Showing posts with label D. R. Bensen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label D. R. Bensen. Show all posts

Friday, June 29, 2018

FFB: THE UNEXPECTED edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid 1961); THE BEST FROM FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION 9th Series (aka FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON AND OTHER STORIES) edited by Robert P. Mills (Doubleday 1960)

In English, and probably in any language, the most consequential and certainly the most sustained fantasy-fiction magazines have been Weird Tales (or WT), running for 31 years in its first form and revived multiply since (the most recent revival having run for 26 years, if some of them very lean indeed) and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), soon to enter its 7oth year of continuous publication. In the earliest 1960s, Robert P. Mills was editing F&SF (and therefore the annual best-of anthologies drawn from it), which had absorbed his magazine Venture Science Fiction shortly beforehand, and while publisher Joseph W. Ferman was the credited editor of Bestseller Mystery Magazine, the last remaining crime-fiction magazine at publisher Mercury Press after they sold Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (where Mills had been Managing Editor since 1948) and Mercury Mystery had been folded, I suspect Mills had an editorial  hand in there, as well. Leo Margulies had purchased the assets of Short Stories, Inc., the publishers of Short Stories and the folded Weird Tales...Margulies continued to publish Short Stories for a while, and though his one consistent title in the last couple decades of his life was Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine,  he hoped to revive Weird Tales...and did so, for four issues in 1973-74. But in 1961, Margulies published two
anthologies drawn from Weird Tales, the first such to be published explicitly as anthologies from Weird Tales,  though they didn't advertise that fact on their covers: The Unexpected and The Ghoul Keepers, both almost exclusively drawn from the issues edited by Dorothy McIlwraith, who had edited both Short Stories and Weird Tales in the 1940s and '50s.  And so, today's books...the first of three  Robert Mills annual volumes from F&SF, and the first McIlwraith-issues volume (aside from Wellman's story) Margulies put together from WT...two impressive sets of contributors, and not a few notable stories between them...

