From ISFDB (supplemented by the FictionMags Index):- Publication: Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, April 1963
(View All Issues) (View Issue Grid) - Editor: Cele Goldsmith
- Year: 1963-04-00
- Publisher: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company
- Price: $0.35
- Pages: 132
- Binding: digest
- Cover: Frank Bruno
- Contents:
- 4 • According to You ... (Fantastic, April 1963) • letter column conducted by Norman Lobsenz, and including a letter from Robert Coulson, along with two others...
- 5 • Editorial (Fantastic, April 1963) • essay by Norman Lobsenz ("editorial director" and essentially only the public corporate voice for the Goldsmith ZD magazines, since she was rather young...and a woman and all...)
- 6 • Some Fabulous Yonder • novelette by Philip José Farmer
- 6 • Some Fabulous Yonder • interior artwork by Bruno
- 47 • The Malatesta Collection • shortstory by Roger Zelazny
- 50 • The Malatesta Collection • interior artwork by Lee Brown Coye [as by Coye ]
- 53 • A Fate Worse Than... • shortstory by Robert Rohrer (variant of A Fate Worse Than ...) [as by Robert H. Rohrer, Jr. ]
- 54 • A Fate Worse Than... • interior artwork by Leo Summers [as by Summers ]
- 58 • The Casket-Demon • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
- 58 • The Casket-Demon • interior artwork by Lee Brown Coye
- 70 • Survival Packages • [Moderan] • shortstory by David R. Bunch
- 70 • Survival Packages • interior artwork by Leo Summers [as by Summers ]
- 75 • A Thing of Terrible Beauty • shortstory by Roger Zelazny [as by Harrison Denmark]
- 77 • A Thing of Terrible Beauty • interior artwork by Blair
- 82 • Rain Magic: Introduction • (1928) • essay by Erle Stanley Gardner from Argosy All-Story Weekly Oct 20 1928
- 82 • Rain Magic • interior artwork by Dan Adkins [as by Adkins ]
- 86 • Rain Magic • (1928) • novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner from Argosy All-Story Weekly Oct 20 1928
- 120 • Possible to Rue • shortstory by Piers Anthony
- 120 • Possible to Rue • interior artwork by Leo Summers [as by Summers ]
- 124 • Fantasy Books (Fantastic, April 1963) • [Fantasy Books (Fantastic)] • essay by S. E. Cotts
- 124 • Review: The Frankenstein Reader edited by Calvin Thomas Beck; The Fiend in You edited by Charles Beaumont • reviews by S. E. Cotts
- bc • The Casket-Demon [bc] • artwork by Lee Brown Coye
- Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1964
(View All Issues) (View Issue Grid) - Editor: Avram Davidson
- Year: 1964-02-00
- Publisher: Mercury Press, Inc.
- Price: $0.40
- Pages: 132
- Binding: digest
- Cover: Jack Gaughan
- Contents:
- 4 • Editorial (F&SF, February 1964) • [Editorial (F&SF)] • essay by Avram Davidson
- 5 • The House by the Crab Apple Tree • novelette by S. S. Johnson
- 28 • The Shepherd of Esdon Pen • shortstory by P. M. Hubbard
- 35 • [essay series The Science Springboard:] Our Fuzzy Moon • essay by Theodore L. Thomas
- 36 • Ms Found in a Bottle Washed up on the Sands of Time • poem by Harry Harrison
- 37 • Nobody Starves • shortstory by Ron Goulart
- 48 • One Hundred Days from Home • shortstory by Dean McLaughlin
- 63 • The Slowly Moving Finger • [Asimov's Essays: F&SF] • essay by Isaac Asimov
- 73 • Little Gregory • novelette by Evelyn E. Smith
- 93 • Books (F&SF, February 1964) • [Books (F&SF)] • essay by Avram Davidson
- 93 • Review: A Sense of Reality by Graham Greene • review by Avram Davidson
- 94 • Review: 5 Tales from Tomorrow: Selected from the Best Science-fiction Stories and Novels: 1955 by T. E. Dikty • review by Avram Davidson
- 94 • Review: Eros and Evil by R. E. L. Masters • review by Avram Davidson
- 94 • Review: Radio Astronomy for Amateurs by Frank W. Hyde • review by Avram Davidson
- 94 • Review: The Big Dish by Roger Piper • review by Avram Davidson
