Showing posts with label C.M. Kornbluth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label C.M. Kornbluth. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Short Story Wednesday: stories from ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY READER edited by Carol Serling, Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh (Dembner, 1987)

Some of the stories...the whole volume to follow...


the Contento/Stephensen-Payne/Locus index:

Rod Serling’s Night Gallery Reader ed. Carol Serling, Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh (Dembner 0-934878-93-5, Dec ’87 [Nov ’87], $15.95, 326pp, hc) Anthology of 18 stories that were adapted as Night Gallery tv episodes.
  • ix · Introduction · Carol Serling · in
  • 1 · The Escape Route · Rod Serling · na The Season to be Wary, Little Brown: Boston, 1967
  • 71 · The Dead Man · Fritz Leiber · nv Weird Tales Nov ’50
  • 104 · The Little Black Bag · C. M. Kornbluth · nv Astounding Jul ’50
  • 138 · The House · André Maurois · vi Harper’s Jun ’31
  • 141 · The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes · Margaret St. Clair · ss Maclean’s, 1950
  • 152 · The Academy · David Ely · ss Playboy Jun ’65
  • 163 · The Devil Is Not Mocked · Manly Wade Wellman · ss Unknown Jun ’43
  • 171 · Brenda · Margaret St. Clair · ss Weird Tales Mar ’54
  • 184 · Big Surprise [“What Was in the Box?”] · Richard Matheson · ss EQMM Apr ’59
  • 191 · House—with Ghost · August Derleth · ss Lonesome Places, Arkham: Sauk City, WI, 1962
  • 199 · The Dark Boy · August Derleth · ss F&SF Feb ’57
  • 215 · Pickman’s Model · H. P. Lovecraft · ss Weird Tales Oct ’27
  • 230 · Cool Air · H. P. Lovecraft · ss Tales of Magic and Mystery Mar ’28; reprinted in Weird Tales Sep ’39
  • 240 · Sorworth Place [“Old Place of Sorworth”;  Ralph Bain] · Russell Kirk · nv London Mystery Magazine #14 ’52
  • 261 · The Return of the Sorcerer · Clark Ashton Smith · ss Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror Sep ’31
  • 279 · The Girl with the Hungry Eyes · Fritz Leiber · ss The Girl With the Hungry Eyes, ed. Donald A. Wollheim, Avon, 1949
  • 297 · The Horsehair Trunk · Davis Grubb · ss Colliers May 25 ’46; ; as “The Secret Darkness”, EQMM Oct ’56
  • 308 · The Ring with the Velvet Ropes · Edward D. Hoch · ss With Malice Toward All, ed. Robert L. Fish, Putnam, 1968
the 1990 Knightsbridge paperback edition (courtesy Andy Austin):

Last Wednesday, I cited Rod Serling's novella "The Escape Route" and its failure as prose (even if it would serve, and probably did, as an acceptable "treatment" to get a script greenlit)...some well-turned dialog, not much else (and the script as shot made for a decent segment of the Night Gallery pilot film...another novella from the same Serling collection was also adapted as the second and weakest of the three stories, directed by Steven Spielberg in a rather painfully "arty" fashion and, like most Spielberg work, wildly overpraised, even giving credit for it being his first professional effort). So, as we build this book's review piecemeal, let's turn to some rather better work, by rather better writers of prose (and at least one of them a playwright who did rather better work at least in fantasticated scripting). 

"The Little Black Bag" is Cyril Kornbluth at his cynical best, the story of his also selected by a poll of the Science Fiction Writers of America for the first volume of their The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (though Kornbluth wrote several books' worth of short fiction in the same league), and as adapted for Night Gallery slightly watered down (such as having the secondary character become a middle-aged man rather than a young woman, perhaps to allow for casting a veteran actor, but even more likely to keep from offending those who would find the character's selfishness easier to take from a somewhat weatherbeaten male). A down and out, homeless and alcoholic ex-doctor comes across a bag of medical instruments more or less accidentally sent back in time from the future...and he and his default assistant find themselves able to do very good things...but the assistant decides the potential for profit should be exploited, with both tragic and ironic consequences.

