Showing posts with label Kit Reed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kit Reed. Show all posts

Friday, October 20, 2017

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

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

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

 The ISFDB index:
The earlier UK collection (1978 vs. 1981)
For more of today's books, and mostly actual books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, September 29, 2017

FFB: Kit Reed, 1932-2017 and some of her peers

Kit Reed died this past week; energetic up to the point where her inoperable brain tumor got the better of her over the last month or so, at age 85 she left us a final novel and a final short story (unless something turns up in papers that her kids think she might've wanted to see in print). 
  The New York Times obit:
Kit Reed, Author of Darkly Humorous Fiction, Dies at 85, though it manages to not mention her contemporary fiction, it does mention her work as a professor and writer in residence.

 Colette Bancroft in the Tampa Bay Times.
Locus magazine (unsigned)

Her new novel:
And her new short story, both on sale now:

 Reed, as noted here last year, started her writing career as a professional journalist, and made a mark, winning industry awards before selling her first short story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1958, "The Wait" (collected in her first shorter works volume as "To Be Taken in a Strange Country")...one rather pathetic colleague at the New Haven Register, she recounted not too long ago, would make a point of pulling her office typewriter off her desk and taking it over to a corner where he would type out his own attempts at stories, and claimed, upon learning of her F&SF sale, to have sold a story to The New Yorker, which would be appearing Real Soon Now. Reed continued to place fiction with F&SF, and branched out to the Yale Literary Magazine, Robert Lowndes's  Science Fiction, Joseph Payne Brennan's Macabre, and by 1960 Redbook...while her colleague had slunk off somewhere to await his further stories' appearance in equally imaginary issues of The Dial and Scribner's, no doubt.

In the previous Reed review-essay, I noted that Reed was a member of an (in the latter 1950s) emerging school of women writers not too worried about sticking within expected boundaries in their writing, whether it terms of "genre" or attitude toward their subjects, which I suggest also included Kate Wilhelm, Carol Emshwiller, Lee Hoffman, Joanna Russ and, starting just a bit later, Joyce Carol Oates...all were publishing in several fields at once, and impressively so. The NYT obituarist  attempts to suggest Reed "evokes Stephen King" (as opposed to the other way around) as well as Shirley Jackson, a rather better guess, but Reed noted to me last year that Evelyn Waugh was perhaps her greatest influence. 

 Courtesy Kate Maruyama, who notes on FaceBook: "Mom mailed this to me, gleefully, noting 'I thought you'd enjoy this little artifact.'"
But that wasn't the only "celebratory" slight she would see in her early fiction-writing career, as the World Science Fiction Convention was moved to attempt a third award in the category best new writer...the first Hugo ceremony in 1953 bestowed Best New Writer or Artist on Philip Jose Farmer, apparently by fiat of the convention committee (though not unreasonably so); in 1956, "Most Promising New Author" was voted upon and Robert Silverberg took home the Hugo, with the rest of the shortlist composed of Harlan Ellison, Frank Herbert and a relatively obscure writer these days, Henry Still, apparently a friend of convention organizers; and in 1959, the Hugo ballot featured the following impressive set of nominees for Best New Author, listed alphabetically:

 Brian W. Aldiss
Pauline Ashwell (Pauline Whitby)
Rosel George Brown
Louis Charbonneau
Kit Reed

 ...and the ungrateful bastards voted "No Award" the winner. Which is perhaps why there was no more attempt at Best New Author-style awards till the establishment of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, itself never officially a Hugo but voted on and awarded at the same convention ceremonies, in the early 1970s. (The voters in '59 did have the flexibility to give an sf award to Robert Bloch's humorous dark fantasy "That Hell-Bound Train" for best short story, but also chose No Award rather than favor any of the three ballot choices for best sf/fantasy film: The Fly, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and The Horror of Dracula...worse A/V presentations have won before and since.)
All five went on to notable careers, even if Brown's was cut very short by cancer fifty years ago, when she was 41; Ashwell died two years ago, and Charbonneau and Aldiss both died earlier this year. Three women and two men on a ballot in 1959 might've bothered some idiots; Aldiss and Ashwell were British, which might somehow have offended Yankee chauvinists; who knows why the voting populace was so honest and/or churlish as to not  care enough about any of these reasonably new writers to vote for any  (Charbonneau had written some radio drama before becoming a professional journalist, which would be his primary work while writing novels on the side; Aldiss had been the literary editor for the newspaper The Oxford Mail; Ashwell had been precocious, publishing her first short story in the British, and misleadingly titled, magazine Yankee Science Fiction at fourteen and publishing a children's fantasy chapbook at 15). 

