Two issues off the shelf, and I thought I'd mention (in first pass, anyway) the stories I particularly remembered, from collecting and reading these two some years back or from reading beforehand the stories collected elsewhere, contemporary issues (as Fantastic was a bimonthly that year) and both published just over a decade before I was born.
Neither has the best cover that either magazine would sport in their early years, though the F&SF cover did inspire Alfred Bester to write the impressive cover story, my default choice for his best short fiction.
Shirley Jackson's first short story for F&SF, "Bulletin", is a fine jape in the form of a story of apparatus, several fragments or documents returned from a time-traveler's investigation of the U.S. in 2123, including a scrap from the New York Herald-Tribune (well, it Could be possible again, eventually), a US history exam questions sheet from a frosh course in an unnamed college, a letter home from summer camp from a young boy, and a Your Weight and Fortune card...something a bit Retro even in 1954, I think. Jackson has the most fun with the history exam questions, running some jokes by us that could be a bit recondite even for relatively well-informed readers today, seven decades later ("Identify Twelve of the Following:", with the appended list including "Sinclair (Joe) Louis", and "Sergeant Cuff"--the pseudonym once used, adorably, by Saturday Review magazine crime-fiction reviewer John Winterich, after the character in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone).
"5,271,009" digs a bit deeper, and is just as funny, as Alfred Bester introduces us to a humanoid alien who chooses to aid a human artist whose work he has admired, the latter currently locked up in a psychiatric hospital after some acting out. The mysterious Mr. Solon Aquila, who speaks in a jazzy patois that drops in phrases from various languages and types of English-language slang, forces Jeffrey Halsyon to undergo a series of psychodramas that rather savagely mock a number of childish and adolescent fantasies not altogether uncommon to fantasy readers/fans and rather more conventional people, alike. Bester once had it collected in an early volume as "The Starcomber" (a reference to Aquila, as akin to a beachcomber), but was convinced to revert to the magazine title for subsequent reprints.
"All Summer in a Day" is one of Ray Bradbury's most widely-reprinted stories, set on his fantasy of the planet Venus as an environment of endless rain, albeit at a livable temperature for its largely unprotected human colonists, including a young girl who is locked by her classmates away so that she misses the one afternoon of relatively clear skies and opportunity to romp about in recess one year. A bit heavy-handed, I thought even as I read it for the first time in a 7th-grade reading textbook, but makes its points; Bradbury apparently approved a 2002 sequel story by one Jason Marchi, originally published in Verbicide magazine, and eventually in a chapbook with the Bradbury story and introduction by Bradbury's old friend William F. Nolan.
"Dumb Supper", as Manly Wade Wellman originally called and would again title this John the Balladeer story, in the collection Who Fears the Devil? and subsequently, is a fine entry in this cycle, but I'll have to reread it to recall which events occur in this entry in the series vs. the others. They reward rereading, as prime examples of folk horror and fantasy decades before that term achieved its current fashionable status.
Robert Bloch's "Mr. Steinway", with a handsome, boldly inked illustration by Bill Ashman in this issue of Fantastic, is a fine example of a kind of haunted object story that Bloch executes here (and on most other occasions) with panache, one of the earlier examples of his work in this mode to appear other than in Weird Tales, the magazine which folded for the first long stretch in 1954, and which had helped launch or further the careers of so many of the best fantasy and horror writers of the early 20th century in English.
Jerome Bixby's "The Young One", involving a New Kid in town who definitely seems to have Something Odd going on (as do his parents), is an utterly charming story that I first encountered in one of Robert Arthur's YA "Hitchcock"-branded anthologies published by Random House in the 1960s. Happily, this kid is far less threatening than the protagonist in Bixby's most famous story, "It's a Good Life--"
Gahan Wilson has two of his first professional cartoons in this issue, having sold his very first to Fantastic for publication in the January, 1954 issue, and one can see the seeds of his career in the early examples here, and in the other Fantastic and stablemate Amazing Stories issues of the period...his drawing style not yet as distinctive, but the kind of subject matter he was drawn to already clear. His tenure at the Ziff-Davis magazines not nearly as long as it would be at F&SF during Edward Ferman's editorship; a pity for the ZD magazines and their readers.