- 95 • Review: Intelligent Life in Space by Frank D. Drake • review by Avram Davidson
- 95 • Review: The Secrets of Dr. Taverner by Dion Fortune • review by Avram Davidson
- 95 • Review: A Survey of the Moon by Patrick Moore • review by Avram Davidson
- 96 • Review: Seconds by David Ely • review by Avram Davidson
- 96 • Review: Man on Earth by S. P. R. Charter • review by Avram Davidson
- 96 • Review: Who Fears the Devil? by Manly Wade Wellman • review by Avram Davidson
- 97 • Review: Man and the Sun by Jacquetta Hawkes • review by Avram Davidson
- 97 • Review: The World of Flying Saucers by Donald H. Menzel and Lyle G. Boyd • review by Avram Davidson
- 97 • Review: Essays on a Science of Mythology by C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi • review by Walter Breen
- 100 • Burning Spear • shortstory by Kit Denton
- 105 • In the Bag • shortstory by Laurence M. Janifer
- 107 • The Fan: Myth and Reality • essay by Wilson Tucker
- 113 • Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming • shortstory by Doris Pitkin Buck
- 127 • Letters (F&SF, February 1964) • conducted by Avram Davidson
Two issues, less than a year apart rather than (as is my usual practice in such things) as close to on the stands simultaneously as is practical. But these happened to be two issues which were in a convenient stack, and rather good ones of either magazine, the most consistently published US fantasy/sf magazines in the 1950s-70s, and at many times the best, even when not the only (which wasn't too uncommon, either).
The two best stories in their respective issues (so far) are the familiar ones to me (from Leiber's collections and anthology appearance for the Johnson), Fritz Leiber's "The Casket Demon" in Fantastic and S. S. Johnson's "The House by the Crab Apple Tree" in F&SF. The Leiber is a sly bit of humorous horror, involving a generational curse afflicting a Prussian family whose current representative among the living is a hardbitten Hollywood sexpot, and the ways the eponymous demon can be...incompletely...foiled (also notable is how the very distinctive illustrator Lee Brown Coye chose to represent the determined actress). The Johnson is as brutal a post-apocalyptic tale as you can possibly want...recently discussed on F&SF's forum as a rather obvious anticipation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (not that that novel doesn't have dozens of literary fathers, and not a few at least as good), it's an example of the kind of controversial story editor Avram Davidson would seek out and publish even more often than most of his fellow F&SF editors over the decades. (Allen Kim Lang's "Thaw and Serve," which anticipates rather more intelligently and viscerally "Demolition Man" the film, is another which comes to mind, and Ray Nelson's work likewise pushed some envelope seams.) Johnson, 24 when the story was published (and a sports reporter for the Hartford Courant at 14, apparently), took his doctorate in English and had an academic career, submitting a short story collection and apparently a novel as his theses but never publishing them, and instead collaborating on a technical writing text as apparently his only other published work (that we've seen, so far). Johnson's rather prodigious nature is echoed by Robert Rohrer, who has a decent, notional fantasy, itself post-apocalyptic, in the earlier issue, involving the changing nature of the holy and unholy supernatural world after the nuclear culling of so much of the human population. Rohrer published a double-handful of short stories in sf and fantasy magazines between the ages of 15 and 18, and then abruptly ceased in 1965...one hopes it wasn't the result of, say, military experiences that left him unwilling or unable to continue.