 Kit Reed (when not signing her suspense novels Kit Craig and publishing one horror novel as Shelley Hyde) and Brian Aldiss have been hugely prolific, often challenging (never more to the reader than to themselves) writers in the decades since; Rosel George Brown wrote increasingly impressive short fiction and a few novels before her early death; Pauline Ashwell, sometimes publishing as Paul Ash, was not hugely prolific but published consistently impressive work--her perceived audience was such that a short novel she saw published in Analog has never been reprinted in book form, but her work is widely respected and enjoyed by those in the know; Louis Charbonneau, not the Canadian Human Rights Watch executive and bilingualism advocate (IMDb currently confuses them), went on to write several sf novels in the 1960s, novelized at least one unproduced film script and wrote the treatments for two episodes of  the original series of The Outer Limits, published westerns as Carter Travis Young beginning in 1960, and eventually moved more in the direction of writing horror and particularly suspense novels in the 1970s, along with the westerns/historicals under his own name Down from the Mountain and Trail: The Story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: A Novel.
Rosel George Brown, 1966
There is something to be said for honoring the work of living writers while they're living, and perhaps praising some writers too young will discourage growth, but somehow I suspect the encouragement will more often be worthwhile. I'm glad I got to meet Kit Reed and tell her how much I've enjoyed her work over the years; didn't seize what opportunity I had with the others (though of course Brown had died before I was reading much beyond Seuss and Golden Books). More to say soon. 

 For more typical book reviews this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog. 





































































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Thursday, February 16, 2017

FFB/S: evil children week: THE LITTLE MONSTERS et seq. edited by Roger Elwood and/or Vic Ghidalia; stories by Jerome Bixby, Kit Reed, Damon Knight, "Matthew Gant" (Arnold Hano) and C. M. Kornbluth

There are all sorts of delightful stories about evil children, as well as merely mischievous children (standard and psychopathic and supernatural); FFB organizer Patti Abbott, mother of a prosecuting attorney and a crime-fiction specialist, perhaps knows something we don't, and called this week for a special attention on the perhaps overlooked examples of this particular genre of novels and, in my case at least, short fiction instead. 

 So, before turning to the anthologies of Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia, perhaps the most prolific miners of this vein, separately and together, in fantastic fiction, some examples that come to mind that aren't included in any of their books cited here...
Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life" is perhaps the least obscure bad child story, beyond "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" and few others, vying with The Bad Seed and Peck's Bad Boy and probably ahead of Conradin in Saki's "Sredni Vashtar" or "Gabriel-Ernest" or Small Simon in John Collier's "Thus I Refute Beelzy", and on par with the protagonists of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the increasingly obscure Penrod and their sequels. Adapted several times for versions of The Twilight Zone and mocked as a result by The Simpsons, it's the most famous of Bixby's works by some distance, and a fine evocation of why, perhaps, children shouldn't be omnipotent. Similarly, Joe Hensley's "Lord Randy, My Son."

Damon Knight's brilliant "Special Delivery" involves another rather more insidious sort of bully, a (to understate) precocious and telepathic fetus who chooses to dictate (rather more explicitly than a fetus might anyway) how its parents get to behave as it develops. A great resolution and last line, which, Knight notes, his first wife actually said upon parturition of their first.

 "Matthew Gant" (Arnold Hano)'s "The Uses of Intelligence" involves two smug, and also precocious, early-adolescent miscreants who don't quite discover in time that they are not the most intelligent people in their environment. As a bright young thing when first reading this one, as reprinted from the MWA's own short-lived magazine Sleuth in one of Robert Arthur's Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies (A Month of Mystery, as paperbacked in part as Dates with Death), the dopiness of the young crooks rather offended me at least as much as their viciousness. And I'm reminded of Hensley again; Joe Hensley and Harlan Ellison's "Rodney Parish for Hire" rings a similar change on this basic story, perhaps a bit more convincingly. 

