FFB: THE WOMEN WHO WALK THROUGH FIRE edited by Susanna J. Sturgis (Crossing Press 1990)

from liberation: a magazine for freedom issue 0/(in*sit) issue 4.5, Summer 1993 (review written in 1990)

An impressive anthology, a sequel to Memories and Visions, reviewed last issue, and like V. 1 mostly new fiction with a few reprints mixed in. At least four stories here are about as good as they can be: the brilliant Rachel Pollack's "The Girl Who Went to the Rich Neighborhood" (a fairy tale in a modern urban setting), J. L. Comeau's hard-edged, violent contemporary horror "Firebird", and two stories which draw on Polynesian and Native American mythology, Eleanor Arnason's "A Ceremony of Discontent" and Carol Severance's "Shark-Killer". Cathy Hinga Haustein's "Earth and Sky Woman" is also very good, but it's realistic, not fantastic, and apparently was included on the strength of being about a scientist. G. K. Sprinkle's "Road Runner", Deborah H. Fruin's "New Age Baby" and Ruth Shigezawa's "Hills of Blue, an Orange Moon" are all well-handled "small" stories, by which I mean they don't invest as much in their subplots or resonances as the best stories here. Good, flawed stories include "The Forbidden Words of Margaret A." by L. Timmel Duchamp (it posits a quarantine on an Angela Davis-analog; fortunately or not, the U.S. takes more subtle measures against most of its dissidents than do most of its puppet satellites, which Duchamp credits with inspiring this story; even as an allegory for the lack of access most U.S. citizens have to dissident views, the story comes off as heavy-handed); Elaine Bergstrom's "Net Songs" (yet another tyranny overthrown by one bold individual, but AIDS-angst well-channeled); Lucy Sussex's "My Lady Tongue" (which [seemed to me at the time] to be afraid to endorse lesbian separatism more out fear of offense than actual conviction); and Phyllis Ann Karr's "Night of the Short Knives", which strikes me as a minor Frostflower and Thorn story [Karr's sword & sorcery series]--likewise Ginger Simpson Curry's "Sahrel Short Swords" has several imaginative touches but is a too-familiar tale. Nonetheless, all of these repay the reader well; less satisfactory, if still readable, are Rosalind Warren's fannish joke "The Inkblot Test", Merrill Mushroom's "Mamugrandae--the Second Tale" (just as overly cute as the author's handle might suggest), and Cleo Kozol's "Picnic Days", which would've fit well into the back pages of the late 1950s Galaxy magazine as an example of heartfelt, playful, but ultimately bootless "comic inferno" satire. This book is definitely worth owning; the best work sings, and the least hums along well enough.

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

from the Locus index of sf:

The Women Who Walk Through Fire: Women’s Fantasy & Science Fiction Vol. 2 ed. Susanna J. Sturgis (The Crossing Press 0-89594-419-7, Sep ’90 [Oct ’90], $9.95, 275pp, tp, cover by Beth Avery) Anthology of 16 sf and fantasy stories by women, ten original, with an introduction by the editor. A hardcover edition (-420-0) was announced, but not seen.

• 1 · Introduction · Susanna J. Sturgis · in
• 12 · Earth and Sky Words · Cathy Hinga Haustein · ss *
• 23 · The Inkblot Test · Rosalind A. Warren · ss *
• 27 · New Age Baby · Deborah H. Fruin · ss *
• 34 · Night of the Short Knives · Phyllis Ann Karr · ss *
• 53 · The Forbidden Words of Margaret A. · L. Timmel Duchamp · nv Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine Issue 8, ed. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Pulphouse, 1990
• 76 · Road Runner · G. K. Sprinkle · ss *
• 85 · Picnic Days · Cleo Kocol · ss *
• 93 · Net Songs · Elaine Bergstrom · ss *
• 111 · Shark-Killer · Carol Severance · nv The Dragon Feb ’88
• 132 · Firebird · J. L. Comeau · nv *
• 162 · A Ceremony of Discontent · Eleanor Arnason · ss Room of One’s Own v6 #1&2 ’81
• 173 · Mamugrandae—The Second Tale · Merrill Mushroom · ss Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, 1982
• 182 · The Girl Who Went to the Rich Neighborhood · Rachel Pollack · ss Beyond Lands of Never, ed. Maxim Jakubowski, Allen & Unwin, 1984
• 194 · Sahrel Short Swords · Ginger Simpson Curry · ss *
• 208 · My Lady Tongue · Lucy Sussex · na Matilda at the Speed of Light, ed. Damien Broderick, Angus & Robertson: Australia, 1988
• 256 · Hills of Blue, an Orange Moon · Ruth Shigezawa · ss *
• 268 · Contributors’ Notes · Misc. · bg *

FFB: MEFISTO IN ONYX by Harlan Ellison (Ziesing 1993); HARLAN ELLISON'S WATCHING (Underwood-Miller 1989)

Harlan Ellison, 1934-2018. 

