Showing posts with label Cele Goldsmith/Lalli. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cele Goldsmith/Lalli. Show all posts

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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Wednesday, March 17, 2021

FFB/SSW: THE SEVENTH GALAXY READER edited by Frederik Pohl (Doubleday 1964); THE BEST FROM FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, 14th Series, edited by Avram Davidson (Doubleday 1965); SWORD & SORCERY ANNUAL edited by Sol Cohen (and Cele Goldsmith Lalli) (Ultimate Publications 1975); PERCHANCE TO WAKE: YET MORE SELECTED STORIES FROM SCIENCE FANTASY edited by John Boston and Damien Broderick (Surinam Turtle Press 2016)

the final cover painting by Hannes Bok


Lee Brown Coye

Agosta Morol
The Shock of the New...

 Fantasy and sf in the fiction magazines devoted to them trended ever more sophisticated from their introduction in the US and UK in the 1920s and '30s, and in other English-language countries (though most other Anglophone countries usually featured simply local editions of the US or UK magazines), till by the 1950s the good ones averaged on par with the run of more sophisticated 
Virgil Finlay
commercial and little magazines. Hugo Gernsback reprinted the likes of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe in his early issues of his pioneering (in 1926) Amazing Stories, which was otherwise largely built, at first, on a tradition of notional technology anecdotes in his early electronics magazines.  (But Gernsback was also happy to feature an Edgar Rice Burroughs "John Carter of Mars" story for the only 
issue of his Amazing Stories Annual). F. Orlin Tremaine innovated as successor to Harry Bates and the latter's Astounding Stories of Super Science; John W. Campbell Jr. refined and continued those advances away from standard pulp adventure, and had the title changed from Tremaine's Astounding Stories to Astounding Science-Fiction, and then eventually to Analog (which it remains today);  Sam Merwin, Jr. likewise in the latter '40s  into the '50s improved on the efforts of his predecessors (at Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, the latter-day versions of Gernsback's second set of sf magazines), Dorothy McIlwraith's Weird Tales (where she widened that magazine's remit beyond the kind of neo-gothic horror and purple overstatement that her predecessors favored, even as impressive as Farnsworth Wright's best editorial work had been), and even the young Frederik Pohl, at his promising magazines Astonishing Stories and Super-Science Stories, demonstrating their initially 19-year-old editor's  quick learning curve but also his openness to  the larger literary world, and as the most financially sound and widely-read of the magazines edited by the young lions of the Futurian Society of New York, a fan/ aspiring pro group of writers, editors, artists, agents and more who included a large number of the most notable conscious artists in fantastic fiction, albeit all still very young in the 1930s and '40s. Judith Merril, freelancing anthologies and establishing the second, and often controversial, sf and fantasy best-of-the-year annual, Donald Wollheim, at Avon Books, then Ace Books, then DAW Books, Robert Lowndes, at Columbia Publications and other low-budget publishers, and Larry Shaw in magazines and at Lancer Books, were among the other most prominent editors among the Futurians.

And so, as the new magazines of the 1950s entered the scene, including the four magazines represented in this review essay, the bend toward increasing literary excellence and ambition was already established ...the best of the new magazines, and the best work in the field published in the 1950s, was able to match the standards of fiction published in any other forum on a consistent basis, even given there was still a fair amount of relatively trivial and weak fiction also made available, as in every other field of fiction as well. By the early/mid '60s, the groundwork laid by the increasing urbanity and prose facility of fiction published in magazines such as Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, and Science Fantasy had been building steadily on the good work of and in the previous issues of the same magazines, and not a few other allied periodical titles and anthologies of new work, and book publishers open to novels of ambition, at least fitfully... was resulting in some of what is collected in the books, and one special retrospective magazine issue, we consider here.