 In a sense, Mills and McIlwraith were both "third editors" of their respective groundbreaking magazines ...Mills followed the four-year solo editorship of Anthony Boucher (legally William White, but known even to friends mostly as "Tony") and Boucher and J. Francis "Mick" McComas's founding stint as co-editors of the magazine for its first five years of publication (and several years of development before that). Mills had been managing editor since the launch in 1949, as well, but even with that and his excellent work at Venture, there was a certain amount of pressure in the new gig. If not nearly the audience resistance that Dororthy McIlwraith faced at Weird Tales, when she succeeded long-term second editor Farnsworth Wright (first editor Edwin Baird did little of note beyond get the magazine out for the first year, and publish WT's first "scandalous" and always most notorious story, "The Loved Dead" by C. M. Eddy, and first contributions by H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith). Wright's magazine had been a receptive market to Lovecraft, Smith, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, the magazine's most popular contributor Seabury Quinn, and such younger writers as Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Catherine L. Moore, Henry Kuttner (these last two would soon marry and collaborate heavily and constantly), Carl Jacobi and Mary Elizabeth Counselman; he also favored purple prose and exoticism, and had some peculiar crotchets...he consistently rejected Leiber's "Fafhrd and Gray Mouser" sword and sorcery fantasies, which found their early home with Unknown Fantasy Fiction instead, as did "Smoke Ghost", Leiber's best early horror story. McIlwraith brought a greater modernism and broader appeal to the magazine, and published Ray Bradbury, Margaret St. Clair, Richard Matheson, Joseph Payne Brennan, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Jim Kjelgaard (best remembered now as the author of Big Red and its sequels) and all the previously-mentioned contributors who were still willing and able to contribute, and reprinted some of the others' work...and was roundly condemned by such staunch fans of the Wright magazine as Donald Wollheim, who founded The Avon Fantasy Reader in part to publish something more reminiscent of what Wright's WT had been.
    The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Ninth Series ed. Robert P. Mills (Doubleday LCC# 52-5510, 1960, $3.95, 264pp, hc)
    Also as Flowers for Algernon and Other Stories (Ace, 1966); British editions omit Feghoots [pun vignettes], Ace pb editions omit Feghoots and the poetry by Schenck, Buck, Belkin and Brode; retained are the Lewis, Aldiss and McClintic poems; Mills's headnotes also removed.
    • 7 · Introduction · Robert P. Mills · in
    • 9 · Flowers for Algernon · Daniel Keyes · nv F&SF Apr 1959
    • 41 · Me · Hilbert Schenck, Jr. · pm F&SF Aug 1959
    • 42 · A Different Purpose · Kem Bennett · ss F&SF Nov 1958
    • 62 · A Vampire’s Saga · Norman Belkin · pm F&SF May 1959
    • 63 · Ralph Wollstonecraft Hedge: A Memoir · Ron Goulart · vi F&SF May 1959
    • 67 · Sportsman’s Difficulity · Doris Pitkin Buck · pm F&SF Mar 1959
    • 68 · “All You Zombies—” · Robert A. Heinlein · ss F&SF Mar 1959
    • 81 · An Expostulation · C. S. Lewis · pm F&SF Jun 1959
    • 82 · Casey Agonistes · Richard M. McKenna · ss F&SF Sep 1958
    • 94 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XI · Grendel Briarton · vi F&SF Feb 1959
    • 95 · Eastward Ho! · William Tenn · ss F&SF Oct 1958
    • 113 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XIV · Grendel Briarton · vi F&SF May 1959
    • 114 · Soul Mate · Lee Sutton · ss F&SF Jun 1959
    • 130 · Call Me Mister · Anthony Brode · pm F&SF Feb 1959
    • 131 · What Rough Beast? · Damon Knight · nv F&SF Feb 1959
    • 156 · Classical Query Composed While Shampooing · Doris Pitkin Buck · pm F&SF Jul 1959
    • 157 · Far from Home · Walter S. Tevis · ss F&SF Dec 1958
    • 161 · Space Burial · Brian W. Aldiss · pm F&SF Jul 1959
    • 162 · Invasion of the Planet of Love · George P. Elliott · ss F&SF Jan 1959
    • 173 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: X · Grendel Briarton · vi F&SF Jan 1959
    • 174 · Dagon · Avram Davidson · ss F&SF Oct 1959
    • 184 · Pact · Winston P. Sanders (Poul Anderson) · ss F&SF Aug 1959
    • 200 · To Give Them Beauty for Ashes · Winona McClintic · pm F&SF Sep 1959
    • 201 · No Matter Where You Go · Joel Townsley Rogers · nv F&SF Feb 1959
    • 222 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XII · Grendel Briarton · vi F&SF Mar 1959
    • 223 · The Willow Tree · Jane Rice · ss F&SF Feb 1959
    • 233 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XIII · Grendel Briarton · vi F&SF Apr 1959
    • 234 · The Pi Man · Alfred Bester · ss F&SF Oct 1959
    • 252 · The Man Who Lost the Sea · Theodore Sturgeon · ss F&SF Oct 1959
    • 264 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XV · Grendel Briarton · vi F&SF Jun 1959
The Ace paperback edition contents, as a result, under both titles:
The offerings in both books are impressive--check out these sets of contributors, and the most key stories in each, even in the pointlessly dressed-down Ace and UK editions of the Mills (though the Ace movie tie-in edition pictured at the top has the amusing distinction of seeming to have three titles). The WT volume surveys eleven stories from a dozen years of the magazine, with only the Wellman and Leiber stories likely to have been the purchases of Wright rather than McIlwraith; the F&SF volume surveys issues from 1958 and '59, with a number of stories almost certainly purchased by Boucher as editor. Margulies dedicates his book to Donald R. Bensen, the publisher's editor at Pyramid, and quite likely all but a collaborator in the editorial selections as well as clerical/rights work Margulies definitely credits him with: "To Don Bensen, without whom these stories were written, but without whom they would not be in this book"; on the first edition, back cover, "H. H. Holmes" (Boucher as book reviewer for The New York Herald-Tribune, while also reviewing as Boucher for the NY Times) has a praiseful pull-quote (in a sense praising his own work in part); Margulies would dedicated his next WT anthology (reviewed here soon) to Holmes/Boucher, "who asked for more"...Mills dedicates his volume to Boucher and McComas, "who are truly responsible for this book's existence...and to Anne, Alison and Freddie, who contribute so much to the editor's."