Harlan Ellison having died after a long illness, or set of illnesses, that had left him mostly bedridden for the last years of his life, has resulted in an unsurprising upwelling of obituaries and less formal reminiscences, only some of them probably actionable, if anyone was so inclined, the most obvious of those being the screeds in Publisher's Weekly, of all places, and Jeet Heer's credulous bit of tantrum-throwing in what remains of The New Republic (there's been little to brag about in TNR for some decades). You can't libel the dead legally, but you sure can believe every bit of hyperbole the departed had inspired others to say or write, and that he had said or written himself (in the Heer say, it was that Ellison had once punched an ABC executive, who had messed with one of his scripts, in the mouth so hard the latter had fallen over and fractured his pelvis. And yet Ellison magically remained unindicted for what would be felony assault. Ellison once wrote in an essay about a rumor that he had thrown a aggressive convention fan/attendee down an elevator shaft, also noting there that surprisingly, no one had summoned police nor emergency medical services. No one the other week at TNR thought perhaps fact-checking might be in order).

Not that Ellison didn't, as noted, blather on at times about how he had been the swift sword of physical justice in one or another situation with venal producers and publishers among others; he could and did see people in court and would stand up to bullies, and also would give some people a very hard time, via phone calls and letters, if they did something to displease him. He famously got  physical with fellow troublemaker Charles Platt at a SFWA function (how physical is not yet clear to me, in the haze of differing accounts), and in the course of performing a weak comedy sketch with Connie Willis at a Hugo Awards ceremony, she playing a teacher scolding a mischievous child, he as said child promising to be Good and demonstrating his lack of good faith by reaching up and putting his hand on her breast...without having actually cleared this with Willis beforehand...has become the meat of the PW account of his purported "tendency toward violence and sexual harassment." Usually, it was a matter of talk, at his worst, rather than such acting out. Ellison strove to apologize to Willis immediately afterward; while his act was stupid and rude and ill-conceived, there are still those in the fannish community, including at least one woman I've corresponded with, who'd received worse treatment back in the day from others--not, as much as I've yet heard or read, from Ellison--who will still (somewhat) defend, say, Isaac Asimov's repeated tendency to grope/shake the breasts of women he just met, in lieu of shaking their hand, as him Just Trying to Make a Joke. That is one of the things he was trying to do, yes. (Judith Merril was given a footnote in Asimov's 1980 autobiography to give her assessment of this tendency; she noted that in eventual response to Asimov's freedom with his hands toward the women he knew or met that she one day reached down and took a firm grip of his testes, through his pants, and that helped settle the matter between them, at least.) Though Ellison was not above shit-talking and seeming ready to be physically aggressive (he had been a small boy and was a short man, who had been the target of a lot of physical aggression particularly in his youth, and wasn't above fronting), he was a lot more likely to try to argue with you than punch you. You could wish to be able to say the same for, say, Norman Mailer. 

And all this, usually trotted out as either damnation or, sadly, in admiration, ignores that despite the occasional bluster, Ellison was also often generous with his time and support for others, and was not, in fact, a monster on balance. He was a reasonably pleasant person on the two times I had a discussion with him, once face to face, once via telephone, albeit the latter time was in a professional context, as I was interviewing him for a TV Guide write-up of his then-new television series Masters of Science Fiction, broadcast by ABC in the US, as it happens, as a summer replacement series. The first time, I was at a signing, picking up copies of his first comic book compilation volume, Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor, for myself and my aunt Beverly Laquerre. There were a few scraps of correspondence, via paper mail and through his webpage, between those events. So, I don't know how bad or good his behavior tended to be in his day-t0-day private life, but I do know he didn't act as, say, a certain repeatedly failing businessman and completely out of his depth politician, but successful tv performer, apparently does at all times, as a clownish walking example of insecure narcissism. 

"Officially" this is a piece on the Ellison novella Mefisto in Onyx, his last longer work to be published so far, first in Omni in 1993, and shortly thereafter in the Mark V. Ziesing edition pictured here, with comics artist/writer Frank Miller's cover design and introduction, where I first read it (as opposed to as included in Stephen Jones's 1994 volume of his annual Best New Horror, or in Ellison's '97 collection of recent fiction Slippage). And on Harlan Ellison's Watching, the 1989 edition of his collected film and other a/v criticism and related matter  (there was a later edition with more material added, I believe; I have a copy of the 1992 trade paperback, with a creased cover from a tumble off a bookshelf some years back).

