in both cases are almost illegible on the back cover, if the casual browser gets past the front cover. The "If" in the one should've been larger, to resemble the magazine's frequent logo; the spine of the TriQuarterly jacketdoesn't have the title "TQ 20" on it anywhere. It takes some effort to get much more clumsy than this.

Unfortunately, the bad packaging gives way in the If to some very blatant typos (Charles Beaumont's The Hunger and Other Stories becomes the "Hunter"; the Zelazny here is incorrectly cited as the only story he published in If; there's a more unforgivable one that I'll have to find again--it's Martin Greenberg's contention that Larry Niven was rare in being conversant in both "hard" science fiction and adventure fantasy...as if Poul Anderson and at least arguably Jack Vance and the predominance of the contributors to the magazineUnknown didn't rather roundly contradict that). Perhaps even more of a mixed bag is the uncorrected nature of a number of the memoirs; several contributors, Algis Budrys for one and P.J. Farmer to a gross extent, manage to get historical facts out of order (Budrys misremembers Fairman as the editor after Quinn), but mostly the disagreements between the nonfiction contributors are reasonable disagreements of judgment, and useful assessments. (One which definitely caught my eye detailed editor Larry Shaw's run-ins with Evan Hunter, whom he found unpleasant, not least when Shaw sought to have him correct an error in his famous, overrated story "Malice in Wonderland," and Hunter replied, "Well, it's only science fiction, after all." A kind of irresponsibility I tend to find in all the Hunter [McBain, et al.] fiction I've read.)

The TQ basically reshoots the pages of the magazine for the book; the typefaces are unmistakable, and so any typos in the original magazine run are presumably reproduced here (I haven't spotted any blatant ones yet); and, again, as little as possible is said about the purge of Anderson and Onopa from the magazine; in fact, Onopa is neither reprinted (he contributed interesting fiction, as well) nor mentioned. Very much down the memory hole.
Above, a 1974 issue; below, one of the last Anderson/Onopa issues, from 1980.


These books are valuable documents, if not quite what they could've been; the magazines treated, as their staffs were, with insufficient respect once again. And, in part as consequence, they are long out of print. But they will reward you if you seek them out, and they won't cost you too much...unless you don't look for the bargains. The better work represented here is even worth a premium price.

Below: some If covers through the years (including one from when Keith Laumer was still a bit more of an audience favorite than Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.):


















































Fact (I believe) about If: it employed more book-publisher editors as its editor or associate/assistant editor than any other sf magazine has, before or since: founding editor Paul Fairman might make the weakest link (in several ways!) by being the editor in charge of the Ziff-Davis fiction magazines later when they published the one volume/issue of Amazing Stories Science Fiction Novels, Henry Slesar's novelization of 20 Million Miles to Earth (I wouldn't be surprised if Fairman eventually edited books for others, as well). James Quinn (Handi-Books--or did he not wield an editorial hand there as well as publishing?), Larry Shaw (Lancer Books), Damon Knight (Berkley), H. L. Gold (Galaxy Novels), Frederik Pohl (Ace, Bantam), Judy-Lynn Benjamin/Del Rey and Lester Del Rey (Ballantine/Del Rey), Ejler Jakobsson (Award and other UPD lines), and James Baen (Ace, Baen Books).

courtesy the Locus Index:
Worlds of If: A Retrospective Anthology ed. Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg & Joseph D. Olander (Bluejay 0-312-94471-3, Dec ’86, $19.95, 438pp, hc) Anthology of 24 stories. This is the last Bluejay book.