"The House" is a deft and resonant if somewhat one-punch anecdote of a story; as a vignette, this is enough. I should re-subscribe to Harper's for several reasons, not least to get access to their archive and discover, perhaps, who translated this fine bit of horror (I first read it in Hal Cantor's Ghosts and Things, a Berkley Books anthology that was everywhere one might turn in the '60s and '70s, and one of the two first adult horror anthologies I read at a tender age).

David Ely's "The Academy" is another essentially one-punch story, a bit longer than a typical vignette but not Too much so, and so nicely worked out that even an adult reader who might see the reveal coming might simply continue to enjoy the ride. A suspense story of the disquieting rather than pulse-pounding sort...and even though there's no supernatural element to it, it's usually been reprinted in horror anthologies, such as Ray Russell's The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, where I first read it. Ely was usually good for this kind of disquiet, as in his near-future sf novel Seconds...very well filmed. For that matter, the NG adaptation of  "The Academy" is only a bit heavy-handed, and Bill Bixby did a very good job as the protagonist.

"The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" is one of the more brilliant of the early stories of the frequently brilliant Fritz Leiber, and it's a severe pity both the Leiber adaptations for Night Gallery were rather half-assed. (Oddly enough, the Lovecraft adaptations were the best I've seen that had been produced up till then, though that wasn't too tough, and they not matched for another decade or so.) A strange sort of psychic vampirism is exploited by both the "girl" (1949 will out) model and the photographer and sponsors  employing them. Another disquieting story, as usually the case with the best of Leiber's horror fiction, and there's no disputing the supernatural element in this one. I might've first read it in the 1978 revised edition of the early Leiber collection Night's Black Agents...

More to come from this volume...and a related one...






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Thursday, February 16, 2017

FFB/S: evil children week: THE LITTLE MONSTERS et seq. edited by Roger Elwood and/or Vic Ghidalia; stories by Jerome Bixby, Kit Reed, Damon Knight, "Matthew Gant" (Arnold Hano) and C. M. Kornbluth

There are all sorts of delightful stories about evil children, as well as merely mischievous children (standard and psychopathic and supernatural); FFB organizer Patti Abbott, mother of a prosecuting attorney and a crime-fiction specialist, perhaps knows something we don't, and called this week for a special attention on the perhaps overlooked examples of this particular genre of novels and, in my case at least, short fiction instead. 

 So, before turning to the anthologies of Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia, perhaps the most prolific miners of this vein, separately and together, in fantastic fiction, some examples that come to mind that aren't included in any of their books cited here...
Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life" is perhaps the least obscure bad child story, beyond "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" and few others, vying with The Bad Seed and Peck's Bad Boy and probably ahead of Conradin in Saki's "Sredni Vashtar" or "Gabriel-Ernest" or Small Simon in John Collier's "Thus I Refute Beelzy", and on par with the protagonists of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the increasingly obscure Penrod and their sequels. Adapted several times for versions of The Twilight Zone and mocked as a result by The Simpsons, it's the most famous of Bixby's works by some distance, and a fine evocation of why, perhaps, children shouldn't be omnipotent. Similarly, Joe Hensley's "Lord Randy, My Son."

Damon Knight's brilliant "Special Delivery" involves another rather more insidious sort of bully, a (to understate) precocious and telepathic fetus who chooses to dictate (rather more explicitly than a fetus might anyway) how its parents get to behave as it develops. A great resolution and last line, which, Knight notes, his first wife actually said upon parturition of their first.

