Showing posts with label Avram Davidson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Avram Davidson. Show all posts

Thursday, November 7, 2024

Wednesday Short Stories (on Thursday, due to recounts): Avram Davidson, Harlan Ellison, Thom Jones, John Sladek, Gahan Wilson, Isaac Asimov, et al: THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, March 1973, edited by Edward L. Ferman

A redux post from 31 July 2009. Comments can be seen here.

Cover painting by Leo and Diane Dillon. This issue can be read here.

From the F&SF index--not a perfect tool, as one of the mistakes in Ellison's citations refers to the misbegotten television series The Starlost, which abused Ellison's "bible" and groundwork, as The Starcrossed, also correctly noted as Ellison collaborator Ben Bova's parodic novel about the travesty:

Dean McLaughlin, The Trouble With Project Slickenside nv
Avram Davidson. Books, reviewing:
Donald A. Wollheim (ed): The 1972 Annual World's Best SF; Terry Carr (ed) The Best Science Fiction of the Year; Robin Scott Wilson (ed): Clarion II; Lester del Rey (ed): Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year
Gahan Wilson, Cartoon ct
Thom Jones. Brother Dodo's Revenge ss
Edward Wellen, Chalk Talk vi
Baird Searles, Films: Return to Cobra Island
reviews Cobra Woman (1944), starring Maria Montez; The Undead (1957)
Chris G. Butler, A Coffin in Egypt ss
Gahan Wilson, The Zombie Butler vi; 6th story in Moral Vignettes series;
Waldo Carlton Wright, Spirit of the White Deer ss
John Sladek, Solar Shoe-Salesman by Ph*l*p K. D*ck ss
andrew j. offutt, Sareva: In Memoriam ss
Isaac Asimov, Science: Down From the Amoeba essay
Michael G. Coney, The Manya ss; 1st story in Finistelle series
Walter H. Kerr, poem
Harlan Ellison, The Deathbird nv (Winner-1974 Hugo, Jupiter, Locus Awards; Nominee-1973 Nebula award)

From ISFDB:
I'd picked this issue up off a stack and browsed the Table of Contents, and realized I couldn't remember reading the Avram Davidson book review column...Davidson, the brilliant fiction writer and former F&SF editor, would occasionally drop back in during the 1970s to offer a book column, one which otherwise would be conducted in those years by a rotating group including James Blish till his final illness, Algis Budrys with ever-greater frequency in the latter '70s, Joanna Russ, Barry Malzberg, and others from time to time (the best lineup any fantastic-fiction magazine has ever had in this wise, F&SF in the 1970s, even if Damon Knight didn't publish reviews again in F&SF after 1960, and Fritz Leiber in the 1970s published most of his in longterm "rival" magazine Fantastic, instead). Sadly, this consideration of three of the Best of the Year annuals and a Clarion writing workshop anthology is unusually slight and terse for a Davidson review, if gracious and witty. Oddly enough, one of Harlan Ellison's few book-review essays for F&SF, a year before, was also a rundown of the available BOTYs, and a very good one.

But, quite aside from offering a gorgeous wraparound cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, one of the best the magazine has published (and it's a pity the Dillons and Ellison don't seem to work together any longer [by the 2000s]--a falling out, or is it simply that the Dillons are too expensive for most of Ellison's publishers these days?), for the best Harlan Ellison story I've read so far (both in terms of its power and breadth and even its flaws being so much of the Ellison geist)...quite aside from that, this issue also contains the one Thom Jones contribution to F&SF, a story which The Pugilist at Rest writer might've been ashamed of (or he might've feared that being associated with fantastic fiction or the magazine might tar him somehow, the Vonnegut Perplex or the Hortense Calisher flitter). As it is, it is a reasonably deftly-written if rather heavy-handed Orwellian animal fantasy; rather than Lenin and Trotsky with trotters, we have a convocation of Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement and the Young Lords as a Pogo-esque mixture of human-hating animals, including insects and an ill-fated "Tomming" martyr to the Revolution in the form of a cow, sacrificed not altogether accidentally to further the cause (which is greater than the fate of any one constituent, doncha know). Like myself, only fifteen years or so earlier, Thom Jones was a University of Hawaii dropout who took his degree elsewhere.

