Showing posts sorted by relevance for query brian aldiss. Sort by date Show all posts
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Monday, August 21, 2017

Brian Aldiss, RIP

Unfortunately, Brian Aldiss's family have this morning confirmed his death, on Friday, his 92nd birthday.


It is with great sadness we announce the death of our beloved father & grandfather. Brian died peacefully at home on his 92nd birthday ^TA
8:00 AM - 21 Aug 2017

And the full statement, courtesy the Brian Aldiss Fan Page on FaceBook:

Announcement of the death of Brian Aldiss O.B.E.

It is with sadness that we announce the death of Brian Wilson Aldiss O.B.E. author, artist and poet, at his home in Oxford in the early hours of Saturday 19th August 2017, aged 92. Author of British Science Fiction classics Non-stop, Hothouse and Greybeard, Aldiss's writing spanned genres and generations, bridging the gap between classic science fiction and contemporary literature with his Helliconia Trilogy and Thomas Squire Quartet. Aldiss was also an entertaining memoirist, notably basing his Horatio Stubbs saga on his wartime adventures in Burma and the Far East, as well as the autobiography The Twinkling of an Eye.

A friend and drinking companion of Kingsley Amis and correspondent with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldiss was a founding member of the Groucho Club in London and a judge on the 1981 Booker Prize. Awarded the Hugo Award for Science Fiction in 1962 and the Nebula Award in 1965, Aldiss's writings were well received by the critics and earned a strong following in the United States and in Britain as well as being widely translated into foreign languages. In later years his cultured world view and enduring curiosity found expression in the novels Harm and The Finches of Mars, dealing with the contradictions of the war against terror and the logistical difficulties of accommodating different terrestrial belief systems in space.

Among his considerable body of short fiction are the ‘Supertoys’ stories, adapted for film as A.I., on which Aldiss collaborated with Stanley Kubrick for over a decade before its completion by Steven Spielberg. His novel Frankenstein Unbound was made for screen by Roger Corman.
In 2000 Brian Aldiss was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Reading and received the title of Grandmaster from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He was honoured by Her Majesty the Queen for services to Literature with the O.B.E. in the 2005 Birthday Honours list.

my post last night began:
'I quote to him something he wrote in 1990: “Just as the [literary] establishment is philistine about science, the bulk of the science-fiction readership is philistine about literature.” “Ha!” he cries gleefully, “offends both parties.” “Well done, Brian,” says Alison, rolling her eyes.'

--Brian Aldiss, reveling in telling what is too frequently the truth...though these days, it's more likely philistinism between contemporary-fiction writers and fantastic-fiction writers, aside from those who have frequently done both, such as Aldiss. This quotation from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/brian-aldiss-interview-much-snobbery-science-fiction/

Further links:

And my own thoughts about his work, from this morning on a discussion list which includes many of his friends, and simply long-term readers such as myself:

"Manuscript Found in a Police State" and "Full Sun" were my first Aldiss fictions, when I was 9yo and, with "Police State" fascinated by the concept of the hellish jail, a sort of water-wheel structure, the protagonist found himself in...probably introduced me to the concept of a police state, as well. And the reverse lycanthropy of "Full Sun" amused me. His and Harry Harrison's annual Best SF '71 was one of the first of my father's anthologies I read at about the same time, introducing me to Donald Barthelme as well as Barry N. Malzberg, Cynthia Ozick as well as Robert Sheckley, and gave me my first taste of non-cartoon Gahan Wilson...

The memoirs and critical writing joined my encounters with further fiction not long after. 

