Showing posts sorted by relevance for query jack vance. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query jack vance. Sort by date Show all posts

Friday, August 9, 2013

Jack/John Holbrook Vance FFB: THE DOGTOWN TOURIST AGENCY by Jack Vance (1975)

This, my review of Jack Vance's short novel/long novella The Dogtown Tourist Agency, first published in the bugcrushing all-original-publication anthology Epoch, edited by Robert Silverberg and Roger Elwood (subtitled, modestly, "The State of the Art of Science Fiction Now") will be delayed to later today, as I'm feeling a bit under the weather. It is notable that Epoch was Berkley Books's attempt to do just that, offer an expensively-budgeted all-original anthology to stand with anyone's, including such relatively rare commercial successes as the Star Science Fiction series edited by Frederik Pohl (Ballantine, 1950s) and its less-sustained heir of sorts, Stellar Science Fiction (edited by Judy-Lynn Benjamin/Del Rey, for Ballantine, then Ballantine/Del Rey Books, 1970s) or Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison (Doubleday, 1967) after an Ellison-commissioned similar project to be edited by Judith Merril had fizzled while Ellison was editing at Regency Books.

Robert Silverberg, during the most artistically "hot" period of his life as a writer, and most prolific period as anthologist for adult and younger readers, and Roger Elwood, the controversial and hugely prolific anthologist (infamous in sf circles for his conservative Christian opinions and relative nonchalance about the quality of the work he would publish, while usually querying work from good writers for his original anthologies and often depending on his co-editors to exercise most of the literary judgment about what was going into original or reprint anthologies) were given the contract to produce the Big Book for Berkley, which was also one of the first books (iinm) to be published after the merger of the paperback line with G.P. Putnam, as a Berkley/Putnam hardcover. The SF Book Club and, of course, Berkley's originals line Medallion did reprint editions, and that latter was how I first saw and read the volume in early 1977, when my father had purchased it for himself (probably not least because it leads off with the first appearance of Larry Niven's novella "ARM" and he was a Niven fanatic up until about that point of Niven's career). It was also the first time I would see the name of my friend A. A. Attanasio in print (and it was close to his first sale).

For some reason as yet unknown to me, this solid example of Vance's voluptuous color sense, knack for sketching convincing alien culture and keen sardonic wit has been republished in, among other collections, the second volume of The Early Jack Vance, which leads me to wonder if this first Miro Hetzel story had been sitting in Vance's drawer before he dusted it off and sent it along to Silverberg and Elwood (or if it simply struck the editors of The Early Vance as in the spirit of Vance's early work for Planet Stories and Startling Stories magazines, which it is)...why that would be the case, I'm unsure, as it is while not the absolute essence of Vance's art that the likes of the Dying Earth and arguably the Lyonesse sequences of books, or his early award winners, have been, they are still Vance hitting on all cylinders.

More anon.

The ISFDB index to Epoch (the hardcover and book club editions, with different pagination for the paperback, unsurpisingly)
  • Pages: viii+623
Please see BV Lawson's blog for more of today's (Vance week) books...Patti Abbott is on assignment.
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Friday, November 26, 2010

Friday's "Forgotten" Book: THE HUGO WINNERS, Volumes I and II, edited by Isaac Asimov



Somehow, to someone who started reading sf regularly in the 1970s, the notion of The Hugo Winners volumes being out of print is remarkable, to say the least...in fannish argot, croggling. Even the third Asimov volume, and the much more recent Connie Willis and Gregory Benford-edited volumes which followed Asimov's death, are all out of print...but the similarly astounding decade-long lack of in-print status for The Science Fiction Hall of Fame volumes was rectified by Tor a few years back, and they're still in print today. For now.

Collecting the short fiction which won the World SF Convention polls, with their writers given variations on the trophy pictured on the back cover of the SFBC edition, named in honor of the pioneering editor, publisher and writer Hugo Gernsback, seemed a pretty natural idea. Asimov brought a sense of fannish patter and his toastmaster's skill to the introductions to the three volumes he oversaw; he was originally chosen to edit (as much as editing was needed) as the biggest name in sf who had not ever won the award, which fate he inveighed against with mostly good humor in the individual story introductions as well as the general introductions to each volume, collected as jacketed above for the perennial Science Fiction Book Club omnibus. One clumsy oversight by Asimov, leaving out Fritz Leiber's "Ship of Shadows" from the second volume even when its award-winning status is noted in the appendix, is even worse than the clumsy mistitling of Robert Bloch's "That Hell-Bound Train" as "The Hell-Bound Train" in the first volume...and both are more than indicative of the lack of useful attention being paid to these products by Doubleday, in preparing the trade editions or revising them for the book club.

The stories that won the awards (and since Brian Aldiss's "Hothouse" series of stories won the short-fiction award in 1962, no individual story was selected as representative for inclusion in the book, rather another slight) are at this remove an impressive bunch, though not uniformly so...Bloch's story was also the first no-bones-about-it fantasy to win what began its run as the Science Fiction Achievement Award, though the "Hothouse" cycle, Avram Davidson's "Or All the Seas with Oysters" and the Jack Vance "The Dragon Masters" were almost textbook examples of what was meant by science fantasy, when that term was not being used to cover the whole range of fantastic fiction, as speculative fiction and "fantastika" are often used today. Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!'" can seem a bit precious, in a way that his "I Have No Mouth..." certainly still doesn't, even if the other work in the latter's vein since, from Ellison and others, has taken some of the edge off that story's blade. The Daniel Keyes has always trembled on the edge of excessive sentimentality without falling in; the Leiber which is present, another utter fantasy, is still as powerful a fable now as it was then. Clifford Simak, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, Samuel Delany, Robert Silverberg and Gordon Dickson are well-represented by the stories offered...if Anne McCaffrey and Larry Niven are perhaps a bit less so, they also turned out to be perhaps more limited artists than the others, including the modestly-demeanored but diversely-talented Dickson (and it's rather sad McCaffrey is the only woman writer in the book, and Delany the only non-Caucasian, but that's how the field was rewarding folks at the time, and the writers were largely male and overwhelmingly pale)...the Nebula Award volumes had the space to feature all the stories on the shortlists from the final ballots, making for a better representation of the best work in the field, I would certainly argue...but this was and remains a vital book, as do its sequels, and that there's no ebook nor in-print edition for any of the five volumes I've seen really should be addressed.