What helped distinguish the two magazines under these editors in the early '60s was their mutual openness to odd approaches, literary adventurousness, and generally furthering the expansion of the palette in newsstand sf and fantasy that had begun in earnest in the better magazines of the 1950s, and would be a little (but not Too much) more pronounced in the British magazines New Worlds and Impulse. To one degree or another such challenging work would continue to appear in Fantastic (and its stablemate Amazing) and F&SF, and also was making itself felt in the magazines Frederik Pohl was editing from the latest '50s onward through the '60s, at first as a shadow assistant to the ailing H. L. Gold, Galaxy, If, and eventually Worlds of Tomorrow and International Science Fiction. Writer/editor Michael Moorcock criticized Davidson for publishing too much jocular and slight fiction, and there was some of that, but never enough to undermine to seriousness of F&SF as a magazine; Cele Goldsmith (later to marry and sign herself Cele Lalli and later in her career as Cele Goldsmith Lalli) also could be drawn to notional stories at times to a fault, but she could also fill her magazines with stories as beautifully written as the Leiber, the two good stories in this issue by Roger Zelazny (one published as by "Harrison Denmark," his pseudonym which impishly pointed toward Harry Harrison, then resident in Denmark, as the man behind the name) and the David Bunch "Moderan" story, a series of heavily symbolic sf Bunch would contribute to throughout his career. Another decent joke story in her issue is the first published fiction by Piers Anthony, "Possible to Rue," involving a very odd sort of comeuppance to a parental fib or two. (Goldsmith Lalli was the first or practically the first to publish as professional fiction writers Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas Disch, Keith Laumer, Sonya Dorman, Ted White and Kate Wilhelm, along with Anthony and a number of others...Ben Bova's first work in sf magazines was a series of essays in her Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction).
F&SF certainly takes the lead in contrasting the non-fiction features between the two issues; in the Fantastic, the Norman Lobsenz "editorial" is a bit meatier than his usual facile essay, though mostly in being about some of the more interesting advances in information and space technology newly arrived or on the horizon, rather than in being all that deep; the letter column is pleasant enough, and the (also often shallow) book reviewer S. E. Cotts has a rather good assessment of two horror anthologies, one mediocre, from Norman Bates-inspiration and enterprising film fan Calvin Thomas Beck and a brilliant one edited by soon-tragic, brilliant fiction and script writer (and former F&SF film columnist) Charles Beaumont (Jeff Segal has reviewed the latter here...and probably would review the former if it was to hand). However, the Erle Stanley Gardner "introduction" letter to his reprinted story is a nice touch, and Fantastic, unlike F&SF, does feature illustration for most of its text items. The F&SF editorial, the often long headnotes to the stories, and the bulk of the book reviews are by editor Davidson, default choice for my favorite writer of any kind, when one must be named (one review is by the then just beginning to become notorious fan, and husband of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Walter Breen, whose review of a Jung text somewhat creepily touches on children as sexual archetypes). The magazine had two science columns in the early '60s, with Isaac Asimov's long-running essay series joined for several years by Theodore L. Thomas's two-page essays on a monthly basis, and this issue has one of the occasional letter columns F&SF would run (rather more infrequently since Davidson's years), featuring a number of mildly famous figures in fannish and eventually professional circles, and an essay, one of a short series Davidson would offer, of examinations of sf and fantasy fandom, this one by Wilson Tucker (next month's by Robert Bloch, the third by Terry Carr), from a time when fandom and geek culture had not yet multiplied to take up significant amounts of space in the world.