1 · Introduction · Frederik Pohl · in
6 · As If Was in the Beginning · Larry T. Shaw · ar, 1986
19 · Memoir · Philip K. Dick · ms
20 · The Golden Man · Philip K. Dick · nv If Apr ’54
50 · Memoir · Robert Sheckley · ms
51 · The Battle · Robert Sheckley · ss If Sep ’54
57 · Last Rites · Charles Beaumont · ss If Oct ’55
71 · Game Preserve · Rog Phillips · ss If Oct ’57
85 · The Burning of the Brain · Cordwainer Smith · ss If Oct ’58
95 · Memoir · Algis Budrys · ms
103 · The Man Who Tasted Ashes · Algis Budrys · ss If Feb ’59
117 · Memoir · Poul Anderson · ms
119 · Kings Who Die · Poul Anderson · nv If Mar ’62
147 · Memoir · Fred Saberhagen · ms
148 · Fortress Ship [Berserker] · Fred Saberhagen · ss If Jan ’63
158 · Father of the Stars · Frederik Pohl · ss If Nov ’64
177 · Trick or Treaty [Jame Retief] · Keith Laumer · nv If Aug ’65
202 · Memoir · R. A. Lafferty · ms
203 · Nine Hundred Grandmothers · R. A. Lafferty · ss If Feb ’66
214 · Memoir · Larry Niven · ms
216 · Neutron Star [Beowulf Shaeffer] · Larry Niven · nv If Oct ’66
234 · Memoir · Roger Zelazny · ms
235 · This Mortal Mountain · Roger Zelazny · nv If Mar ’67
272 · Memoir · Harlan Ellison · ar *
289 · I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream · Harlan Ellison · ss If Mar ’67
305 · Memoir · Samuel R. Delany · ms
306 · Driftglass · Samuel R. Delany · ss If Jun ’67
324 · Memoir · Isaac Asimov · ms
326 · The Holmes-Ginsbook Device · Isaac Asimov · ss If Dec ’68
336 · Memoir · Philip José Farmer · ms
338 · Down in the Black Gang · Philip José Farmer · nv If Mar ’69
359 · Memoir · Robert Silverberg · ms
361 · The Reality Trip · Robert Silverberg · ss If May ’70
378 · Memoir · James Tiptree, Jr. · ms
379 · The Night-Blooming Saurian · James Tiptree, Jr. · ss If May ’70
385 · Memoir · Theodore Sturgeon · ms
388 · Occam’s Scalpel · Theodore Sturgeon · nv If Aug ’71
409 · Memoir · Clifford D. Simak · ms
410 · Construction Shack · Clifford D. Simak · ss Worlds of If Jan/Feb ’73
424 · Memoir · Craig Kee Strete · ms
427 · Time Deer · Craig Kee Strete · ss Red Planet Earth #4 ’74
433 · Afterword: Flash Point, Middle · Barry N. Malzberg · aw

courtesy WorldCat:
TQ 20 : twenty years of the best contemporary writing and graphics from TriQuarterly magazine
Editors: Reginald Gibbons; Susan Hahn
Publisher: Wainscott, NY : Pushcart Press, ©1985.
Description: 667 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

