Wednesday, January 3, 2024

SSW: short stories by Lyn Venable (Marilyn A. Venable): "Time Enough at Last" (the Twilight Zone favorite) and others: Short Story Wednesday (2 of 2)

Lyn Venable's work, as detailed by ISFDB (there are also chapbooks and podcast readings/possibly dramatizations cited for some of these stories), including that endlessly-rerun TZ adaptation...at least one US digital broadcast network, H&I, and one cable station, SyFy [koff], dusted it off again for their New Year's Serling marathons:

Featuring Lyn Venable's last? story (so far?)

Short Fiction

Lyn Venable, as far as I can tell, has only published seven short stories in her career, all of them in a stretch in the early-to-mid/late 1950s (1952-1957).  The second to see print, and easily the most famous, was her 1953 story "Time Enough at Last" in If: Worlds of Science Fiction for January 1953, edited and published by James Quinn. The short story is less heavy-handed than The Twilight Zone adaptation, one of the most widely-loved of first-season episodes (1959, notably after Venable had apparently stopped publishing), though Burgess Meredith's crowd-pleasing performance probably helps there. The short story's Mr. Henry Bemis is competent at work and slightly better at getting around his controlling wife's resentment of his spending any time reading, vs. socializing or watching television with her...and the portrayal of atomic war and its aftermath is rather better-presented in the story than in the television episode (TZ Bemis seems to think he'll be able to leave books from a destroyed public library in stacks in the exposed rubble of the building and they not fall prey to weather, or other problems, for example...he's not quite so foolish in the short story). The current Wikipedia entry for Venable suggests that the story is akin to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which it is not, except to the degree that Bemis is kept from reading by (rather less overarching) villains. However, Venable does write in a mode that is not altogether unlike Bradbury's, and in a few of her stories with rather less fake naivete than RB might slip into...the ending of "Time Enough" has been roundly dismissed as cruel by at least one latter-day reviewer, rather than, as I suspect it was meant, as a metaphor for how much misery modern warfare and its potential for massacre place on even those who hope to find some way to cope with it. Seems a pity she didn't (or couldn't) continue into the early '60s, at very least, and no doubt be courted by Gamma magazine, the home of Bradbury (and Patricia Highsmith, both on rare occasion) and the "Little Bradburys", and perhaps be reprinted by Judith Merril in her anthologies.

Her other best story, I'd suggest, from my quick whip-around her published work (I've yet to read her first, "Homesick", a 1952 publication in Galaxy, at that point the most popular and widely-imitated of the US sf magazines, and [since launched by an Italian firm moving into the US market] one with several foreign-language editions as early as its second year of publication), perhaps surprisingly, is the one published in a magazine that made an attempt to present itself as an essentially nonfictional magazine about supernatural phenomena, Mystic, while regularly publishing fiction written in no way "nonfictionally"...and edited by the team of Ray Palmer and Bea Mahaffey who were also producing Other Worlds and its sf/fantasy spinoff titles, before Mahaffey left and Palmer threw his fate in with all-woo-woo "nonfiction" with his magazines Fate and  Other Worlds remade as Flying Saucers from Other Worlds. An historical borderline suspense/horror story (it can be interpreted as either "realistic" or "fantastic" depending on how much one trusts the characters' perception of events). "Doppelganger" involves a gravid woman in suddenly problematic labor, her desperate husband and the midwife, who in better times had helped deliver him, who is reluctantly called into service in the growing emergency...and what they make of the one baby delivered who is suddenly joined in his crib by a twin whom no one remembers from previously. 


But "Punishment Fit the Crime" is a reasonably good variation on an Isaac Asimov sort of robot story, where a very specialized robot behaves in such a way that it is the one who needs protection from humans. This was Venable's one story in Other Worlds, and her only pair of stories to sell to the same editors, vs. "one-shots" in all her other markets.  

While "The Missing Room" is a rather deft more-or-less straightforward sf story she sold to Weird Tales, which, under editor Dorothy McIlwraith, always open to certain kinds of science fiction with a menacing element to it...an open house in a future (perhaps even still) suburb (commuters use personal helicopters) turns out to be a kind of alien's specimen trap. That Venable sold most of her large handful of stories to editors who were women or men who were particularly interested in publishing women writers (Hans Stefan Santesson at Fantastic Universe, Quinn at If, and certainly Ray Palmer and Galaxy's H. L. Gold weren't unwilling to publish women writers--given both her approach and subject matter, I'm a bit surprised that Anthony Boucher never took one of her stories for F&SF).  Her last two stories are a notch lower in originality, at least, with her one story in a non-U.S. magazine, the UK Authentic Science Fiction item "Parry's Paradox", being a mildly clever but slight time-travel tale, and the Big Twist in the ending of her otherwise rather nicely-detailed story of a first-encounter with another humanoid species, "Grove of the Unborn", being a rather too foreseeable twist.  


For more of today's Short Stories, please see Patti Abbott's blog, and/or the post just before this one, Paul Di Filippo on an issue of Lester Del Rey's magazine Space Science Fiction.

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2 comments:

  1. Rich HortonJanuary 4, 2024 at 7:38 PM

    As you sort of hint, I am inclined to believe that Bea Mahaffey's editorial presence is a major reason Ray Palmer's magazines were, for their time, relatively hospitable to women writers.

    I admit I did not know that the Burgess Meredith TZ episode was based on an SF story from the magazines!

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  2. Todd MasonJanuary 5, 2024 at 7:52 PM

    I suspect Mahaffey's presence was the reason there was much good work at all in the magazines Palmer published during her employment there. Not that he was allergic to it, so much as for his part at least as interested in the fringe "science" and mysticism and such that made the late Campbell ANALOG often such a bore, as well (and would be the most annoying aspect of OMNI, and to a much lesser extent TWILGHT ZONE MAGAZINE, decades later)...albeit Campbell's magazine had a height to fall from that was rather steeper than that of Palmer's Ziff-Davis work to OTHER WORLDS and its stablemates and variations.

    Lyn Venable apparently never published a collection (though her work known to me would make a decent half of an Ace Double), has barely been registered in the sf/fantasy references nor even the fannish ones, and is one of those who was more nonchalantly brushed rather than forcibly thrown down the memory hole. It didn't help a bit that James Quinn typoed her byline as "Lynn", which is how it appeared in the TZ credits.

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