Wednesday, August 31, 2022

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)

 See this previous post for overviews and complete issue indices: 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)

The apparent source collection for the Lincoln story...

In the rather impressive F&SF and not-bad Fantastic Universe (FU, not at all as an imprecation, from here onward) issues for April 1958, among the most impressive stories is Kit Reed's first published fiction, "The Wait", a grim story that if anything hits home at least as hard in these days of the sense of a Great Running Down of U.S. and world human culture, and anticipates the likes of the recent cable horror series From, only in a far less stupid fashion than that tale of monsters besieging a lonely town told its story. Of course, it hit home hard then, too, as "The Wait" is a ritual in the small town that the protagonists are unfortunate enough to need to stay in, after some set of increasingly common maladies afflict the mother of her soon-to-be-18-year-old daughter on their roadtrip together across the continent, the high school graduation "present" for the daughter. The young woman would've preferred to stay home in NYC, and enjoy the summer with her friends before acquiescing to go to secretarial school, as her mother hopes that she'll catch the eye of a banker or other rising businessman looking for a wife; young Miriam's desire to attend a more traditional college is pooh-poohed. This town puts its young women up for a far more literal sort of not-quite-merchandise ritual. Reed noted that after this issue of F&SF appeared, some of her colleagues at The New Haven Register put a hank of blue yarn and knitting needles on her desk, in imitation of a part of the ritual. Shirley Jackson fans will like this one.

A number of the stories in this issue have been read by me previously, some such as the Reed recently, some such as Robert Arthur's amusing "Obstinate Uncle Otis" in childhood, and Fritz Leiber's cover story in late adolescence (it's at least one other grimly pro-feminist story in this issue, even as its title somewhat prefigures Mitt Romney's famous malapropism about having binders-full of women to choose running mates from)(late note: at the bottom of the page before "A Deskful of Girls" begins, there's an ad for Jesse Jones Box Corp.-style clip-binders to store issues of F&SF in. You read this coincidence here first and perhaps in the Leiber review piece forthcoming and will probably never read it anywhere else again!). But I thought I had read "The Grantha Sighting" by Avram Davidson before, and apparently, unless I've forgotten it altogether over the years, somehow I haven't. It's even more amusing, given how much UFOlogy and alien visitation chatter was about in the late '50s (and not least in FU, where editor Hans Stefan Santesson loved to entertain various sorts of fringe and mystical notions, and presumably the UFO material didn't hurt sales; Anthony Boucher at F&SF wasn't altogether immune to them, either, but didn't take them as at least semi-seriously as Santesson or John W. Campbell at the sf magazine Astounding, later Analog, much less Ray Palmer, who converted his sf magazine Other Worlds into a UFOlogy magazine, Flying Saucers from Other Worlds, a companion to his long-running Fate magazine, for a few final issues in 1957), in that Davidson's story in F&SF and Richard Wilson's in FU tread similar paths toward their mostly humorous points..."Grantha" refers to aliens who (somewhat intentionally improbably) have to stop near a deserted farmhouse in central New York because they need to heat up formula for their baby (very humanoid space travelers, these. and their human contacts sound a lot like those who were actually getting media attention at the time), and there's something awry with their small space-ship's engine. The wife and husband are able to intuit most of the visitors' desires, in part from a sudden incomplete understanding of the alien language, and help as best they can, sending the aliens somewhat effectively on their way...a parody of UFOlogy organizations' representatives, and long-term WOR and WABC radio host "Long John" Knebel, visit the farm couple and encourage a more elaborated report...much of the story is all but transcript from the Knebel-parody's broadcast (Knebel's series was briefly national, and was turned over to Larry King after Knebel's departure). Meanwhile, the Richard Wilson FU story, "Grand Prize", similarly is mostly given over to a parody of What's My Line?, the panel game show, as it was conducted in 1957, with a Steve Allen parody among the most vocal participants, along with the John Charles Daly parody as host to a very dangerous Mystery Guest indeed, one whose intentions can only be thwarted by a certain segment of the populace. Wilson's story isn't as elaborated as Davidson's, but it's a clever, notional story. Likewise, the fairly clever, humorous first-contact with aliens story "Case History" by Nelson Bond, an old hand at various forms of fiction writing for a wide variety of magazines and more.

