Showing posts sorted by relevance for query judith merril. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query judith merril. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

fantasy magazines, late March, 1965

The first set is comprised of what could've been found on a theoretical Very well-stocked newsstand (as some were) in late March, 1965...the English-language professional magazines specializing in publishing fantasy fiction (though all of the science fiction and mystery magazines were not averse to publishing some fantasy or horror or at least material running up to the very edges, nor the eclectic fiction magazines, of which there were a few non-littles still extant at that time...). For some reason, the March issues, or the earlier issues in each case, have somewhat better covers...either better-executed, or better subjects, or perhaps just a touch less blatantly sleazy in Gamma's case. Some of he second set might just have been on the stands instead, given the vagaries of magazine distribution...and certainly the undercapitalized Gamma (which folded with the issued dated September) and the microbudgeted Magazine of Horror had erratic schedules (Gamma had announced a stablemate, crime-fiction magazine Chase, which was published by MOH's publisher instead...and was much less handsome for it).
Cover by Agosta Morol

Cover by Fred Wolters





























Cover by Edmund Emshwiller ("Emsh")

































Cover by Gray Morrow















Cover by John Healey
Cover by Bert Tanner





































The notable facts of these issues are several, not least that John Brunner appears in the April issue of the Magazine of Horror, and any number of other fantastic-fiction issues at about this time (as the always-prolific Brunner was working up to some of the best work in his career); the March F&SF features one of Roger Zelazny's most important early stories, while the April issue is perhaps most significant as the first issue that Edward Ferman edited on his own (even though his father, publisher Joseph Ferman, still had the formal title of "editor" as he had since Davidson's resignation the previous year), not "using up" the inventory that Avram Davidson had purchased for the magazine, and introducing Gahan Wilson's first monthly cartoon (Wilson had contributed cartoons to Fantastic in the 1950s, as well as having already made a career for himself in Playboy, The New Yorker and other slick magazines by 1965)...Southern Illinois University Press published a facsimile of this issue in hardcover, with added memoirs by several of the contributors including Ferman, in 1981. Meanwhile, these were almost the last issues edited by the similarly important Cele Lalli, who had begun editorship of Fantastic and its stablemate Amazing as Cele Goldsmith; when the magazines were sold at mid-year to independent publisher Sol Cohen, as Cele G. Lalli she would stay with Ziff-Davis as a notable editor of bridal magazines. Here's a decent appreciation for some of the early issues of the Magazine of Horror, which Robert A. W. Lowndes was able to keep afloat from 1963-1971, and a more comprehensive one here...and not long after these issues, edited by Kyril Bonfiglioli with the help of fellow writer and artist Keith Roberts, the British institution Science Fantasy would change title to SF Impulse...while its elder sibling, New Worlds, underwent similar changes and eventually even greater ones...
Indices courtesy ISFDb:

Science Fantasy, March 1965 

  
Magazine of Horror, April 1965 


The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1965 

  
Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, March 1965


Gamma,  February 1965 

Cover by Gray Morrow



Cover by Fred Wolters
Cover uncredited (perhaps a rush job
by Keith Roberts)

Cover by John Healey,  which would be recycled much later by Mike Shayne 
Mystery Magazine, then also under the editorship of Charles Fritch


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Wednesday, June 28, 2023

SSW: The Annotated Facsimile of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, April 1965, edited by Edward Ferman (with an introduction by Ferman and memoirs by most of the contributors to the issue, edited by Ferman and Martin H. Greenberg), Southern Illinois University Press, 1981


This was one of a series of books the Southern Illinois University Press issued in their "Alternatives" line, devoted to fantasy and sf, which published a number of volumes from 1990, including collections of Cornell Woolrich's fantasticated fiction (which can be read here), with essays by Francis Nevins and Barry Malzberg, and the first collection of Algis Budrys's book-review essays, for Galaxy magazine, Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf, in 1985 (and similar collections of his later work have been published by Ansible Editions). The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton (1980), edited by Malzberg and Greenberg (with an introduction by Judith Merril), which can be read here, was one of a number of similar books SIU Press was publishing in the same years that were, for no obvious reason, not under the "Alternatives" aegis. Another, less improbably segregated from the "Alternatives" label, was Exeunt Murderers: The Best Mystery Stories of Anthony Boucher (1983), edited by Nevins and Greenberg.