Ed Ferman's editorship was at least as notable as those around his for the occasional contributions from fiction writers better known for work in other modes...the first F&SF I ever perused, but decided against buying since I had only so many quarters on hand and the magazine was a buck, was the Janauary, 1976 issue...led off by and perhaps best remembered for Joanna Russ's "My Boat," but also featuring Stuart Dybek's disturbing "Horror Movie." Ellen Gilchrist would place her "The Green Tent" with F&SF a decade later.

Some quick notes: Edward Wellen's vignette is one of the few linguistics fantasies, Chomskyite deep structure and all, that I've come across. Wellen, much like such others as Henry Slesar, Fredric Brown, and Miriam Allen de Ford, was a crime fiction/fantastic fiction amphibian, and like them a multiple-story contributor to F&SF and its short-lived sibling magazine Venture Science Fiction. In fact, he was enough of a favorite with Edward Ferman, editor of both magazines from the mid '60s to the turn of the '90s (well, the Venture revival lasted only a year or so at the turn of the '70s), so that Ferman took Wellen's long novella/short novel Goldbrick and ran it, despite it having essentially no sf nor fantasy content, in the November, 1978 issue...it was more a crime fiction, but the only cf magazine running any long stories at this point was Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and the only long-form fiction it wanted to run were the ghosted Shayne novellas.

John Sladek's Dick parody was one of a series of short lampoons that Sladek was publishing in those years...I don't have the issue at hand at this moment, but it's a rich and dense parody, and if there's an indispensable line in it, it would be (paraphrased from memory, to be corrected later): "This was the end of existence, they all agreed."

Gahan Wilson contributed a cartoon to every issue of F&SF for 17 years, from Edward Ferman's first issue till Ferman and Wilson had a falling out...a loss all around, particularly since Wilson's occasional fine fiction for the magazine also ceased.

andrew j. offutt often made a point of using all miniscules in his signatures in those years, and his story is almost a parody of Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife at the point where I've broken off (I will slog through soon). offutt is probably best known these days for the rather bad relation he's had with his writer son Chris Offutt (who likes capitals). (The whole story is about how much less your kids like you than your spouse does, as well as pulling in some heavy winks toward Bewitched the television series.)

Baird Searles was the film, television, and general A/V club reviewer for F&SF from 1969 till moving over to be the book reviewer in Asimov's after the recently late Charles Brown left, in the early '80s. He and his life partner Martin Last ran The Science Fiction Shop in NYC in the '70s, as well. Searles had been preceded in the late 1950s by Charles Beaumont as film reviewer (with William Morrison also submitting at least one stage review), and was succeeded by Harlan Ellison, Kathi Maio, Lucius Shepard and the recently-late David J. Skal.

Dean McLaughlin was one of the folks who did usually good work for various magazines starting around the turn of the '60s...the last time Davidson, Ellison, and McLaughlin had been in the same issue was a decade before, when Davidson had been editing.

Walter Kerr the poet eventually started adding his middle initial to his F&SF contributions to stave off confusion with the NYC stage critic. F&SF contributor Paul Darcy Bowles felt a similar responsibility.

Isaac Asimov eventually wrote 399 monthly pop-science essays (a few touched only peripherally on science) for F&SF, and credited that series, and the predecessor column in the short first run of stablemate Venture Science Fiction, with inspiring his most prominent public career, as a popular-science writer. The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, later revised as Asimov's Guide to Science, was his first borderline bestseller, and his royalties allowed him to give up his full-time university position and become a full-time freelance writer.