Mefisto in Onyx is good rather than great work by Ellison. It demonstrates some of the recurring themes and approaches in his work: the outsider who doesn't let others see him fully, though who does make a strong bond with a few, while hiding from the mass; he being an intelligent man who has not ever quite found his niche, suffered from a lot of early emotional and other damage, and finds he can relate best to others who've faced much the same situation; and finds himself, with a special talent, facing a truly monstrous set of circumstances, institutional and personal, which threaten him and those he loves. Telepathic Rudy Pairis (the variant spelling paying off, arguably, as a foreshadowing of certain dualisms late in the narrative) is asked by his long-time friend and (literally) one-time lover Allison Roche to read the mind of, or jaunt (a term Ellison notes in his acknowledgements he borrowed, and has Pairis define differently, from Alfred Bester and the latter's novel The Stars My Destination, aka Tiger! Tiger!) into the consciousness of a man for whom she, as an Alabama prosecutor, was the primary litigator in putting away for serial murder. This is a lot to ask, as jaunting takes a lot out of Pairis; further, she admits that not only is she concerned she helped convict an innocent man, but that she's now in love with the convict, several days away from execution, which only compounds Pairis's mixed emotions, as he fully realizes the degree he still carries a torch for Roche, as well as puzzling him as to how she might fall for someone so clearly Wrong.

Ellison, as with certain other writers only often more gracefully (usually, I hope to do better than I usually do), tries to pack as much information into a sentence or, certainly, a paragraph as he possibly can; as with most writers in fantastic fiction, he is fascinated by often-obscure areas of knowledge, and musing asides will go in that direction and also toward the sensory responses he wishes the reader to feel as powerfully as the characters do, often with a high degree of success. And the descriptions of the alienating nature of the penitentiary experience, as well as the ghastliness of the crimes committed by the murderer, are compounded also not only by the dance between two people who are more than friends but have difficulty coping with that and what comes with it, and also Pairis's experiences as an African-American, including a few minor annoyances as he deals with observers nearby while simply talking, occasionally arguing, with Roche, who is a pale Caucasian. Ellison has studied the history of serial killers, and loves the scents of flowers after a rainstorm, and has meditated perhaps too much about revenge and how it can be achieved, and he wants you to know what he's found. And I think there's a certain degree of Ellison talking to himself, even as his protagonist does, in realizing it might be better if he'd stop getting in his own way. 

The story won the Horror Writers of America Stoker Award, and the Locus magazine poll, for its year, and you probably won't want to be reading something else while you read it. Ellison notes that he ran it by a number of his friends, I gather more so than most of his work, at various points, including Robert Crais, Octavia Butler, John-Henri Holmberg, Steven Barnes, O'Neil De Noux, J. Michael Straczynski, Edward Bryant, Martin H. Greenberg, Bill Warren, Robert Kilheffer, editors Ellen Datlow (at Omni) and Mark Ziesing, Kathryn Drennan and Susan Ellison. Along with crediting Alfred Bester as inspiration, he also notes both Kyle Baker's Why I Hate Saturn and Frank Miller's Sin City as giving him some nudges; in turn, I wouldn't be surprised if Ellison's aside in the novella about the Spartans versus the Persian army at the Hot Gates might not've nudged Miller along to his eventual exercise in goofiness, 300. The story was dedicated to Robert Bloch, who had commissioned a piece from Ellison for his 1991 anthology Psycho-Paths (Ellison excoriates that project's Tor Books publisher and editors presumably for pressuring him to get his work in by their deadlines, noting that between his book deal and film options he seems to have done better than he would've by rushing to meet their schedule); the book package to Dean Koontz. 

I will, as I take after Ellison in having difficulty with deadlines, have more to say about Watching later. To begin, though, this might be the most representative collection of his nonfiction writing one can find, as, more so than any other of his nonfiction volumes, it draws upon nearly every period of writing (including an example of his high school film-review beginnings) and touches upon a major segment of his work, dealing with how an excellent prose writer and dramatist can be seen coping with the demands of both media, and analyzing how others do so...often through the collected columns he wrote for such magazines as Cinema, The Staff, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and others. The high-school review is offered as an appendix, as is an essay dealing with The Daisy nightclub, the same sort of mid-'60s "scene" as Jilly's, where Frank Sinatra's attempt at bullying Ellison, as recounted in Gay Talese's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold", took place...The Daisy run by Curtis Hanson's parents, who also published Hanson's Cinema for several years. Among the things missing here that shouldn't be are Ellison's fine essay on how to write a film or television script, "With the Eyes of a Demon: Seeing the Fantastic as a Video Image".

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

Other Ellisonia on the blog:

Partners in Wonder by HE and divers hands

All the Lies That Are My Life

The Book of Ellison, Sleepless Nights on the Procrustean Bed, Stalking the Nightmare, Strange Wine, Medea: Harlan's World

Mind Fields by Ellison and Jacek Yerka

Harlan Ellison's Watching, briefly dealt with among the other The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction A/V critics' volumes (Kathi Maio, Lucius Shepard, Baird Searles).