 The four editors, or the three editors and a small cluster of editors at Science Fantasy in the early/mid-'60s the fiction collected here springs from, were doing, under some stressful limitations and not always fully successfully, some of the most important editorial work in fantastic fiction of their time. Frederik Pohl, officially the editor of Galaxy and its recently-acquired sibling If from 1962, had been responsible for an increasing amount of the editorial work behind the scenes since the late '50s, as Pohl's literary agency and Galaxy founding editor H. L. Gold were both facing extreme difficulty. Pohl had been a key supporter of Gold, as agent and as a contributor of fiction, from the magazine's founding in 1950, and was unsurprisingly tapped to serve.  Galaxy and If under his initial official editorship faced tough times; one strategy he took to help the magazines weather slowing sales was to buy a certain amount of acceptable-to-good fiction at a new low rate of payment for stories, 1c/word, then immediately afterward begin editing more selectively, seeking better work at Galaxy's initial 1950 rate of three cents per word...and mix the better work in with the readable till reader support could be, he hoped, regained.

At The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, or F&SF, increasingly frequent contributor Avram Davidson was asked in 1962 to become its fourth editor, and third solo editor, the first in that position to not have been either a co-founder or an old hand around the magazine. Davidson as editor was often seen as willing to explore eccentricity even more than had predecessors Robert P. Mills and founding editors "Anthony Boucher" and J. Francis McComas, but he managed to publish a considerable amount of pathbreaking fiction; he remains my favorite of the editors of the magazine, in a very impressive field. 

Similarly, Cele Goldsmith (later married and signing herself Cele Lalli, and later yet Cele Goldsmith Lalli) had joined the magazine staff at Ziff-Davis in the mid '50s with the primary task of editing a short-lived magazine called Pen Pals which was devoted to just that, facilitating new mail correspondents. She was also tasked with assisting the ever-more nonchalant fiction magazine editor on staff, Howard Browne, who had been founding editor of Fantastic, but whom increasingly spent his on-the-clock time at the offices writing his own fiction for publication elsewhere. Goldsmith didn't know very much about fantasy or sf as fields, but was the conscientious presence on the staff, as Browne was succeeded by an old writing colleague of his, and founding editor of  If, Paul W. Fairman, if anything even more oblivious to the quality of the magazine he was barely editing. Goldsmith would comb through the "slush pile" of unsolicited manuscripts, and found as a result, among other work, what would be Kate Wilhelm's first published story, which Fairman disinterestedly published along with the fiction he bought unread from his five "regulars": Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Milton Lesser (before he legally changed his name to Stephen Marlowe), Randall Garrett and Henry Slesar, a very talented quintet who were not usually offering their best work to an editor who wanted manuscripts on-time and unproblematic much more than he wanted them good. Others, including Fairman himself, would also contribute, particularly for some special issues devoted to wish-fulfillment fantasy that led up to a short-lived spinoff magazine called Dream World. Goldsmith learned a lot about what to do and more of what not to.

 All of these items have been packaged on the cheap--standard practice at Doubleday in the '60s when not dealing with their "lead titles", and Ultimate and Surinam Turtle Press were and are all but one-person shops, Ultimate a retirement job for publisher Sol Cohen and STP kind of an avocational project of Richard Lupoff's.


Introduction · Frederik Pohl · in
For Love · Algis Budrys · nv Galaxy Jun 1962
Come Into My Cellar · Ray Bradbury · ss Galaxy Oct 1962
The Tail-Tied Kings · Avram Davidson · ss Galaxy Apr 1962
Crime Machine · Robert Bloch · ss Galaxy Oct 1961
Return Engagement · Lester del Rey · ss Galaxy Aug 1961
Earthmen Bearing Gifts · Fredric Brown · vi Galaxy Jun 1960
Rainbird · R. A. Lafferty · ss Galaxy Dec 1961
Three Portraits and a Prayer · Frederik Pohl · ss Galaxy Aug 1962
Something Bright · Zenna Henderson · ss Galaxy Feb 1960
On the Gem Planet [Casher O’Neill] · Cordwainer Smith · nv Galaxy Oct 1963
The Deep Down Dragon · Judith Merril · ss Galaxy Aug 1961
The King of the City · Keith Laumer · nv Galaxy Aug 1961
The Beat Cluster · Fritz Leiber · ss Galaxy Oct 1961
An Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas · Margaret St. Clair · nv Galaxy Dec 1961
The Big Pat Boom · Damon Knight · ss Galaxy Dec 1963

--More to come...



