Showing posts sorted by relevance for query kate Wilhelm. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query kate Wilhelm. Sort by date Show all posts

Friday, February 3, 2017

FFB: BETTER THAN ONE by Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight (MCFI/NESFA Press 1980); BLACK COCKTAIL by Jonathan Carroll (Legend/Century 1990)

"...And you know two heads are better than one..." 
--Annie Ross
Better Than One was the only officially collaborative book that Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm published during his life and their long marriage; she was one of the most frequent as well as most important of the contributors to Knight's anthology series Orbit, and they are presences in each other's anthologies and nonfiction books, but they never formally collaborated on fiction; Knight refers to one abortive attempt early on, in the prefatory matter in this collection, which was published as a convention commemorative volume for the WorldCon, NorEasCon II in 1980 in Boston, where the couple were the Guests of Honor. (As with the books from Advent: Publishers, only with an even more obvious throughline, the book is now available from the subsequent publishing project NESFA Press.) ISFDB credits D. Christine Benders as editor, though the credit she takes is designer in the volume itself; it does seem likely that Knight and Wilhelm decided what went into the book. There are two introductions, one from each, which serve as brief memoirs of their lives together as partners and artists, followed by three poems by Knight, a prefatory note and the short story "Semper Fi" by Knight, a prefatory note and the short story "Baby, You Were Great" by Wilhelm, and four poems by Wilhelm. The stories deserve to be collected together inasmuch as Knight's story, originally published with some editorial fiddles as "Satisfaction" in Analog for August 1964, inspired Wilhelm to write hers, originally in the second Orbit anthology of original fiction in 1967. Both stories deal with virtual reality in a sense, with Knight's about the opportunities for people to create their own masturbatory playgrounds via a sort of interactive VR drawing on one's own imagination; Wilhelm, rather convinced that the technology that Knight described would probably be put to more social-controlling ends, posits instead a sort of remote experience of the lives of eventually unwilling stars of "reality" VR. Turns out they were both right, to the extent we've achieved a limited form of virtual reality and interactive programming. 

 The two stories are not nearly the best single works by either writer, but are both good examples of what they can do, and the introductory matter is insightful and informative, and telling...particularly to the degree to which Knight's comments are more reserved, if clear in his gratitude for the life he has had with Wilhelm and illuminative of his artistic process (as Algis Budrys has noted about other Knight nonfiction, few could tell you more clearly how they go about the actual craft of writing than Knight), while Wilhelm's is more emotionally naked, providing a bit more of the sense of how their partnership worked and how it felt to live together and work separately; they are pretty obviously each other's biggest fans, though no more uncritically than you would expect two artists of their caliber to be.  Wilhelm's poetry gains a bit in comparison by her relative lack of reserve, feeling a bit less like exercises in the form (apparently, one of hers had been published elsewhere previously, though where is not cited; the balance of hers and all of his were apparently first published in the book), though both display their wit and grace.  Wilhelm continues to contribute notably to both fantastic and crime fiction; Knight is not as well-remembered as he should be but even last night, as I write, he was referenced blind on the topical comedy series @Midnight, in a game called "It's a Cookbook" where comedians were encouraged to mock silly or awful  examples of actual cookbooks...a reference to Knight's story "To Serve Man," also not his best but easily his most famous, and a fine more-than-a-joke story, slipped into the cultural surround in part by the adaptation on The Twilight Zone and reference to that episode by The Simpsons, those staples of proto-VR pop culture. 