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Friday, April 10, 2015

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:
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.
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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 to Astounding 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 Scientology 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.
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Friday, June 3, 2016

FFB: STRANGE HIGHWAYS: READING SCIENCE FANTASY 1950-1967 by John Boston and Damien Broderick (Borgo Press 2012)

Science Fantasy was the primary British magazine devoted to fantasy, science fiction and the arguably hybrid form of science-fantasy at mid-century, the companion to the slightly longer-lived and more famous (and/or infamous) New Worlds, as well as to the short-lived Science Fiction Adventures magazine (one of a handful of magazines to have that title over the years, this one originally the UK edition of the second US magazine of that title). Strange Highways is John Boston's issue by issue run through the magazine and its fiction, editorials, critical writing, covers, illustration and design, and even its advertising, in a manner not altogether different if more exhaustive than my own adventures in magazine reviewing on this blog, and similar to those of Paul Fraser (among others) on his, as edited and occasionally expanded or footnoted by Damien Broderick. It's one of the smaller ironies of this labor of love, a casual rather than dryly academic look at the magazine's content, that it has been assembled by an American ("John Boston" is about as Yankee as a name can be without having "Knickerbocker" mixed in somehow) and an expatriate Australian living in Texas, but perhaps this isn't as improbable as it might seem (or no more so than the book itself, or its similar companion
volumes on the years of New Worlds, and SF Adventures, before NW became a cause célèbre and a source of political harrumphing over its content while receiving Arts Council grants from the British government); Science Fantasy, despite no lack of mediocre and some worse fiction, was also the first home of the baroque fantasy fiction of Michael Moorcock (mostly published before he became New Worlds's editor), not a few of the key early stories by J. G. Ballard, Josephine Saxton and Brian Aldiss, and some fine adventure and historical fantasy by John Brunner and Thomas Burnett Swann, among a number of others, from all over the Anglophone world. Its editors included a number of the key figures among the editorial ranks of UK fantastic fiction: founding editor Walter Gillings had been a pioneer in professional sf magazine
publishing in Great Britain, even if none of his projects were particularly financially hearty, and even this title was taken away from him for financial reasons by its publisher, so that New Worlds's E. J. "Ted" Carnell could serve as the sole magazine editor at cash-strapped Nova Publications; Carnell, the primary editor throughout most of its run; novelist and art collector Kyril Bonfiglioli, who took on apparently as few editorial duties as he possibly could after the magazines were sold to publishers Roberts and Vintner, who changed the format from digest-sized magazine to an often attractive paperback-book package; Keith Roberts, who was largely responsible, as art director as well, for that attractiveness; and Harry Harrison, briefly in from the US and back out on his way to live on the Continent again, with Roberts essentially stepping back in after his brief run...Harrison also one of the key American contributors to the magazine.

 I'm surprised to find myself disagreeing strenuously with the assertion in Broderick's introduction that John Campbell's Unknown Fantasy Fiction magazine (1939-43) was the first great expression of science-fantasy fiction, given Campbell's famous predilection for "rationalized" fantasy, where rigorous rules were applied to the fantastic...when such predecessors as H. G. Wells (with his proviso that there be only "one miracle per story") and Thorne Smith had been adhering to similar notions rather prominently, and were models for much of what Campbell published in his magazine...which was, however, launched in part because Campbell wanted to be able to explore "fringe science" and paranoid philosophical points in fiction that might not so easily fit into his Astounding Science-Fiction magazine at that time...but that wasn't the only kind of fantasy Unknown published. Meanwhile, some of the most popular pulp
fiction of the previous decades, such as the Mars and other stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well as fantasies of lost civilizations and continents by writers such as Talbot Mundy and A. Conan Doyle, had already helped set some of the parameters of mixtures of sfnal speculation and fantasy coloration and romance; in the same year, 1939, Unknown was founded, such longer-lived magazines devoted in one degree or another to other flavors of science-fantasy, such as space opera and planetary romance stalwart Planet Stories, and frequent late-Burroughs (and imitators) market Fantastic Adventures, also made their debut. Such periodicals as Weird Tales and the various science fiction magazines had also published their share of science-fantasy, as had most of the adventure pulps, and such stories as F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" were in the same vein, often published by more affluent "slick" magazines and other markets (though the Fitzgerald was first published in the modestly-budgeted, influential The Smart Set, stablemate of the first issues of similarly influential crime-fiction pulp Black Mask). John Boston doesn't quite make any such
filmed loosely as Soylent Green
sweeping claim, preferring to get on with the history and critique of the magazine itself, and, at obvious transition stages, listing some of the best fiction among that referred to so far...assessments that have allowed for three anthologies from Boston and Broderick so far, published by Surinam Turtle Press. This volume, while perhaps best not read straight through in one or three sittings unless one is deeply intrigued by the magazine and its time and place, is conveniently broken down into the several-issue essays in which it was originally published, as contributions to the FictionMags discussion list. While the anthologies might make for more engaging reading for general audiences, those who are vitally interested in the literature or even popular culture of the time, at very least, should find this volume (and its companions) valuable and amusing.