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Friday, April 8, 2016

FFM: FANTASTIC: STORIES OF IMAGINATION, April 1963, edited by Cele Goldsmith (Ziff-Davis); THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, February 1964, edited by Avram Davidson (Mercury Press)

From ISFDB (supplemented by the FictionMags Index):
Two issues, less than a year apart rather than (as is my usual practice in such things) as close to on the stands simultaneously as is practical. But these happened to be two issues which were in a convenient stack, and rather good ones of either magazine, the most consistently published US fantasy/sf magazines in the 1950s-70s, and at many times the best, even when not the only (which wasn't too uncommon, either). 

 The two best stories in their respective issues (so far) are the familiar ones to me (from Leiber's collections and anthology appearance for the Johnson),  Fritz Leiber's "The Casket Demon" in Fantastic and S. S. Johnson's "The House by the Crab Apple Tree" in F&SF.  The Leiber is a sly bit of humorous horror, involving a generational curse afflicting a Prussian family whose current representative among the living is a hardbitten Hollywood sexpot, and the ways the eponymous demon can be...incompletely...foiled (also notable is how the very distinctive illustrator Lee Brown Coye chose to represent the determined actress). The Johnson is as brutal a post-apocalyptic tale as you can possibly want...recently discussed on F&SF's forum as a rather obvious anticipation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (not that that novel doesn't have dozens of literary fathers, and not a few at least as good), it's an example of the kind of controversial story editor Avram Davidson would seek out and publish even more often than most of his fellow F&SF editors over the decades. (Allen Kim Lang's "Thaw and Serve," which anticipates rather more intelligently and viscerally "Demolition Man" the film, is another which comes to mind, and Ray Nelson's work likewise pushed some envelope seams.) Johnson, 24 when the story was published (and a sports reporter for the Hartford Courant at 14, apparently), took his doctorate in English and had an academic career, submitting a short story collection and apparently a novel as his theses but never publishing them, and instead collaborating on a technical writing text as apparently his only other published work (that we've seen, so far). Johnson's rather prodigious nature is echoed by Robert Rohrer, who has a decent, notional fantasy, itself post-apocalyptic, in the earlier issue, involving the changing nature of the holy and unholy supernatural world after the nuclear culling of so much of the human population. Rohrer published a double-handful of short stories in sf and fantasy magazines between the ages of 15 and 18, and then abruptly ceased in 1965...one hopes it wasn't the result of, say, military experiences that left him unwilling or unable to continue. 
back cover of the Fantastic; not Lee Brown
Coye's image of the Hollywood actress in the
story, though of an earlier curse victim

 What helped distinguish the two magazines under these editors in the early '60s was their mutual openness to odd approaches, literary adventurousness, and generally furthering the expansion of the palette in newsstand sf and fantasy that had begun in earnest in the better magazines of the 1950s, and would be a little (but not Too much) more pronounced in the British magazines New Worlds and Impulse. To one degree or another such challenging work would continue to appear in Fantastic (and its stablemate Amazing) and F&SF, and also was making itself felt in the magazines Frederik Pohl was editing from the latest '50s onward through the '60s, at first as a shadow assistant to the ailing H. L. Gold, Galaxy, If, and eventually Worlds of Tomorrow and International Science Fiction. Writer/editor Michael Moorcock criticized Davidson for publishing too much jocular and slight fiction, and there was some of that, but never enough to undermine to seriousness of F&SF as a magazine; Cele Goldsmith (later to marry and sign herself Cele Lalli and later in her career as Cele Goldsmith Lalli) also could be drawn to notional stories at times to a fault, but she could also fill her magazines with stories as beautifully written as the Leiber, the two good stories in this issue by Roger Zelazny (one published as by "Harrison Denmark," his pseudonym which impishly pointed toward Harry Harrison, then resident in Denmark, as the man behind the name) and the David Bunch "Moderan" story, a series of heavily symbolic sf Bunch would contribute to throughout his career. Another decent joke story in her issue is the first published fiction by Piers Anthony, "Possible to Rue," involving a very odd sort of comeuppance to a parental fib or two. (Goldsmith Lalli was the first or practically the first to publish as professional fiction writers Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas Disch, Keith Laumer, Sonya Dorman, Ted White and Kate Wilhelm, along with Anthony and a number of others...Ben Bova's first work in sf magazines was a series of essays in her Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction). 
includes "The Casket Demon"