Contents:
Preface/1964-1984 --
Forward / Charles Newman --
Fragments from the unpublished death fantasy sequence of Judgment day / James T. Farrell --
To friends in East and West "A New Year's greeting" / Boris Pasternak --
Three essays / Roland Barthes --
Two stories / Richard Brautigan --
In a hole / George P. Elliott --
Two poems / Anne Sexton --
Why is American poetry culturally deprived? / Kenneth Rexroth --
Storm still / Brock Brower --
TV / Howard Nemerov --
Two essays / E.M. Cioran --
The fly / Miroslav Holub --
Two poems / Vasko Popa --
A damned man / Aleksander Wat --
From the wave / Thom Gunn --
Meeting hall of the Sociedad Anarquista, 1952 / Irving Feldman --
Few things to say / John Frederick Nims --
The town / C.P. Cavafy --
Tuesday siesta / Gabriel García Márquez --
The sea / Jorge Luis Borges --
The doll queen / Carlos Fuentes --
From unusual occupations / Julio Cortázar --
Montesano unvisited / Richard Hugo --
Possibility along a line of difference / A.R. Ammons --
Life / Jean Follain --
Footprints on the glacier / W.S. Merwin --
The Eagle Exterminating Company / James Tate --
The double dream of spring / John Ashbery --
Toward a new program for the university / Christopher Lasch --
Three meetings / Stanley Elkin --
Three / W.S. Merwin --
Pain / Maxine Kumin --
That's what you say, Cesar? / Andrew Glaze --
Enigma for an angel / Joseph Brodsky --
Two poems / Osip Mandelstam --
To Edward dahlberg / Jack Kerouac --
Confessions / Edward Dahlberg --
From The tunnel: why windows are important to me / William H. Gass --
The wheel / Aimé Césaire --
A tale from Lailonia / Leszek Kolakowski --
Men fought / Jorge Luis Borges --
Meredith Dawe / Joyce Carol Oates --
From Ninety-two in the shade / Thomas McGuane --
Torpid smoke / Vladimir Nabokov --
My encounters with Chekhov / Konstantin Korovin --
Commitment without empathy : a writer's notes on politics, theatre and the novel / David Caute --
Human dust / Agnes Denes --
Heart attack / Max Apple --
The reurn of Icarus / David Wagoner --
With Uncle Sam at Burning Tree / Robert Coover --
Gala / Paul West --
The sewing harems / Cynthia Ozick --
Two shoes for one foot / John Hawkes --
Coyote hold a full house in his hand / Leslie Marmon Silko --
Dillinger in Hollywood / John Sayles --
Walking out / David Quammen --
Where is everyone? / Raymond Carver --
Hunters in the snow / Tobias Wolff --
From A flag for sunrise / Robert Stone --
Embryology / Magdalena Abakanowicz --
Going to the dogs / Richard Ford --
Editorial / Reginald Gibbons --
Dear Lydia E. Pinkham / Pamels White Hadas --
Somg of napalm / Bruce Weigl --
Three prose pieces / Stephen Berg --
Had I a hundred mouths / William Goyen --
From Steht noch dahin / Marie Louise Kaschnitz --
Prayer for the dying / Willis Johnson --
Don't they speak jazz? / Michael S. Harper --
Aubade / Roalnd Flint --
The third count / Andrew Fetler --
In the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried / Amy Hempel --
June harvest / W.S. Di Piero --
Ambush / John Morgan --
Instructions to be left behind / Marvin Bell --
Gill Boy / Dennis Schmitz --
From A minor apocalypse / Tadeusz Konwicki --
The belly of Barbara N. / Wiktor Woroszylski --
Two poems / Stanislaw Baranczak --
Isaac Babel / R.D. Skillings --
The story tellers / Fred Chappell --
Night traffic near Winchester / Dave Smith --
Sweet sixteen lines / Al Young --
Father and son / Morton Marcus --
His happy hour / Alan Shapiro --
The last class / Ellen Bryant Voigt --
Two poems / C.K. Williams --
Recovering / William Goyen --
On welfare / William Wilborn --
Two poems / William Heyen --
The hooded legion / Gerald McCarthy --
Snowy egret / Bruce Weigl --
Three epigrams / Elder Olson --
Interview with Saul Bellow / Rockwell Gray, Harry White and Gerald Nemanic --
Fulfilling the promise / Lisel Mueller --
The Aragon ballroom / John Dickson --
The city / Lorraine Hansberry --
The address / Marga Minco --
Departures / Linda Pastan --
He, she, all of them, ay / John Peck

Friday, February 3, 2012

FFB: Terry Carr, ed: SCIENCE FICTION FOR PEOPLE WHO HATE SCIENCE FICTION (Doubleday 1966); Harry Harrison, ed: THE LIGHT FANTASTIC (Scribner's 1971)

Missionary Work

Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction was Terry Carr's first solo anthology to be published, after a volume or two of his work with Donald Wollheim on their Best of the Year sf volume for Ace Books; The Light Fantastic: Science Fiction Classics from the Mainstream(sic: there is not now, nor has there ever been, a true mainstream of literature) was not Harry Harrison's first antho, but his first, as well, was an sf BOTY, in his case for Putnam/Berkley, with Brian Aldiss as increasingly co-editing junior partner in the first volume or so. Perhaps the same impulse that drives one to work on annual showcases makes putting together this kind of instructional anthology, even beyond the usual "this is important, or at very least interesting" thrust of nearly any anthology assembled with care, particularly attractive...in the cases of these two fine anthologies, the instructional thrust can be executively summarized as "Open your eyes." (The appended "fool!" is only occasionally barely audible, almost impossible to completely suppress, as well.)

The Carr anthology brings together accessible, intelligent, (at the time) not terribly overexposed mostly sf stories (H.L. Gold's synesthesia tale "The Man with English" certainly is arguably fantasy, and Arthur Clarke's "The Star" introduces supernatural elements of the most widely accepted sort in Christendom)...Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" hadn't quite become common coin by the mid '60s, and the Damon Knight story, despite "To Serve Man" having become a much-loved Twilight Zone episode, was nearly as famous as Knight's other early joke story, and even more sapiently pointed). While "What's It Like Out There?" remains The cited example of What Else Edmond Hamilton could do aside from planet explosion, and the Wilmar Shiras a slightly odd choice in this set of encouraging the outlanders to try some of the pure quill. Algis Budrys, in reviewing this one at the time, noted that people who hate sf hate reading, and the only way to get them to take up this book would be for it to be socially necessary to have on their coffee-table or equivalent (as Cat's Cradle andSlaughterhouse-Five and Stranger in a Strange Land and to a lesser extent at that timeDune and No Blade of Grass and The Child Buyer would be)...but the thoughtful reader who thought they hated sf somehow (probably more common in '66 than today, if not much moreso) could find some diversion here, at very least. Or, by the end of the decade, could enjoy making a joke about reading up on the topic in their Funk & Wagnalls paperback edition.