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Wednesday, October 18, 2023

20th Anniversary Issues: THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION October 1969, edited by Edward Ferman, and FANTASTIC August 1972, edited by Ted White: Short Story Wednesday

Perhaps unsurprisingly for 20th Anniversary issues of fantasy/sf magazines, or for any gathering of fiction, considerations of time (and, often, loss) loom large in the stories in these two issues. Slightly odd that two magazines which have been, at times at least in their previous histories, famous as homes for women writers in fantastica should produce "all-stag" anniversary celebration issues, albeit in the case of Fantastic, Alice (at conventions, going by nickname "Racoona") Sheldon was still hiding behind the "James Tiptree, Jr." pseudonym, and cover artist Jeff Jones was eventually to transition to womanhood and take on the name Jeffrey Catherine Jones in 1998; "Ova Hamlet" as the pseudonym Richard Lupoff used for his parody stories for Fantastic, mostly, was a Very open non-secret (part of the gag was that Lupoff was serving as interlocutor for the eccentric "Hamlet"). 

That said, these are impressive issues, helping to kick off good decades artistically for both magazines, and eventually financially for F&SF, at least.

The best stories in either issue are, I'd say at this hour, Robert Bloch's time-travel (of a sort) and definitely afterlife fantasy "The Movie People", which incorporates his love for film and his experiences as both youthful film fan and eventual professional screenwriter, and Tiptree's "Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket", very much a time-travel story and yet also deeply encoding some of her lived experience as a young debutante (and, to a much lesser extent, her later life as an OSS/CIA staffer). I haven't yet read the Conan pastiche by de Camp and Carter, nor this part of the eventual Ursus of Ultima Thule by Avram Davidson, but the introduction to the first part of the serial, giving some of the events in the previous segment published as a standalone story in the sf magazine Worlds of If, is indicative of Davidson in one of his favorite modes, writing about the origins of the mythology he's mining for the story, and the sort of thing he eventually would write at length in the essays collected as Adventures in Unhistory...which is highly recommended.

Barry Malzberg, the editor of Fantastic and stablemate Amazing before White, as well as contributor to this issue, would later collect the Tiptree story in his 2003 anthology The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time, as well as it being first collected in Sheldon/Tiptree's first, widely-hailed collection, Ten Thousand Light Years from Home. Bloch's "The Movie People" has also been widely collected, in his The Best of Robert Bloch and many other volumes, in translation as well as the original.

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more complete considerations of their objects of discussion and review, and a fine new poem she's composed commemorating the birthday of her late husband, the political science professor and historian Philip Abbott (whose favorite short story was E. M. Forster's seminal sf story, "The Machine Stops")...



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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
Wednesday!
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Wednesday, September 8, 2021

stories by Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Avram Davidson, Rosel George Brown, Fredric Brown, Frederik Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth, Eric Frank Russell, et al; columns by Asimov, Bester, Moskowitz: FANTASTIC August 1960, edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli; THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION October 1961, edited by Robert P. Mills: Short Story Wednesday

Off the shelf--from six decades ago, and featuring some of the more-admired stories of Vonnegut and Bloch, and "rare" stories by similarly notable writers...

Fantastic [v9 #8, August 1960] (35¢, 132pp, digest, cover by Albert Nuetzell)  edited by Cele Goldsmith












































































The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [v21 #4, No. 125, October 1961] (40¢, 132pp, digest, cover by Chesley Bonestell)  edited by Robert P. Mills