The Contento index:
The Hugo Winners, Volumes One and Two ed. Isaac Asimov (Nelson Doubleday, 1972, 849pp, hc)
v · The Hugo Winners, Volume 1 · an Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962
x · Introduction · Isaac Asimov · in
5 · The Darfsteller · Walter M. Miller, Jr. · na Astounding Jan ’55
64 · Allamagoosa · Eric Frank Russell · ss Astounding May ’55
80 · Exploration Team [Colonial Survey] · Murray Leinster · nv Astounding Mar ’56
123 · The Star [Star of Bethlehem] · Arthur C. Clarke · ss Infinity Science Fiction Nov ’55
132 · Or All the Seas with Oysters · Avram Davidson · ss Galaxy May ’58
145 · The Big Front Yard · Clifford D. Simak · na Astounding Oct ’58
193 · That Hell-Bound Train · Robert Bloch · ss F&SF Sep ’58
208 · Flowers for Algernon · Daniel Keyes · nv F&SF Apr ’59
236 · The Longest Voyage · Poul Anderson · nv Analog Dec ’60
266 · Appendix: The Hugo Awards · Misc. · bi
269 · The Hugo Winners, Volume 2 · an Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971
273 · Here I Am Again · Isaac Asimov · in
280 · The Dragon Masters · Jack Vance · na Galaxy Aug ’62
363 · No Truce with Kings · Poul Anderson · na F&SF Jun ’63
421 · Soldier, Ask Not [Childe Cycle] · Gordon R. Dickson · na Galaxy Oct ’64
477 · “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman · Harlan Ellison · ss Galaxy Dec ’65
492 · The Last Castle · Jack Vance · na Galaxy Apr ’66
546 · Neutron Star [Beowulf Shaeffer] · Larry Niven · nv If Oct ’66
567 · Weyr Search [Pern] · Anne McCaffrey · na Analog Oct ’67
618 · Riders of the Purple Wage · Philip José Farmer · na Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967
681 · Gonna Roll the Bones · Fritz Leiber · nv Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967
702 · I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream · Harlan Ellison · ss If Mar ’67
721 · Nightwings [Watcher] · Robert Silverberg · na Galaxy Sep ’68
769 · The Sharing of Flesh · Poul Anderson · nv Galaxy Dec ’68
800 · The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World · Harlan Ellison · nv Galaxy Jun ’68
813 · Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones · Samuel R. Delany · nv New Worlds Dec ’68
847 · Appendix: Hugo Awards 1962-70 · Misc. · bi

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Sunday, August 30, 2020

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links to the reviews and more: 28 August 2020

The past week's and a few more books and other literature, unfairly (or sometimes fairly) neglected, or simply those the reviewers below think you might find of some interest (or, infrequently, you should be warned away from); certainly, most weeks we have a few not at all forgotten titles...if I've missed your review or someone else's, please let me know in comments.

 Patricia Abbott: The Star Machine by Jeanine Basinger; Vanished by Mary McGarry Morris

 Neeru/AHCOP: The Girl in Cabin B54 by Lucille Fletcher; Death of a Stray Cat by Jean Potts

 Frank Babics: Bourbon Penn, March 2020, edited by Erik Secker; Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, March 1969, edited by Ernest Hutter 

 Mark Baker: What Happened at Midnight by "Franklin W. Dixon"

 Paul Barnett/"John Grant": The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler (translated by Neil Smith)

 Brad Bigelow: An Unknown Woman by Alice Koller; O Western Wind and You've Gone Astray by Honor Croome

 Les Blatt: A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie; Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home by Harry Kemelman; The Yellow Room by Mary Roberts Rinehart

 Paul Bishop and Richard Prosch: television tie-in novels

 Elgin Bleecker: The Captain Must Die by Robert Colby

 Joachim Boaz: The Best SF Stories from New Worlds 6 edited by Michael Moorcock

 John Boston: Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction Stories, June 1965, edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli; Amazing Stories, August 1965, edited by Joseph "Ross"/Wrzos;
World's Best Science Fiction: 1965 edited by Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr (and in comparison to the Bleiler/Dikty annuals, and Judith Merril's, and the one-volume false start of Wollheim's Prize Science Fiction)

 Ben Boulden: The Haunted by "Robert Curran" (Ed Gorman), Janet and Jack Smurl, and Lorraine and Ed Warren; The Tenth Virgin by Gary Stewart

 Brian Busby: The Darling Illusion by Margerie Scott; "The Voyage to Kleptonia" by "E. M. Scott" (apparently E. Margerie Scott), Amazing Stories, October 1928, edited by Hugo Gernsback, among other Scott work

 Bob Byrne: "Have One on the House" by Norbert Davis, Dime Detective, edited by Rogers Terrill

 Jason Cavallaro: The Summer That Melted Everything and Betty by Tiffany McDaniel; Best and Worst Reads: June; and July

