Showing posts with label BEYOND. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BEYOND. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

1962/63: Three fantasy fiction anthologies from Pyramid Books: THE UNEXPECTED edited by Leo Margulies, THE UNKNOWN edited by D. R. Bensen, SWORDS AND SORCERY edited by L. Sprague de Camp (and, from other publishers about then, BEYOND and THE FANTASTIC UNIVERSE OMNIBUS)


















In 1962, Pyramid Books was widely considered a second-string publisher of paperbacks, but had, in Donald R. Bensen, an intelligent and innovative editor, who among other things was commissioning (or editing himself) some impressive anthologies. The Unexpected was the first of four anthologies he'd buy from Leo Margulies (although the veteran pulp editor/publisher apparently farmed out the editing of at least the latter two to Sam Moskowitz), the first anthologies drawn from the pages of Weird Tales since the magazine folded in 1954, and, first published in 1961, it sold well enough to have a new edition, with a different cover reflecting the new standardized Pyramid design, the next year. Concentrating as it does on the later years of Weird Tales, it featured some of the most innovative and influential writers in fantasy and related fields still active at the time...with stories that were good to brilliant examples of the kind of new horror Dorothy McIlwraith's WT featured in the 1940s and into the 1950s, moving away from the neo-gothic work that the Farnsworth Wright issues had specialized in. 




In 1963, Bensen himself offered a companion, the first anthology (eventually of two Bensen would edit) drawn from Unknown Fantasy Fiction, later Unknown Worlds, to appear since the magazine's publisher had produced a magazine-format best-of, From Unknown Worlds, after World War II to test the waters for possible revival of the magazine. Unknown had folded in 1943 as a victim of relatively low sales during wartime paper restrictions. But while McIlwraith's WT was innovating in modern horror and fantasy, so, too, was Unknown featuring a lot of the kind of modern or "low" fantasy that Thorne Smith and John Collier, or Noel Coward, were writing or had written...nowadays, this kind of fiction is often considered "urban fantasy". The two magazines overlapped in appeal and shared many of their star contributors, even more after Unknown dropped off the market. Editor John Campbell apparently never completely got over the loss of the magazine, and even though his more durable science fiction magazine Astounding, later Analog, was famous for being the primary home for "hard" or scientifically rigorous sf, Campbell would slip at least some borderline fantasy into the mix for the rest of his time as editor.

 Though Weird Tales was best known for horror, and Unknown for contemporary fantasy, both featured no little adventure fantasy of the kind that had been tagged, in the early '60s by notable innovator Fritz Leiber, "sword and sorcery" fiction (in part after the model of "sword and sandal" historical drama, often with some fantasy and/or religious elements); L. Sprague de Camp, a writer of historical fantasy and one of those "completing" fragmentary Conan stories and pages left unfinished when creator Robert Howard committed suicide, put together the first anthology to feature the new term in its title...gathering a defining set of classic and more recent stories in the mode. De Camp would go on to do several more anthologies for Pyramid and eventually others. While Lancer Books had the collected Conan stories in the '60s, and Ballantine was publishing most of the more classic epic fantasy in the market, with some items of similar interest published by Avon, Ace and Berkley, among others, Pyramid had these widely-loved antholgies in its catalog.

The first, 1961 edition of The Unexpected:


One of the Berkley anthologies of similar interest is still the only anthology so far drawn exclusively from Beyond Fantasy Fiction, the first fantasy companion to Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, and in many ways a successor to Unknown, edited by one of that magazine's star contributors, H. L. Gold--for no obvious reason, the anthology was edited anonymously, and saw only one edition--which misidentifies its content as sf: 
    Beyond ed. Anon. (by Thomas A. Dardis) (Berkley Medallion F712, Jan ’63, 50¢, 160pp, pb)
    • 7 · The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse · Ray Bradbury · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Mar 1954
    • 15 · The Ghost Maker · Frederik Pohl · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Jan 1954
    • 27 · Can Such Beauty Be? · Jerome Bixby · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1953
    • 40 · The Real People · Algis Budrys · na Beyond Fantasy Fiction Nov 1953
    • 94 · The Beautiful Brew · James E. Gunn · nv Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1954
    • 117 · I’d Give a Dollar · Winston K. Marks · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction May 1954
    • 130 · The Root and the Ring · Wyman Guin · nv Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1954
    • 150 · Double Whammy · Fredric Brown · gp Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1954; Naturally, vi; Voodoo, vi
    • 153 · Talent · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1953