As is utterly, perhaps tiresomely obvious to those who've been reading my blog entries over the years, that along with loving such magazines as Lewis Lapham's Harper's, particularly after its revamp and re-energization in 1983 (and how much The Atlantic had been on a downward slide since I first picked it up in 1978, one it hasn't ever reversed--for that matter, it was a better magazine in the '60s...), and Our Generation, the Montreal-based anarchist and libertarian socialist journal (even if I ended up contributing to Social Anarchism out of Baltimore instead--OG already had Noam Chomsky and Janet Biehl and George Woodcock and Murray Bookchin--as well as The Progressive in my early writing career, before both OG and SA folded), and loving fiction magazines and slightly more eclectic literary magazines (was even very briefly editor-in-chief of Hawai'i Review at the dawn of my arguably pro writing and editorial efforts, in 1983), particularly the likes of Ontario Review and The Paris Review and Short Story International, the crime fiction magazines (particularly The New Black Mask but also the veterans), the sf magazines, and the odd western or other specialized title that might come my way...with all of that, the fantasy and horror fiction magazines have had a special place in my heart, and in 1977 I voraciously fell upon The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949-date) and Fantastic (1952-1980, incorporated to a notable degree into its older stablemate Amazing Stories, at that time, and briefly revived since). I had learned of their existence in the previous-publication credits in various anthologies I'd read since about age 9, though even earlier I was beginning to seek out horror anthologies and the eclectic anthologies attributed to Alfred Hitchcock. New issues off the stands of both F&SF and Fantastic were a joy, along with such others as the little magazine Whispers and the companion Doubleday anthology series it spawned (or the companion Doubleday series Shadows) and such annuals as Gerald Page's The Year's Best Horror Fiction or Terry Carr's new Year's Finest Fantasy, and all the back issues I could dig up (not too tough even then, though not as easy as in these days of web marketing). With the folding of Fantastic, one magazine or another would tend to "take its spot" on newsstands and otherwise, whether it was Twilight Zone Magazine (and its short-lived companion Night Cry), the reasonably hardy late 1980s revival of Weird Tales (still rumored to be a going concern, though the recent death of the most recent editor and publisher, Marvin Kaye, probably means this revival has ceased completely) or the slick if rather busy-looking Realms of Fantasy, while F&SF has soldiered on.

So, for today's consideration, two relatively random, reasonably contemporaneous back issues I happened to be moving from one spot to another...one being the first publication site for Kurt Vonnegut's most popular single short story, and notable that it didn't find a home with The Saturday Evening Post or Esquire (or Esquire's offspring, Playboy and its imitators), but apparently it wasn't stroking their fur quite the right way. Shirley Jackson had placed four stories with F&SF and one with Fantastic in the 1950s, stories that likewise should've been snapped up by Redbook or The New Yorker, but apparently were the Wrong kind of strange for the less-adventurous post-Harold Ross TNY or even the more literary women's magazines (though Redbook was pitching itself at young married couples for most of the '50s)...the fantasy magazines, and their founding editors Anthony Boucher and Howard Browne, took the stories even if they weren't quite fantasy. Not the only time they would make that exception for their fantasy/sf titles.  (Boucher and his co-founding editor J. Francis McComas would both take her first story for the magazine, "Bulletin" in 1954, but from her next and most famous F&SF offer "One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts" [1955] her appearances in the magazine were in Boucher solo issues. That Boucher and Browne were also notable crime-fiction writers among other interests, not least seeking prestige for their magazines, might also have made it more attractive than solely commercial good sense to pick up the Jacksons.)

"Harrison Bergeron" isn't the most subtle of Vonnegut's stories, which probably helps to explain its relative popularity, but it is rather funny while pounding its point into the ground with more urgency than slyness. As you might know, it's the allegory of a rebel in a society that hopes to make all persons equal in every manner by, for example, constantly piping a cacophony of noises into the ears of the musically talented, and hobbling the good dancers. More, apparently, a mockery of anti-intellectualism and rigidly-imposed conformity than of egalitarianism, it can also stroke those who feel their greatness (however actually limited) stymied by the jealousy and backstabbing of the ants around them. And it leads off this, the 17th Anniversary issue, part of a trend for the year-marking F&SF issues to be "All-Star" affairs (also, in later years, issues with which the cover price needed to be raised would also be All-Star issues). And, like a number of the stories in these two issues, it is rather short, almost a vignette.