 "Matthew Gant" (Arnold Hano)'s "The Uses of Intelligence" involves two smug, and also precocious, early-adolescent miscreants who don't quite discover in time that they are not the most intelligent people in their environment. As a bright young thing when first reading this one, as reprinted from the MWA's own short-lived magazine Sleuth in one of Robert Arthur's Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies (A Month of Mystery, as paperbacked in part as Dates with Death), the dopiness of the young crooks rather offended me at least as much as their viciousness. And I'm reminded of Hensley again; Joe Hensley and Harlan Ellison's "Rodney Parish for Hire" rings a similar change on this basic story, perhaps a bit more convincingly. 

 Two stories that aren't quite about evil children, so much as nearly so: "The Education of Tigress McArdle" by C. M. Kornbluth and "The Attack of the Giant Baby" by Kit Reed; the first about a robot baby simulator that prospective parents are required to survive before being allowed to procreate; the other about an infant accidentally Made Large (the filmmakers of Honey, I Blew Up the Kids didn't quite come close enough to be actionable), both accumulations of charming and off-putting detail. Half-masticated Mallomars alone. (Kornbluth and his wife had extra struggle in treating with their special needs child, which also led to his writing the unfinished fragment that Frederik Pohl, who had some similar experience, completed and published as "The Meeting".)

 And there are many other stories about not so much evil as self-preserving children driven to extremes, such as Graham Greene's "The End of the Party"...and the exploitation of children, such as "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin...or something too much akin, as with the eerie "At the Bottom of the Garden" by David Campton or Joyce Carol Oates's slightly older protagonist dealing with an impossible situation in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

 Meanwhile, over the course of five anthologies, the busy and controversial anthologist Roger Elwood (very prolific and responsible for a number of good and indifferent anthologies in the latter 1960s into the late 1970s, among other editorial work and eventually some novels of his own) and part-time anthologist and early collaborator Vic Ghidalia (his day job apparently was as a publicist at ABC television in Los Angeles) managed to gather other stories instead, between them in four predominantly reprint volumes and one all-original anthology. I have yet to see that last, but have enjoyed most of the stories in the other books over the years, and picked up their first joint effort, The Little Monsters, when I was about twelve or thirteen  from some secondhand book source. 

 The Little Monsters ed. Roger Elwood & Vic Ghidalia (MacFadden-Bartell 288, 1969, 75¢, 160pp, pb)
    • 5 · The Metronome · August Derleth · ss Terror by Night, ed. Christine Campbell Thomson, London: Selwyn & Blount 1934
    • 13 · Let’s Play “Poison” · Ray Bradbury · ss Weird Tales Nov 1946
    • 19 · The Playfellow · Cynthia Asquith · nv Shudders, Cynthia Asquith, London: Hutchinson 1929
    • 43 · Mimsy Were the Borogoves · Henry Kuttner · nv Astounding Feb 1943, as by Lewis Padgett
    • 77 · The Antimacassar · Greye La Spina · ss Weird Tales May 1949
    • 91 · Old Clothes · Algernon Blackwood · nv The Lost Valley and Other Stories, London: Nash 1910
    • 123 · How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery · E. F. Benson · ss The Windsor Magazine Dec 1911
    • 139 · “They” · Rudyard Kipling · nv Scribner’s Aug 1904
Four years later, for the successor no-budget publisher, a sequel:
But beforehand, another joint anthology, for a somewhat more solvent publisher:
And Elwood exploring, with an anthology of all new stories, rather than one or two, the subject matter on his own as editor: 
































 And Ghidalia taking up his own exploration:
    The Devil’s Generation ed. Vic Ghidalia (Lancer 75465, 1973, 95¢, 175pp, pb)
One can see that the two editors' tastes were rather similar, and all five anthologies at least look solid. I need to pick up Demon Kind even if the stories gathered there might be minor in each case...the sequel to Kris Neville's most famous story, "Bettyann", makes that story of some special interest even without the potential of the others, including an early story by eventual YA specialist Laurence Yep, along with several old favorite writers of mine. The mostly/entirely reprint anthologies are an interesting mix of chestnuts and more unlikely choices; The Little Monsters is a rare, if not the only, selection not taken explicitly from Weird Tales to include a La Spina story, I believe, that I own. And, certainly, some of these stories vary a bit from the theme of genuinely evil children, even if the malefactors, as in "The Black Ferris", appear to be children at first. Elwood and Ghidalia perhaps do not need to be crusaded for, but in their ways, they did some good work they could be proud of...even if one chooses never to forgive Elwood for most of the Laser Books line.  Certainly, anyone who hadn't previously come across Robert Bloch's "Sweets to the Sweet" or the Bradbury stories, or the far less commonly reprinted Derleths, was likely to feel like they had made a wise investment. 

