Wednesday, July 9, 2025

SSW: "Plenitude" by Will "Worthington"/Mohler, THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, November 1959, edited by Robert P. Mills



















This issue can be read at the Internet Archive here.

Heinlein and Fast as the cover draws. John Collier's story was a reprint. Starship Soldier was, as editor/critic John Boston has noted in email, a truncated form of  Starship Troopers, which was published in book form about the same time the second and final installment in the next month's F&SF was on the stands.

From the FictionMags Index and ISFDB:

I first read the story in this volume of Judith Merril's annual:
(note the early Lawrence Block story collected below; a good volume even for Merril...)


Can't imagine why ("Snirsk!" says Ninja the cat as she walks by), but post-crisis fiction and drama is at least as common (and perhaps popular) as ever, though one of the more memorable post-crisis stories that has stuck with me through the decades (I would've read it perhaps forty years ago, and it wasn't so very new then) was by Will Mohler, who apparently published all his fiction in a five-year span from 1958-63, almost all of it signed "Will Worthington", and that was that, despite a receptive audience for it in the field.  

"Plenitude" is an interesting mixture of outsider resentment of conformity culture--through that conformity seeking a kind of community and security which can be all too poisonous (hello, current crises, particularly when the current power structure is, more than usual, in the hands of particularly self-regarding irresponsible, ignorant fools), and how one might attempt to imagine a better, truer existence through turning away from all that. It's not a brilliant story, but it does rather cleverly outline what seems at first to be a post-apocalypse scenario which turns out to be something rather different, a latter-day refinement of H. G. Wells's Eloi and Morlock dynamic, if less systematically brutal. Mohler's a better polemicist than he is a fashioner of fully human characters (the adult women characters are puzzling wonders to the [not quite fully] adult viewpoint character, and this is something he brushes off improbably, given their situation...such obliviousness might make more sense in a story set in a 1960s US reasonably affluent suburb). It's a relatively short story, and it mostly surprised me back then in its critique...Mohler mockingly uses Hegelian terms to chide its upper middle-class conformist survivors, and one will find it more difficult in a quick search for the term "Parmenidean" than it should be, as our bots of today are made to be certain we must mean to search for "Pomeranian"...I believe I first read this story in the back volume of the Merril annual rather than the back issue of F&SF, which with even a glance at the contents marks it as a typically star-studded one...editor Robert Mills, like his predecessors "Anthony Boucher" and J. Francis McComas, being as much at home in crime fiction as fantastica.

I suppose I should make a study of  Mohler's work in toto, as far as we know of it, with three stories in Fantastic, one each in If and the British Science Fantasy, and six in total in F&SF, the last one, along with a single story in Galaxy, as Mohler:
***For more of today's story reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blogpost here.
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Sunday, July 6, 2025

Friday's Books: the least of Robert Bloch's novels, PSYCHO HOUSE (Tor Books 1990)...and your much better Bloch choices.

The worst of Bloch's novels I've read by some distance; one can see why he introduced the twist that is the story's most redeeming feature, but it doesn't redeem enough of the weight of bad feeling that had attached to others making ever more foolish films of his characters (and more money from their foolishness) that one senses while reading it. It's not a fully worthy sequel to the novel Psycho II, much less the brilliant short novel that was the original. You won't suffer too greatly, to be sure, but keep your expectations low if you pick it up, and certainly don't use it to gauge whether you want to any of Bloch's other fictions, few of which are as ultimately dispirited as this one. American Gothic (which anticipated The Devil in the White City by more than some years--see also Bloch's novella-length nonfiction "Doctor Holmes' Murder Castle" [1983]), The Scarf and any number (in fact, essentially all) of his other novels are better (even his most minor sf novel, Sneak Preview, though I've only read the 1959 novella version; perhaps the 1971 expansion for book publication is better), and reading his short fiction is always recommended (however, one edition to avoid is the trade paperback reprint of sorts of The Selected Stories of RB, retitled for no good reason The Complete Stories of RB, which is riddled with typos and other distractions, aside from the false advertising of the retitle). The Best of Robert Bloch (a 1977 Ballantine Book mixing fantasy, horror, and sf) and its companion Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of  (Ballantine/Del Rey 1979, mostly devoted to horror and crime fiction) are among the best bets in introductions to his work, along with the original edition of the Selected Stories volumes. Or, for fine selections from the shank of his short fiction career, the largely crime fiction Blood Runs Cold (Simon and Schuster, 1961--with another cover, after his cover for Psycho with that distinct font, by Tony Palladino) and the largely fantasticated, leaning mostly but not exclusively to horror fiction, Pleasant Dreams (in several configurations, originally Arkham House, 1960). I had the 1963 Popular Library paperback of Blood and the Jove Books 1979 version of Pleasant...




























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Friday, June 27, 2025

Lalo Schifrin (June 21, 1932 – June 26, 2025)

My Life in Music (career survey anthology)
 
 
Opening theme and montage, Bullitt (1968)

Jazz Meets the Symphony (1994 concert)
Lalo Schifrin featured as a pianist and conductor for this concert, recorded live from the Philharmonie in Munich. He appeared with members of the Münchner Rundfunkorchester and soloists Ray Brown (double bass), Grady Tate (drums) and the Australian James Morrison (flugelhorn, trumpet, trombone). This concert includes some of Schifrin's original compositions - including his film music - as well as well-loved standards. 0:20 Lalo Schifrin - Down here on the Ground 7:04 Trad./arr. Schifrin - The Battle Hymn of the Republic 15:01 Lalo Schifrin - Brush Strokes 19:22 Ray Brown - Blues in the Basement 26:48 Vernon Duke / arr. Schifrin - I can`t get started 32:01 Lalo Schifrin - Madrigal 36:59 Lalo Schifrin - Mission Impossible Subscribe to LOFTmusic: https://goo.gl/wwlZl8


Psychedelic Jukebox

@60sPsychJukebox
Lalo Schifrin, the legendary Argentine-American composer, pianist, and conductor, died on June 26, 2025, at the age of 93 in Beverly Hills, California. According to multiple reports, the cause of death was complications from pneumonia. His son, Ryan Schifrin, confirmed he passed away peacefully. His most famous composition, the Mission: Impossible theme, with its distinctive 5/4 time signature, became a cultural touchstone, instantly evoking espionage and suspense. He also crafted iconic scores for films like Dirty Harry (1971), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Bullitt (1968), Enter the Dragon (1973), and the Rush Hour trilogy, as well as TV themes for Mannix and Starsky & Hutch.