The first story in the Margulies, and the last (non-joke story) in the Mills are both by Theodore Sturgeon, the only writer shared by both books, and, till now not having read them within more than several years of each other, I'm struck by how even more similar they are than might be expected...yet the later story, "The Man Who Lost the Sea", is not in any way a retread (and is Sturgeon's one story included by Martha Foley in her annual Best American Short Stories volumes), a science fiction story that nonetheless does in its more non-linear way recapitulates several of the key aspects of the far more unnerving horror story "The Professor's Teddy-Bear".  Both stories deal rather directly with the notion of the boy being the father of the man, and of how the man, coming to understand the full import of his experience in the present, comes to a fuller understanding of the strangeness of his earlier experiences...whether in the context of dealing with a literal psychic vampire creature in the form of a young child's teddy bear, or in the understanding of the full import of early experiences of near-death in exploring new and dangerous environments, in the ocean and elsewhere. Sturgeon's literary grace and deftness in putting across sensory experience in fiction is on full display, as is his fascination with bits of arcane knowledge that he will use as another anchor, along with his exploration of the emotional states of his characters, and their legacies of trauma, in their usually extreme or at least very strange circumstances, to build his stories around. He wants to show you several kinds of wonders simultaneously, and in his many best stories, the integration of these desires is utterly effective. There's a reason he was Ray Bradbury's chiefest literary model, and such an inspiration and goad to writers ranging from Kurt Vonnegut to Judith Merril to Isaac Asimov. 

And Daniel Keyes. "Flowers for Algernon" is, rather obviously, the most famous story in the F&SF volume as things were in 1966, and still, along with Walter Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz" and Stephen King's "The Gunslinger", still among the more famous stories the magazine has published so far. It, and Robert Heinlein's "'All You Zombies-'" and perhaps still Richard McKenna's first story, "Casey Agonistes", are probably the most widely-read stories in Mills's anthology ...the Heinlein a key late short story in his career, and also a further mining of a key trope for him, notably less emotionally explored in his earlier story "By His Bootstraps", involving a very peculiar sort of time paradox and its results, and the McKenna a very powerful yet gentle sort of horror/fantasy, though McKenna's early death didn't allow him to capitalize much on the enormous popular success of his first and only fully-finished novel The Sand Pebbles, an autobiographical recent-historical story dealing in part with his experiences in East Asia as a seaman in the years before WW2.  Likewise, Walter Tevis, more widely known (or at least his novels are, as sources for films) for The Hustler and its sequel The Color of Money (you might think of Paul Newman), and The Man Who Fell to Earth (and David Bowie), has a particularly charming and resonant vignette, "Far From Home", for which he also titled his one powerful collection of short fiction. But "Flowers for Algernon," the tale of a mentally challenged man who undergoes an experimental medical procedure which makes of him a genius, and the joys and dangers this offers him emotionally and otherwise, is a story which has a visceral appeal particularly to the kind of person drawn to science fiction, but which also has almost as strong a hold on less sf-prone readers, particularly as delicately but straightforwardly told, in the form of diary entries by the protagonist Charly, about his experiences and those of the lab mouse Algernon who has also undergone an earlier test of the procedure.
Among the familiar stories (at least since their early reprint in the Margulies book)  in The Unexpected are Fredric Brown's "Come and Go Mad", Fritz Leiber's "The Automatic Pistol" and Manly Wade Wellman's "The Valley Was Still", an historical fantasy set during the waning days of the US Civil War, later adapted, with a slightly heavy hand but still effectively, for an episode of  the first version of the tv series The Twilight Zone, "Still Valley"; such stories as Margaret St. Clair's "Mrs. Hawk" and Ray Bradbury's "The Handler" (not to be confused with Damon Knight story of the same title) in the WT book, and Alfred Bester's "The Pi Man", "William Tenn"'s "Eastward Ho!", Knight's "What Rough Beast" and Avram Davidson's "Dagon" in the Mills book are all very good examples of what their authors could do, if not the first stories one might think of from them or the magazines, and the other stories in the books are at least more than simply worth preserving, in 1960 and '61 when these books were first issued, and today--and the openness of Dorothy McIlwraith and Robert Mills to writers whom one might not think of as "typical" for their magazines, such as Frederik Pohl and Isaac Asimov in WT, or George P. Elliott (who was, like John Ciardi and others, a lifelong enthusiast of and occasional contributor to fantastic literature, as well as Barry Malzberg's mentor of sorts in the latter's university career) and Joel Townsley Rogers in F&SF, are on display here as well. I suspect I'll have more to say about them, soon.