Both issues are filled with notable writers, even if Johnson would publish so regrettably little, and Rohrer fall silent; the other example of a writer with few other credits in fantastic fiction, at least, is the Australian (Mr.) Kit Denton, whose possibly only published short story is also in the F&SF. P. M. Hubbard (a Davidson favorite) and Erle Stanley Gardner, with a "classic" reprint from Argosy All-Story Weekly (part of a series in Goldsmith's magazines), are among those better remembered for their crime fiction--Goldsmith presumably offered the classics in part to help the budget woes at her magazines, which were allowed a base rate of pay of 1c/word for their fiction and other content during her years at Ziff-Davis; the reprints would get big names into the issues and presumably could be purchased at bargain reprint rates, to allow her, as she did, to offer a higher pay rate to such favorites of hers as Fritz Leiber (F&SF has also never been the best-paying magazine in the fantastic-fiction field, though currently it's on par with most of its fellow-travelers). F&SF's Ron Goulart (his first professional publication a decade+ previous F&SF reprint of some sfnal humor from the UC Berkeley campus magazine Pelican) was just starting to get serious about his often satirical crime fiction along with his established career in fantastic fiction, and would soon become almost as much a speculative fiction/crime fiction "amphibian" as Davidson himself; his story here seems at first Just Another Comic Inferno story, but it does have a bit of Kafkaesque intensity that the more generic examples usually lacked. Evelyn E. Smith, Dean McLaughlin and Laurence Janifer (with a clever-enough joke-story) had all established themselves as at least capable talents in the fields, and while Doris Pitkin Buck was better known for her light verse in the magazine, her fiction contribution wasn't too much more unusual than Harry Harrison's amusing poem about time travel paradoxes. I still need to read the long cover story by Philip Jose Farmer (himself a writer not averse to challenging fiction at times) in the Fantastic and several of the shorts in the F&SF, but I'm glad I did dip into these for this week's column...which will be filled out soon!
For more of this week's fiction (and some nf) you should know about, please see Patti Abbott's blog; next week I'll be hosting the links, barring the flood.
The two best stories in their respective issues (so far) are the familiar ones to me (from Leiber's collections and anthology appearance for the Johnson), Fritz Leiber's "The Casket Demon" in Fantastic and S. S. Johnson's "The House by the Crab Apple Tree" in F&SF. The Leiber is a sly bit of humorous horror, involving a generational curse afflicting a Prussian family whose current representative among the living is a hardbitten Hollywood sexpot, and the ways the eponymous demon can be...incompletely...foiled (also notable is how the very distinctive illustrator Lee Brown Coye chose to represent the determined actress). The Johnson is as brutal a post-apocalyptic tale as you can possibly want...recently discussed on F&SF's forum as a rather obvious anticipation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (not that that novel doesn't have dozens of literary fathers, and not a few at least as good), it's an example of the kind of controversial story editor Avram Davidson would seek out and publish even more often than most of his fellow F&SF editors over the decades. (Allen Kim Lang's "Thaw and Serve," which anticipates rather more intelligently and viscerally "Demolition Man" the film, is another which comes to mind, and Ray Nelson's work likewise pushed some envelope seams.) Johnson, 24 when the story was published (and a sports reporter for the Hartford Courant at 14, apparently), took his doctorate in English and had an academic career, submitting a short story collection and apparently a novel as his theses but never publishing them, and instead collaborating on a technical writing text as apparently his only other published work (that we've seen, so far). Johnson's rather prodigious nature is echoed by Robert Rohrer, who has a decent, notional fantasy, itself post-apocalyptic, in the earlier issue, involving the changing nature of the holy and unholy supernatural world after the nuclear culling of so much of the human population. Rohrer published a double-handful of short stories in sf and fantasy magazines between the ages of 15 and 18, and then abruptly ceased in 1965...one hopes it wasn't the result of, say, military experiences that left him unwilling or unable to continue.