 Two stories that aren't quite about evil children, so much as nearly so: "The Education of Tigress McArdle" by C. M. Kornbluth and "The Attack of the Giant Baby" by Kit Reed; the first about a robot baby simulator that prospective parents are required to survive before being allowed to procreate; the other about an infant accidentally Made Large (the filmmakers of Honey, I Blew Up the Kids didn't quite come close enough to be actionable), both accumulations of charming and off-putting detail. Half-masticated Mallomars alone. (Kornbluth and his wife had extra struggle in treating with their special needs child, which also led to his writing the unfinished fragment that Frederik Pohl, who had some similar experience, completed and published as "The Meeting".)

 And there are many other stories about not so much evil as self-preserving children driven to extremes, such as Graham Greene's "The End of the Party"...and the exploitation of children, such as "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin...or something too much akin, as with the eerie "At the Bottom of the Garden" by David Campton or Joyce Carol Oates's slightly older protagonist dealing with an impossible situation in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

 Meanwhile, over the course of five anthologies, the busy and controversial anthologist Roger Elwood (very prolific and responsible for a number of good and indifferent anthologies in the latter 1960s into the late 1970s, among other editorial work and eventually some novels of his own) and part-time anthologist and early collaborator Vic Ghidalia (his day job apparently was as a publicist at ABC television in Los Angeles) managed to gather other stories instead, between them in four predominantly reprint volumes and one all-original anthology. I have yet to see that last, but have enjoyed most of the stories in the other books over the years, and picked up their first joint effort, The Little Monsters, when I was about twelve or thirteen  from some secondhand book source. 

 The Little Monsters ed. Roger Elwood & Vic Ghidalia (MacFadden-Bartell 288, 1969, 75¢, 160pp, pb)
    • 5 · The Metronome · August Derleth · ss Terror by Night, ed. Christine Campbell Thomson, London: Selwyn & Blount 1934
    • 13 · Let’s Play “Poison” · Ray Bradbury · ss Weird Tales Nov 1946
    • 19 · The Playfellow · Cynthia Asquith · nv Shudders, Cynthia Asquith, London: Hutchinson 1929
    • 43 · Mimsy Were the Borogoves · Henry Kuttner · nv Astounding Feb 1943, as by Lewis Padgett
    • 77 · The Antimacassar · Greye La Spina · ss Weird Tales May 1949
    • 91 · Old Clothes · Algernon Blackwood · nv The Lost Valley and Other Stories, London: Nash 1910
    • 123 · How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery · E. F. Benson · ss The Windsor Magazine Dec 1911
    • 139 · “They” · Rudyard Kipling · nv Scribner’s Aug 1904
Four years later, for the successor no-budget publisher, a sequel:
But beforehand, another joint anthology, for a somewhat more solvent publisher:
And Elwood exploring, with an anthology of all new stories, rather than one or two, the subject matter on his own as editor: 
































 And Ghidalia taking up his own exploration:
    The Devil’s Generation ed. Vic Ghidalia (Lancer 75465, 1973, 95¢, 175pp, pb)
One can see that the two editors' tastes were rather similar, and all five anthologies at least look solid. I need to pick up Demon Kind even if the stories gathered there might be minor in each case...the sequel to Kris Neville's most famous story, "Bettyann", makes that story of some special interest even without the potential of the others, including an early story by eventual YA specialist Laurence Yep, along with several old favorite writers of mine. The mostly/entirely reprint anthologies are an interesting mix of chestnuts and more unlikely choices; The Little Monsters is a rare, if not the only, selection not taken explicitly from Weird Tales to include a La Spina story, I believe, that I own. And, certainly, some of these stories vary a bit from the theme of genuinely evil children, even if the malefactors, as in "The Black Ferris", appear to be children at first. Elwood and Ghidalia perhaps do not need to be crusaded for, but in their ways, they did some good work they could be proud of...even if one chooses never to forgive Elwood for most of the Laser Books line.  Certainly, anyone who hadn't previously come across Robert Bloch's "Sweets to the Sweet" or the Bradbury stories, or the far less commonly reprinted Derleths, was likely to feel like they had made a wise investment. 