 David Cramner: The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs 

 Doug Cohen: Realms of Fantasy, August 1995, edited by Shawna McCarthy

 Alan Cranis: The Best of Manhunt 2 edited by Jeff Vorzimmer 
my response to Cranis's review of the first volume, since the Bookgasm blog won't accept comments:
Cranis: "From 1952 until 1967, Manhunt magazine was the most popular and revered crime fiction magazine in the USA; succeeding its well-known predecessor, Black Mask." --Well, yes and no...from its first issue, featuring the first fragment of a serialized(!) novelet by Mickey Spillane at the height of his popularity, Manhunt was the best-selling and most influential (particularly on other crime-fiction digest magazine publishers) of the 1950s...but by the turn of the '60s, it was already on the long slide into oblivion. The magazine continued to run the cover line describing itself as the bestselling mystery magazine in the world up to the last, not well-produced, bimonthly 1967 issue, while such other titles as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and, in the UK, the London Mystery Selection, all continued to plug along (the other US magazines as monthlies), among other shorter-lived titles, The Saint Mystery Magazine (also monthly in the '60s) and others; Queen's and Hitchcock's are still publishing, and Shayne and London would continue into the 1980s. (And Black Mask wasn't the only crime-fiction pulp to make a big impression before Manhunt made its digest-sized debut...Dime Detective perhaps most obviously.)

Liz Dexter: The Serial Garden by Joan Aiken 

Scott Edelman: Michael Dirda; Sarah Pinsker

 Martin Edwards: These Names Make Clues by "E. C. R. Lorac" (Edith Rivett); The Case of the Four Friends by J. C. Masterman

 Peter Enfantino and Jack Seabrook: Batman comics in the 1980s; Warren Comics, February/March 1973

 Barry Ergang: A Jade in Aries by "Tucker Coe" (Donald Westlake); Swan Dive by Jeremiah Healy 

 Will Errickson: Summer Quarantine Reads: Familiar Spirit by Lisa Tuttle; Dearest aka Jacqui by Peter Loughran; The Midnight Club by Christopher Pike; Wicked Angel by Taylor Caldwell and Night Train by Thomas Monteleone; Nine Horrors and a Dream by Joseph Payne Brennan

 José Ignacio Escribano: A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie; The Case of the Murdered Major by Christopher Bush

Curtis Evans: The Scarlet Circle by "Q. Patrick" (Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler), Detective Story Magazine, January 1936, edited by Frank Blackwell; The Scarlet Circle by "Jonathan Stagge" (Webb and Wheeler), substantially revised, Doubleday Crime Club, 1943

"Olman Feelyus": The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester; Out of Control by G. Gordon Liddy

 Paul Fraser: Best SF: 1971 edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss; Henry Kuttner: A Memorial Symposium edited by Karen Anderson

 Cullen Gallagher: Who Has Wilma Lathrop? by "Day Keene" (Gunard Hjerstedt); By Hook or By Crook and 30 More of the Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg (2010 annual volume)

 Barry Gardner: Mucho Mojo by Joe R. Lansdale

 Aubrey Nye Hamilton: Death at the Medical Board by Josephine Bell; A Deceptive Clarity by Aaron Elkins; Nantucket Sawbuck by Steven Axelrod

 Bev Hankins: A Client is Cancelled by Frances and Richard Lockridge

 James W. Harris: "After the Fall" by Alec Nevala-Lee, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May/June 2019, edited by Trevor Quachri

 John-Henri Holmberg: Jack Vance; stories with a woman as US President

 Sandie Herron: The Silence of the Library by Miranda James

 Rich Horton: stories of Jack Vance (John Holbrook Vance); Old New York by Edith Wharton; The Rachel Papers, Experience, and Heavy Water and Other Stories by Martin Amis; Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

 Jerry House: Rocket to Limbo by Alan E. Nourse; The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, in five volumes, edited by Robert Silverberg, Ben Bova, Arthur C. Clarke and George Proctor, and Terry Carr; What's It Like Out There? and Other Stories by Edmond Hamilton

 Kate Jackson: Don't Monkey with Murder by Elizabeth Ferrars; Murder in the Family by James Ronald; Uncle Paul by Celia Fremlin

 Nick Jones: Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith

 Tracy K: Shooting at Loons by Margaret Maron; Young Bess by Margaret Irwin

 Colman Keane: Blood Dreams by "Jack MacLane" (Bill Crider); Bang Bang You're Dead by Evan Baldock

 George Kelley: Violence is My Business and Turn Left for Murder by Stephen Marlowe; Science Fiction: The Great Years, V. 1, edited by Carol and Frederik Pohl

 Mark Kelly: Sinister Barrier by Eric Frank Russell; The Winds of Time by Chad Oliver

 Joe Kenney: The Progress of an Affair by Felice Gordon; Gannon's Vendetta by John Whitlatch

Dana King: Remo Went Rogue by Mike McCrary; Burglars Can't Be Choosers by Lawrence Block; Left Turn at Alburquerque by Scott Phillips and other recent reads

 Rob Kitchin: A Philosophical Investigation by Philip Kerr; The Lost Man by Jane Harper
K. A. Laity: Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith (image courtesy Nick Jones)

 Karen Langley: English Climate: Wartime Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner

 B. V. Lawson: A Different Kind of Summer by Gwendoline Butler; Five Passengers from Lisbon by Mignon G. Eberhart 

 Xavier Lechard: the best reads of January-June

 Des/D. F. Lewis: The Varvaros Ascensions by Forrest Aguirre

 Evan Lewis: "A Gift of the Gods" by Carroll John Daly, People's Magazine, 1 January 1923; "The Dragon of Kao Tsu" by "Sam Walser" (Robert E. Howard), Spicy-Adventure Stories, September 1936