US edition of the first collection with BC
While it's been collected twice since with short fiction by Jonathan Carroll, Black Cocktail was first published in both the UK and (in 1991) the US on its own, and is (surprisingly to me, considering how long I've had his books in my virtual TBR piles) the first longer fiction I've read by him.  I've had my copy of the St. Martin's Press hardcover of this one for a quarter-century, in fact, almost all of that time in a storage box, and that was my mistake...it's a good read, and I'm even more likely to pick up one of his novels soon. This one begins feeling a bit like Harlan Ellison's "Jeffty is Five"...only with a more sinister, not at all nostalgic mood...and ends with a sense of the same sort of Gestalt personality exploration that fascinated Theodore Sturgeon so fruitfully, and while the story, even given its excellent detail and grace and wit (and good choices of models to draw on...along with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fritz Leiber, Shirley Jackson and a few other writers working similar territory over the the years) doesn't quite convince, finally, it's a more than game try, and you won't be likely to want to read something else while you're reading this one. The protagonist, mourning the loss of his life-partner, meets up with an enigmatic new man who turns out to have even more enigmatic friends...and an odd connection to people from the protagonist's past as well... Even more than the short stories I've read by Carroll over the years, this reminds me also of William Kotzwinkle's work, and that, too, is high praise. The jacket by Dave McKean is pretty brilliant; the interior illustrations, in black and white, are less effective, if appropriately moody.

The utterly spartan jacket for the first edition.
Peripheral facts: both these books have "officially" 76pp. of formal text (though as the index above notes that leaves out the overall introductions by Wilhelm and Knight); Knight's story appeared in the Analog for my birth-month; Wilhelm had essentially two "first" stories for professional publication--John W. Campbell had purchased Wilhelm's sf story "The Mile Long Spaceship" for Astounding Science Fiction (later known, as of 1960,  as Analog) before assistant editor Cele Goldsmith picked out KW's fantasy "The Pint-Sized Genie" for publication in Fantastic...but Fantastic published its story first...and Wilhelm was also soon selling crime fiction short stories and her first novel, More Bitter than Death, was cf...Knight's first professional publication had been a decade and half earlier, in Fantastic's elder stablemate Amazing, a cartoon (as Knight was initially as much visual as literary artist, but soon determined he was better at the latter...actually, he was better at the former than he gave himself credit for, if still a better writer)...one of the few reasons I was a bit sad to leave New Hampshire behind in 1979 for Hawaii, not quite as acute as leaving my few good friends and some other good people (though also not a few jerks) was that I really wouldn't've minded attending the 1980 WorldCon in Boston. As it was, I didn't get to one till 2001, the one just before 9/11. 

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

Lucky Cluadia got hers signed...but had to or chose to sell it, or someone did for her...

Posted by at 3 comments:
Labels: , , ,

Friday, February 10, 2012

FFB: STORYTELLER by Kate Wilhelm (2005); CREATING SHORT FICTION by Damon Knight; (1981/1985/1997); callback to Donald Westlake and Jody Scott rarities



Next week, The Donald Westlake Symposium among the FFB crowd...here's my review from some ways back (almost three years...goodness) of two all-too-forgotten works, novellas by (Mr.) Donald Westlake ("Call Me a Cab") and (Ms.) Jody Scott ("Down Will Come Baby") that were never reprinted from their initial magazine appearances, his in Redbook when that magazine still published ficiton, hers in Escapade in its last issues as a rather sophisticated Playboy imitator, while Barry Malzberg was editing there (a short tenure, just before his much less well-paid short tenure as editor of Fantastic and Amazing).

I didn't finish the book I was likely to write up this week, so instead I'll briefly cite two which are definitely in print, from a rather less coincidental gender-pairing, Kate Wilhelm and the late Damon Knight, married for decades and also partners in creation of the Clarion Writers' Workshops, now a multi-site annual tradition and the most sustained program within, but not restricted to, fantastic-fiction writing instruction. Much of Knight's primarily instructional Creating Short Fiction and Wilhelm's mix of instruction and memoir (favoring the former) Storyteller comes out of their experiences with Clarion, as well as their larger working lives as highly analytical fiction-writers, and to some degree (Knight vastly moreso over the years than Wilhelm) editors (though Wilhelm has been in her turn a much more prolific fiction-writer than Knight was, after his most productive years in the 1950s and early '60s).