 For more of this week's books and evil children, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, May 6, 2016

FFFirstB: MOTHER ISN'T DEAD SHE'S ONLY SLEEPING by Kit Reed (Houghton Mifflin 1961); SHORT STORY 2 by Arno Karlen, Sally Weber, Michael Rumaker and Gertrude Friedberg (Scribner's 1959)

Kit Reed has had a fairly remarkable career for someone who has only infrequently gotten due attention and commendation for her consistently sharp and grounded comic vision, satirical without rendering her characters as cartoons. Not all of her work is inherently sardonic as well as humane, but that's the way to bet it, from what I've read (I still need to read the suspense novels, such as Gone, she's published as "Kit Craig" and the horror novel, Blood Fever, as by "Shelley Hyde"...her legal name is Lillian Craig Reed). She came out of college and began a career in journalism, originally in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the Times in 1954, marrying in 1955 Joseph Reed, who became an English professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she resettled, joining the staff of the Hamden Chronicle, and quickly moving on to the New Haven Register, where she was recognized for her work by peers, both on her paper and in the wider journalistic world, named by the New England Women's Press Association "New England Newspaperwoman of the Year" in 1958 and 1959. 1958 also saw her first short story publication, "The Wait" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April); she reported recently on FaceBook that her colleagues at the Register left rope and other bits on her desk shortly after publication, relating to events in the story itself (which I have yet to read, but will soon, as it's in her fine retrospective collection, The Story Until Now, which I picked up recently, published by Wesleyan University Press, as she herself has had a long teaching as well as publishing relation with the university)(I also have the F&SF issue, but it's a slightly less sturdy product). Mother Isn't Dead She's Only Sleeping was her first novel, published three years later, with an excerpt, an earlier form of chapter four, in The Yale Literary Magazine in 1960. 
We are introduced to Linda Sharon Snigg as a pre-schooler, abandoned by her mother, who'd conceived her as the result of  a one-night stand with a random pickup, to her grandmother's care; young Linda idolizes her mother, who apparently joined the Air Force but is cagy about where she's stationed in her infrequent mail to her mother and daughter, never providing a return address. 
Anna Snigg is none too pleased to find herself in late middle age suddenly in loco parentis of a strong-willed, in some ways deeply sad infant, and isn't above reminding the child of this...while idolizing her mother, as much as she can, Linda hates her name, and becomes obsessed at a young age with listening to Connecticut local radio host Willie Butz, soon demanding that everyone refer to her as Willie Butz Snigg, or simply Willie. After some interaction with the actual Butz and his family, Willie is a bit disillusioned but retains the name and a loose connection to her former idol and budding lust/father-figure, even after winning a teen beauty pageant Butz signs her up for as a sort of farewell gesture, as he moves on to a new job in Phoenix. Willie's winning a $2K cash prize in the next-level pageant gives Anna an idea, to retire from her civil service job and move down to a resort in Florida to snag herself a wealthy-enough, perhaps widowed new husband.  And that is where I'm currently at, about 60 pages in (the book was delivered rather later than I expected, on what has turned out to be a sporadically busy week), along with a rather deft set of introductions to the cast of characters in the opening pages, almost all aside from the Sniggs already resident in or converging on the sleepy resort town of Ft. Jude (a nice amalgam name, that), including a ne'er-do-well uncle and his rather more rapacious nephew, both keeping one step ahead of the younger man's scandal-messes as their brother and father finance their lives far away from the family estate...and the youngish creep has just met, and set his sights on, Willie. 
Reed has been one of what is arguably a generational cohort of women writers who began publishing fiction in the latter 1950s, who have contributed consistently good to brilliant work to a range of fields, from contemporary/mimetic fiction to crime fiction to fantastic fiction and a bit beyond, all with equal facility and often with nearly equal numbers of publications in at least two of their fields, Reed perhaps the most-"balanced" of the group as I think of them, including also Kate Wilhelm, Carol Emshwiller, Lee Hoffman, Joanna Russ and, increasingly, Joyce Carol Oates, who started just a bit later and has received, of course, easily the most attention. But Reed's work, in its gentle incision and excellent sense of detail, can also put one in mind of such other writers as Bruce Jay Friedman, Wilma Shore or a less detached Kurt Vonnegut, where the consistent deployment of wit doesn't interfere with the serious intent of the work, nor countermand the empathy the writers seek to demonstrate (Reed and Friedman perhaps more consistently than the post-trauma Vonnegut; Reed has noted today, in response to a roundabout question I posed on FaceBook, that her fiction writing, certainly her sense of comic writing, was heavily influenced by Evelyn Waugh). I'll be finishing the novel over the next few days, mostly likely, and will have a fuller assessment then. 