 For more of this week's books and evil children, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, April 25, 2014

FFB: THE LOVED ONE by Evelyn Waugh and some other Funny Books...

The contemporary Dell paperback (the
 edition I read) w/Chas. Addams cover.
I've been reading about humor and satire recently, sometimes a dull and infrequently a dangerous thing, and it occurred to me how many genuinely or reasonably good and how many rather tired or otherwise not so good humorous novels I've read over the decades...among those aimed at adults, the most thoroughly successful I remember off the top would be the novella The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh's jaundiced look at Los Angeles and the primary industry in the city, also the funeral industry (and its offshoots) and the British expatriate colony that clustered around the entertainment establishment in a vaguely marking-time way at the turn of the '60s. I've yet to see the entirety of the film version, but the novella was more than sufficient for anyone's purposes, right up to the biggest laugh-line in the book, a grim little joke to cap the rest assembled here. Brevity, soul of wit, and all, though certainly there is no lack of long, funny novels...it's simply easier to sustain a consistent tone, particularly of black comedy much as with its cousins horror and suspense fiction, in the shorter lengths (and this novella can remind one, particularly in retrospect, of another contemporary short novel with ultraviolet humor and even a certain amount of similar undertaking within, Robert Bloch's Psycho). A light touch never hurts...Waugh wouldn't dream of making matters any more blatant than he needs to, though of course the grotesquery of much of what he's dealing with here takes care of that for him...which is part of why I enjoyed this novella so much and found very little to stir enthusiasm in, for example, the blatant and unsubtle pity-success, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, which novel was never content to simply squirt water from a plastic lapel flower if it could hit you with an oversized powder puff as well. The residue was palpable. 

Likewise, as I recall some of the less successful humorous novels of the past decades, sometimes the invention or motivation simply flags, and one is left with the mildly amusing (Art Buchwald's Irving's Delight was meant to be as scathing of the advertising and, in another odd kinship with the Waugh, the pet food industries and related matters as the Waugh was in its compass, but Buchwald was rarely too prone to go for the jugular, hence probably both the popularity of his column and the obscurity most of his work, very much including this novel, has fallen into since his death; Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth had far less restraint, and so their The Space Merchants has at least a good-sized if infrequently-heard-from cult following, and such similar work from them as Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" can be utterly plagiarized for other cult-followed items as the Mike Judge film Idiocracy). It's not as if the models for the likes of Buchwald or Erma Bombeck weren't at times at least as outraged or at least as amused as Waugh...think of Jean Kerr's parody of Mike Hammer (and of the Dramatic Reading) collected in her breakthrough volume Please Don't Eat the Daisies (though, sadly, her corrosive mockery there isn't what she's remembered for), or Robert Benchley at his most enervated. 

 Ah, well. I'll have more (and probably better) to say about a number of these and perhaps some more over the next several weeks (I really should be talking about Bruce Jay Friedman here, if not also the Angry Young Men and Heller and Thurber and Ms. Parker and Twain...). And I see Bill Crider was inspired by an old review of mine to look up Nelson Algren's anthology...I'm honored. Better essays and reviews by Bill and others are linkable at Patti Abbott's blog today...


































































The Library of America version.
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Friday, December 3, 2010

FFB: Joan Aiken, THE GREEN FLASH; THE BEST OF MARGARET ST. CLAIR (Greenberg, ed.); C. M. Kornbluth, THIRTEEN O'CLOCK AND OTHER ZERO HOURS (Blish, ed.)