"The Deathbird"  as it appeared in F&SF March 1973

Other media:

Richard Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky interview Harlan Ellison in 1997 for Bookwaves on Pacifica Radio in Berkeley (longer cut of the interview)

FFB: BEWARE OF THE CAT edited by Michel Parry (Gollancz 1972; Taplinger 1973)

In the 1970s, if any British anthologist of horror fiction was rivaling Peter Haining and Hugh Lamb in productivity (at least among those whose books were also available in the US), Michel Parry was the one. And this, which really should've been titled Beware the Cat, was his first. Some of his other anthologies were explicitly aimed  at older readers (most famously the two released by UK paperback line Corgi jokingly as if edited by "Linda Lovecraft": The Devil's Kisses and More Devil's Kisses...both featuring one of Chris Miller's intentionally obnoxious National Lampoon stories, the latter volume essentially pulped by Corgi because of complaints about Miller's "The Magic Show"), but Beware of the Cat was usually stacked in the young readers' shelves in my experience.  (Not only his sex-themed anthologies probably not shunted over to YA library shelves, but [given this was the '70s] also his three anthologies devoted to fantasticated drug-experience stories.)

And, aside from horror usually not being taken very seriously in the US (and perhaps held too suspect in the UK), the assumption (not driven by Taplinger's packaging) that the book was meant for young readers might've been driven in part by the proportion of chestnuts included (and that it was illustrated)...though by no means was the book completely devoted to stories Everyone's Read:

•  Beware of the Cat • interior artwork by Nancy Lou Gahan
• 9 • Introduction (Beware of the Cat) • (1972) • essay by Michel Parry
• 13 • Beware the Cat (extract) • (1570) • shortstory by William Baldwin (variant of Beware the Cat) [as by Gulielmus Baldwin ]
• 13 • The Grey Cat • (1901) • shortstory by Barry Pain
• 28 • The King of the Cats • (1929) • shortstory by Stephen Vincent Benét
• 44 • The Vampire Cat • (1972) • shortstory by Traditional
• 53 • The Cat Man • (1960) • shortstory by Byron Liggett
• 69 • The White Cat • (1872) • shortstory by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (variant of The White Cat of Drumgunniol 1870) [as by J. Sheridan Le Fanu ]
• 82 • Ancient Sorceries • [John Silence] • (1908) • novelette by Algernon Blackwood
• 130 • Tobermory • (1909) • shortstory by Saki
• 139 • Fluffy • (1947) • shortstory by Theodore Sturgeon
• 148 • Cat and Mouse • (1972) • shortstory by Ramsey Campbell
• 162 • The Cats of Ulthar • [Dream Cycle] • (1920) • shortstory by H. P. Lovecraft
• 166 • Eyes of the Panther • (1897) • shortstory by Ambrose Bierce (variant of The Eyes of the Panther)
• 186 • The Black Cat • (1921) • shortstory by W. J. Wintle [as by William Wintle ]
• 186 • The Child Watcher • (1958) • shortstory by Ernest Harrison
• 189 • Notes (Beware of the Cat) • essay by uncredited

Note also he eschewed the obvious Poe story, even with three other stories perhaps nodding to it with their titles, at least...a solid anthology, with endnotes (I always appreciated these back when; still do)...and while I'd read the Benet, the Saki, the Bierce and perhaps (though probably not) the Sturgeon elsewhere first, the others were new to me.  The small slew of Parry anthologies I'd see afterward were always welcome...

Michel Parry in the Contento anthology index.
A previous citation here.

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

Addendum: Stephen Jones notes via FaceBook that this anthology led directly to Parry's script for the anthology film The Uncanny (1977):

The Uncanny (1977) by MargaliMorwentari

FFB: ISAAC ASIMOV PRESENTS THE GREAT SF STORIES 18 (1956) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW Books 1988); SPEAKING OF HORROR: INTERVIEWS WITH WRITERS OF THE SUPERNATURAL by Darrell Schweitzer et al. (Milford Series #48) (Borgo Press 1994)

Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg began their retro Best of the Year series with a volume devoted to the (predominantly, but not quite exclusively) science fiction stories published in 1939...a few fantasies found their way in over the course of the series of anthologies, which ended by both design and (almost) necessity with the volume gathering 1963 stories, published in 1992 shortly after the deaths of both Isaac Asimov and publisher Donald Wollheim, two of the most active sf professionals among the (former) members of the Futurian Society of New York in their youth...a very active bunch of budding and eventual professionals in the field.  The hook was that 1939 was the year Asimov first saw a short story of his in print in a professional sf magazine, Amazing Stories; it was also the year that, in the more literarily ambitious Astounding Science-Fiction magazine, that Asimov's mentor John W. Campbell, Jr. really began to find his footing as an editor, and began publishing Asimov and a number of his other most important contributors, including Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt and others. Also, no one published a BOTY volume in sf until 1949, when E. F. Bleiler and Ted Ditky becan a decade-long series with the now-obscure but then reasonably visible publisher Frederick Fell; and they were not joined in their efforts until Judith Merril began her rather more widely-read annual in 1956. As it happens, Bleiler and Ditky's annual skipped a year (and the last, 1958 volume of their series appeared from the small press Advent: Publishers), so that between them two volumes of their series barely touched the stories published in 1956; Merril's 1957 volume shares several stories with the Asimov/Greenberg, but in this case (and not every case where they overlap) I'd suggest the selection in the latter-day series is stronger than Merril's contemporary sampling was...this might be the single best volume in the DAW Books series, which Greenberg apparently felt was his most useful and important project. 