 Another book, which I've barely begun (I checked it "out" of the Archive.org partner Open Library, but it got caught up in a technical snag resolved only the day before yesterday, after I'd barely begun reading the first of the four chapbook-like collections in one volume, of short stories by then-new writers), inspired me to note this about it and the short series of books Scribner's published, as the first multi-author collections from some people who often went onto impressive careers:

 Woman on the edge of sf*: Gina Berriault (along with Gertrude Friedberg and Joseph Slotkin)...and Scribner's new-writer showcases of the 1950s and '60s...
Best remembered for her short story "The Stone Boy" and the film version she scripted, along with her retrospective collection Women in Their Beds, and the namesake of a San Francisco-based literary award, this from her NYT obit:
'Her first novel, The Descent, was published in 1960. Set in America in 1964, the story described the conflict between the Secretary for Humanity, a newly created Cabinet post, and a group of people who believed that moving to underground shelters would manifest "prepared togetherness."'
I'm catching up with her in the course of looking into a brief but interesting project Scribner's ran as the '50s turned into the 1960s, Short Story, a series of three anthologies featuring the first collections of short fiction from four writers each, each getting roughly a quarter of the pages.
1958's Short Story featured Berriault, Richard Yates (who went on to a major career, most famously with Revolutionary Road), Seymour Epstein (the fiction writer and Denver professor, vs. the psychologist and Massachusetts professor) and Bonnie Barnett, who wrote one much-loved-by-coterie novel, Love in Atlantis. 1959's Short Story 2 had the first collections of Gertrude Friedberg (occasional F&SF contributor and remembered in the sf community for The Revolving Boy, as well as considerable fiction of other sorts), Michael Rumaker, Arno Karlen, and Sally Weber (the only member of this quartet who didn't appear to go on to a sustained career). The third and last volume, 1960, featured an all-stag line-up of writers better-known now for their engagement with poetry: Burton Raffel, Robert Creeley, and two who had less-sustained careers, Matthew Carney (probably not the Australian documentarian) and Joseph Slotkin, who was probably the same writer who published ten stories in US and UK sf/fantasy magazines in the 1950s.

Scribner's gave up on this series at that point, but mined it a bit later on with the 1967 anthology Publisher's Choice: Ten Short Story Discoveries:
A really good jazz piano / Richard Yates --
A survivor in Salvador / Frank Tuohy --
Your best interests at heart / Joseph Slotkin -
The clown / Arno Karlen --
The pipe / Michael Rumaker --
Sicilian vespers / Burton Raffel --
The starless air / Donald Windham --
Don't take no for an answer / George Garrett 
The stone boy / Gina Berriault --
The well / Hugh Nissenson.
(courtesy WorldCat). No editor credited for any of the Scribner's volumes.

 *a bit of a reference to Marge Piercy's work...

Todd Mason (with thanks to Eric Davin for his PARTNERS IN WONDER for a few of the background facts on Kit Reed conveniently gathered.)
for more of today's first and other books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.








































2015.






































First appearance of Reed's first short story, "The Wait"...
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Saturday, April 2, 2016

Magazine issue review: SCIENCE FICTION STORIES, May 1959

from the FictionMags list, 6 January 2004:

(THE ORIGINAL) SCIENCE FICTION STORIES, May 1959, V. 10 #2. 10 
issues/year (monthly without April or June issues), digest. 132pp 
including covers; 35c ($3/yr). Robert A. W. Lowndes, editor; 
published by Columbia Publications.

Cover features two interior illustrations by Ed Emshwiller and what 
looks like a spot illo of a rocket, uncredited. Cover is in three 
colors, white, purple, and yellow. Readers are asked within if they 
like this new (and presumably economical) sort of cover.

