Friday, August 18, 2017

FFM/B: New fantasy short fiction on the US newsstands & bookshelves, late 1976: ARIEL, Autumn 1976, edited by Thomas Durwood; CHACAL, Winter 1976, edited by Arnie Fenner and Byron Roark; FANTASTIC, November 1976, edited by Ted White; THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, October, November and December 1976, edited by Edward Ferman; WHISPERS, December 1976, edited by Stuart David Schiff; FLASHING SWORDS #3: WARRIORS AND WIZARDS, edited by Lin Carter; THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY STORIES, Volume 2, edited by Lin Carter; THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES, Series 4, edited by Gerald W. Page


Short fantasy fiction on the American racks, late 1976:

 There were other magazines and other books publishing new fantasy fiction (including horror and often along with crime or science fiction), but in the last months of 1976, these are the eight magazines and anthology series offering the most new fiction in the field. Two were new, three were semi-professional or "little" magazines, two theoretically best of the year anthologies featuring some new fiction, one a specialized sword & sorcery anthology series, and three were magazines which had offered special Fritz Leiber issues (Fantastic in 1959, F&SF in 1969 and Whispers in 1979)...

F&SF and Fantastic were low-budget but professional magazines, both put together in the houses of their editors, Edward Ferman's F&SF from Cornwall, Connecticut and Ted White's Fantastic, with companion Amazing Science Fiction, in Falls Church, Virginia. Ferman also published his magazine, having inherited its concern, Mercury Press, from his father, Joseph Ferman; White was working for a very modest stipend from Ultimate Publications, which amounted to a retirement job for magazine veteran Sol Cohen and a diversified holding for his junior partner Arthur Bernhard, who published other low-budget magazines on his own. A few other newsstand fantasy-fiction magazines had briefly appeared on the newsstands to join Fantastic and F&SF in the 1970s, including Coven 13, purchased, retitled and edited by Gerald W. Page as Witchcraft and Sorcery in the early 1970s, a brief run of Worlds of Fantasy magazine from the Galaxy group of magazines (where Cohen had worked just before setting up Ultimate in 1965), two issues of Gerry Conway's The Haunt of Horror (as a fiction magazine; publisher Marvel went on to relaunch the title as a large-format comic book), and the first briefly flourishing attempt to revive Weird Tales, in 1973-74 by Leo Margulies, at that point still trying to expand his line beyond the long-running Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. But Fantastic (since 1952) and F&SF (since 1949) had been the consistently-appearing magazines in the field, helped to continue in part by both usually featuring some science fiction in their mix. Even in these days of a resurgence in fantasy (Tolkien, Richard Adams, Richard Bach) and horror (Ira Levin, William Peter Blatty, Stephen King) fiction as potent commercial forces in book form, fantasy including some horror wasn't necessarily going to sell copies of a fiction magazine by itself in sustainable quantity...though F&SF was the only fantastic-fiction magazine to steadily increase its circulation throughout the '7os,

and Fantastic, which had with the previous issues gone from bimonthly to quarterly publication, saw issues which included authorized pastiches of Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories, usually by Lin Carter or Carter with L. Sprague de Camp, do rather well in sales. And both Ferman and White's magazines were well-regarded, offering usually good to brilliant fiction on their modest budgets, perhaps in part due to the continuing lack of other markets that would pay more for such fiction... with rare exceptions in the cases of (sophisticated) general-interest and gendered "slick" magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Cavalier, Playboy, Redbook or Mademoiselle. There were little magazines, such as TriQuarterly, Antaeus or Ontario Review (and, in their own way, the then-relatively new
folkloric journal Parabola), which were open to some fantasy as well as part of their regular remit, and there had been a longstanding tradition of such little magazines within the fantastic-fiction community, as well...Stuart David Schiff's Whispers was becoming one of the most prominent of these, meant in its own way to be a sort of Weird Tales revival of its own, like Witchcraft and Sorcery before it devoted to a WT-like mix of horror and mostly dark fantasy.