Much as with the Wellman story, I know I've read (and enjoyed) the Sturgeon, which I read at least in Sturgeon in Orbit under his preferred title of "Extrapolation", but will have to reread, at least skim, it to help segregate it from other good Sturgeon stories of the era.
Fantastic, April 1954 --can be read here
- Editor: Howard Browne
- Cover: Fantastic, April 1954 by Augusto Marin
- fep/inside front cover • Louis Priscilla: A Portfolio • essay by uncredited
- fep • Louis Priscilla: A Portfolio • interior artwork by Louis Priscilla
- 4 • According to You ... (Fantastic, April 1954) • [According to You (Fantastic)] • letter column by various
- 6 • The Letter • short story by Doris E. Kaye
- 6 • The Letter • interior artwork by Ernest Schroeder
- 23 • Cartoon: no caption • interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
- 25 • Mr. Steinway • short story by Robert Bloch
- 28 • Mr. Steinway • interior artwork by Ashman [as by Bill Ashman]
- 38 • The Young One • novelette by Jerome Bixby
- 38 • The Young One • interior artwork by Sanford Kossin
- 62 • One Foot in Yesterday • essay by William Lindsay Gresham
- 62 • One Foot in Yesterday • interior artwork by Ashman [as by Bill Ashman]
- 68 • Cartoon: no caption • interior artwork by Hanna
- 70 • A Portfolio • interior artwork by Louis Priscilla
- 74 • Beware the Fury • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon (variant of Extrapolation)
- 74 • Beware the Fury • interior artwork by Louis Priscilla
- 79 • Cartoon: "Could you direct me to the Vampire State Building?" • interior artwork by Frosty
- 95 • The Moon and Nonsense • novelette by William P. McGivern
- 97 • The Moon and Nonsense • interior artwork by Louis Priscilla
- 101 • Cartoon: "Sorry, sir--no browsing in the occult section." • interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
- 114 • Cartoon: "No, No, Smithers! I said get me Rosenbaum!" • interior artwork by uncredited
- 116 • Anything to Declare? • interior artwork by uncredited
- 116 • Anything to Declare? • short story by Eric Frank Russell [as by Naille Wilde]
- 127 • Cartoon: "That surrealist stuff bores me." • interior artwork by Carl Geren
- Editors: Anthony Boucher, J. Francis McComas
- Cover: 5, 271,009 by Fred Kirberger
- 3 • 5,271,009 • novelette by Alfred Bester
- 33 • Mrs. Hinck • short story by Miriam Allen deFord
- 39 • Spunk Water • short story by Bill Brown
- 46 • Bulletin • short story by Shirley Jackson
- 49 • The Last Caper • short story by Charles Beaumont
- 58 • Man Friday • novelette by Roger Dee
- 78 • The Firefighter • short story by Robert Abernathy
- 81 • Call Me from the Valley • [John the Balladeer] • short story by Manly Wade Wellman (variant of Dumb Supper)
- 91 • Recommended Reading (F&SF, March 1954) • [Recommended Reading]: "The Best Science-Fantasy Books of 1953" • essay by The Editors;
- among the many sf, fantasy, and associational titles cited:
- 92 • Review: Out of the Deeps by John Wyndham • review by The Editors
- 92 • Review: Expedition to Earth by Arthur C. Clarke • review by The Editors
- 93 • Review: The Lights in the Sky are Stars by Fredric Brown • review by The Editors
- 95 • Sriberdegibit • (1943) • novelette by Anthony Boucher
- 122 • All Summer in a Day • [All Summer in a Day series] • short story by Ray Bradbury
- 127 • Two More Outstanding Writers! (F&SF, March 1954) • house ad by uncredited (touting upcoming stories by "William Tenn" and Marion Zimmer Bradley, among others)
6 comments:
I remember both issues, especially the Lee Brown Coye-ish cover on FANTASTIC. The stories in FANTASTIC ranged from good to readable; the cartoons, with the exception of Gahan Wilson, not so much. The F&SF had some really great content with Bester, deFord, Jackson, Beaumont, Boucher, and Bradbury; Wellman's John the Balladeer stories were always a main attraction for me in F&SF. The book review column listed the Best Science-Fantasy Books of 1953 and I was very pleased by the editor's comments about Brown's THE LIGHTS IN THE SKY ARE STARS, one of my all-time favorite books: "probably the best small scale, intimate s.f. of the year."