Meanwhile, Margaret St. Clair has stories in both issues, with her FU story, "Birthright", one of those which pits abortion rights against blithe assumptions about what now is tagged ableism...it makes its point, and has something to say about medical hierarchies and how to get around them, as well, but, like many FU stories, is more a clever story than a profound one. Santesson's magazine was widely seen as a salvage market for F&SF rejects; not always true, by any means, but too often a likelihood, though also no magazine was more interested in hosting the continuations of Robert Howard's "Conan" story-cycle than was FU--and, in its last issue (in 1960), Santesson's magazine was the only fantasy magazine (so far!) to host the first English translation of a Jorge Luis Borges story, the translation uncredited (possibly by Santesson), one of the vignettes from The Universal History of Infamy. St. Clair's F&SF story, as published under her "Idris Seabright" pseudonym (I'm not sure if any pattern was ever established for which byline went on which of her stories), digs a bit deeper, and is also primarily a medical story, in this case dealing with a war of attrition and how the veterans still in the field are drugged into forgetfulness after each day, and the disabled veterans, including the protagonist's womanfriend, Miriam, left essentially to wither and rot (two key Miriams in two impressive stories in this F&SF). "The Death of Each Day" (as Boucher notes, taking its title from Macbeth) has excellent detail and limns the exploration of personal realities in a manner not altogether unlike Philip K. Dick's work a few years later. 

Victoria Lincoln's "No Evidence" is a graceful approach to concretizing a metaphor, in this case the two identities of a troubled Irish immigrant, brought to the States as a boy, but never happy and never quite able to cope with what he faces in life and in himself, finds himself/themselves literally split into two men after a night of drinking some very suspicious homebrew. The "liberated" self finds his way back to Ireland, and leads a relatively bohemian life; the original self keeps at his sensible job and has a rather good life with his ever more dear wife, whose flaws are part of the attraction for him. This really is one of the best issues of F&SF I've read.  One gets the sense that Boucher, reaching the end of his time editing the magazine, was throwing off all his assumptions about what might be "too sophisticated" for fantasy-magazine readers, and as a result is providing a literate and challenging set of stories this issue even by F&SF's regular standards. 

Rather early on, while co-editing F&SF with J. Francis McComas, Boucher actually slipped in a reference to how he'd like to include, say, a Mark Van Doren story in the magazine, but he doubted that most fantasy-magazine readers would appreciate the subtlety of such work...not, on balance, the wisest sort of slap in the face unless every given reader decided they were of the Sophisticated Minority. "The Witch of Ramoth" is at least a Van Doren story, and in rather fitting company in this issue, dealing as it does in a relatively cozy fashion with a witch who plays rather cruelly with two sibling children who were too preoccupied with arguing to note the witch's offer of roasted chestnuts. Akin to Bradbury's least sentimental tales, or a slightly less doom-laden sort of Ramsey Campbell tale of children facing the Very Strange.

The best story I've read so far in the FU issue is by one of the "Little Bradburys" as they were sometimes dismissed, particularly at the turn of and into the early '60s, as they clustered around The Twilight Zone, similar film work, and the magazine Gamma (which in its brief and erratic run from 1963-65 would take up a similar place to FU in the fiction-magazine gamut). William F. Nolan's "Full Quota" is a crisply-written, straightforward horror story, involving an utterly unsought and involuntary deal with a demon, rather a deceptively unthreatening one, not even as stereotypically sinister as Van Doren's witch...till one looks into her eyes. The kind of horror story crime-fiction magazines could be comfortable buying (and perhaps Santesson dithered over including it here or in his other fiction digest, The Saint Mystery Magazine). Also an example of the utterly non-sf content FU featured as regular part of its remit, despite the fantasy-less "science fiction" tag on the covers.

And if sense-of-wonder sf is what you seek in your reading, Stanton Coblentz hoped to oblige you with the rather accurately-titled "Microcosm", in which a physicist experimenting with a viewer of sub-atomic particles finds himself transported into a series of microscopic recapitulations of planetary history, including the development and destruction of human civilization (sorry, those hoping for techno-optimism from our stars of '30s sf...perhaps the nuclear arms race as well as the more pessimistic elements of models including H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon would out). As mentioned at the top of this post, Robert Arthur's "Obstinate Uncle Otis" also has a bit of an old-fashioned feel to it, only fitting in that it was reprinted in the F&SF from a 1941 issue of the hugely popular pulp version of Argosy, not as dominant a presence in publishing as it was when it ushered in pulp magazines as a format around the turn of the century, but still potent, and still publishing some of the most popular writers in the country...Arthur's story, part of his Murchison Morks series of tall-tales told by Morks in bars, does share a few characteristics with Theodore Sturgeon's "The Ultimate Egoist" (published earlier in 1941) and considerably more with Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life--" (from the first volume of Frederik Pohl's new-fiction anthology series Star Science Fiction in 1953, and a captive creature of The Twilight Zone and thus also eventually The Simpsons by the end of the '50s)...Otis Morks is the kind of Utter Skeptic who chooses to not believe people and things he finds unpleasant or annoying actually exist...which has some unfortunate consequences when he's magically imbued with the ability to make his willful disbelief reality. I first read the story in one of  Robert Arthur's surprisingly few collections, Ghosts and More Ghosts, from 1963, or his initial volume in Random House's young readers' "Alfred Hitchcock" anthology series (parallel to Random's adult Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies, also edited in the '60s by Arthur), 1962's Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery. 


For more of today's Short Story Wednesday entries,
 please see Patti Abbott's blog
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