 Weirdbook, Nyctalops and Fantasy and Terror, three of the other notable US little magazines in the field, produced no issues in late '76 (in the UK, Dark Horizons did publish such an issue, and if one wishes to fault me for not including the late 1976 issue of Midnight Sun or the final, 1976 issue of Joseph Payne Brennan's long-running Macabre, I'd have to concede one had a case), but two new entries did, both in their ways hoping to demonstrate that relatively elegant, large-format packaging could be achieved on even a modest budget: Arnie Fenner's Chacal and Thomas Durwood's Ariel. Both were largely but not exclusively devoted to epic fantasy, and both would continue for several issues (nine and four, respectively) over the next several years, Chacal soon (essentially) changing its title to Shayol (and the editorship eventually passing on to Pat Cadigan) and Durwood from issue two throwing in with Betty and Ian Ballantine at their Peacock Press imprint and changing the title formally to Ariel: The Book of Fantasy. 

 When the Ballantines had sold their paperback company, Ballantine Books, completely to Random House a few years previously, Lin Carter had lost one of his regular gigs, editing their line of Adult Fantasy reissues and infrequent new books, some of the latter anthologies he would edit of short fiction. Happily for him, he picked up two new annual projects, an anthology series devoted to publishing new sword and sorcery fiction, Flashing Swords!, published by Dell Books, and editorship of a new best-of-the-year (mostly) reprint anthology for DAW Books, joining Donald A. Wollheim's sf annual and what had become, with its fourth volume, Gerald W. Page's The Year's Best Horror Stories (the players do tend to recur in various roles in the small world of fantasy-fiction publishing in this era). And because it remained a relatively small world of fantasy and horror short-fiction publishing, both the Carter Fantasy and the Page Horror annuals were allowed, as Wollheim didn't allow himself in his series, to publish original stories in the BOTY volumes, rather than depend solely on reprints from the year's books and magazines...even given the quality of much of what those newsstand and little magazines were publishing. Page, on balance, was a better editor
of his books (including his own original-fiction anthologies Nameless Places and Heroic Fantasy), but Carter's books have their charm, as well, and draw from more than their share of notable contributors and present some very good fiction, reprinted from the other publications noted here and others beyond.  With both editors including the original stories mentioned previously, these annual series were important showcases for new as well as reprinted fantasy fiction. 

 Some contents (indices courtesy the FictionMags and Contento Anthology Indexes and ISFDB) and comments on them: 
This is a very good set of months for F&SF, even if the December issue isn't quite up to the previous two, even with a fine Varley and a Jennings. The all-star issue features fine work from Bloch, Ellison, Le Guin, Wellman and Cowper...the Bretnor is one of the earlier annoying Schimmelhorn stories, where the misogyny will out rather intensely (Raylyn Moore, in the December issue, can usually be counted on for some loathing of her own gender as well).  The Damon Knight story is pretty brilliant, and it's an otherwise good issue built around him, with a very fine Joanna Russ book essay. Meanwhile, the Budrys book essay in the December issue is definitely one of the highlights there. Beware Ray Bradbury poetry. 
    Fantastic [v25 #5, November 1976] ed. Ted White (Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc., $1.00, 132pp, digest, cover by Doug Beekman)  Note: title on spine is “Fantastic Stories”
Fantastic was in the midst of its several-years' experiment of explicitly labeling itself a fantasy-only magazine, with a special emphasis on sword and sorcery fiction. I've liked Brian Lumley's "Tharquest" only marginally better than Carter's "Thongor" over the years...but the Leiber and de Camp columns are fine, the other fiction mostly engaging. 
One of the last issues of Whispers before its companion Doubleday anthology series began...and one of the best of the magazine issues to be published, with the Etchison and Campton stories highly memorable. I'll need to refresh my memory of the Lafferty.
    Note a certain similarity to the Chacal contents, only with more engagement with comics, notably but not exclusively Batman comics...

    Flashing Swords! #3: Warriors and Wizards ed. Lin Carter (Dell 2579, Aug ’76, $1.25, 272pp, pb) Cover: Don Maitz
It was not possible for me to pass up a book with new fiction from Leiber and Davidson in 1978...

Note that Carter, not for the first nor last time, is kind enough to include two of his own stories (including one based on a Clark Ashton Smith fragment) among the reprinted Year's Best...the two new stories in this volume have no previous publication site specified.

While Page includes none of his own fiction, I suppose one could "fault" him for digging three times into his own anthology and magazine, and for going back an extra year for the Witchcraft and Sorcery story (but a Lafferty deserves the showcase)...but that would be foolishness, seeing the diversity of the sources tapped for this BOTY, along with the two newly-published short stories and Price's essay...