Knight is clear and concise and witty as he lays out the various approaches to and strictures of short-fiction writing, and the highlight of the book, for me is the way in which he presents his fine novelet "Four-in-One" and breaks down what he was doing with it, and how, at every step of its conception and writing. Wilhelm is more meditative, if no less witty, as she deals with basic questions of both literature and writing instruction specifically (excerpts of her book have been posted, with permission, thus: "Can Writing Be Taught?"; "Trivia vs. Writing Real Stories"; and "My Silent Partner". They are, together, an excellent distillation of what the two have taken away from their instructional experiences, and useful and a pleasure to read in a way that the best criticism tends to be, as well...illuminating and genuine fun.

For more of this week's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Saturday, August 9, 2025

Late Friday's "Forgotten" Books: On ORBIT 6 edited by Damon Knight (Putnam, 1970) a discussion on Facebook initiated by Gregory Feeley


Gregory Feeley (link here) August 7







The anthology begins with “The Second Inquisition” by Joanna Russ and ends with “The Asian Shore” by Thomas M. Disch. In between are “Goslin Day” by Avram Davidson, “Entire and Perfect Chrysolite” by R.A. Lafferty, “The End” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Where No Sun Shines” by Gardner R. Dozois, and “Debut” by Carol Emshwiller.
Neither of the two short stories by Gene Wolfe are among his classics (that began with the next volume), and I don’t remember anything about the story by Kate Wilhelm—I will try reading it next week when the present project is finished.
In terms of sheer quality, this may be one of the very best original anthologies ever published, Harlan Ellison’s not excepted.

Anthology Title: Orbit 6 • [Orbit • 6] • anthology by Damon Knight

Contents (view Concise Listing)

Rich Horton
"The Creation of Bennie Good" isn't my favorite early Sallis story, when he was at his weirdest, but I think it's at least intriguing. And of the two Wolfe stories, I think "How the Whip Came Back" is pretty good -- for me it's the earliest of his stories to really make an impression (though I do like "Trip Trap".)
Definitely a remarkable original anthology. The next issue is pretty strong too, with two of Lafferty's best stories, one of Wolfe's very best and another good one, one of the best early Sallis stories, a strong Wilhelm novella, very good stories from Disch, Emshwiller, and Dozois, and probably the only Laumer story that stands out in my memory.
Knight really knew what he was doing. And so of course the old farts in SF got really ticked off at him, and pulled stunts liking voting for No Award in the Nebulas to keep Gene Wolfe from winning.

[in response to a Brett Cox conjecture on the No Award "winner" in a Hugo ballot at the height of New Wave/Old Guard hostility in SF; at the 1971 SFWA Nebula Awards ceremony, MC Isaac Asimov, reading from the list of various nominees and winners, assumed that "No Award" getting the most votes in the short fiction category must be a transcription error, and read off Gene Wolfe, whose story "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" received the second-highest number of votes, as the winner:]
Brett Cox For Jo Walton's "Revisiting the Hugos" project, I made a comment about that particular controversy repeating the "confusing ballot instructions" explanation, and Gardner Dozois, who was there, responded as follows:
'There’s no “supposedly” about it, Rich. I was there, sitting at Gene Wolfe’s table, in fact. He’d actually stood up, and was starting to walk toward the podium, when Isaac was told about his mistake. Gene shrugged and sat down quietly, like the gentleman he is, while Isaac stammered an explanation of what had happened. It was the one time I ever saw Isaac totally flustered, and, in fact, he felt guilty about the incident to the end of his days.
'It’s bullshit that this was the result of confusing ballot instructions. This was the height of the War of the New Wave, and passions between the New Wave camp and the conservative Old Guard camp were running high. (The same year, Michael Moorcock said in a review that the only way SFWA could have found a worse thing than RINGWORLD to give the Nebula to was to give it to a comic book). The fact that the short story ballot was almost completely made up of stuff from ORBIT had outraged the Old Guard, particularly James Sallis’s surreal “The Creation of Benny Hill”, and they block-voted for No Award as a protest against “non-functional word patterns” making the ballot. Judy-Lynn del Rey told me as much immediately after the banquet, when she was exuberantly gloating about how they’d “put ORBIT in its place” with the voting results, and actually said “We won!”
'All this passion and choler seems far away now, as if we were arguing over which end of the egg to break.' 