Robert P. Mills was at least as much a sophisticate in his editorial tastes as Boucher, or, rather, didn't feel he needed to obviously cater to a relative lack of sophistication in the fantasy/sf magazine readership (Boucher would, in his book review columns for F&SF itself, make reference to how the likes of Mark Van Doren's fantasies might well go over the heads of the magazine's readership, unlike those of, say, Ray Bradbury.) Mills was also not the writer that Boucher was, nor quite the artistic polymath (Boucher was also expert in at least one musical field, opera, in which he conducted a weekly program for Pacifica Radio from the station/network's foundation till his death), but if he was quite as willing to limit his magazines' horizons as Boucher was, he wouldn't advertise the fact so baldly. The story Mills would publish in his F&SF that was even more famous than the Vonnegut would be Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon", the first published form of what Keyes would expand into a novel, famously adapted for television and film and discussed in George Kelley's Friday Books entry this past week. Before taking over F&SF from the retiring Boucher, Mills had edited the companion magazine Venture Science Fiction, which had picked up the banner from the slightly fading Galaxy magazine and Damon Knight's short term as editor of If: World of Science Fiction as the US sf magazine most likely to feature what Harlan Ellison would later tag "dangerous visions", and stories that dealt relatively frankly for the time in sexual matters and other taboo topics, albeit its leaning toward sometimes grim adventure fiction also saw it get some light mockery for being a magazine about manful suffering, in the post-Hemingway, Maileresque mode. While editing Venture, he continued to assist Boucher at F&SF, and Frederic Dannay as managing editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (even through the transition in early 1958 due to EQMM's sale to B. G. Davis. leaving Ziff-Davis to found Davis Publications, for which EQMM would be a bedrock title), and apparently served as the uncredited editor of the last two other crime fiction magazines published by Mercury Press, Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine (merged with Bestseller in 1959) and Bestseller Mystery Magazine (folded 1962), both officially edited by publisher Joseph Ferman (Ferman would also, apparently for appearances' sake, take the "official" editorial title at F&SF for the first several months after his college-aged son Edward Ferman succeeded  Avram Davidson as the editor of F&SF, after Davidson would succeed Mills; Mills went on to be primarily a literary agent, and apparently a bit more than that for James Baldwin in terms of taking care of practical matters for the writer, for the rest of Mills's professional life.)

Leading off this issue of Fantastic, after a typically chatty and not terribly deep (if more self-revealing than usual, describing his own personal utopia, yacht-based) editorial by "editorial director" Norman Lobsenz (tasked, apparently, with making sure the young and not too experienced editor Cele Goldsmith, later to marry and sign herself, eventually, as Cele Goldsmith Lalli, didn't make any serious mistakes at her legacy--and mostly Just legacy--Ziff-Davis magazines), Robert Bloch's "The World Timer" is a novelet with Bloch in jokey mode, generally amiable even when the jokes don't land, in which he would frequently (though not always) write in the work published by the Ziff-Davis magazines going back to the late '30s (most famously, his "Lefty Feep" series of stories)...Isaac Asimov, in reading the Ray Palmer-edited issue of Amazing Stories that featured Asimov's first published story, noted that the only story he thought better than his own modest effort was Bloch's "The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton" (as Asimov noted in the course of introducing the Bloch story's inclusion in Asimov et al.'s retro best-of-the-year anthology devoted to fiction first published in 1939). But Bloch at the heart of this story is getting at some serious points about psychiatry, which he'd been studying to a great degree throughout the '50s while writing some of the most famous crime-fiction work of his career (including, unsurprisingly, 1959's Psycho); beyond the comedy of humors naming of his psychiatrist protagonist "Morton Placebo", and the pharmaceutical time-travel/psychedelics as warping objective reality plot used in the story, Bloch shares his concerns with the seedier and less responsible behavior in the profession, and considered this as a result one of his best stories for the purposes of his sf- and fantasy-heavy volume The Best of Robert Bloch (Ballantine 1976)(a couple of years later, he published with Ballantine/Del Rey a companion best-of devoted to his horror and suspense fiction).