 Steve Lewis: The Gold of Troy by Robert L. Fish; "A Proper Santa" by Anne McCaffrey (first published in Demon Kind, edited by Roger Elwood); "The Problem of the Snowbound Cabin" by Edward D. Hoch, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, December 1987, edited by Eleanor Sullivan; "The Cardboard Box" by Terence Faherty, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, January/February 2019, edited by Janet Hutchings 

 Library of America: "The Circus at Denby" by Sarah Orne Jewett from her collection Deephaven; "The Water Baby" by Jack London, Cosmopolitan, September 1918, edited by Douglas Z. Doty

 Robert Lopresti: "No Body" by Clea Simon, Shattering Glass edited by Heather Graham

 Gary Lovisi: John D. MacDonald's later Fawcett Gold Medal editions

 Walker Martin: The Hardboiled Dicks, edited and annotated by Ron Goulart; Black Mask Magazine, edited by Joseph Shaw et al. among its competitors

James McGlothlin: The Best of Jack Williamson  

 Mike McGonigal: Octavia Butler, interviewed in 1997 (scroll down)

 Mike: An English Murder by Cyril Hare

 Jess Nevins: H. P. Lovecraft: pro and con

 John F. Norris: Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins; The Woman in the Wardrobe by Peter Shaffer; Poison Unknown by Max Dalman (Binns)  

 Jim Noy: The D.A. Breaks the Seal by Erle Stanley Gardner 

Juri Nummelin: "A Man Called Horse" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" by Dorothy M. Johnson 

 Ray O'Leary: Brunswick Gardens by "Anne Perry" (Juliet Hulme)

 John O'Neill: So Bright the Vision by Clifford D. Simak; Tor.com novellas; To Open the Sky by Robert Silverberg; Poul Anderson's novels at David Hartwell's Berkley SF

 "Paperback Warrior": Night Extra by William P. McGivern

 Matt Paust: The Illegal: The First Mexican SuperHero by Steven Cortinas; 
Symmetry: earth and sky by Tobi Alfier

 Mildred Perkins: The House of Daniel by Harry Turtledove

 Jordan Prejean: The Twilight Zone Magazine, June 1982, edited by T. E. D. Klein

 James Reasoner: 14 Seconds to Hell by "Nick Carter" (Jon Messmann in this case); Infestation by William Meikle

 Richard Robinson: First Step Outward edited by Robert Hoskins

 Gerard Saylor: Rowdy in Paris by Tim Sandlin; The Fort by Bernard Cornwell 

 Jack Seabrook: "Summer Evil" by Nora H. Caplan, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, October 1960, edited by William Manners; The Hitchcock Project so far...

 Scott: To Man Alone, The Blossom on the Bough, and Summer Cloud by Dorothy Clewes

 Steve Scott: "The Golden World of Travis McGee" by Mike Baxter, Tropic, the Sunday supplement magazine in The Miami Herald, 14 December 1969

 Robert Silverberg: City by Clifford Simak

 Victoria Silverwolf: Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, June 1965, edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli; Fantastic, September 1965, edited by Joseph "Ross"/Wrzos

 Kerrie Smith: Thirst by L. A. Larkin

 Marina Sofia: Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd)

 Kevin Tipple: Crime Syndicate Magazine, May 2016, edited by Michael Pool and Dietrich Kalteis; The Hairy Potter and Other Al Quinn Detective Stories by Russ Hall

 "TomCat": Death at the Château Noir by E. and M. A. Radford; The Whistling Legs by Roman McDougald

 Prashant Trikannad: Able Team: Ironman by "Dick Stivers" (G. H. Frost?); Sudden: Apache Fighter by "Frederick H. Christian" (Frederick Nolan); Hanging Woman Creek by Louis L'Amour

 Adam Wagner: The Last Child by John Hart 

 Bill Wallace: England's Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia by Philip Hoare; Evergreen Review, August 1967, edited by Barney Rosset

 A. J. Wright: Truman Capote's book covers

Mark Yon: Science Fantasy, September 1965, edited by Kyril Bonfigioli and Keith Roberts; New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock


more to come...
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Thursday, October 22, 2009

Friday's Forgotten Books: Anthologies from AMAZING



Perhaps the ugliest cover of any anthology drawn from Amazing's fiction contents, although none of the anthologies has been particularly famous for its cover.

Extracted from the Locus and Contento/Stephensen-Payne indices:

The Best of Amazing ed. Joseph Ross (Doubleday, 1967, hc)
· Foreword · Joseph Ross · fw
· The Lost Machine · John Beynon Harris · ss Amazing Apr ’32
· The Worm · David H. Keller, M.D. · ss Amazing Mar ’29
· The Runaway Skyscraper · Murray Leinster · nv Argosy and Railroad Man’s Magazine Feb 22 ’19
· Marooned Off Vesta [Brandon, Shea & Moore] · Isaac Asimov · ss Amazing Mar ’39
· Anniversary [Brandon, Shea & Moore] · Isaac Asimov · ss Amazing Mar ’59
· The Metal Man · Jack Williamson · ss Amazing Dec ’28
· Pilgrimage [revised from “The Priestess Who Rebelled”, Amazing Oct ’39; Meg] · Nelson S. Bond · nv The 31st of February, Gnome, 1949
· Sunfire! · Edmond Hamilton · ss Amazing Sep ’62
· Try to Remember! · Frank Herbert · nv Amazing Oct ’61