Damon’s story selection model made him open to getting great stories from not just established writers but new voices. He took unsolicited submissions (I have the rejection slips!), but I’m guessing he also invited Milford [Writer's Workshop] and other writers to submit.
If he stumbled upon a good story he also grabbed it, as when he bought Kim Stanley Robinson’s Clarion [Writer's Workshop] application story. I think it was Damon who suggested Stan use his full name so as to not be confused with Spider Robinson.

Buggerly Otherly
(aka Michael Moorcock, among other tasks editor of New Worlds magazine in the latter '60s/early '70s)
ORBIT & NEW WORLDS were publishing similar authors sometimes almost simultaneously -- Sallis and Wolfe for instance -- and occasionally even taking stories which for some reason were not quite suitable for our respective markets. I think ORBIT was, indeed, the best original anthology series. 

Steve Rhodes
Orbit 6 & 13 others in the series can be checked out at Internet Archive


Ian McDowell notes that the Roderick Thorp listed on the cover is the same Thorp who might be best-remembered for such novels as THE DETECTIVE (adapted to a Frank Sinatra film) and NOTHING LASTS FOREVER (the novel source for the film DIE HARD).



Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday, October 30, 2009

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: WELCOME, CHAOS by Kate Wilhelm and A FOR ANYTHING by Damon Knight (and...)




Of all the impressive literary couples we've seen (not all happy but nontheless all impressive), ranging from Margaret Millar and "Ross Macdonald" to Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson to Marijane Meeker and Patricia Highsmith to Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton to C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, few hav been more variously influential as well as literarily impressive as Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight. The late Knight, my default choice for the best sf writer we've had in terms of his strengths measured all around, had one glaring omission in his c.v.: until CV (1986), the first in a trilogy that continues with The Observers and A Reasonable World, Knight had never written a fully successful novel, after brilliant work at all the shorter lengths, from vignette to novella. A for Anything is one of those not completely satisfying earlier novels, but it remains a valuable, even necessary, read for the short story which serves as preface to the main body of the novel. If a duplicator is created that essentially allows an end to all shortages and material want, what will this mean for human society? Knight's supposition, which sets the groundwork for the retro-feudal society of the somewhat satrical adventure novel that follows, is depressingly believable. The adventure story, drawing on the same traditions that Robert Heinlein and Jack Vance did in their turns (harkening back to Dumas and his peers), is considerably less compelling, but still fun.

 While Kate Wilhelm's novel, an expansion of "The Winter Beach" (a novella first published in Redbook in 1981 and collected in KW's Listen, Listen the same year), is also satirical in part and typically for Wilhelm combining aspects from various forms of fiction (this utterly sfnal quasi-apocalyptic novel also incorporates a scathing parody of a typical romance-novel hero of the dashing, preremptory sort). Society is threatened, to say the least, by a new (fairly AIDS-like) disease that kills most of those who contract it...but after it passes for a small minority, it leaves them apparently immortal.

 As too often with my FFB entries, this is just a rough sketch of what I'd hoped to get in (and I'll hope to expand it over the weekend), but I'll note in the wake of the recent Washington Post quizzing of writers as to what their favorite horror fiction is, or at least what scared them the most, one of the now-obscure favorites of my youth is David Campton's "At the Bottom of the Garden."

 Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more "forgotten" books for this week...
Posted by at 9 comments:

Sunday, February 26, 2012

1968: Judith Merril and Kate Wilhelm put together an ad against the Vietnam War...


...and it appears in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and in Galaxy, Worlds of If and International Science Fiction magazines (the latter three of which are published by the same publisher, Robert Guinn of the Galaxy Publishing Co., and edited by Frederik Pohl, the first edited by Edward Ferman and published by his father Joseph Ferman), along with a corresponding ad from "hawks" who are moved by Wilhelm and Merril's canvassing.