As Jerry House has noted in a comment on this blog recently about the similar matter of this year's Retro Hugos, Asimov and Greenberg had the advantage of the perspective of the decades in making their choices, not least in having the example of which 1956 stories had been the most anthologized (including several first by Merril) and apparently most influential...Merril didn't even have the Hugo Awards results for 1956 publications to guide her as she assembled her second annual volume. 

But they did a very impressive job, while focusing only on those stories published in the magazines devoted to fantastic fiction (and only several of those, as it happens in this volume):

Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories: 18 (1956) ed. Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg (DAW 0-88677-289-3, Aug ’88 [Jul ’88], $4.50, 366pp, pb) Anthology of 15 sf stories from 1956.

• 9 · Introduction · Martin H. Greenberg · in
• 13 · Brightside Crossing · Alan E. Nourse · nv Galaxy Jan ’56
• 35 · Clerical Error · Mark Clifton · nv Astounding Feb ’56
• 75 · Silent Brother · Algis Budrys · ss Astounding Feb ’56
• 96 · The Country of the Kind · Damon Knight · ss F&SF Feb ’56
• 111 · Exploration Team [Colonial Survey] · Murray Leinster · nv Astounding Mar ’56
• 161 · Rite of Passage · Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore · nv F&SF May ’56
• 203 · The Man Who Came Early · Poul Anderson · nv F&SF Jun ’56
• 230 · A Work of Art [“Art-Work”] · James Blish · nv Science Fiction Stories Jul ’56
• 248 · Horrer Howce · Margaret St. Clair · ss Galaxy Jul ’56
• 261 · Compounded Interest · Mack Reynolds · ss F&SF Aug ’56
• 276 · The Doorstop · Reginald Bretnor · ss Astounding Nov ’56
• 286 · The Last Question · Isaac Asimov · ss Science Fiction Quarterly Nov ’56
• 300 · Stranger Station · Damon Knight · nv F&SF Dec ’56
• 327 · 2066: Election Day · Michael Shaara · ss Astounding Dec ’56
• 344 · And Now the News... · Theodore Sturgeon · ss F&SF Dec ’56

--And, of course, there's the good chance that I like this selection better than any other the Asimov/Greenbergs, or than Merril's 1956-stories volume, because I read a number of these when I was very young and even more prone to be devastated by a brilliant story than in my not quite jaded later years.  But I first read "The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One anthology Robert Silverberg put together out of a poll of SFWA members, and it's one of the most brilliant stories in that impressive collection, as well as perhaps the single best here. Knight's "Stranger Station" (the one Knight story in the Merril) is almost as good, though not quite..."Kind" is a twisting knife of a story that challenges the reader to think about criminality, institutional punishment, the limits of utopian thought and practice, the nature of art and the degree to which artists have to be troublemakers at least...and at what point that level of deviance is no longer worth putting up with to gain the art or other work in question. It's also a fiction designed to have particularly sf readers of a more reflective sort thinking about how they fit into society. That's a hell of a lot to drop on a ten year old, relatively ingenious misfit. Knight doesn't relent...it's a hell of a lot to drop on any reader in the course of a remarkably well-controlled, beyond-mordant short story.

But that is only the best of an impressive lot here...we have (another very early read for me) Alan Nourse's survival-on-planet-Mercury adventure "Brightside Crossing," which, as with Michael Shaara's "2066: Election Day" is the one story almost anyone will think of first when its author is mentioned...though of course that's true of the Shaara only in the context of his impressive, if only intermittent, career in science fiction, which bookended his rather more obvious career as a writer of historical fiction (The Killer Angels) and to a lesser extent sports fiction (For the Love of the Game; The Broken Place). "And Now the News" by Theodore Sturgeon is one of his stories of this period, in the 1950s, that is Just Barely sf if you squint, being primarily about the mutual support news-media coverage and psychopathic rampagers offer each other...and what the attention we give to both suggests about us all (particularly in the wake of all our recent gunfire massacres, at home and abroad)...in a sense, an only slightly less devastating and wide-ranging consideration of what the Knight masterwork addresses; among Sturgeon's other work, "A Saucer of Loneliness" and the slightly later novel Some of Your Blood are of a similar nature. As with the Shaara, former political science professor Greenberg and lifelong enthusiastic welfare-state liberal Asimov could hardly pass up Mack Reynolds's ingenious "Compound Interest," in which a deft time-traveler manages to set himself up with the most overwhelming fortune imaginable, and what effect that has on the course of human events...another story that might just be the first one most of its author's readers might think of. 