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



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Friday, August 11, 2017

FFB: ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S WITCH'S BREW edited by Henry Veit (Random House 1977)...as opposed to ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S WITCHES' BREW edited by the staff of ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE (Dell Books 1965)


Among the manifold confusions that the branding of "Alfred Hitchcock" anthologies has engendered, between their clutch of publishers (particularly Dell Books, which was in the "Hitchcock" anthology business the longest and mostest--and the books they didn't generate they often reprinted, the long Random House hardcovers frequently broken into two volumes each and sometimes with differing contents from the original anthologies and sometimes with new titles) and ghost-editors (it's not too clear that Hitchcock himself ever did much to edit any of the books credited to him; it's utterly clear that he didn't do much more than sign off in a general way on almost all of them, along with the magazine named for him and other similar products), one of those which can even vex such careful "Hitchcock" readers as Frank Babics and the folks at The Hitchcock Zone, much less all the others more casually engaged (such as ISFDB or GoodReads, and even WorldCat), is the similarity of titles between the last of the young readers' anthologies in the series Random House would publish, Henry Veit's 1977 Alfred Hitchcock's Witch's Brew, and the early (1965) entry in the long series of Dell Books paperback original volumes of stories drawn from the pages of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Witches' Brew, edited anonymously but presumably by the editorial staff at AHMM.  Hell, I tripped up on this when writing to George Kelley, who was trying to figure out the confusion these and other references had presented, in his post on both books a year or so back. 
The known ghost-editors of Hitchcock anthologies include: Don Ward (long-term Dell editor who did "Hitchcock" anthologies from the years before the AH Presents: tv series began and branding went into overdrive, with both the Random House anthologies and AHMM beginning along with the show in 1956; notably, later, Ward edited Zane Grey's Western Magazine for Dell), Patricia Hitchcock aka O'Connell (his daughter), most diversely and importantly Robert Arthur (the one who also wrote radio scripts as well as for a wide range of fiction magazines, and who edited such magazines as The Mysterious Traveler keyed to one of his radio series), Harold Q. Masur (who succeeded Robert Arthur as editor of Random House's anthologies aimed at adults when Arthur died rather young in 1969), Peter Haining (primarily for UK paperback line the New English Library's Four Square imprint), Muriel Fuller (a children's lit specialist who edited the first Random House YA, Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful, before Arthur took the series over till his death), and for the last two YA volumes, Veit. 

 So...I remember reading Alfred Hitchcock's Witch's Brew, already a bit nostalgically as I'd gone through Robert Arthur's YA Hitchcocks several years before, while sitting in detention at what was then Londonderry Junior High School one afternoon. I'd already read through some back issues of AHMM by that time, borrowed from the library or purchased at used book sales, but was a month or so away from buying my first new issue of AHMM (January 1978) and growing as addicted as I've been since to fiction magazines generally. Following the Robert Arthur YA model rather well (though it's arguably a bit less focused an anthology than most of the Arthur YAs, more like the Arthur and Masur Alfred Hitchcock Presents: adult anthologies thus, even given the witchy theme), it's a diverse and good collection of horror, fantasy and related stories mostly by notable writers in these fields, mixed in this case with a novel excerpt (from T. H. White's Arthurian fantasy The Sword in the Stone) and another novelty for the series, an abridged version of a story, this one probably an improvement on the original by the windy Sterling Lanier. 

 The contents of Witch's Brew (courtesy ISFDB and corrected with The FictionMags Index, since ISFDB incorrectly assumes several of the newer stories first appeared in the Dell anthology, which it mistakes for the first edition of this book):
Illustration from AH's Witch's Brew by Stephen Marchesi; scan courtesy The Hitchcock Zone.
Meanwhile, here is the Hitchcock Zone table of contents of Alfred Hitchcock's Witches' Brew, the 1965 AHMM best-of, with the pagination of the 1978 edition added by me, and original publication info from the FictionMags Index:

1965 first edition; not solely in paperback
6. Introduction by Alfred Hitchcock (ghost-written)
19. A Shot from the Dark Night by Avram Davidson  Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Feb 1958 (incorrectly cited in the book's acknowledgments as a 1960 story)
31. I Had a Hunch, and... by Talmage Powell (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine May 1959 (incorrectly cited in the book as a 1960 story) (also included in Alfred Hitchcock’s Anthology #18 1984)
43. A Killing in the Market by Robert Bloch Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine May 1958 (also included in Alfred Hitchcock’s Anthology #16 1983)
91. The Gentle Miss Bluebeard by Nedra Tyre Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Nov 1959
121. Just for Kicks by Richard Marsten (Evan Hunter) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1958
169. When Buying a Fine Murder by Jack Ritchie Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1960

Richard Decker was the AHMM editor for much of 1964, succeeded by G. F. Foster, so one or the other is probably the editor of this volume unless the Dell Books editor made the selection...or some combination...

Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology #13, a Davis Publications magazine issue, reprinted by the Dial Press (a Dell hardcover imprint) as Alfred Hitchcock's Death-Reach
Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology #18 reprinted by the Dial Press as Alfred Hitchcock's Crimewatch

I don't remember if I picked up my then-new 1978 third edition or the secondhand copy of the 1965 original first, but probably the former...I don't think I have a copy of the 1975 second edition from Dell:


The AHMM best-of is very much comparable, if certainly less diverse, a reading experience to the YA anthology of a dozen years earlier, with a similar mix of brilliant to decent writers; the classic Robert Bloch story in the Random House volume is certainly better than the good Bloch story in the AHMM book, but that's hardly a fair comparison, as "That Hell-Bound Train" is one of the key stories in Bloch's career. The ghosted introduction to the Dell book is rather funnier, one of the best in that series...one wonders who actually wrote it (perhaps devising editorials for her father was one of Patricia Hitchcock's duties in the office of the magazine). 

 For some reason, the Random House paperback editions of the YA volumes would often drop some of the stories, though I don't see that RH even ever offered a paperback reprint of Witch's Brew, though the UK saw both hardcover and paperback editions:





























For more of today's books, much more promptly reviewed, 
please see the gracious and patient Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, August 4, 2017

FFB: THE BARBIE MURDERS aka PICNIC ON NEARSIDE by John Varley (Berkley 1980)

In 1980, after the publication of his first three somewhat disappointing novels (to most if not necessarily all his fans) and the all but intolerably brilliant first, 1978, collection of his shorter fiction, Berkley, which was publishing his trilogy of novels beginning with Titan, decided to release The Barbie Murders, which appeared to be meant as the B-side collection of his shorter works. The Persistence of Vision (aka In the Hall of the Martian Kings in the UK; the two longest and most widely-hailed stories in the earlier volume thus vied for collection title for, no doubt, Publishers' Reasons), had been seen as kind of the cream of his shorter work published up to 1978; the weakest story in the book was also one of the most popular, "Air Raid," one of two Varley stories in the first issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and the source, after a torturous years-long process, of a not-bad short novel by Varley and a somewhat more disappointing film, script by Varley, starring Daniel Travanti, Cheryl Ladd and Kris Kristofferson, both entitled Millennium. "Air Raid" had been the one of the two in that IASFM issue published under a pseudonym (in longstanding bad magazine-publishing tradition, that would suggest two stories by the same writer in an issue Would Be Wrong), while "Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe" (the better story, I'd say, and perhaps Varley would, too) was published under the John Varley byline. 