Frank Hollander was kind enough to transcribe the lists from the ads for the FictionMags list:


We the undersigned believe the United States must remain in Vietnam to
fulfill its responsibilities to the people of that country.

Karen K. Anderson
Poul Anderson
Harry Bates
Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
J. F. Bone
Leigh Brackett
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Mario Brand
R. Bretnor
Fredric Brown
Doris Pitkin Buck
William R. Burkett, Jr.
Elinor Busby
F. M. Busby
John W. Campbell
Louis Charbonneau
Hal Clement
Compton Crook
Hank Davis
L. Sprague de Camp
Charles V. de Vet
William B. Ellern
Richard H. Eney
T. R. Fehrenbach
R. C. FitzPatrick
Daniel F. Galouye
Raymond Z. Gallun
Robert M. Green, Jr.
Frances T. Hall
Edmond Hamilton
Robert A. Heinlein
Joe L. Hensley
Paul G. Herkart
Dean C. Ing
Jay Kay Klein
David A. Kyle
R. A. Lafferty
Robert J. Leman
C. C. MacApp
Robert Mason [not my father, but the Vietnam vet who would eventually write the novels Weapon and Solo, and the memoir Chickenhawk]
D. M. Melton
Norman Metcalf
P. Schuyler Miller
Sam Moskowitz
John Myers Myers
Larry Niven
Alan Nourse
Stuart Palmer
Gerald W. Page
Rachel Cosgrove Payes
Lawrence A. Perkins
Jerry E. Pournelle
Joe Poyer
E Hoffmann Price
George W. Price
Alva Rogers
Fred Saberhagen
George O. Smith
W. E. Sprague
G. Harry Stine (Lee Correy)
Dwight V. Swain
Thomas Burnett Swann
Albert Teichner
Theodore L. Thomas
Rena M. Vale
Jack Vance
Harl Vincent
Don Walsh, Jr.
Robert Moore Williams
Jack Williamson
Rosco E. Wright
Karl Würf [George Scithers]

We oppose the participation of the United States in the war in Vietnam.

Forrest J Ackerman
Isaac Asimov
Peter S. Beagle
Jerome Bixby
James Blish
Anthony Boucher
Lyle G. Boyd
Ray Bradbury
Jonathan Brand
Stuart J. Byrne
Terry Carr
Carroll J. Clem
Ed M. Clinton
Theodore R. Cogswell
Arthur Jean Cox
Allan Danzig
Jon DeCles
Miriam Allen deFord
Samuel R. Delany
Lester del Rey
Philip K. Dick
Thomas M. Disch
Sonya Dorman
Larry Eisenberg
Harlan Ellison
Carol Emshwiller
Philip José Farmer
David E. Fisher
Ron Goulart
Joseph Green
Jim Harmon
Harry Harrison
H. H. Hollis
J[oan]. Hunter Holly
James D. Houston
Edward Jesby
Leo P. Kelley
Daniel Keyes
Virginia Kidd
Damon Knight
Allen Lang
March Laumer [Keith Laumer was still in active service, I believe, and probably constrained from adding a signature to either]
Ursula K. Le Guin
Fritz Leiber
Irwin Lewis
A. M. Lightner
Robert A. W. Lowndes
Katherine MacLean
Barry Malzberg
Robert E. Margroff
Anne Marple
Ardrey Marshall
Bruce McAllister
Judith Merril
Robert P. Mills
Howard L. Morris
Kris Neville
Alexei Panshin
Emil Petaja
J. R. Pierce
Arthur Porges
Mack Reynolds
Gene Roddenberry
Joanna Russ
James Sallis
William Sambrot
Hans Stefan Santesson
J. W. Schutz
Robin Scott [Wilson, not yet retired from the CIA, already working on the first Clarion Workshops]
Larry T. Shaw
John Shepley
T. L Sherred
Robert Silverberg
Henry Slesar
Jerry Sohl
Norman Spinrad
Margaret St. Clair
Jacob Transue
Thurlow Weed
Kate Wilhelm
Richard Wilson
Donald A. Wollheim