Yes, whoever created the citation for the books column in ISFDB really dropped the ball there, and I'll go ahead and get that expanded. Boucher would later thunder, in the WHO KILLED SF? era of 1958, that even the "secondary" novels of 1953 such as the Brown would shine like a supernova in the context of the current year's crop.
"Mr. Steinway" is a bit more than good, I'd suggest...Bloch thought so, too, as he included it in THE BEST OF ROBERT BLOCH volume. But you're certainly right about the Other cartoonists in FANTASTIC--not a memorable panel, except for corniness, that isn't one of the two Gahans. The Bradbury is not, by me, his best--good but handwringing, definitely not his worst, but not going to make anyone forget "The Sound of Thunder" or "Skeleton". I definitely need to read the Beaumont, which I've missed over the years. I will probably like the McGivern more than most would...the Jackson almost, not quite, prefigures Wilma Shore's first F&SF story, "The Bulletin of the Trustees..." in '64.
Glad to trigger youthful memory! Certainly the Bradbury and the Bixby bring me back to my single-digit years and just after.
I actually owned that cool FANTASTIC issue with the eye-popping cover artwork! It now resides at the State University at Buffalo's Special Collections. I was five years old when these two issues were published...I could read a little, but not at SF level yet.
Many critics consider the 1950s the Golden Age of SF magazines. I know that years later I bought issues of SF magazines from the Fifties in used bookstores and loved them!
The good ones were very good, usually...but there were So Many newsstand fantastica magazines in the mid-'50s, it was easy for too many of them to be Not Great. Perhaps even more in the UK than in the US, for that matter.
As I mention, I'm not the biggest fan of either cover...glad the FANTASTIC cover (which does look a bit like a more realistic Lee Brown Coye image) has its partisans, at least! And Bester was certainly amused by the F&SF cover.
I'm still trying to figure out which pulp reprint magazine I first read, slowly, at age five or possibly four (FAMOUS SCIENCE FICTION? One of the Ultimate reprint magazines?), but I sure would like to know what it was...and if it was my much older cousin's, since it seems to have disappeared while I making my way through.
Both of those sound very good. With lots of interesting authors. I like the cover of the Fantastic magazine very much. How many shelves of magazines like this do you have?
They are good examples of both magazines at this point; FANTASTIC had an editor with good instincts (and himself a good writer) in founder Howard Browne, but one who was rather willing to slough off his work at Ziff-Davis, given (I gather) a rather profit-driven rather than quality-driven approach to the fiction magazines; they apparently didn't treat Browne all that well and he returned the favor (and his assistant, Paul Fairman, who would succeed him when he finally quit, was if anything even more cynical about the production of the magazine and how little priority was placed on it by the publishers, particularly after ZD cofounder B. G. Davis left to found Davis Publications, buying ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE to help get his new venture off to a good start; it had been the linchpin of Mercury Press, the continuing publisher of and in many ways the model for F&SF; selling THE AMERICAN MERCURY earlier was perhaps a greater blow to their prestige but not to their bottom line).
I currently have shelves and shelves, and shelves awaiting the unboxing of fiction magazines and books and replacement of them after various upheavals around the house (a flooded basement did some of them no favors, a roof/ceiling collapse in a room with a number of the shelves in it also not my favorite day, nor weeks following of repairs and insurance claims including on a fair amount of lost books, mostly). I have probably half the F&SFs published so far, or a bit more, most of the FANTASTICs, nearly as many of several other titles (and a few short-run titles, such as BEYOND FANTASY FICTION, in their entirety)...all told I'd estimate about 40K individual volumes and issues. A lot of crime fiction, eclectic little magazines and specialized ones, a good-sized bunch of western magazines, a fair in very incomplete run of HARPER'S and the like among other magazines. A lot of paperbacks, hardcovers, and relatively few newspapers though some. I'm not a collector of the breadth of personal library as, say, Walker Martin, who eventually bought a neighboring house to contain his often complete runs of an eclectic set of titles, but in casually collecting since childhood in the '70s has allowed me to gather no few. Roof leaks in two apartments, and losses in the mail in moving my collection from Hawaii to Virginia in 1984 have been among other sad thinning incidents. But there's still plenty to read. (My single biggest influx was probably in the purchase of Donald Westlake's collection of 1950s and '60s fiction magazines a decade+ back, from Ms. Westlake.)
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