They issued only two facsimile issues of fiction magazines during the run, in hardcover editions, one devoted to one of the most promising, as it was laden by current and future stars of the magazine and sf, issues of Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939, and this one, devoted to the first issue Edward Ferman would consider as one he fully edited, as he was the editor succeeding Avram Davidson, who had been editing remotely from Mexico for his last year or so, and his father, the publisher of F&SF, Joseph Ferman, wasn't at all sure it would make for a Good Look to install his young son, four years out of college, as the editor at once, so called himself "editor" as well as publisher during the transition--with Ted White, later to edit Fantastic and Amazing for a decade, continuing as Assistant Editor and Robert P. Mills, editor of Mercury Mystery, Bestseller Mystery, Venture Science Fiction, and of F&SF just before Davidson (and having been managing editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine while that was still a Mercury Press  property) as staff advisor, younger Ferman was able to make his mark, as the various memoirs as well as the evidence of his issues, and longest term of anyone as editor (and eventually publisher) of the magazine, has made clear.

This issue was a good one, and Ferman can be reasonably proud of it, as he was, as he settled into the full role beyond the "Managing Editor" credit he took for this and previous issues, as they worked through most of the Davidson-selected inventory. (In this issue, at least the M. J. Engh story, her second and last to be published as by "Jane Beauclerk", of a loose and widely-spaced trilogy of stories; "Lord Moon" having been a story eventually bought by the departing Davidson, and, probably only coincidentally, her last F&SF story--she's not been hugely prolific. Engh is probably best-known for her first novel, Arslan, published in the UK as A Wind from Bukhara, which I couldn't help but be reminded of during the recent fracas in Russia, when the mercenary army Putin has been employing for various ugly business around the world briefly threatened to attack him,) Also notable, Gerald Jonas's charming poem "Imaginary Numbers in a Real Garden", a decent Isaac Asimov story (as he informs us in his essay, one solicited by Playboy as one of three vignettes to be written in response to an illustration...and, despite Algis Budrys as a tapped-temporarily [as Asimov remembers it, at least] fiction editor [or sub-editor] seeking to accept Asimov's second draft, it being bounced by the upper hierarchy)(Steven Cooper was kind enough to point me to the relevant Playboy issue, December 1966, which features Jack Gregory's sculpture, as photographed by Seymour Mednick, and the three vignettes Playboy went with: "Playback" by Arthur C. Clarke. "Lovemaking" by Frederik Pohl [which Pohl called "Making Love" in his collections] and "Cephalotron" by Thomas Disch [which Disch called "Fun with Your New Head" in his collections]. Gahan Wilson has his first F&SF cartoon in this issue, a regular feature (as with Asimov's essays, which would continue till Asimov's death in 1992) for the next 17 years...whatever ended Wilson's run in the magazine apparently also had enough bad blood to it for Wilson to not provide a memoir. "T P Caravan" also has his last F&SF contribution in this issue, and sadly also doesn't have a latter-day essay.

Len Guttridge would have only two more F&SF stories, despite living into his 90s; then-young Robert Rohrer would have only one more in F&SF, his last in the fantastica magazines (two stories, one each in Cele Goldsmith Lalli's Fantastic and Amazing appeared between his last two in Ferman's magazine)(in comments below. Rich Horton notes that Rohrer wrote to comment on RH's blogpost about Rohrer's career), and Roderic Hodgins has never published in fantastica magazines again (though he did keep a hand in, as a science and medicine reporter for Life magazine [not, alas, a long-term job for him given the essential folding of the magazine not long after, with sporadic specials and revivals], apparently before turning his day-job efforts toward clinical psychology). Judith Merril didn't offer an essay, either, though she might've been under the weather by the time this book was being put together in 1980...the eclecticism of the work she was reviewing (as well as assembling in her annual) was notable. And Ted Thomas's short-form science and speculation column, which ran in the magazine for a few years in the '60s, was a nice counterpoint to Asimov's essays (the film and other a/v reviews wouldn't reappear in the magazine till Samuel Delany, initially reviewing 2001, would begin a column in '68, after Charles Beaumont's column in the latter '50s ended with his ill health...William Morrison's very occasional stage reviews ended with Beaumont's; Baird Searles, Harlan Ellison, Kathi Maio, Lucius Shepherd, Dave Skal and others would follow Delany). 