6 * Robert Silverberg * There's No Place Like Space * ss (illus. 
Wallace Wood)(cover has it with exclamation point; title on text, in 
contents and in running heads do not)
24 * Basil Wells * Utility Girl * ss (illus. Ed Emshwiller)
42 * Kate Wilhelm * Android, Kill for Me! * ss (illus. Ed Emshwiller)
49 * Kit Reed * Here, Kitty Kitty * ss
57 * A. L. Caramine * Weapon Master * ss
63 * (Silverberg as) Calvin M. Knox * Readin' and Writhin' * book reviews:
Algis Budrys MAN OF EARTH (Ballantine)
Donald Wollheim, ed MEN ON THE MOON/Murray Leinster CITY ON 
THE MOON (Ace)
C. L. Moore DOOMSDAY MORNING (Doubleday)
Lester del Rey ROBOTS AND CHANGELINGS (Ballantine)
Wilmar H. Shiras CHILDREN OF THE ATOM (Avon)
Leo Margulies, ed. THREE TIMES INFINITY (Fawcett Gold Medal)
69 * Ward Moore and Robert Bradford * CADUCEUS WILD, Conclusion of 
Four Parts * sr (illus. Uncredited, probably reprinted from earlier 
issue)
117 * R. A. W. Lowndes and others * The Last Word and the Reckoning 
* combined editorial, reader poll, and letter column, including 
letters from:
118 * F. M. Busby
119 * Murray King
121 * Alma Hill
124 * J. Martin Graetsz

The three-color cover, with three small illustrations not 
reproducing all that well under those circumstances, probably didn't 
help sales; clearly one gets the sense that Lowndes was being 
instructed not only to economize but to WW Scott-up his magazines, 
at this point..."Eight Crewmen and One UTILITY GIRL," the cover 
teases, and one doubts that "Android, Kill for Me!" was KW's first 
choice of title. (I'll also remind the assembled of James Blish's 
little poke at the magazine's title, labelling SFS as if it was a 
neighborhood bar...not just McGinty's, but the Original McGinty's.)

"There's No Place Like Space" (which sounds like it should be the 
label on an early acetate by the Sun Ra Arkestra) is a smooth, minor 
effort with a reasonably deft handling of the breast-fetish would-be 
eroticism of its story of the colony-planet technician forced by 
those darn bureaucrats into taking a vacation in NYC. Much as Knox 
will later in the issue (justly) complain about MAN OF EARTH, this 
could pretty easily be rewritten to describe the wearying effect of 
NYC's crowding and groupthink in the 1950s as much as the 2650s 
(when $7500--whose dollars not quite specified--is a fine wage), and 
how much more fine a house in Woodstock is. Wood's illustrations 
are very recognizably Woodish, and cartoonishly handsome for it (one 
may make obvious puns); the erotism of this late issue of the 
magazine definitely suggests to me the influence of both MANHUNT and 
VENTURE, going beyond even the somewhat more submerged yearning of 
BEYOND and the other '50s magazines.

"Utility Girl" (Irish ballad, or neo-retro recording by the Roches, 
this one) betrays rather more debilitatingly hidebound thought, or 
lack of it ("It was too bad [Utility Girl] Ellson was a woman. A man 
could be groomed to take [first mate] Alpergen's place. [...] But a 
woman--no!"). However, I like the phrase, "the needle gun was 
sewing" a lot. Wells, to judge by his ISFDb entries, contributed 
most often in the '40s to PLANET and in the '60s to Pohl's magazines 
(and to IF when not the Lowndes magazines in the '50s), and as late 
as the early '90s to SPACE AND TIME. Emsh's illo is appropriately frantic, if not quite representative.

"Bored Faculty Wife with Android" (as might've been Wilhelm's 
working title for this near-vignette) is an early example of KW 
turning women's-magazine-fiction tropes to her own purposes, if only 
just so; a biter-bit plot out of every other contemporaneous episode 
of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS and every issue of either MANHUNT or AHMM, to say nothing of the lesser CF magazines then, and some 
nicely turned phrases...and the creepy fun of the lustful robot, 
made slightly more suburban (and telegraphed by Emsh's utterly 
appropriate illustration, well-rendered and the Kind Men Like). A 
bit of genuine melancholy seeps through in that the protag is a 
writer caught in a loveless marriage, I gather not a completely 
alien situation to the author at the time.