The Best from Amazing ed. Ted White (Manor, 1973, pb)
· No Charge for Alterations · Horace L. Gold · nv Amazing Apr/May ’53
· The Augmented Agent [“I-C-a-BeM”] · Jack Vance · nv Amazing Oct ’61
· The Misfit · Roger Zelazny · nv Amazing Oct ’63
· The Dowry of the Angyar [“The Dowry of Angyar”] · Ursula K. Le Guin · ss Amazing Sep ’64
· Placement Test · Keith Laumer · nv Amazing Jul ’64
· The Horn of Time the Hunter [“Homo Aquaticus”] · Poul Anderson · ss Amazing Sep ’63
· Phoenix · Ted White & Marion Zimmer Bradley · ss Amazing Feb ’63
· Rogue Psi · James H. Schmitz · nv Amazing Aug ’62

Amazing Stories: 60 Years of the Best Science Fiction ed. Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg (TSR 0-88038-216-3, Jul ’85 [Aug ’85], $7.95, 255pp, pb); Anthology of 20 stories which originally appeared in Amazing, with a section of color illustrations showing magazine covers.
5 · Amazing Stories and I · Isaac Asimov · in
9 · The Revolt of the Pedestrians · David H. Keller, M.D. · nv Amazing Feb ’28
29 · The Gostak and the Doshes · Miles J. Breuer, M.D. · ss Amazing Mar ’30
43 · Pilgrimage [“The Priestess Who Rebelled”; Meg] · Nelson Bond · nv Amazing Oct ’39
57 · I, Robot [Adam Link] · Eando Binder · ss Amazing Jan ’39
67 · The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton · Robert Bloch · ss Amazing Mar ’39
75 · The Perfect Woman · Robert Sheckley · vi Amazing Dec ’53/Jan ’54
79 · Memento Homo [“Death of a Spaceman”] · Walter M. Miller, Jr. · ss Amazing Mar ’54
93 · What Is This Thing Called Love? [“Playboy and the Slime God”] · Isaac Asimov · ss Amazing Mar ’61
103 · Requiem · Edmond Hamilton · ss Amazing Apr ’62
115 · Hang Head, Vandal! · Mark Clifton · ss Amazing Apr ’62
125 · Drunkboat · Cordwainer Smith · nv Amazing Oct ’63
ins. · 60 Years of Amazing Stories’ Covers · Misc. Material · il
147 · The Days of Perky Pat · Philip K. Dick · nv Amazing Dec ’63; expanded to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964
165 · Semley’s Necklace [“The Dowry of Angyar”] · Ursula K. Le Guin · ss Amazing Sep ’64
179 · Calling Dr. Clockwork · Ron Goulart · ss Amazing Mar ’65
187 · There’s No Vinism Like Chauvinism · John W. Jakes · nv Amazing Apr ’65
215 · The Oögenesis of Bird City · Philip José Farmer · ss Amazing Sep ’70
225 · The Man Who Walked Home · James Tiptree, Jr. · ss Amazing May ’72
237 · Manikins · John Varley · ss Amazing Jan ’76
247 · In the Islands · Pat Murphy · ss Amazing Mar ’83

Amazing Stories: Vision of Other Worlds ed. Martin H. Greenberg (TSR 0-88038-302-X, Sep ’86 [Nov ’86], $7.95, 253pp, pb); Anthology of 15 stories. Includes a center insert (unpaginated) of color reproductions of 16 “Amazing” covers from 1930-1985.
7 · Introduction · Robert Silverberg · in
11 · Strange Wine · Harlan Ellison · ss Amazing Jun ’76
18 · The Cosmic Frame · Paul W. Fairman · ss Amazing May ’55
29 · Or Else · Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore · ss Amazing Aug/Sep ’53
38 · Sail 25 [“Gateway to Strangeness”] · Jack Vance · nv Amazing Aug ’62
62 · Third Stage · Poul Anderson · ss Amazing Feb ’62
79 · The Stars, My Brothers · Edmond Hamilton · nv Amazing May ’62
116 · The Bald-Headed Mirage · Robert Bloch · ss Amazing Jun ’60
ins. · Artists’ Visions of Other Worlds · Various Hands · il
129 · The Forest of Zil · Kris Neville · ss Amazing Dec ’67
134 · Before Eden · Arthur C. Clarke · ss Amazing Jun ’61
145 · Quinquepedalian · Piers Anthony · ss Amazing Nov ’63
160 · A Dusk of Idols · James Blish · nv Amazing Mar ’61
182 · The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal · Cordwainer Smith · ss Amazing May ’64
197 · We Know Who We Are · Robert Silverberg · ss Amazing Jul ’70
207 · No Charge for Alterations · Horace L. Gold · nv Amazing Apr/May ’53
228 · Titan Falling [Bradley Reynolds] · Gregory Benford · nv Amazing Aug ’80

Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The Wonder Years 1926-1935 ed. Martin H. Greenberg (TSR 0-88038-439-5, Mar ’87 [Feb ’87], $3.95, 316pp, pb); Anthology of stories from the first decade of Amazing, with an introduction by Jack Williamson. UK price £2.50.
7 · Introduction · Jack Williamson · in
11 · The Metal Man · Jack Williamson · ss Amazing Dec ’28
27 · The Jameson Satellite [Professor Jameson] · Neil R. Jones · nv Amazing Jul ’31
57 · The Man Who Saw the Future · Edmond Hamilton · ss Amazing Oct ’30
77 · The Machine Man of Ardathia [Ardathia] · Francis Flagg · ss Amazing Nov ’27
97 · The Tissue-Culture King · Julian Huxley · ss The Yale Review Apr ’26; Amazing Aug ’27
127 · The Voice from the Ether · Lloyd Arthur Eshbach · nv Amazing May ’31
165 · The Coming of the Ice · G. Peyton Wertenbaker · ss Amazing Jun ’26
185 · The Miracle of the Lily · Clare Winger Harris · nv Amazing Apr ’28
209 · The Man with the Strange Head · Miles J. Breuer, M.D. · ss Amazing Jan ’27
223 · Omega · Amelia Reynolds Long · ss Amazing Jul ’32
241 · The Plutonian Drug · Clark Ashton Smith · ss Amazing Sep ’34
257 · The Last Evolution · John W. Campbell, Jr. · ss Amazing Aug ’32
281 · The Colour Out of Space · H. P. Lovecraft · nv Amazing Sep ’27
318 · The Authors · Misc. Material · bg

Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The War Years 1936-1945 ed. Martin H. Greenberg (TSR 0-88038-440-9, May ’87, $3.95, 331pp, pb); Anthology of 10 sf stories, with an introduction by Isaac Asimov. Available in the UK for £2.50.
7 · Introduction · Isaac Asimov · in
11 · Robot AL-76 Goes Astray · Isaac Asimov · ss Amazing Feb ’42
29 · Devolution · Edmond Hamilton · ss Amazing Dec ’36
49 · The Four-Sided Triangle · William F. Temple · nv Amazing Nov ’39
79 · The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years · Don Wilcox · nv Amazing Oct ’40
119 · Adam Link’s Vengeance [Adam Link] · Eando Binder · nv Amazing Feb ’40
157 · The Living Mist · Ralph Milne Farley · nv Amazing Aug ’40
197 · Phoney Meteor [as by John Beynon] · John Wyndham · nv Amazing Mar ’41
229 · The Council of Drones · W. K. Sonnemann · nv Amazing Oct ’36
279 · Shifting Seas · Stanley G. Weinbaum · nv Amazing Apr ’37
311 · I, Rocket · Ray Bradbury · ss Amazing May ’44
333 · The Authors · Misc. Material · bg

Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The Wild Years 1946-1955 ed. Martin H. Greenberg (TSR 0-88038-441-7, Aug ’87, $3.95, 318pp, pb); Anthology of 12 stories from Amazing.
6 · Introduction · Robert Bloch · in
11 · You Could Be Wrong · Robert Bloch · ss Amazing Mar ’55
29 · Breakfast at Twilight · Philip K. Dick · ss Amazing Jul ’54
51 · Operation RSVP · H. Beam Piper · ss Amazing Jan ’51
63 · Satisfaction Guaranteed [Susan Calvin (Robot)] · Isaac Asimov · ss Amazing Apr ’51
83 · Restricted Area · Robert Sheckley · ss Amazing Jun/Jul ’53
105 · Peacebringer [“Sword of Peace”] · Ward Moore · nv Amazing Mar ’50
139 · The Little Creeps · Walter M. Miller, Jr. · nv Amazing Dec ’51
191 · The Draw · Jerome Bixby · ss Amazing Mar ’54
215 · A Way of Thinking · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Amazing Oct/Nov ’53
251 · Skirmish [“Bathe Your Bearings in Blood!”] · Clifford D. Simak · ss Amazing Dec ’50
275 · They Fly So High · Ross Rocklynne · ss Amazing Jun ’52
293 · Chrysalis · Ray Bradbury · nv Amazing Jul ’46
319 · The Authors · Misc. Material · bg

If Weird Tales has never been definitively, representatively anthologized (see my earlier post on this subject), then Amazing, the first sf magazine to be a no-bones-about-it science fiction magazine (as opposed to fantasy magazine with sfnal content, or a dime novel/dime novelesque production) has been ridiculously poorly represented, even as several of the anthologies above are pleasant reading. I picked up a copy of the first Martin Greenberg anthology from Amazing the other day, the one edited in collaboration with Isaac Asimov, and while it's a reasonably decent selection of stories from most of the editorial eras of the magazine, it definitely slights some even more than they deserve (to be sure, Amazing has had long fallow periods, most notably during the T. O'Connor Sloane, Ray Palmer, and Paul Fairman editorial reigns...even though the last was notable for much early, and rarely outstanding but reliably competent, work by a stable of Milton Lesser (who wrote more, slightly later, as Stephen Marlowe), Randall Garrett, Robert Silverberg, and Harlan Ellison--Fairman, who was primarily interested in crime fiction (much like his slightly more engaged predecessor and mentor, Howard Browne), famously would buy stories from this quartet without bothering to read them, and run them in Amazing and its slightly more fantasy-oriented companion Fantastic (and Fantastic's shortlived spinoff, Dream World)...his successor, Cele Goldsmith, working as his secretary and first reader, was apparently responsible for most of the better work to appear in the magazine in those years, as she pulled (perhaps most notably) Kate Wilhelm's first published story from the slush pile. Goldsmith, who married to become Cele Lalli, is perhaps the best-represented editor in the anthologies above, as her run from 1959-1965 was possibly the best period for the magazine, despite being barely supported by its publisher Ziff-Davis (her editorial budget apparently was restricted to paying a penny a word to most writers, less than even the other poorly-paying fiction magazines extant at the time, among which only Astounding, becoming Analog, was also published by a financially secure publisher). But being a ZD magazine meant that Amazing and Fantastic were out in the market and reliably issued monthly during her term, which mixed relatively traditionalist adventure fiction with innovative approaches from folks ranging from J. G. Ballard to Cordwainer Smith to David Bunch to such Goldsmith "discoveries" as Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, Thomas Disch, Sonya Dorman, and Keith Laumer (often but not always rather a traditionalist)...and with some rather goofy materials that might've slipped in largely out of having Nothing Better at hand (fellow magazine editor Bruce Elliott placed a long story about a face drawn on the Moon which causes much shame among humanity, who feel themselves Observed).