"The Wave" (in 5/4 time) (1962)
 


Mannix opening/closing theme:
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Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Short Story Wednesday: HAUNTINGS edited by Henry Mazzeo (illustrated by Edward Gorey)















This book can be read here, at the Internet Archive (sadly denuded of its jacket).

Contents, all illustrated by Edward Gorey:

Introduction: The Castle of Terror by Henry Mazzeo
"The Lonesome Place" by August Derleth
"In the Vault" by H. P. Lovecraft
"The Man Who Collected Poe" by Robert Bloch
"Where Angels Fear" by Manly Wade Wellman
"Lot No. 249" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"The Haunted Dolls’ House" by M. R. James
"The Open Door" by Mrs. Oliphant
"Thus I Refute Beelzy" by John Collier
"Levitation" by Joseph Payne Brennan
"The Ghostly Rental" by Henry James
"The Face" by E. F. Benson
"The Whistling Room" by William Hope Hodgson
"The Grey Ones" by J. B. Priestley
"The Stolen Body" by H. G. Wells
"The Red Lodge" by H. Russell Wakefield
"The Visiting Star" by Robert Aickman
"Midnight Express" by Alfred Noyes

This might be one of  the most important books to me among all those I've read. It's certainly, among the four or five horror anthologies I read by the time I was eight, one of only two aimed at adults (the other was the Berkley paperback edited by Hal Cantor, Ghosts and Things), and the one which I remember best (odd how few women's stories were collected in either this or the Cantor, which featured only Shirley Jackson's "The Lovely House" in that wise, though Betty M. Owen's Scholastic Book Services anthologies and the Robert Arthur and Harold Q. Masur Hitchcock anthologies helped redress that balance). Happily for me, perhaps (foolishly) because of the Gorey illustrations, this one was classed in the children's section of the Enfield Central Public Library, where I found it easily enough (not that having to go over to the adult section to find, say, Joan Aiken's collection The Green Flash was any great trial).

This book introduced me to all these geniuses, though of course I'd heard of Sherlock Holmes before reading Doyle's detective-free mummy story here, and had probably seen adaptations of at least some of these folks' works on Night Gallery, or in Bloch's case, his Star Trek scripts, and the George Pal productions of adaptations from that other familiar name, H. G. Wells.

Despite the attempts by some reviewers to claim this book for the ghost story tradition, Mazzeo cast his net considerably wider than that, including revenants other than Doyle's mummy, devils (or at least one Assumes they're devils) in at least one of the wittiest stories here (John Collier lets you know, after all, with his title, and Manly Wade Wellman is only a bit more coy in labeling his tale of a place you don't want to be). M. R. James traps children with a toy, Alfred Noyes with a book; Joseph Payne Brennan, with his best story and one of his shortest, traps the childish, and even H. P. Lovecraft is represented by one of his least self-indulgent stories. Derleth shows what he could do, when not attempting to corrupt Lovecraft's legacy into a Christian metaphor, and Wells's stolen body story is an improvement over the "Elvesham" variation collected by Damon Knight in his The Dark Side. J. B. Priestly, a diverse man of letters, I would next encounter primarily as the author (and reader, for a Spoken Arts recording) of his essay collection Delight, which was indeed delightful; Robert Aickman, while also expert on the waterways of Britain, remained for me and many others the greatest of ghost-story writers of the latter half of the 20th Century, even with Russell Kirk and Joanna Russ and Charles Grant and so many others providing excellent contributions to that literature. That obscure fellow James and E. F. Benson (not yet rediscovered for his Mapp & Lucia comedies of manners, and only one of three prolific Benson brothers in the horror field) were the only writers shared by both this book and the Cantor; the Hodgson is a Carnacki story, a fine introduction to psychic investigators.

And the Gorey illustrations will stay with anyone. This book essentially introduced me to lifelong favorites Bloch, Collier, Benson and Wellman, and even the weakest stories here were rewarding; the Noyes, like the Brennan, is almost certainly the best thing he wrote (at least in prose or the uncanny) and a landmark in the field. I see where Gahan Wilson reviewed this for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1969, Fritz Leiber somewhat belatedly for Fantastic in 1973...I shall have to seek out those reviews [and have, below]...for that matter, I will need to read this book again, eventually, and see how completely all of these have stuck with me. And, as far as I know, Mazzeo never published another book.

And looking at the book at the Internet Archive let me see, for the first time in years (decades?) that Mazzeo thanks prolific (and often horror-fiction) anthologist Seon Manley (usually in tandem with her sister, GoGo Lewis) for assistance on this, again possibly only book. He asked the right editor, clearly.

Further appreciations: 

Gahan Wilson in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1969 (Joanna Russ also has reviews in this issue, just before Wilson's occasional column about horror fiction and related matter, "The Dark Corner").

Fritz Leiber in Fantastic, September 1973 (page 110), published around the time I found the book...

And please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's short stories...


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