Harry Harrison attempts a slightly more double-edged trick, in getting the (presumably well-meaning ignorant) snobs against sf to consider reading the form, and to get similar snobs within the sf-reading community to look beyond the commercial labels for the pure quill wherever it's actually found. Harrison, too, gets in some work in this "sf" context that is arguably (the Cheever, the Greene) or almost inarguably (the Lewis, the Twain) fantasy rather than sf, though the sort of fantasy that sf people usually find agreeable, even leaving aside the time-travel paradox introduced in Anthony Burgess's "The Muse" (Burgess, of course, couldn't leave sf alone any more than C. S. Lewis could, and saw no more reason to do so than Lewis, I'm sure). And, of course, Gerald Kersh and Jorge Luis Borges had no qualms about being considered writers of fantasticated fiction, as long as no one insisted that was all they did or could do, and, happily, no one has...if anything, Kingsley Amis, that passionate advocate for sf so labeled, has seen his advocacy and contributions to the literature all but forgotten in favor of his Angry Young Man (and Older Man) satire, even when careful to have Lucky Jim a reader of Astounding Science Fiction magazine back when Analog was still called that.

It's a funny old world, and there's no shortage of ignorance of all sorts, but that's what this FFB exercise is here to combat, in its small and often nostalgic way. I liked both these anthologies a lot as a kid, and would still like them if I was first to open them today. What more could we ask?

Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction ed. Terry Carr (Doubleday LCC# 66-24334, 1966, $3.95, 190pp, hc); Also in pb (Funk & Wagnalls 1968).

7 · Introduction · Terry Carr · in
11 · The Star [Star of Bethlehem] · Arthur C. Clarke · ss Infinity Science Fiction Nov ’55
21 · A Sound of Thunder · Ray Bradbury · ss Colliers Jun 28 ’52
37 · The Year of the Jackpot · Robert A. Heinlein · nv Galaxy Mar ’52
79 · The Man with English · H. L. Gold · ss Star Science Fiction Stories #1, ed. Frederik Pohl, Ballantine, 1953
91 · In Hiding [Timothy Paul] · Wilmar H. Shiras · nv Astounding Nov ’48
135 · Not with a Bang · Damon Knight · ss F&SF Win/Spr ’50
143 · Love Called This Thing · Avram Davidson & Laura Goforth · ss Galaxy Apr ’59
157 · The Weapon · Fredric Brown · ss Astounding Apr ’51
163 · What’s It Like Out There? · Edmond Hamilton · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec ’52

The Light Fantastic ed. Harry Harrison (Scribner’s, 1971, hc)
· Introduction—The Function of Science Fiction · James Blish · in
· The Muse · Anthony Burgess · ss The Hudson Review Spr ’68
· The Unsafe Deposit Box · Gerald Kersh · ss The Saturday Evening Post Apr 14 ’62
· Something Strange · Kingsley Amis · ss The Spectator, 1960; F&SF Jul ’61
· Sold to Satan [written Jan 1904] · Mark Twain · ss Europe and Elsewhere, Harper Bros., 1923
· The End of the Party · Graham Greene · ss The London Mercury Jan ’32
· The Circular Ruins [1941] · Jorge Luís Borges; trans. by James E. Irby · ss Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962
· The Shout · Robert Graves · ss The Woburn Books #16 ’29; F&SF Apr ’52
· The Door · E. B. White · ss New Yorker, 1939
· The Machine Stops · E. M. Forster · nv Oxford and Cambridge Review Nov ’09
· The Mark Gable Foundation · Leo Szilard · ss The Voice of the Dolphins, and Other Stories, Simon & Schuster, 1961
· The Enormous Radio · John Cheever · ss New Yorker May 17 ’47
· The Finest Story in the World · Rudyard Kipling · nv Contemporary Review Jul, 1891
· The Shoddy Lands · C. S. Lewis · ss F&SF Feb ’56
· Afterword · Harry Harrison · aw

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

1968: Judith Merril and Kate Wilhelm put together an ad against the Vietnam War...