Three collections, none definitive, all rewarding.







Title: The Green Flash and Other Stories of Horror, Suspense, and Fantasy
Author: Joan Aiken
Year: 1973-00-00
Catalog ID: #3235
Publisher: Dell Laurel-Leaf
Pages: 176
Binding: pb
Contents:
A View of the Heath • (1971) •
Belle of the Ball • (1969) •
Dead Language Master • (1965) •
Follow My Fancy • (1971) •
Marmalade Wine • (1958) •
Minette • (1971) •
Mrs. Considine • (1969) •
Searching for Summer • (1969) •
Smell • (1969) •
Sonata for Harp and Bicycle • (1958) •
Summer By the Sea • (1971) •
The Dreamers • (1971) •
The Green Flash • (1971) •
The Windshield Weepers • (1971) • (aka The Windscreen Weepers 1969)
(index courtesy ISFDb)

 The Best of Margaret St. Clair Margaret St. Clair (Academy Chicago 0-89733-164-8, 1985 [Nov ’85], $4.95, 271pp, pb) Collection of 20 stories plus a new introduction by the author, edited by Martin H. Greenberg.
v · Introduction · in
1 · Idris’ Pig [“The Sacred Martian Pig”] · nv Startling Stories Jul ’49
40 · The Gardener · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Oct ’49
53 · Child of Void · ss Super Science Stories Nov ’49
70 · Hathor’s Pets · ss Startling Stories Jan ’50
84 · The Pillows · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Jun ’50
98 · The Listening Child · ss F&SF Dec ’50
109 · Brightness Falls from the Air [contest story] · ss F&SF Apr ’51
117 · The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles [as by Idris Seabright] · ss F&SF Oct ’51
122 · The Causes [as by Idris Seabright] · ss F&SF Jun ’52
135 · An Egg a Month from All Over [as by Idris Seabright] · ss F&SF Oct ’52
143 · Prott · ss Galaxy Jan ’53
159 · New Ritual [as by Idris Seabright] · ss F&SF Jan ’53
168 · Brenda · ss Weird Tales Mar ’54
180 · Short in the Chest [as by Idris Seabright] · ss Fantastic Universe Jul ’54
190 · Horrer Howce · ss Galaxy Jul ’56
203 · The Wines of Earth [as by Idris Seabright] · ss F&SF Sep ’57
211 · The Invested Libido · ss Satellite Aug ’58
220 · The Nuse Man [Nuse Man] · ss Galaxy Feb ’60
232 · An Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas · nv Galaxy Dec ’61
255 · Wryneck, Draw Me · ss Chrysalis 8, ed. Roy Torgeson, Doubleday, 1980
(index courtesy the Contento/LOCUS indices)

 Thirteen O’Clock and Other Zero Hours C. M. Kornbluth (Dell, 1970, pb); Cecil Corwin stories, edited by James Blish.
· Preface · James Blish · pr
· Thirteen O’Clock [combined version of “Thirteen O’Clock” and “Mr. Packer Goes to Hell”, Stirring Science Stories Feb & Jun ’41, both as by Cecil Corwin; Peter Packer] · nv *
· The Rocket of 1955 · vi Escape Aug ’39
· What Sorghum Says [as by Cecil Corwin] · ss Cosmic Stories May ’41
· Crisis! [as by Cecil Corwin] · ss Science Fiction Quarterly Spr ’42
· The Reversible Revolutions [as by Cecil Corwin] · ss Cosmic Stories Mar ’41
· The City in the Sofa [as by Cecil Corwin] · ss Cosmic Stories Jul ’41
· The Golden Road [as by Cecil Corwin] · nv Stirring Science Stories Mar ’42
· MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie · ss F&SF Jul ’57
(from the Contento indices)