Patti Abbott has the balance of Short Story Wednesday reviews posted and linked here.

And here's the FMI listing for the Playboy issue, slightly augmented:

    Playboy [v13 #12, December 1966] (quarto) 
    Details supplied by Paul Di Filippo (with some additions, the variant titles of the Pohl and Disch vignettes from ISFDB citations).
    • 126 · An Expensive Place to Die [Part 1 of 3] · Len Deighton · n.
    • 138 · Accidentally Good · Robert Ruark · ss
    • 141 · So Pretty and So Green · MacKinlay Kantor · ss
    • 165 · The Truth About Orlik · Gerald Kersh · ss
    • 182 · The Only Game in Town · Garson Kanin · ss
    • 215 · The Scamp He Would a Scribbler Be · Poggio Bracciolini (as "retold" by John Keefauver) from Facetiae (1470) (the "Ribald Classic"; the volume was the first printed jokebook in Europe, a collection of satirical vignettes) illustration uncredited
    • · Fantastic Trio
    • 220 · Playback · Arthur C. Clarke · ss
    • 221 · Lovemaking · Frederik Pohl · ss [variant title of "Making Love"] (as in Day Million et al.)
    • 222 · Cephalatron · Thomas M. Disch · ss [variant title of "Fun with Your New Head"] (as in the collection of that title and others)


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Wednesday, July 9, 2025

SSW: "Plenitude" by Will "Worthington"/Mohler, THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, November 1959, edited by Robert P. Mills



















This issue can be read at the Internet Archive here.

Heinlein and Fast as the cover draws. John Collier's story was a reprint. Starship Soldier was, as editor/critic John Boston has noted in email, a truncated form of  Starship Troopers, which was published in book form about the same time the second and final installment in the next month's F&SF was on the stands.

From the FictionMags Index and ISFDB:

I first read the story in this volume of Judith Merril's annual:
(note the early Lawrence Block story collected below; a good volume even for Merril...)


Can't imagine why ("Snirsk!" says Ninja the cat as she walks by), but post-crisis fiction and drama is at least as common (and perhaps popular) as ever, though one of the more memorable post-crisis stories that has stuck with me through the decades (I would've read it perhaps forty years ago, and it wasn't so very new then) was by Will Mohler, who apparently published all his fiction in a five-year span from 1958-63, almost all of it signed "Will Worthington", and that was that, despite a receptive audience for it in the field.  

"Plenitude" is an interesting mixture of outsider resentment of conformity culture--through that conformity seeking a kind of community and security which can be all too poisonous (hello, current crises, particularly when the current power structure is, more than usual, in the hands of particularly self-regarding irresponsible, ignorant fools), and how one might attempt to imagine a better, truer existence through turning away from all that. It's not a brilliant story, but it does rather cleverly outline what seems at first to be a post-apocalypse scenario which turns out to be something rather different, a latter-day refinement of H. G. Wells's Eloi and Morlock dynamic, if less systematically brutal. Mohler's a better polemicist than he is a fashioner of fully human characters (the adult women characters are puzzling wonders to the [not quite fully] adult viewpoint character, and this is something he brushes off improbably, given their situation...such obliviousness might make more sense in a story set in a 1960s US reasonably affluent suburb). It's a relatively short story, and it mostly surprised me back then in its critique...Mohler mockingly uses Hegelian terms to chide its upper middle-class conformist survivors, and one will find it more difficult in a quick search for the term "Parmenidean" than it should be, as our bots of today are made to be certain we must mean to search for "Pomeranian"...I believe I first read this story in the back volume of the Merril annual rather than the back issue of F&SF, which with even a glance at the contents marks it as a typically star-studded one...editor Robert Mills, like his predecessors "Anthony Boucher" and J. Francis McComas, being as much at home in crime fiction as fantastica.

I suppose I should make a study of  Mohler's work in toto, as far as we know of it, with three stories in Fantastic, one each in If and the British Science Fantasy, and six in total in F&SF, the last one, along with a single story in Galaxy, as Mohler:
***For more of today's story reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blogpost here.
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