Contributions to help meet the expense of future ads are welcomed, and
should be sent to:

Judith Merril or Kate Wilhelm Knight
P. O. Box 79
Milford, Pennsylvania 18337
Posted by at 15 comments:
Labels:

Friday, November 5, 2010

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: This Week's Links and DEATH QUALIFIED by Kate Wilhelm; IN DEEP by Damon Knight




There has been no lack of brilliant writing married or at least affianced couples, ranging from Margaret Millar and "Ross Macdonald" through Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson through Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini, Marijane Meaker/"Vin Packer"/"M.E. Kerr" and Patricia Highsmith to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, for fairly random selection (and the last family didn't do so badly with the family literary output in their daughter, either). But in fantastic fiction, if not solely in fantastic fiction, alongside such couples as C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton, Frederik Pohl and Judith Merril (among many other Futurian interactions), no couple has done more nor completely better than Kate Wilhelm and her late husband, Damon Knight.

So, here are two of their more brilliant books.

Death Qualified: A Mystery of Chaos, is typical of Wilhelm's work in that it gleefully breaks out of any barrier or classification that you might want to put it in. It's a crime-fiction novel, even a legal procedural in part, and the beginning of a series invovling lawyer Barbara Holloway that has become a reliably interesting and challenging set of legal procedural novels...but this one is also a borderline science-fiction novel, a borderline horror novel, has elements of sophisticated romantic fiction and is an utter tour de force as it meshes these elements as Holloway and company peel back the mystery of the death of scientist Lucas Kendricks, working on top-secret materials related to the then still relatively new field of chaos theory. It might be her most popular novel and it might be her best, so far...in a staggeringly rich and diverse career, ranging from contemporary mimetic work such as Margaret and I to suspense novels such as City of Cain to horror such as The Good Children to the influential sf novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.

Damon Knight didn't branch out in fiction as much as his wife did...he was, however, perhaps the all-around best sf and fantasy short-fiction writer working in the 1950s, and while his early novels are uniformly disappointing, in his last decade he published a trilogy, beginning with CV, that demonstrated that he had mastered that form, as well. The guy who wrote the fine joke stories "To Serve Man" (the one The Twilight Zone and The Simpsons have had such fun with) and "Not with a Bang" early in his career was ready to dig deeper almost immediately afterward, and his second collection (if I recall correctly), In Deep collected some of his most brilliant work...not least the powerful and disturbing "The Country of the Kind"...a consideration of the artist's place as misfit, or the misfit's as artist if it's less discomforting, in nearly utopian circumstances. The lead-off story, "Four-in-One," is fascinatingly broken down as a product of the writing process in Knight's book Creating Short Fiction (Knight and Wilhelm were founding and key instructors of the Clarion Writers Workshop; Wilhelm's Storyteller is similarly necessary).

Here's the Contento index:
In Deep Damon Knight (Berkley Medallion F760, 1963, 50¢, 158pp, pb); British Editions Omit “The Handler”.

· Four in One · nv Galaxy Feb ’53
· An Eye for a What? · nv Galaxy Mar ’57
· The Handler · ss Rogue Aug ’60
· Stranger Station · nv F&SF Dec ’56
· Ask Me Anything · nv Galaxy May ’51
· The Country of the Kind · ss F&SF Feb ’56
· Ticket to Anywhere · nv Galaxy Apr ’52
· Beachcomber · ss Imagination Dec ’52

The Brit editions omitting the vignette "The Handler," which also deals pungently with the artist in relation to society, was a woeful error on that publisher's part. These stories, like Wilhelm's novel, are necessary reading, and while there are other Knight collections as good, there are none better.

Knight was also a pioneering critic, and not always the kindest one, and at least one talented writer and lifelong Richard Matheson fan has never forgiven Knight for his criticism of Matheson's work, particularly the quality of his prose...but Knight, nonetheless, remains a genius (I think I can say, as well) and his prose is indeed sterling and playful, as is Wilhelm's.