The Reed story is cute, almost too cute, and not as redeemed as are 
most of her later humorous stories by what could be called 
Bradburyan detail (and usually less romantic than RB), and it posits 
that no one was getting their cats fixed in 1959. True, that? Fun 
enough.

A. L. Caramine...I knew I'd come across that by-line before, and 
ISFDb reinformed me that it was on a guest editorial in one of Barry's issues of FANTASTIC, which leads me to suspect [incorrectly, as it turned out] that this one is also Robert Silverberg  sorry if no, Mr. S.  A twist ending hard not to see coming, although a point for giving the swindler a slightly more amusingly corrupt reason than usual, even if also a point or two off for his relentless "g"-dropping from gerunds and the utter foolishness of his marks.

I have not yet read the synopsis and conclusion of the serial, 

though it seems to be in the GALAXY tradition, this time with MDs in 
charge of society and just waiting to fall on their own scalpels.  
Apparently, this one may not've gotten a US book publication, at 
least, till a 1978 Pinnacle paperback, so clearly this was not a 
robust moneymaker for Moore nor Bradford; I don't know if the latter 
has done anything else notable in sf or otherwise. Since I like 
Moore, I'll probably read it soonish, and may seek out the Pinnacle edition [or the Armchair reprint pictured above] and hope it isn't too bad a job of republishing.

The most interesting assertion, to me, in Knox's reviews is Silverberg's 
crediting FURY primarily to C. L. Moore. Was there some confusion at that time that has since been resolved toward crediting it mostly or entirely to Kuttner? [Silverberg soon told me he doesn't know why he was so certain of this, though he still suspects Fury was mostly Moore's work.] I idly wonder if Margulies actually edited THREE TIMES INFINITY (since it's comprised of Brackett and Bradbury's "Lorelai of the Red Mist," Sturgeon's "The Golden Helix," and Heinlein's "Destination Moon," it presumably wouldn't take anyone too long to assemble), and am pleased to be pointed toward our much-missed-here Frank Robinson's "The Reluctant Heroes" as the best story in the Wollheim antho. I also wonder how the various reviewers (including Damon Knight) felt about that "Readin' and Writhin'" column-title, and if Silverberg might now be the most frequent column-holder in sf-magazines, with however many of these he did, "The Spectroscope" book reviews in AMAZING in the '60s, the 
"Opinion" columns in AMAZING and ASIMOV'S later, "The Observatory" in 
the last AMAZING inpulpation so far, and possibly others I'm overlooking ...not that Damon Knight wasn't pretty widely-dispersed in this regard, as well...

The ads are a reasonably insane bunch; aside from unsurprising house 
ads for DOUBLE ACTION MYSTERY AND DETECTIVE STORIES (the one led off by Wilhelm's "Murderer's Apprentice" and detailed in the FM Index), and FUTURE SCIENCE FICTION, there are the usual pulp-holdover RUPTURED? ads, offers of "spot-reducing" anti-flab handheld vibrators, BOYS! GIRLS! SPECIAL OFFER TO ZOOM YOUR POPULARITY! through the wonders of personalized stationery, with a menu of suggested self-inflicted nicknames you, too, could have included on your letterhead..."Spook" or "Goldbrick Harry" for boys, "Hep Cat" or "Slick Chick" for the XX chromosome crowd, hoo doggie. Also, an offer for unisex hooded sweatshirts emblazoned "U. S. Drinking Team" just to remind us College Humor was already very much with us by 1959. John Boston's much-beloved "You Traveled Through Time for FORBIDDEN LOVE..." SFBC ad would actually be an improvement, on balance...but perhaps not if it nudged the ILLUSTRATED SEX FACTS ad out. For a magazine printed by the reasonably-rated folk in Holyoke, there's unusually dark ink on the relatively large-charactered, uncrowded pages. I wonder how Lowndes might've done with a budget...but, we can wonder this about 
so many editors, eh?

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