Most of the rest aren't so much the defining short fiction of their authors' careers as they are simply among their better efforts. Budrys's "Silent Brother", the late Moore/Kuttner story (not long before his death and her retirement), Clifton's "Clerical Error" and Anderson's "The Man Who Came Early"  are very effective examples of the kind of concerns each writer would return to in their work, the Anderson perhaps the closest to the final word in its kind of story (a sort of reproach to Mark Twain and other arguable time-travel optimists, the protagonist here finds he doesn't have "the machines necessary to make the machines" to help him revolutionize the past era he finds himself in. Margaret St. Clair's "Horrer Howce" is, for her work, typically incisively satirical and (as its title suggests) very effectively borderline horror fiction in its account of blood-sport entertainments of the future; again, not her best work, but not far from it, even as it deftly overcomes the improbability of the basic situation presented (I first read that one in the Galaxy: 30 Years retrospective anthology)...yet more consideration of what do we Really want. James Blish turns to one of his most effective studies of one of his most central themes...art and artists (albeit in somewhat less dire opposition to much of what's best in us, so much as how it's included). The Leinster was the Hugo winner for this year, and again one of his very better stories, not far from his best; only the Asimov (his own personal favorite of his short stories) and the Bretnor (though a compact account of how frightening it can be to contemplate all that space beyond the sky and what might exist out there) strike me as relatively minor, if amiable...I think Asimov loved how his was almost in the form of a joke story, but with rather more import than his usual efforts in that regard; it might also put you in mind of "Nightfall" in some ways, and that might be part of why Asimov rated "Question" so highly--he was both happy about "Nightfall" as a story and how it got him his first wide-audience attention, and rather put off that so many readers might suggest to him that a story he wrote as a late teen, very much at the explicit suggestion of John Campbell, was the Best Thing He Ever Wrote. (I agree that "Nightfall" is nothing of the kind, but neither is "The Last Question.")

The headnotes and Greenberg introduction (with its running joke throughout the series' prefaces that charts whether Greenberg favorite Mel Brooks was still referring to himself as Melvin Kaminsky) are more than adequate, though not terribly profound, though Asimov's notes can be more so than Greenberg's (which in their turn do most of the heavy lifting in terms of brief biographies and other factual matter). And while Merril in her volume was already casting her net a bit beyond the typical sf and fantasy fiction magazines (which trend would grow with time, to mixed response then and even now), Greenberg and Asimov have managed a very impressive book while focusing on work from essentially only four magazines (officially five; other volumes draw from more sources, but rarely from a non-sf/fantasy magazine or anthology of new fiction)...six stories from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, five from Astounding (which would change its name to Analog in 1960 and still publishes thus), two from Galaxy (which by the mid-'50s was starting to lose some of its edge, if less drastically than Astounding would by decade's end) and two from two of the magazines edited by another ex-Futurian, Robert A. W. Lowndes, which had very low budgets but a receptiveness to experimental work greater than most magazines in the field (and Lowndes not afraid to tap fellow ex-Futurians such as Blish on the shoulder, as well). 

But even such focus doesn't detract from the impressive nature of this volume in a very impressive series. 

For swank, here's the contents of the 1957 Merril volume, as above a Contento index--Merril took the Malpass from a 1956 reprint in Maclean's, the Canadian news/general interest magazine--and it really is nearly as good a selection, and somewhat more wide-ranging in several senses:

SF:’57: The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy ed. Judith Merril (Gnome Press LCC# 56-8938, 1957, $3.95, 320pp, hc)
• 9 · The Man Who Liked Lions · John Bernard Daley · ss Infinity Science Fiction Oct 1956
• 25 · The Cosmic Expense Account · C. M. Kornbluth · nv F&SF Jan 1956, as “The Cosmic Charge Account”
• 51 · The Far Look · Theodore L. Thomas · nv Astounding Aug 1956
• 81 · When Grandfather Flew to the Moon · E. L. Malpass · ss The Observer Jan 2 1955, as “Return of the Moon Man” by Samson Darley
• 88 · The Doorstop · Reginald Bretnor · ss Astounding Nov 1956
• 98 · Silent Brother · Algis Budrys · ss Astounding Feb 1956
• 119 · Stranger Station · Damon Knight · nv F&SF Dec 1956
• 146 · Each an Explorer · Isaac Asimov · ss Future #30 1956
• 161 · All About “The Thing” · Randall Garrett · pm Science Fiction Stories May 1956, as “Parodies Tossed”
• 164 · Put Them All Together, They Spell Monster · Ray Russell · ss Playboy Oct 1956
• 173 · Digging the Weans · Robert Nathan · ss Harper’s Nov 1956
• 181 · Take a Deep Breath · Roger Thorne · ss Tiger 1956
• 187 · Grandma’s Lie Soap · Robert Abernathy · ss Fantastic Universe Feb 1956
• 206 · Compounded Interest · Mack Reynolds · ss F&SF Aug 1956
• 220 · Prima Belladonna [Vermilion Sands] · J. G. Ballard · ss Science-Fantasy #20 1956
• 235 · The Other Man · Theodore Sturgeon · na Galaxy Sep 1956
• 290 · The Damnedest Thing · Garson Kanin · ss Esquire Feb 1956
• 298 · Anything Box · Zenna Henderson · ss F&SF Oct 1956
• 313 · The Year’s S-F, Summation and Honorable Mentions · Judith Merril · ms