Patti Abbott is on vacation this week, so I've gathered up a list of the "forgotten" books for this Friday...before finally going to make my own NoirCon plunge. What I'm aware of so far:

Paul Bishop: Whiteout and Black Camelot by Duncan Kyle (Bish is also heavy on the "men's sweat" magazine and other colorful cover illos this week)
Bill Crider: The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker
Scott Cupp: Pixie Dust by Henry Melton
Martin Edwards: Heir Presumptive by Henry Wade
Ed Gorman: The Crime Lover's Casebook (aka The New Mystery) edited by Jerome Charyn
Glenn Harper: The Coast Road by John Brady
George Kelley: The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (the new edition)
Steve Lewis's The Mystery File, as usual, has a plethora of arguably FFB reviews.
Ann Parker: Rose by Martin Cruz Smith
Eric Peterson: Men, Women and Chainsaws by Carol Glover
James Reasoner: Tarzan and the Lion Man by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Kerrie Smith: Deadly Variations by Paul Myers

If you've done an FFB and I've not listed you, I'll appreciate the update! Patti will be back at it on her blog next week.
Posted by at 7 comments:
Labels: , ,

Wednesday, September 7, 2022

SSW: Kate Wilhelm, Harlan Ellison, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Gordon Dickson, Edward Wellen, Arthur & Irwin Porges: FANTASTIC, April 1959, edited by Cele Goldsmith (Lalli)

The third in a series of posts about select set of late '50s issues of fantasy and related-fiction magazines: 

The first can be read here: Fantasy/Horror/SF fiction magazine issues from the 1950s fantastica "End of Summer": THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION April 1958 edited by "Anthony Boucher"; FANTASTIC April 1959 edited by Cele Goldsmith; FANTASTIC UNIVERSE April 1958 edited by Hans Stefan Santesson; TALES OF THE FRIGHTENED August 1957 edited by Lyle Kenyon Engle; SCIENCE FANTASY April 1958 edited by John Carnell (and INSIDE SF's F&SF/Mercury Press parody issue/September 1958, edited by Ron Smith, and MACABRE, Summer 1958, edited by Joseph Payne Brennan)

Not yet reviewed, though described in the first post's overview...and a more eye-catching cover than than the Fantastic sports!

The second, here: Short Story Wednesday: Kit Reed, Margaret St. Clair, William F. Nolan, Avram Davidson, Richard Wilson, and others: April 1958 fantasy (and related) stories from THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASTIC UNIVERSE (part 2)

Can be read here.

The first thing one might note about the April 1959 issue of Fantastic, beyond the notional cover, is that the issue became Even More an all-star issue in time than it was upon release...Arthur Porges (usually without his brother) might be the most obscure of the professional writers assembled here, and he can be remembered for the more clever stories he saw published in fantasy, sf and crime fiction magazines, such as "$1.98" in F&SF in 1954 (Irwin presumably helped develop the gimmick in "A Touch of the Sun", as he never published his own fiction in magazines, though he did publish essays). Kate Wilhelm and Harlan Ellison went on to become major writers in several fields; Wilhelm's first published story, "The Pint-Sized Genie"  had been pulled out of the "slush pile" by Goldsmith during her assistant-editor days and was published in Fantastic, though she had already sold her notable story "The Mile-Long Spaceship" to Astounding SF, it would be published later; I remain somewhat amused that she thus limned small and large, fantasy and sf, in her earliest career; Ellison had, during Goldsmith's predecessor-editor Paul Fairman's term, been one of the writers with a contract to produce a certain amount of fiction each month for a flat fee, and that was that, making for a fair amount of on-the-job training. Edward Wellen was a consistently interesting writer of crime fiction and some speculative fiction (often with a criminous aspect as well), and while Jack Sharkey, who had his first published short story in the previous, March 1959, issue of Fantastic, never wrote too much of lasting value in fantastica, he did go on to become one of the most successful playwrights among those who provided mostly one-act plays for community theater and similar productions, published by Samuel French, Inc. Rog Phillips was, along with William P. McGivern, among the rather good writers who often provided the best copy as regulars in the Ray Palmer years of Fantastic's older siblings Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures. And, other cover Names Jack Williamson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Gordon R. Dickson had already established their often influential careers, Williamson already one of the grand old writers in the fields, his work first appearing in the 1920s.