As noted elsewhere on this blog, Cele Goldsmith, who had been initially hired at Ziff-Davis as a secretary and quickly handed the task of editing a short-lived magazine for finding Pen Pals, had also been tasked with helping Howard Browne and then Paul Fairman with traffic around the fiction magazines Ziff-Davis was still publishing, though with less enthusiasm than they had previously, expensive-hobby magazines (stereo equipment, boating, electronics, photography) becoming the publisher's bread and butter (leading to cofounder B. G. Davis leaving the company to strike out on his own with Davis Publications); Browne eventually and Fairman throughout his (rather dire) editorship took a factory approach to filling Fantastic and Amazing Stories, Fairman relying on a quintet of young writers (Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Randall Garrett, Milton Lesser before legally changing his name to Stephen Marlowe, and Henry Slesar) for most of what he published in the magazines (including a brief run of wish-fulfillment fantasy magazine Dream World)--get it in Wednesday and make sure it Won't Cause Trouble, and you get a paycheck--if it's good, all the better, but that was secondary (Fairman famously didn't bother to read what he bought from his quintet). Goldsmith at this point was combing through the unsolicited manuscripts, the "slush pile", which is how, among other rather good work, Kate Wilhelm's first published story was in Fantastic in 1956. So, when Fairman resigned in '58 (and oddly enough was soon working as Assistant Editor at the Davis Publications Ellery Queen's), William Ziff and company offered young Goldsmith actual editorship of Fantastic and Amazing, with a penny/word budget for the fiction and other content, gave Lobsenz the task of keeping an eye on her and writing the "editorials" and usually conducting the letter column, and blurbing the contents, while Goldsmith tried to learn as fast as she could about fantasy and sf, and how to properly edit a magazine. One of her self-assigned projects was to lure Fritz Leiber out of one of his periodic bouts of crippling alcoholism and get him back to writing, squeezing her budget for at least 2c/word for his contributions and those of a few others, and publishing the first stories of  a remarkable number of new talents; she never won the Hugo Award for best magazine (her two magazines would compete with each other, splitting vote totals), but she did get a special award at one World Convention, for her work at improving the Ziff-Davis magazines.  When ZD found a buyer for Fantastic (the brief period of it being titled Fantastic Science Fiction, with the notion that sf sold better in magazines than fantasy did, was followed [beginning two issues after the August issue discussed here] by a longer run as Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, a rather more accurate title), and Amazing Stories (or, in the same Goldsmith/Lalli years, Amazing Stories: Fact and Science Fiction), they sold the magazines out from under her rather abruptly, and she was redeployed to ZD's bridal magazines, where she soon became the dominant and most admired editor in that specialized fashion/planning field for the rest of a lengthy career. (While ZD's Popular Electronics and Electronics World magazines ended up being the most obvious progenitors of Ziff-Davis's ultimate fate as a brand of computer information publisher and web/cable tv producer.)

But Leiber wasn't the only veteran writer Goldsmith/Lalli was interested in taking work from, even if the Leiber story, "Rats of Limbo" (not yet reprinted anywhere, as far as I know) reads like the transcript of a surreal nightmare for its brief run, with its protagonist in Limbo but tormented, in a fashion reminiscent of Sisyphus's punishment, by among others the specter of Robert E. Lee and a bevy of rats. Fredric Brown also has a similar vignette in the issue, "The House", which Brown scholar Jack Seabrook reminds me was included in Brown's most widely distributed collection, Nightmares and Geezenstacks (Bantam 1961), and two other Brown retrospectives since; it's an enigmatic and highly symbolic account of a traversal of a house that might symbolize a metaphor or psychodrama of a life coming to its end, but resists easy interpretation. It definitely reads as if it resonates more deeply with Brown than Leiber's, which can be seen as a kind of jest in comparison, does with him (look to the plays for voices by Leiber such as "The Secret Songs" and  "247 Talking Statues, Etc." for similarly obviously deeply-felt work). The kind of enigmatic fiction that Goldsmith Lalli was more open to than more seasoned editors, less receptive to non-linear narratives than old hands...though Mills and particularly his F&SF successor Davidson would be more open than many of their colleagues to this kind of story as well, with the result their magazines helped spark "the New Wave" along with the British magazines New Worlds and Science Fantasy, and such anthology series as Damon Knight's Orbit and Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker's Quark in later years. 

More to come...

For more (and, at the moment, more complete!) Wednesday Short Story entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

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