I meant to review Darrell Schweitzer's good, short book of interviews last week (or, as Borgo Press packaged it, also a magazine issue, with both International Standard Book and Serial Numbers). The interviews can dip in to some meat even in their short focus (though Brian Lumley's doesn't have much chance of that, being of vignette length), and it's unfortunate that only the late Tanith Lee is present among women writers, no one in the book is unworthy of inclusion or attention. Darrell can use a bit too much shorthand at times (his first question in the first interview as collected here is asking Robert Bloch why he might be the only "Weird Tales crowd" writer to have any serious Hollywood scripting experience...given that magazine back in the pulp and early '50s digest days published Val Lewton and Richard Matheson, the most egregious further examples among others, one gathers he meant among the Lovecraft Circle writers, or at least the most prolific contributors...but that last would also include Ray Bradbury and...). But the biggest flaws in the book are Borgo's doing...the odd page layout and microprint, which I suspect are replicated in the Wildside reprint (though I haven't seen that yet). Atop the intelligent interviews, Schweitzer's timelines/select bibliographies, dating as they do from before web-accessible databases were in place, is a very useful supplementary feature...and this book is worth the look alongside Darrell's other collections and such similar interview selections as Douglas Winter's, Ed Gorman's, Paul Walker's and Charles Platt's (were Bhob Stewart's ever collected? Shall Go Look...).

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog...where it's Rex Stout day! 

--I continue to recommend this memoir, by Martha Foley, a great friend and writing colleague of Stout's, as informative about the early development of Wolfe and co.:
THE STORY OF STORY MAGAZINE by Martha Foley (assembled and notes added in part by Jay Neugeboren), W.W. Norton 1980

The Hugo Ballot for work published in 1956 (with a few awards for 1955 work):

Best Novel
Win	Double Star	Robert A. Heinlein
Nomination	Not This August	C. M. Kornbluth
Nomination	The End of Eternity	Isaac Asimov
Nomination	The Long Tomorrow	Leigh Brackett
Nomination	Three to Conquer	Eric Frank Russell
Best Novelette
Win	Exploration Team	Murray Leinster
Nomination	A Gun for Dinosaur	L. Sprague de Camp
Nomination	Brightside Crossing	Alan E. Nourse
Nomination	Bulkhead	Theodore Sturgeon
Nomination	Home There's No Returning	C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner
Nomination	Legwork	Eric Frank Russell
Nomination	The Assistant Self	F. L. Wallace
Nomination	The End of Summer	Algis Budrys
Best Short Story
Win	The Star	Arthur C. Clarke
Nomination	Citizen in Space	Robert Sheckley
Nomination	End as a World	F. L. Wallace
Nomination	King of the Hill	James Blish
Nomination	Nobody Bothers Gus	Algis Budrys
Nomination	The Dragon	Ray Bradbury
Nomination	The Game of Rat and Dragon	Cordwainer Smith
Nomination	Twink	Theodore Sturgeon
Best Artist
Win	----	Frank Kelly Freas
Nomination	----	Mel Hunter
Nomination	----	Virgil Finlay
Nomination	----	Edward Valigursky
Nomination	----	Chesley Bonestall
Nomination	----	Ed Emshwiller
Best Book Reviewer
Win	----	Damon Knight
Nomination	----	Villiers Gerson
Nomination	----	P. Schuyler Miller
Nomination	----	Groff Conklin
Nomination	----	Anthony Boucher
Nomination	----	Floyd C. Gale
Nomination	----	Henry Bott
Nomination	----	Hans Stefan Santesson
Best Fanzine
Win	Inside - 1955 (Fanzine)	Ron Smith
Nomination	A Bas	Boyd Raeburn
Nomination	Fantasy Times - 1955 (Fanzine)	James V. Taurasi and Ray Van Houten
Nomination	Grue	Dean A. Grennell
Nomination	Hyphen - 1955	Walt Willis and Chuck Harris
Nomination	Oblique	Cliff Gould
Nomination	Peon	Charles Lee Riddle
Nomination	Psychotic / Science Fiction Review	Richard E. Geis
Nomination	Sky Hook	Redd Boggs
Best Feature Writer
Win	----	Willy Ley
Nomination	----	R. S. Richardson
Nomination	----	Rog Phillips
Nomination	----	Robert A. Madle
Nomination	----	L. Sprague de Camp
Best Professional Magazine
Win	Astounding Science Fiction - 1955	John W. Campbell, Jr.
Most Promising New Author
Win	----	Robert Silverberg
Nomination	----	Frank Herbert
Nomination	----	Henry Still
Nomination	----	Harlan Ellison

Vincent Price: dramatic readings, audio documentary (of several sorts), and narration....spoken word recordings (and a little singing).