 Three books that give a sense, if not the fullest sense, of what their authors were capable of. The Green Flash is a decent cross-section of the short fiction of Joan Aiken, with an eye to her younger audience who had found her through The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and its companions...but not incompatible with the interests of her gothic readers, if less so perhaps with her more straightforward romance-fiction readers (and surely welcomed by those who'd known of her short fiction over the previous decades). "The Green Flash" itself is a charming bit of misdirection, and it introduced me to the notion of the rarely-seen atmospheric prism effect of a green flash at sundown. "Marmalade Wine" is perhaps the story which sruck me hardest at the time, neat and vicious, while "The Windscreen Weepers" manages to overcome its weak title conceit (and apparently was a particular favorite of either Aiken or her book editors, as most of these stories were drawn from an earlier, more comprehensive collection that took its title from this one).

I'd been looking around (for a post last year) for a good image of the handsome cover Ace put to her The Crystal Crow, and managed to finally find it...though not the the more "edgy" cover that at least onne other of her gothics for them sported. Meanwhile, her other work in this mode seems also likely to be more interesting than the usual run of the gothic lines of the times, including her Heyeresque sequelization of Austen:



 Margaret St. Clair has been only very inadequately represented in collections so far, despite a decent selection in the Greenberg compilation, which nonetheless slights her fantasy and horror work in favor of her sf, I'd say...also true of her other two, earlier collections.



 I've had the great pleasure to read some of the stories I hadn't realized were uncollected (at least in a volume of her work), particulary from St. Clair's run around the turn of the 1950s in Weird Tales, while for reasons I'm not yet clear on, she seemingly preferred to publish as "Idris Seabright" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the same years.

Here's the issue of WT featuring St. Clair's "Professor Kate" and the F&SF with Seabright's "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles" (featuring two cover creatures capable of some serious necking, if so inclined). Her sf could often track back to the horrific as well, as with the fine Galaxy story "Horrer Howce," but the absense of such stories as "The Little Red Owl" (WT, July 1951) is felt in the MHG selection. St. Clair could use a fat NESFA Press career-encompassing collection. Otherwise, one might need to buy this Famous Fantastic Mysteries issue to read the only other story in it aside from the cover novella, St. Clair's "The Counter-Charm"...or to seek out this fine issue of F&SF for, among others, St. Clair's "Sawdust" (not that some collectors wouldn't appreciate the mammary attention of artists Lawrence and Freas):



 Happily, C. M. Kornbuth, at least, has already had a NESFA Press retrospective, more than a quarter-century after Dell published this interesting project, interesting in part because Dell felt it worth publishing a collection focusing on the Very early work of a writer, still in his teens when seeing most of these published, who had never quite gained his commercial due (and a man who loved to publish under pseudonyms of various sorts, in part because most of the stories collected here were among several by Kornbluth under various names filling each of the issues of his friend Donald Wollheim's nearly unbudgeted pulp magazines Cosmic Stories and Stirring Science Stories)--even if Dell gave it as little support as possible. James Blish takes some arguable editorial liberties here, in combining the first two stories, and refuses to include a fragment, published much later than most of these, under the Corwin name but apparently without Kornbluth's permission. "Thirteen O'Clock" is famously the young Kornbluth at his most antic, "The Rocket of 1955" first displaying his bitter black humor and trenchancy (to come to full flower in such stories as "The Marching Morons," emulated, to be kind, in a dumbed-down fashion without credit by Mike Judge's film Idiocracy), and has become one of the classic vignettes in science fiction, after extensive reprinting from the little magazine or fanzine (depending on one's point of view) that first published it--Stirring Science Stories was the first to reprint it, in this issue:

The existence of the NESFA His Share of Glory volume almost makes this volume retroactively redundant, but the omnibus doesn't include Blish's notes nor the version of the conjoined stories presented here.

As with the other books and other work under discussion here, eminently worth seeking out.

 For more Forgotten Books this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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