 |
| back cover of the Fantastic; not Lee Brown Coye's image of the Hollywood actress in the story, though of an earlier curse victim |
What helped distinguish the two magazines under these editors in the early '60s was their mutual openness to odd approaches, literary adventurousness, and generally furthering the expansion of the palette in newsstand sf and fantasy that had begun in earnest in the better magazines of the 1950s, and would be a little (but not Too much) more pronounced in the British magazines New Worlds and Impulse. To one degree or another such challenging work would continue to appear in Fantastic (and its stablemate Amazing) and F&SF, and also was making itself felt in the magazines Frederik Pohl was editing from the latest '50s onward through the '60s, at first as a shadow assistant to the ailing H. L. Gold, Galaxy, If, and eventually Worlds of Tomorrow and International Science Fiction. Writer/editor Michael Moorcock criticized Davidson for publishing too much jocular and slight fiction, and there was some of that, but never enough to undermine to seriousness of F&SF as a magazine; Cele Goldsmith (later to marry and sign herself Cele Lalli and later in her career as Cele Goldsmith Lalli) also could be drawn to notional stories at times to a fault, but she could also fill her magazines with stories as beautifully written as the Leiber, the two good stories in this issue by Roger Zelazny (one published as by "Harrison Denmark," his pseudonym which impishly pointed toward Harry Harrison, then resident in Denmark, as the man behind the name) and the David Bunch "Moderan" story, a series of heavily symbolic sf Bunch would contribute to throughout his career. Another decent joke story in her issue is the first published fiction by Piers Anthony, "Possible to Rue," involving a very odd sort of comeuppance to a parental fib or two. (Goldsmith Lalli was the first or practically the first to publish as professional fiction writers Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas Disch, Keith Laumer, Sonya Dorman, Ted White and Kate Wilhelm, along with Anthony and a number of others...Ben Bova's first work in sf magazines was a series of essays in her Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction).
 |
| includes "The Casket Demon" |
F&SF certainly takes the lead in contrasting the non-fiction features between the two issues; in the Fantastic, the Norman Lobsenz "editorial" is a bit meatier than his usual facile essay, though mostly in being about some of the more interesting advances in information and space technology newly arrived or on the horizon, rather than in being all that deep; the letter column is pleasant enough, and the (also often shallow) book reviewer S. E. Cotts has a rather good assessment of two horror anthologies, one mediocre, from Norman Bates-inspiration and enterprising film fan Calvin Thomas Beck and a brilliant one edited by soon-tragic, brilliant fiction and script writer (and former F&SF film columnist) Charles Beaumont (Jeff Segal has reviewed the latter here...and probably would review the former if it was to hand). However, the Erle Stanley Gardner "introduction" letter to his reprinted story is a nice touch, and Fantastic, unlike F&SF, does feature illustration for most of its text items. The F&SF editorial, the often long headnotes to the stories, and the bulk of the book reviews are by editor Davidson, default choice for my favorite writer of any kind, when one must be named (one review is by the then just beginning to become notorious fan, and husband of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Walter Breen, whose review of a Jung text somewhat creepily touches on children as sexual archetypes). The magazine had two science columns in the early '60s, with Isaac Asimov's long-running essay series joined for several years by Theodore L. Thomas's two-page essays on a monthly basis, and this issue has one of the occasional letter columns F&SF would run (rather more infrequently since Davidson's years), featuring a number of mildly famous figures in fannish and eventually professional circles, and an essay, one of a short series Davidson would offer, of examinations of sf and fantasy fandom, this one by Wilson Tucker (next month's by Robert Bloch, the third by Terry Carr), from a time when fandom and geek culture had not yet multiplied to take up significant amounts of space in the world.
Both issues are filled with notable writers, even if Johnson would publish so regrettably little, and Rohrer fall silent; the other example of a writer with few other credits in fantastic fiction, at least, is the Australian (Mr.) Kit Denton, whose possibly only published short story is also in the F&SF. P. M. Hubbard (a Davidson favorite) and Erle Stanley Gardner, with a "classic" reprint from Argosy All-Story Weekly (part of a series in Goldsmith's magazines), are among those better remembered for their crime fiction--Goldsmith presumably offered the classics in part to help the budget woes at her magazines, which were allowed a base rate of pay of 1c/word for their fiction and other content during her years at Ziff-Davis; the reprints would get big names into the issues and presumably could be purchased at bargain reprint rates, to allow her, as she did, to offer a higher pay rate to such favorites of hers as Fritz Leiber (F&SF has also never been the best-paying magazine in the fantastic-fiction field, though currently it's on par with most of its fellow-travelers). F&SF's Ron Goulart (his first professional publication a decade+ previous F&SF reprint of some sfnal humor from the UC Berkeley campus magazine Pelican) was just starting to get serious about his often satirical crime fiction along with his established career in fantastic fiction, and would soon become almost as much a speculative fiction/crime fiction "amphibian" as Davidson himself; his story here seems at first Just Another Comic Inferno story, but it does have a bit of Kafkaesque intensity that the more generic examples usually lacked. Evelyn E. Smith, Dean McLaughlin and Laurence Janifer (with a clever-enough joke-story) had all established themselves as at least capable talents in the fields, and while Doris Pitkin Buck was better known for her light verse in the magazine, her fiction contribution wasn't too much more unusual than Harry Harrison's amusing poem about time travel paradoxes. I still need to read the long cover story by Philip Jose Farmer (himself a writer not averse to challenging fiction at times) in the Fantastic and several of the shorts in the F&SF, but I'm glad I did dip into these for this week's column...which will be filled out soon! |
| the UK hardcover featuring the Johnson |
For more of this week's fiction (and some nf) you should know about, please see Patti Abbott's blog; next week I'll be hosting the links, barring the flood.