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


“THE WRONG TRACK” - A. BERTRAM CHANDLER
“LET’S BE FRANK” - BRIAN W. ALDISS
“THE DAYMAKERS” - PETER HAWKINS
“CHAOTICS” - EDWARD MACKIN
“ME, MYSELF AND I” - JOHN KIPPAX
“TOO BAD!” - E.C. TUBB
“THE ANALYSTS” - JOHN BRUNNER
“HEINRICH” - WALLACE WEST
“TO RESCUE TANELORN” - MICHAEL MOORCOCK
“SAME TIME, SAME PLACE” - MERVYN PEAKE
“THE MUREX” - THOMAS BURNETT SWANN

Jonathan Burke, “The Adjusters” (Science Fantasy #13, Apr 1955)
Martin Jordan, “Sheamus” (Science Fantasy #14, Jun 1955)
John Brunner, “City of the Tiger” (Science Fantasy #32, Dec 1958)
Kenneth Bulmer, “Castle of Vengeance” (Science Fantasy #37, Nov 1959)
John Kippax (John Charles Hynam 1915-1974), “Destiny Incorporated” (Science Fantasy #30, Aug 1958)
J.G. Ballard, “The Watch-Towers” (Science Fantasy #53, Jun 1962, and The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, 2009)
Thomas Burnett Swann, “The Sudden Wings” (Science Fantasy #55, Oct 1962)
Philip E. High, “Dead End” (Science Fantasy #56, Dec 1962)


John Rackham, Bring Back a Life 

 Thomas Burnett Swann, Vashti

 Josephine Saxton, The Wall 

 Brian Stableford and Craig Mackintosh, Beyond Time’s Aegis 

 Brian Aldiss, The Circulation of the Blood 

 J.G. Ballard, You and Me and the Continuum 

 Christopher Priest, The Run 

 Keith Roberts, Corfe Gate 

 Robert Wells, Stop Seventeen 

 Chris Boyce, Mantis
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Friday, May 21, 2010

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)










More landmarks, personally at least














 Courtesy the Contento/Locus/Homeville indices:

Best SF: 1971 ed. Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss (G.P. Putnam’s LCC# 74-116158, 1972, $5.95, 253pp, hc); In the UK as The Year’s Best Science Fiction No. 5 (Sphere 1972).
9 · Introduction · Harry Harrison · in
14 · Doctor Zombie and His Furry Little Friends · Robert Sheckley · ss Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971
25 · Conquest · Barry N. Malzberg · ss New Dimensions I, ed. Robert Silverberg, Doubleday, 1971
31 · Gehenna · Barry N. Malzberg · ss Galaxy Mar ’71
37 · A Meeting with Medusa · Arthur C. Clarke · nv Playboy Dec ’71
83 · The Genius · Donald Barthelme · ss New Yorker Feb ’71
90 · Angouleme · Thomas M. Disch · ss New Worlds Quarterly, ed. Michael Moorcock, London: Sphere, 1971
108 · If “Hair” Were Revived in 2016 · Arnold M. Auerbach · fa The New York Times, 1971
110 · Statistician’s Day · James Blish · ss Science Against Man, ed. Anthony Cheetham, Avon, 1970
120 · The Science Fiction Horror Movie Pocket Computer · Gahan Wilson · ms The National Lampoon Nov ’71
124 · The Hunter at His Ease · Brian W. Aldiss · ss Science Against Man, ed. Anthony Cheetham, Avon, 1970
144 · The Cohen Dog Exclusion Act · Steven Schrader · ss Eco-Fiction, ed. John Stadler, Washington Square, 1971
149 · Gantlet · Richard E. Peck · ss Orbit 10, ed. Damon Knight, G.P. Putnam’s, 1972
162 · Report · Kingsley Amis · pm The New Statesman, 1971
163 · Fisherman · Lawrence Sail · pm The New Statesman, 1971
164 · The Ideal Police State · Charles Baxter · pm The Little Magazine, 1971
165 · The Pagan Rabbi · Cynthia Ozick · nv The Hudson Review, 1966
198 · (Untitled) [from Cancerqueen] · Tommaso Landolfi · ex, 1971
200 · An Uneven Evening · Steve Herbst · ss Clarion, ed. Robert Scott Wilson, Signet, 1971
210 · Ornithanthropus · B. Alan Burhoe · ss If Dec ’71
224 · No Direction Home · Norman Spinrad · ss New Worlds Quarterly 2, ed. Michael Moorcock, London: Sphere, 1971
242 · Afterword: A Day in the Life-Style of... · Brian W. Aldiss · aw

Year’s Finest Fantasy ed. Terry Carr (Berkley/Putnam, 1978, hc)
· Introduction · Terry Carr · in
· Jeffty Is Five · Harlan Ellison · ss F&SF Jul ’77
· The Bagful of Dreams [Cugel; Dying Earth] · Jack Vance · nv Flashing Swords! #4, ed. Lin Carter, Dell, 1977
· The Cat from Hell · Stephen King · ss Cavalier Jun ’77
· Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole · Steven Utley & Howard Waldrop · nv New Dimensions 7, ed. Robert Silverberg, Harper & Row, 1977
· The Kugelmass Episode · Woody Allen · ss New Yorker May 2 ’77; F&SF Dec ’77
· Manatee Gal Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight [Jack Limekiller] · Avram Davidson · nv F&SF Apr ’77
· Getting Back to Before It Began · Raylyn Moore · ss F&SF Aug ’77
· Descent of Man · T. Coraghessan Boyle · ss The Paris Review Spr ’77
· Probability Storm · Julian Reid · nv Universe 7, ed. Terry Carr, Doubleday, 1977
· Growing Boys · Robert Aickman · nv Tales of Love and Death, Gollancz, 1977

So, here are two books which, along the horror anthologies and the Hitchcock antologies and the humor anthologies and eventually the Judith Merril anthologies (among much else, of course), helped shape my view of what literature could do, and why attempts at hard and fast distinction between "genre" fiction and (most pathetically) "literary" fiction are useless at best and pernicious and destructive at worst...they've certainly helped limit and end careers for talented writers throughout the previous century, at least.

It's difficult to read "The Genius" by Donald Barthelme side by side with "Angouleme" by Thomas Disch and say that the first is literary art and the second a mere entertainement written to preconceived limitations, and even if that was remotely true of the Disch, one would have to wonder why it was assumend no preconceptions were at play in the compostion of the Barthelme. As it was, these were two of the stories which utterly floored me in the book, even in the presence of such major work as the Clarke, and the duo from Malzberg, the Spinrad and one of the best stories, slightly time-displaced in a Best of 1971 volume, by Ozick. "The Genius" certainly spoke to me as I reread it on a school bus, on the long hike back from a field trip to the New England Seaquarium as I recall, with my busmates in my vicinity wondering why I was so engrossed in that odd book. What are the responsibilities of being a genius? Can one choose not to be one? A compelling set of questions; nearly as memorable, the convocation of geniuses, several hundred geniuses in one room, reminding our protagonist of his less than utter uniqueness and putting him in a bad mood for several days.