Among the Caedmon covers by Leo and Diane Dillon

I had included links to a couple of the Caedmon recordings in last week's Overlooked A/V...but Horror List member Jeff Swindoll pointing to The Sound of Vincent Price site on Monday, with a number of its links dead or less complete than those below, made traveling down this rabbit hole almost inevitable...that and how much I enjoyed listening to Price's recordings previously linked...

Samples of radio drama and cast recordings:

The Adventures of the Saint (CBS, Mutual/MBS, NBC Radio, 1945-51) starring Price as Simon Templar
Escape (repeat performance): "Three Skeleton Key" (CBS Radio 1950 originally)(recorded again in 1956 as an episode of Suspense)

Capitol Custom Records, 1962. Seattle World's Fair speculation on the next century, full of typical gosh-wow boosterism, and Alexander Laszlo's score. Selections audible here, at The Sound of Vincent Price (note blue vinyl).

from Darling of the Day (Original Cast Recording): "He's a Genius" (RCA, 1968) (Price speak-sings; Broadway production which flopped quickly despite major talent involved--co-star Patricia Routledge won a Tony for it.)

(Cadet Records, 1970; sketch comedy featuring Price and a good cast generally. Nothing online from it that I've seen.)

The Price of Fear: "Remains To Be Seen" (episode one; adapting the Jack Ritchie story; BBC Radio 4, 1973)


The Price of Fear: "Specialty of the House" (ep. 11; adapting the Stanley Ellin story; BBC Radio 4, 1973)


In 1979, Price was the Wednesday night host for the mystery, suspense and horror episodes of The Sears Radio Theater. I'm not sure if he acted in any episode. (Five nights a week, slotted on CBS Radio with The CBS Radio Mystery Theater, also stripped, with Sears offering westerns (with Lorne Greene) on Monday, humorous drama (with Andy Griffith) on Tuesday, Cicely Tyson hosting romantic drama on Thursdays; Richard Widmark adventure drama on Fridays.  Sears at 8p, Mystery at 9p in Honolulu.

Spoken Word Records:

 

Poems of Shelley (Caedmon Records, 1956)

"With a Guitar, To Jane" (and several more at adjoining links)

Co-Star: The Acting Game: Vincent Price (Co-Star Records, 195?)
--part of a series of Co-Star albums with actors playing scenes that took the Music Minus One concept to drama...you're acting, with script provided, the scenes with the actor in the album at hand. Albert Brooks must've had some of these...: "The Governor's Son"


America the Beautiful: The Heart of America in Poetry (Columbia Records, 1961) 

Tales of Witches, Ghosts and Goblins (Caedmon Records, 1972)


A Coven of Witches' Tales (Caedmon Records, 1973) "Baba Yaga"


A Graveyard of Ghost Tales (Caedmon Records, 1974) "The Lavender Evening Dress"

Edgar Allan Poe: The Imp of the Perverse and Other Stories (Caedmon Records, 1975)  "Morella"

"Berenice"

A Hornbook for Witches (Caedmon Records, 1976) 


Edgar Allan Poe: Ligeia (Caedmon Records, 1977) 


The Goblins at the Bathhouse and [The] Calamander Chest (Caedmon Records, 1978) Part 1 of the Ruth Manning Sanders story

Part 2
Part 1 of the Joseph Payne Brennan story
Part 2

Fancies and Goodnights: The Stories of John Collier (Caedmon Records, 1980)--don't find any posts from this album online.

HarperAudio, which bought the Caedmon catalog, has reissued some of these recordings in various compilations, and licensed a few others to other labels.






Audio/multimedia documents:

Panorama: A ColorSlide Tour of  the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio (Harry Abrams/Columbia Record Club 1960) a book with slide cards (one presumably was provided with a custom projector when one subscribed to Panorama)  and a 7" 33rpm disc, as with several others narrated by Price (at not quite double-time to cram it all in 16 minutes, in this case) among other hosts--I had a secondhand couple of the books in the Panorama series when I was young, with the slide cards but no projector and no records still with them.

Witchcraft--Magic: An Adventure in Demonology (Capitol Records, 1969)
--an attempt at "nonfictional" documentary in a double-album set


Price had also done a fair amount of recording about cooking and wine, and audio documentaries about Christian matters, including the double-album His Son, and an earlier LP about art appreciation, Gallery.