 |
| Richard Powers cover for the middling anthology from the editor/publisher of Castle of Frankenstein, and Robert Bloch's model, in part, for Norman Bates, in the novel Psycho...from Ballantine's early '60s horror series... |
10 comments:
Cele Goldsmith turned a pig's ear into a silk purse. Working on a shoestring budget, she managed to publish some wonderful stories in AMAZING and FANTASTIC. Once she left, those magazines fell to junk status.
I'd say that was incompletely true, George...even Joseph "Ross" on his micro-budget was able to publish some good new material (including a short form of Davidson's THE PHOENIX AND THE MIRROR), along with the reprints, and subsequent editors Harry Harrison and Barry Malzberg pushed the magazine a little further along toward interesting new material, and Ted White and, briefly, Elinor Mavor were able to publish considerable good material...and then TSR came along to buy and threw money at the surviving merged magazine, particularly after Spielberg threw money at TSR to rent the AMAZING STORIES title for that dismal NBC-TV series, so there was no lack of budget, if not much interest in competent distribution, for some years...and more good material published.
Enjoyed reading this almost encyclopedic piece on two fascinating magazines, Todd. I haven't read sf/fantasy in more than a year. But then, I haven't read much of anything in recent months.
Thanks, Prashant...the literature awaits you...treat yourself when you can.
I'm tempted to dig out the F&SF issue to read the Johnson. I wonder what types of stories that collection had?
Paul
I'll hope to find out.
Lots of lovely Leiber - always a good thing :)
The F&SF cover-dated the same as the FANTASTIC also had a Leiber short..."Kindergarten"...very vaguely recall it.
Just catching up to this post as I was tracking back on your Avram Davidson reviews and read your speculation regarding Robert Rohrer. I met him a couple of times in an Atlanta used book store when we were both teenagers in high school and we chatted pleasantly. The fact that I didn't drop dead of jealousy over his being a published writer already still surprises me.
About a decade later after college and the army, I was at a crowded, noisy party given by a friend who was a reporter with the Atlanta newspapers. At some point, the host introduced me to Rohrer saying "he works on our news desk."
I had not recognized him by sight but as soon as I heard his name, I reached out my hand and said "Oh yes, the science fiction writer." He gave the biggest double-take I've ever seen and laughing said that was the first time that had ever happened to him. I asked him why he had stopped writing after such a fine start--I subscribed to both Ziff-Davis mags and F&SF and so read most of his stories. He said in college (he went to Emory University) his interests moved to other areas--my distant memory is those interests involved music.
I never ran into him again--I was a reporter and news editor for a state radio network so met many newspaper reporters but seldom desk editors. We had and have a good many mutual friends as I see his name pop up on Facebook. By all accounts, he's a great guy. He continued to work for the Atlanta newspapers, retiring from there a few years back. My only other contact was indirect. Mike Ashley was trying to locate him and I passed along contact information.
Excellent information. Rohrer says something similar, and as little-detailed, in his memoir in the 1965 issue of F&SF as reprinted by Southern Illinois University Press...something I recently picked up for the first time since reading a library copy 30+ years ago. Thanks!
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