...and it appears in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and in Galaxy, Worlds of If and International Science Fiction magazines (the latter three of which are published by the same publisher, Robert Guinn of the Galaxy Publishing Co., and edited by Frederik Pohl, the first edited by Edward Ferman and published by his father Joseph Ferman), along with a corresponding ad from "hawks" who are moved by Wilhelm and Merril's canvassing.

Frank Hollander was kind enough to transcribe the lists from the ads for the FictionMags list:


We the undersigned believe the United States must remain in Vietnam to
fulfill its responsibilities to the people of that country.

Karen K. Anderson
Poul Anderson
Harry Bates
Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
J. F. Bone
Leigh Brackett
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Mario Brand
R. Bretnor
Fredric Brown
Doris Pitkin Buck
William R. Burkett, Jr.
Elinor Busby
F. M. Busby
John W. Campbell
Louis Charbonneau
Hal Clement
Compton Crook
Hank Davis
L. Sprague de Camp
Charles V. de Vet
William B. Ellern
Richard H. Eney
T. R. Fehrenbach
R. C. FitzPatrick
Daniel F. Galouye
Raymond Z. Gallun
Robert M. Green, Jr.
Frances T. Hall
Edmond Hamilton
Robert A. Heinlein
Joe L. Hensley
Paul G. Herkart
Dean C. Ing
Jay Kay Klein
David A. Kyle
R. A. Lafferty
Robert J. Leman
C. C. MacApp
Robert Mason [not my father, but the Vietnam vet who would eventually write the novelsWeapon and Solo, and the memoir Chickenhawk]
D. M. Melton
Norman Metcalf
P. Schuyler Miller
Sam Moskowitz
John Myers Myers
Larry Niven
Alan Nourse
Stuart Palmer
Gerald W. Page
Rachel Cosgrove Payes
Lawrence A. Perkins
Jerry E. Pournelle
Joe Poyer
E Hoffmann Price
George W. Price
Alva Rogers
Fred Saberhagen
George O. Smith
W. E. Sprague
G. Harry Stine (Lee Correy)
Dwight V. Swain
Thomas Burnett Swann
Albert Teichner
Theodore L. Thomas
Rena M. Vale
Jack Vance
Harl Vincent
Don Walsh, Jr.
Robert Moore Williams
Jack Williamson
Rosco E. Wright
Karl Würf

We oppose the participation of the United States in the war in Vietnam.

Forrest J Ackerman
Isaac Asimov
Peter S. Beagle
Jerome Bixby
James Blish
Anthony Boucher
Lyle G. Boyd
Ray Bradbury
Jonathan Brand
Stuart J. Byrne
Terry Carr
Carroll J. Clem
Ed M. Clinton
Theodore R. Cogswell
Arthur Jean Cox
Allan Danzig
Jon DeCles
Miriam Allen deFord
Samuel R. Delany
Lester del Rey
Philip K. Dick
Thomas M. Disch
Sonya Dorman
Larry Eisenberg
Harlan Ellison
Carol Emshwiller
Philip José Farmer
David E. Fisher
Ron Goulart
Joseph Green
Jim Harmon
Harry Harrison
H. H. Hollis
J[oan]. Hunter Holly
James D. Houston
Edward Jesby
Leo P. Kelley
Daniel Keyes
Virginia Kidd
Damon Knight
Allen Lang
March Laumer [Keith Laumer was still in active service, I believe, and probably constrained from adding a signature to either]
Ursula K. Le Guin
Fritz Leiber
Irwin Lewis
A. M. Lightner
Robert A. W. Lowndes
Katherine MacLean
Barry Malzberg
Robert E. Margroff
Anne Marple
Ardrey Marshall
Bruce McAllister
Judith Merril
Robert P. Mills
Howard L. Morris
Kris Neville
Alexei Panshin
Emil Petaja
J. R. Pierce
Arthur Porges
Mack Reynolds
Gene Roddenberry
Joanna Russ
James Sallis
William Sambrot
Hans Stefan Santesson
J. W. Schutz
Robin Scott [Wilson, not yet retired from the CIA, already working on the first Clarion Workshops]
Larry T. Shaw
John Shepley
T. L Sherred
Robert Silverberg
Henry Slesar
Jerry Sohl
Norman Spinrad
Margaret St. Clair
Jacob Transue
Thurlow Weed
Kate Wilhelm
Richard Wilson
Donald A. Wollheim

Contributions to help meet the expense of future ads are welcomed, and
should be sent to:

Judith Merril or Kate Wilhelm Knight
P. O. Box 79
Milford, Pennsylvania 18337