Landolfi's Cancerqueen excerpt haunted me ("Cancroregina" in the language of the author and my grandfather's family), even as Wilson flowchart guide to monster movies (reptinted illegibly in the Sphere edition, even when I had good eyes) blew me away even among the many funny shorter bits, and the acid not so short Sheckley lead-off, included here.

Bill Crider recently reprinted George Kelley's contemporary review of the Carr volume for Paperback Quarterly, and while I commented extensively there, I'd still like to note here that while this volume wasn't quite as unworried about going "outside" the "boundaries" for its contents, it still kept alive the traditions Carr had established with his fine New Worlds of Fantasy trio of anthologies back in the latest '60s and earliest '70s (more directly contemporaneous with the Harrison/Aldiss volume above); this first volume of his annual, which would continue as Fantasy Annual after moving with Carr's publisher's editor David Hartwell from Berkley to Pocket Books, after a second volume with B/P) would've contained Jorge Luis Borges's "The Book of Sand" as well, if Carr was willing to pay the stiff reprint fee demanded. As it was, this volume stands as an iterestingly mixed bag, with excellent stories (unsurprisingly) from Vance, Aickman (which got across to adolescent me the potentially creepish aspects of parenthood), Ellison (not his best fantasy, but just a cut below) and Davidson (though it took me longer to warm up to the Limekiller stories than it did to some of Davidson's more flashily erudite and hilarious work). Ir also, with the inclusion of "The Cat from Hell," confirmed for me that I often found King's work suprisingly dull, crude, and generally dismal, particularly given how much people seemed to love it (while also finding the occasional story, such as "Children of the Corn" as collected in a contemporary Year's Best Horror Stories annual volume, suprisingly good, leaving me to wonder why dreck such as "Cat" was being written, published, and lauded); the (bad sort of) ridiculously smug and cutesy "Descent of Man" was the first exposure, I believe, I had to Boyle, who has tended in his shallow and striving way to appear in magazine issues and anthologies I often otherwise enjoy with appalling frequency over the decades since, usually offering a sort of sub-Ellisonian attempt to be clever and challenging and failing dismally...I have read one, and only one, decent story by him, in Zoetrope All-Story several years back, which just makes me wonder what he might achieve if he didn't so consistently attempt to be so clumsily ironic and fashionably broad in his affect. The Woody Allen story of sorts is typical of his literay work, a series of some good and other jokes barely stuck together as a narrative...a sketch in prose rather than a truly realized story. The early Utley/Waldrop, like the Reid, is more promising than indicative of what the former duo, at least, could do...Utley was already producing better work, and Waldrop would really flower in the next decade. The Moore has most of the flaws of the Boyle, as most of her work did, without being quite as impressed with itself. Oddly, I remember reading some of this one for the first time in the Hirschorn Museum in DC, as I was resting after taking in a good chunk of the collection that day, in a month or so I spent in DC in '78.

All in all, interesting books, not perfect ones, and they did nothing to quell my continuing habit of picking up annuals, even in the rare occasion that I've read most of the contents.

For more "forgotten" books, please see George Kelley's blog...at least he and Bill Crider are highlighting books this week by the late Manly Wade Wellman, whose birthday anniversary is today.
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Friday, August 25, 2017

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links to the reviews and more

This week's selection of books, magazine issues and a bit of shorter fiction that the reviewers feel has been unjustly (or occasionally justly) neglected in recent years or at least months...originator and regular host Patti Abbott will likely be back to gathering the links next week at this time, or a bit earlier!, and with luck without the technical glitches that slowed assembly this week. If I've missed your or someone else's review, please let me know, and many thanks to all the contributors and you readers.
































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