 F&SF certainly takes the lead in contrasting the non-fiction features between the two issues; in the Fantastic, the Norman Lobsenz "editorial" is a bit meatier than his usual facile essay, though mostly in being about some of the more interesting advances in information and space technology newly arrived or on the horizon, rather than in being all that deep; the letter column is pleasant enough, and the (also often shallow) book reviewer S. E. Cotts has a rather good assessment of two horror anthologies, one mediocre, from Norman Bates-inspiration and enterprising film fan Calvin Thomas Beck and a brilliant one edited by soon-tragic, brilliant fiction and script writer (and former F&SF film columnist) Charles Beaumont (Jeff Segal has reviewed the latter here...and probably would review the former if it was to hand). However, the Erle Stanley Gardner "introduction" letter to his reprinted story is a nice touch, and Fantastic, unlike F&SF, does feature illustration for most of its text items. The F&SF editorial, the often long headnotes to the stories, and the bulk of the book reviews are by editor Davidson, default choice for my favorite writer of any kind, when one must be named (one review is by the then just beginning to become notorious fan, and husband of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Walter Breen, whose review of a Jung text somewhat creepily touches on children as sexual archetypes). The magazine had two science columns in the early '60s, with Isaac Asimov's long-running essay series joined for several years by Theodore L. Thomas's two-page essays on a monthly basis, and this issue has one of the occasional letter columns F&SF would run (rather more infrequently since Davidson's years), featuring a number of mildly famous figures in fannish and eventually professional circles, and an essay, one of a short series Davidson would offer, of examinations of sf and fantasy fandom, this one by Wilson Tucker (next month's by Robert Bloch, the third by Terry Carr),  from a time when fandom and geek culture had not yet multiplied to take up significant amounts of space in the world.

 Both issues are filled with notable writers, even if Johnson would publish so regrettably little, and Rohrer fall silent; the other example of a writer with few other credits in fantastic fiction, at least, is the Australian (Mr.) Kit Denton, whose possibly only published short story is also in the F&SF. P. M. Hubbard (a Davidson favorite) and Erle Stanley Gardner, with a "classic" reprint from Argosy All-Story Weekly (part of a series in Goldsmith's magazines), are among those better remembered for their crime fiction--Goldsmith presumably offered the classics in part to help the budget woes at her magazines, which were allowed a base rate of pay of 1c/word for their fiction and other content during her years at Ziff-Davis; the reprints would get big names into the issues and presumably could be purchased at bargain reprint rates, to allow her, as she did, to offer a higher pay rate to such favorites of hers as Fritz Leiber (F&SF has also never been the best-paying magazine in the fantastic-fiction field, though currently it's on par with most of its fellow-travelers). F&SF's Ron Goulart (his first professional publication a decade+ previous F&SF reprint of some sfnal humor from the UC Berkeley campus magazine Pelican) was just starting to get serious about his often satirical crime fiction along with his established career in fantastic fiction, and would soon become almost as much a speculative fiction/crime fiction "amphibian" as Davidson himself; his story here seems at first Just Another Comic Inferno story, but it does have a bit of Kafkaesque intensity that the more generic examples usually lacked. Evelyn E. Smith, Dean McLaughlin and Laurence Janifer (with a clever-enough joke-story) had all established themselves as at least capable talents in the fields, and while Doris Pitkin Buck was better known for her light verse in the magazine, her fiction contribution wasn't too much more unusual than Harry Harrison's amusing poem about time travel paradoxes. I still need to read the long cover story by Philip Jose Farmer (himself a writer not averse to challenging fiction at times) in the Fantastic and several of the shorts in the F&SF, but I'm glad I did dip into these for this week's column...which will be filled out soon!
the UK hardcover featuring the Johnson

 For more of this week's fiction (and some nf) you should know about, please see Patti Abbott's blog; next week I'll be hosting the links, barring the flood.
Richard Powers cover for the middling anthology from the editor/publisher
of Castle of Frankenstein, and Robert Bloch's model, in part, for
Norman Bates, in the novel Psycho...from Ballantine's early '60s horror series...


















































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