And one of the magazines Leo Margulies founded, in 1953, the same year that Beyond launched, Fantastic Universe, was for its seven-year run one of the few consistent markets for both sf and fantasy on U.S. newsstands, along with The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the more erratic Fantastic...which saw its own best-of published in hardcover in 1960, edited by its final editor, Hans Stefan Santesson, and reprinted in paperback in 1968 in the US (the UK edition appeared in 1962)...oddly, Santesson chose to ignore stories from the period before he edited FU, which made for a somewhat less representative...and less good...anthology. Also, the volume lacked what was probably Santesson's own translation of a Jorge Luis Borges story, the first published in a U.S. fantasy magazine...which appeared in a late issue of FU, offered about the same time the anthology was...





































































Posted by at 7 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday, June 12, 2009

Friday's Forgotten Books: BEYOND, edited by Thomas Dardis (Berkley, 1963)




















The Contento Index: Beyond ed. Anon.[by Thomas A. Dardis] (Berkley Medallion F712, Jan ’63, 50¢, 160pp, pb)
 7 · The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse · Ray Bradbury · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Mar ’54 
15 · The Ghost Maker · Frederik Pohl · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Jan ’54 
27 · Can Such Beauty Be? · Jerome Bixby · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep ’53 
40 · The Real People · Algis Budrys · na Beyond Fantasy Fiction Nov ’53 
94 · The Beautiful Brew · James E. Gunn · nv Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep ’54 
117 · I’d Give a Dollar · Winston K. Marks · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction May ’54 
130 · The Root and the Ring · Wyman Guin · nv  Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep ’54 150 · Double Whammy · Fredric Brown · gp Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep ’54;                        
            Naturally, vi; 
            Voodoo, vi 
153 · Talent · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep ’53 

So, this is about as forgotten a book in fantasy-fiction publishing as has ever been released by a major publisher in the field, featuring good (but largely unreprinted) stories by major writers (and a few solid minor writers) in the field, from a magazine that suffered several strikes against it (but largely not artistically, it having published much rather more popular work). Edited by Thomas Dardis, who is credited nowhere on the package (and might well never have edited another book--he was the editor in chief at Berkley Books at the time), the book is misattributed in some places to the magazine Beyond's editor H. L. Gold, a brilliant fantasist in his own right and the clangorous editor of Galaxy, the most influential sf magazine of the 1950s, the stablemate of Beyond. The fantasy magazine, which was issued beginning in 1953, and was retitled from Beyond Fantasy Fiction to Beyond Fiction in 1955 without notable change in content, was hobbled by the financial reverses the Galaxy Publishing Company had suffered--in its very creation, GP Co. had less resources than the international combine, World Editions/Edizioni Mundiale, that had launched Galaxy among several less successful US ventures, and sold the sf magazine to its printer and shut down their US operations. Also, the success of Galaxy had inspired a number of other magazine publishers to try their luck with sf magazines, and sf and fantasy saw more titles flooding the newsstands, at a time when magazine distribution was already becoming a chancier proposition, than ever before or since. Most of these new fiction titles were decentish, but leaning toward the indifferent; some were terrible...which meant any new one, even the sibling of Galaxy, had little chance to distinguish itself, and by the end of the decade most of the magazines had folded. Despite an average quality as good as any of the best fiction magazines in the decade, Beyond folded in 1955, leaving a legacy of largely brilliant longer fiction, often rather notional shorter fiction, and an unusually large percentage of stories with a sort of simmering sexuality that dared not express itself directly, particularly in the early issues. So, eight years later, this anthology, plastered with the claim that Beyond was a great sf magazine, which it was not (like its great model, Unknown Fantasy Fiction, it publshed a fair amount of borderly science fantasy, but not as a majority of its content), and with a decent but unspectacular Richard Powers cover and a clumsy grouping of contributors' names. And its a good, reasoably reprsentative slice of the magazine, leading off with a rather precious Bradbury and wrapping up with a good if unspectacular Sturgeon (not only Bradbury's first great model but also probably the most important contributor to the magazine, much as he was probably the greatest setter of the tone and feel for Unknown in the previous decade, and featuring some of the relatively rare fantasies of Frederik Pohl and Algis Budrys, both much better knwon for their sf, and both vitally important to Galaxy in various ways (even if Budrys was publishing more in nearly every other major sf magazine of the 1950s); the other Gold-magazine stalwarts James Gunn and Wyman Guin (Guin would publish little with any other editor), and such old fantasy hands as Jerome Bixby and Fredric Brown (with two fun if slight vignettes, one of his several specialties). A good if unextraordinary book, and still, I think, the only anthology drawn exclusively from Beyond's inventory, which is criminal in and of itself. But, then, Fantastic's nearly thirty years of publishing is represented by two only slightly less obscure volumes, and they only slightly better representative of its best work. 

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's and previous weeks' "forgotten" books.
Posted by at 11 comments:
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)