 So, these were the stories published in this volume, most of them also pretty damned brilliant, and certainly better, at very least on average, than the novels Varley was publishing in those years (as did his occasional editor Damon Knight, Varley showed a remarkable tendency to slough off good sense or believable character development at novel length, despite being so very good at both in even novellas as well as shorter fiction; both would eventually get past that, Varley happily rather sooner in his career than Knight in his): 
    The Barbie Murders John Varley (Berkley, Sep ’80, pb) (1984 Berkley edition retitled Picnic on Nearside)
While these had been the stories gathered in The Persistence of Vision, one of the several volumes published in a new and sadly short-lived program edited by D, R. Bensen, who had been Pyramid Books' primary editor for more than two decades, and who had been rewarded, after Harcourt Brace Jovanovich bought up Pyramid and rebranded it as Jove Books, with the new Quantum imprint, with some serious promotion and editorial budget, the books published by a consortium of James Wade and Dell Books (and Dell's subsidiary hardcover line the Dial Press), duly reprinted in Britain by Sidgwick & Jackson. (Quantum launched with the first and probably least bad of Varley's first five or six disappointing novels, The Ophiuchi Hotline.)
    The Persistence of Vision John Varley (Quantum/Dial, 1978, hc)
    UK editions (Sidgwick & Jackson/Futura 1978) as In the Hall of the Martian Kings.
    • Introduction · Algis Budrys · in
    • The Phantom of Kansas · nv Galaxy Feb 1976
    • Air Raid · ss Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Spr 1977, as by Herb Boehm
    • Retrograde Summer · nv F&SF Feb 1975
    • The Black Hole Passes · nv F&SF Jun 1975
    • In the Hall of the Martian Kings · na F&SF Feb 1977
    • In the Bowl · nv F&SF Dec 1975
    • Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance · nv Galaxy Jul 1976
    • Overdrawn at the Memory Bank · nv Galaxy May 1976
    • The Persistence of Vision · na F&SF Mar 1978

It's not putting it lightly how mind-blowing Varley's short fiction, up to novella length, was for me as 13yo reader, digging deeply into the new fiction magazines for the first time in 1978, and in my first new issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction finding Varley for the first time with the novella "The Persistence of Vision" and needing to see as much of his fiction as I could gather. He was doing what Heinlein could no longer do, and had been less adept at even at his best (and in establishing a template, or further establishing that of H. G. Wells and other forebears), in providing glimpses of actually lived-in futures, and ones where technological quantum leaps had had concomitant effects on the lives and behavior of the characters, including no little their sexuality. Varley had a very 1970s-era sexual libertinism inherent in much of his work (which also didn't offend me at all at thirteen, relatively alienated and well into puberty) but managed to express it for the most part naturally through a sophisticated take on his characters' lives and interactions, in posited worlds where changing bodies was only mildly more difficult than changing clothes, and (in many of his linked stories) humanity had been displaced from Earth by alien invaders, who came to save the cetaceans, and thus the human diaspora was spread across the other planets and other bodies of the Solar System, giving Varley a lovely assortment of (then up-to-date-detailed) environments on those planets, etc., to explore. Joanna Russ noted that his female characters were unusually good for a male writer, perhaps for all writers (given how there simply was less tradition of good portrayal of women in fiction, not least fantastic fiction, to draw on); Algis Budrys suggested that at his best, Varley was drawing together all the things that science fiction, at least, could do best and uniquely. Even as a new reader of the new work in the field, it felt to me like Varley, while perhaps not the best creator of lapidary prose in the field at the time, was nonetheless otherwise ahead of (nearly if not) everyone else's curve in showing how a future life might be, indeed a quantum jump of his own in the way that, say, Stanley Weinbaum's work had been in the late 1930s in sf, albeit Varley was innovating in a now much richer and vastly more sophisticated tradition. 

And while the stories in the earlier collection averaged a bit more brilliant (and the next collection, Blue Champagne, would also have a slightly better if less startling batting average), the majority here are more than fine, such as "Robinson Crusoe" or "Picnic on Nearside", and the intentionally outrageous "Lollipop and the Tar Baby" (which features among other things a sentient black hole and is one of the most explicitly sex-driven of Varley's stories); all are worthy of standing with his other early short fiction (and most of it has been offered again in Varley's most recent and retrospective collections, The John Varley Reader and Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories). Original title story "The Barbie Murders" was the second account, after introduction in "Bagatelle", of police officer Anna-Louise Bach, whom as Varley has noted lives in a somewhat grittier future than that of most of his human-diaspora stories (I believe Mattel, the doll line's manufacturer, took issue with the book's first title, in part driving the retitling, not that the second title isn't a better one for the collection...wish we could say the same for the new cover). Both Berkley editions were released to coincide with first releases of the latter two novels cited in the blurb between Varley's name and the book title on the cover below.

But I will grant it's better than the Orion/Futura UK paperback cover on the first collection:

Though even that is vastly better than what Futura did with The Barbie Murders in their edition:

For swank, and eyewash, here are the somewhat more dignified and better covers Varley has had on his collections since: 



Though I will grant that none of the covers are absolutely brilliant, and this one particularly seems to me could've used another draft...

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