Another thing one might note is that while the previously reviewed F&SF and Fantastic Universe 4/58 issues were toward the end of their editors' runs (several issues before Anthony Boucher turned over the magazine to Robert P. Mills, barely more than twice as many issues before FU was abruptly folded in 1960, having published only the first installment of Fredric Brown's novel The Mind Thing), this was only the fifth issue Cele Goldsmith served as editor of...though throughout her run on Fantastic and Amazing, "editorial director" Norman Lobsenz wrote the editorials and blurbs for the magazines (sexism and ageism will out, particularly in the latter '50s and early '60s). Previously, I wondered if Paul Fairman's departure, and the end of  his quota system of gathering staff stories, led to a sudden shortage of fiction and a related dearth of interior illustration, and this issue suggests that might well've been the case...a largish number of Coming Soon stories from major writers mentioned in a house ad in this issue are in fact included in this issue.

The Wilhelm and Ellison stories share a certain sense of their writers still trying to refine their approaches. Ellison's "The Abnormals" ("The Discarded" being his preferred title) has a reasonably good sense of propulsion and demonstrates his concern for outsiders and enjoyment of flashy grotesqueries. It features a fairly easy-to-anticipate twist in the plot. Wilhelm's "The Ecstasy of It" demonstrates her interest from the beginning of her career in grounding her stories in day-to-day realities for her characters, notably in this case an insecure torch singer and a philosophical pianist traveling with a small press corps to interact with a first Mars colony, somewhat improbably all-male, and what befalls them. The title refers mostly to what appears to be an illness that strikes several of the characters in the colony, leaving them temporarily unwilling to do anything but enjoy their sudden esthetic appreciation for things generally. Thus also an early example of Wilhelm's fascination with diseases and similar infections that can leave at least some of the afflicted better off than previously. This, and a consistent general engagement with science that is often expressed in how it affects specific individuals, which will also recur in her work (including some of her crime fiction, such as the impressive Death Qualified).

Fantastic was making one of its occasional moves toward being a Mostly fantasy-fiction magazine at this point (and Norman Lobsenz's typically breezy, shallow editorial is about his mulling what kind of classic monster he would prefer to be, between a ghoul, a vampire or a werewolf, settling on the last), and most of the shorter stories are Goldsmith's favorite sort of fantasy, mildly surreal contemporary fantasy...probably part of he reason her magazines were home to some early "new wave" fiction (though she was also a champion of Fritz Leiber's work, including his high fantasy and more traditional horror, among no few others, in years to come, as well as numbering Ursula K. Le Guin and Thomas M. Disch among her many '60s"discoveries"). Edward Wellen's "Hear a Pin Drop" involves a prisoner seeking to retain his sanity in the face of unceasing solitary confinement and darkness, and how things go very oddly; Gordon Dickson's "After the Funeral" is a horror story involving a mixture of ESP research and a haunting; Marion Zimmer Bradley's "A Dozen of Everything" is a mildly amusing deal-with-djinn tale, fairly typical of her lighter-mode stories, and with just enough twist at the end to not be wholly predictable. While the Porges brothers' story is one of the sf "problem stories" Arthur Porges loved to write, along with the not-dissimilar "locked room"/impossible crimes kinds of mysteries he also published copiously, this one a little less dependent on a high-school physics class gimmick than most problem stories, if also acceptably far-fetched and slightly more devoted than usual to fleshing out its caricature characters...in a sense, it's barely sf, since it could conceivably happen and would be arguably possible with the technology of the time, albeit it's unlikely. I shall catch up with the balance of stories in the three issues so far, including the brilliant Leiber and famous Brian Aldiss story in the F&SF, and the other magazines' contents, Soon!

for more of this week's Short Story Wednesday entries, 
!Miercoles!
Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)