Howard Browne had been editor during a brief attempt by ZD to budget its fiction magazines up to the standards of their other magazines, which had paid off rather well for the third issue of Fantastic, Fall 1953, featuring a story attributed to Mickey Spillane at the height of his popularity (it had been ghosted, out of desperation, by Browne when Spillane had described his actual contribution in detail, and apparently Not a Good One though this was less important, in advance in a profile in Life magazine, also at or near the height of its popularlity, the profile published as the Fantastic issue was being put to bed (this issue of Fantastic might still be the best-selling single issue of any fantasy or sf magazine so far, estimated at about 300,000 copies sold). Amazing's somewhat less successful ploy for reaching a mass audience was a story attributed to gossip-mongers Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, well-known at the time for such paperbacks as New York Confidential, entitled "Mars Confidential"--clearly a joke, but not a successful one. Browne (editor from the late '40s to the early mid '50s, when he formally tossed it to Fairman), had succeeded Amazing's most controversial editor, Ray Palmer, who mixed decent (and less decent) adventure fiction with nut-cult material, had hoped to make a big break from those years--most of the stories from Palmer's years reprinted in the books detailed above are by Robert Bloch, the most talented at sf of Palmer's stable, which also included such natural crime-fiction talents as William McGivern. (Palmer was perhaps the single most energetic proponent in magazine publishing of the notion that "flying saucers" were the spacecraft of alien visitors, and ran a number of pieces in his magazines from a somewhat delusional Richard Shaver, who believed humanity was imperfectly controlled by Lemurians who lived within the hollow Earth...Palmer, after leaving ZD, founded several magazines including the durable "mysticism" and fringe-topic digest Fate). Asimov sold his first story to Palmer, as well, and it unsurprisingly was collected in the above.

Amazing: 60 Years... not only sports a hideous cover, but also is set in the format that game publisher TSR put the magazine in during its early years of publication (giving the interior of the magazine, and the book, a rather drab look when illustrations are not present...the book includes a rather odd selection of issue covers, not all but most from the issues the stories come from). TSR probably kept the magazine (barely) alive, and even rather lavishly produced in its later years at the company, in large part due to Steven Spielberg's purchase of "media" rights and renting the title for his rather unimpressive anthology series, with ran on NBC television in the US in the mid 1980s (the magazine's covers trumpeted the connection for the two seasons Spielberg had been guaranteed by NBC). George Scithers, late of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and soon to move on to revive Weird Tales with his partners, produced a magazine not too different from IASFM, albeit with a bit more fantasy content (Fantastic had been absorbed by its older partner shortly before TSR's purchase) and better nonfiction-historical content about the sf field, and blessedly less of Barry Longyear's dire imitation-Jack Vance "Momus" stories which had plagued the latter years of the Scithers Asimov's. The Greenberg/Asimov book doesn't completely slight fiction from Ted White's editorship, during the decade of issues dated from 1969 to 1979, when the magazine's budget was ridiculously small (its publisher, Sol Cohen, treated it as a retirement job, not unlike the 1970s run of that other old pulp hand Leo Margulies as publisher of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and its shortlived companions). White nonetheless was able to publish an interesting mix of the traditionalist and avant-garde work, with somewhat firmer grounding in the field than Goldsmith/Lalli had had, and much as his immediate predecessors, Harry Harrison and Barry Malzberg, had also done while trying to move the magazine away from being largely devoted to reprints (but both Harrison and Malzberg chose to stay with the underbudgeted magazines for only a matter of months--White, living in an inherited house and capable of handling art direction and layout as well as editorial tasks, was able to make a longer go of barely being paid for his efforts).

Ah, well...this has turned into quite the late ramble. You could do worse than any of these books, except not Too much worse than Ross's, which is indicative of his rather poor judgment of what had aged well (he'd been the first editor hired for essetially no salary by Cohen when Cohen bought the magazines from ZD on the relative cheap, and while he published some notable new work, such as Avram Davidson's novel The Phoenix and the Mirror, much of that had apparently been in Cele Lalli's inventory when the magazines were sold, and she went on to her career as editor of ZD bridal magazines). Of the last three Greenberg anthos, published before TSR lost interest altogether, the one drawn largely from the Palmer and Browne years is somewhat surprisingly the most engaging, albeit the others are decent cross-sections of their decades. Given a little more support (and continuation), the Greenberg series might've been a decent roundup of the magazine, which throughout its existence managed to publish some remarkably good work under all sorts of remarkably bad circumtances...even as it was often overshadowed by its companions, the Palmer-founded Fantastic Adventures, which was somewhat better-produced at first and notable for late Edgar Rice Burroughs fiction, then as the home of sporadic evidence of Browne's good taste in fantasy fiction: around the turn of the 1950s, it ran such notable work as Fritz Leiber's You're All Alone, Theodore Sturgeon's The Dreaming Jewels, and Robert Bloch's "The Dead Don't Die!" (despite the classically-pulpy title, exclamation point and all, a rather deft and slightly metafictional novella with a genuine sense of unease to go with Bloch's trademark gallows humor), and Fantastic, which for much of its run benefited from being one of the few reliable markets for fantasy fiction in the Anglophone world, and so often averaged of higher quality than its stablemate...particularly during Browne, Goldsmith/Lalli, and White's editorships.

The most recent version of Amazing was shut down, the publisher, TSR heir Wizards of the Coast, claimed, because it was Too Successful, and thus somehow drew too much from the core business of the publisher. That's about Amazing's luck. Nonetheless, as it noted on a lot of its covers over the years..."First in Science Fiction: Since 1926."

See Patti Abbott's blog for other Friday Forgotten Books today...
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Friday, May 12, 2017

FFB: TURNING POINTS edited by Damon Knight (Harper & Row 1977); DREAM MAKERS: VOLUME II interviews conducted by Charles Platt (Berkley 1985)

Two books about sf and fantasy and what's around them, Damon Knight's pioneering gathering of essays from various sources, about "The Art of Science Fiction" as the subtitle notes (there had been numerous all-original symposia, and some collections of criticism by individual writers, including Knight himself, but no anthology drawing widely on the previously-published literature)...and the second and perhaps more surprising volume of interviews with sf and fantasy writers by the always ready to be contentious Charles Platt (there are two editions of Dream Makers by Platt...the first his first collection of interview essays, the second Platt's selection of entries from both the first two volumes--I recommend reading the entirety of the two earlier volumes).

 Knight's volume, which includes a bit of new material in its time (1977, most notably Knight's own essays on the nature of sf and writing and selling the literature) also offered the first widespread access to certain other documents, published, if at all, only in fanzines of varying degrees of obscurity. This is true of the debate, of sorts, between the rather obscure Philip Geffe and four rather prominent scientists or ex-secientists in the sf field about how scientists are
treated in the fiction, and Joanna Russ's speech, "Alien Monsters," which might be even more controversial, citing as it does an illustration in an sf magazine that no one, apparently, has since found...and which I suspect refers to the resolution to Judith Merril's The Tomorrow People...which Russ cites along the way toward calling for much greater sophistication in dealing with characters and characterization in SF. There is no single thread to the essays Knight collects here, sometimes even within the subheadings the selections are classed with in the table of contents, and I don't think Knight ever intended us to consider each contribution to be the equal of every other one, so much as various sorts of nudges to get the reader new to sf, or a veteran reader or otherwise more involved, to consider or reconsider both conventional wisdom or their own opinions about the field...since the book is mostly about sf, rather than the larger field of fantastic fiction, even if the other sorts of speculative fiction by necessity are discussed. 

 The contents:
i. A Walk Around the Topic
II. History without Tears
III. Criticism, Destructive and Otherwise
IV. S.F. and Science
V. How To, in Four Tricky Lessons
VI. S.F. as Prophecy
VII. Confessions
(The Franklin item, from his book-length study Future Perfect [Oxford, 1966] was omitted by the ISFDB listing for the book; possibly for some reason it's missing from the Macmillan/Orion 2014 ebook edition.)

Casting one's eye over the contents, one can see contributions from those with careers at the heart of the SF fields, including such critics and historians as Versins and Franklin, and those who made notable contributions, sometimes their most important contributions, but who are best-remembered for other work, such as Richard McKenna, whose bestselling historical and only novel The Sand Pebbles might be better known than his notable fantasy short story "Casey Agonistes" and his other work in his brief career in and out of SF, or  Amis, Lewis or Huxley...Lewis definitely considering himself a fantastic-fiction writer, and Amis as well when so engaged, and Huxley apparently not too worried about being so tagged. I do wish another essay by James Blish was included here, though this one is clearly close to Blish's heart, even if the core assumption, that any sentient species is likely to construct a pantheon of gods since humans all over the world do so, seems to me to be shaky anthropomorphism at its most self-reassuring. 

It's a fine and useful book, and I'm glad to see it's once again available, even if solely electronically. 

Charles Platt, for his part, took a few more chances and widened his remit rather better for the interviews gathered for his second collection of interview-based profiles...he, with not much justification, insisted that most of the women writers in SF were essentially fantasy rather than sf writers, so there was only the most begrudged space given to Kate Wilhelm as the only woman writer in the first volume of Dream Makers. And that because Platt didn't have access to Damon Knight, so the married couple interviewed each other for Platt's book, making that the only entry which was not the result of a visit by Platt to the habitation of the writer (or editor) being queried. And to wrap the book, writer and fellow interviewer Douglas Winter interviews Platt (Winter's similar book of interview essays with horror-fiction writers, Faces of Fear, would be released the same year as DM2.
But, despite the presence of Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance and Arthur C. Clarke in this volume (along with the somewhat later arrivals such as Joe Haldman, Larry Niven and Keith Launer), Platt mostly felt freer to include more writers beyond the Old Lions of the field, and with Russ, Alice Sheldon ("James Tiptree, Jr.")  and Kit Reed managed to take in three of the more important women writers, even if none was averse to fantasy, science fantasy or otherwise not have a periodic table of the elements at hand at all times while writing. Andre Norton, then as now, was vastly better known for her YA fiction than her adult work, and others, such as D. M. Thomas, William Burroughs, and to some extent Robert Anton Wilson, were often seen as apart from SF, no matter how much or how often their key works either were firmly in SF traditions or drew heavily on SF viewpoints or techniques. Alvin Toffler was the one non-fiction writer, albeit an allied futurist, included.  But interviews with Russ, the often interview-shy John Sladek, D. M. Thomas (I prefer his sf poetry to his bestseller, in part a time-travel fantasy, The White Hotel)(William Kotzwinkle's The Exile deals far more nimbly with similar materials, I'd suggest). Sturgeon and Laumer capture each at crucial moments in their careeers, or (as in Russ's case) when cagily willing to discuss questions of sexual identity that had not, as far as I know, been stated even as not quite plainly as they are here. And the candid opinions of such writers as Harry Harrison and Stephen King are more than useful in this context; King's cogent assessment of the work of Lin Carter wasn't likely to arise in too many other discussions he'd have in public, much less transcribed. Platt doesn't actually get to see L. Ron Hubbard, but puts an oar in to suggest he was still alive by the time of their 1983 correspondence. 

These two books are collections of useful, if not always the most reliable, statements of thought by mostly major figures in the fields of fantastic fiction, and even those who are not major for one reason or another are worth hearing from even if mostly for the bad example they set. And the mutual appearance of Sturgeon, Russ and Laumer in both volumes isn't the only reason you might gain something from reading them together. 

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