 For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

 Below, earlier-edition covers for the Mills volumes--Doubleday rarely did better than providing merely functional at best covers for the hardcover editions of the series over the decades, and the UK reprint isn't notably better in this case--and the full view of the second-edition package of the Margulies...Pyramid had adopted a sort of semi-uniform "look" for its anthologies drawn from fantasy magazines that the newer covers reflected...it was certainly easier to read while browsing a paperback rack, if less splashily colorful.






















































































































Photo by Bill Crider
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Friday, August 4, 2017

FFB: THE BARBIE MURDERS aka PICNIC ON NEARSIDE by John Varley (Berkley 1980)

In 1980, after the publication of his first three somewhat disappointing novels (to most if not necessarily all his fans) and the all but intolerably brilliant first, 1978, collection of his shorter fiction, Berkley, which was publishing his trilogy of novels beginning with Titan, decided to release The Barbie Murders, which appeared to be meant as the B-side collection of his shorter works. The Persistence of Vision (aka In the Hall of the Martian Kings in the UK; the two longest and most widely-hailed stories in the earlier volume thus vied for collection title for, no doubt, Publishers' Reasons), had been seen as kind of the cream of his shorter work published up to 1978; the weakest story in the book was also one of the most popular, "Air Raid," one of two Varley stories in the first issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and the source, after a torturous years-long process, of a not-bad short novel by Varley and a somewhat more disappointing film, script by Varley, starring Daniel Travanti, Cheryl Ladd and Kris Kristofferson, both entitled Millennium. "Air Raid" had been the one of the two in that IASFM issue published under a pseudonym (in longstanding bad magazine-publishing tradition, that would suggest two stories by the same writer in an issue Would Be Wrong), while "Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe" (the better story, I'd say, and perhaps Varley would, too) was published under the John Varley byline. 

 So, these were the stories published in this volume, most of them also pretty damned brilliant, and certainly better, at very least on average, than the novels Varley was publishing in those years (as did his occasional editor Damon Knight, Varley showed a remarkable tendency to slough off good sense or believable character development at novel length, despite being so very good at both in even novellas as well as shorter fiction; both would eventually get past that, Varley happily rather sooner in his career than Knight in his): 
    The Barbie Murders John Varley (Berkley, Sep ’80, pb) (1984 Berkley edition retitled Picnic on Nearside)
While these had been the stories gathered in The Persistence of Vision, one of the several volumes published in a new and sadly short-lived program edited by D, R. Bensen, who had been Pyramid Books' primary editor for more than two decades, and who had been rewarded, after Harcourt Brace Jovanovich bought up Pyramid and rebranded it as Jove Books, with the new Quantum imprint, with some serious promotion and editorial budget, the books published by a consortium of James Wade and Dell Books (and Dell's subsidiary hardcover line the Dial Press), duly reprinted in Britain by Sidgwick & Jackson. (Quantum launched with the first and probably least bad of Varley's first five or six disappointing novels, The Ophiuchi Hotline.)
    The Persistence of Vision John Varley (Quantum/Dial, 1978, hc)
    UK editions (Sidgwick & Jackson/Futura 1978) as In the Hall of the Martian Kings.
    • Introduction · Algis Budrys · in
    • The Phantom of Kansas · nv Galaxy Feb 1976
    • Air Raid · ss Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Spr 1977, as by Herb Boehm
    • Retrograde Summer · nv F&SF Feb 1975
    • The Black Hole Passes · nv F&SF Jun 1975
    • In the Hall of the Martian Kings · na F&SF Feb 1977
    • In the Bowl · nv F&SF Dec 1975
    • Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance · nv Galaxy Jul 1976
    • Overdrawn at the Memory Bank · nv Galaxy May 1976
    • The Persistence of Vision · na F&SF Mar 1978

It's not putting it lightly how mind-blowing Varley's short fiction, up to novella length, was for me as 13yo reader, digging deeply into the new fiction magazines for the first time in 1978, and in my first new issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction finding Varley for the first time with the novella "The Persistence of Vision" and needing to see as much of his fiction as I could gather. He was doing what Heinlein could no longer do, and had been less adept at even at his best (and in establishing a template, or further establishing that of H. G. Wells and other forebears), in providing glimpses of actually lived-in futures, and ones where technological quantum leaps had had concomitant effects on the lives and behavior of the characters, including no little their sexuality. Varley had a very 1970s-era sexual libertinism inherent in much of his work (which also didn't offend me at all at thirteen, relatively alienated and well into puberty) but managed to express it for the most part naturally through a sophisticated take on his characters' lives and interactions, in posited worlds where changing bodies was only mildly more difficult than changing clothes, and (in many of his linked stories) humanity had been displaced from Earth by alien invaders, who came to save the cetaceans, and thus the human diaspora was spread across the other planets and other bodies of the Solar System, giving Varley a lovely assortment of (then up-to-date-detailed) environments on those planets, etc., to explore. Joanna Russ noted that his female characters were unusually good for a male writer, perhaps for all writers (given how there simply was less tradition of good portrayal of women in fiction, not least fantastic fiction, to draw on); Algis Budrys suggested that at his best, Varley was drawing together all the things that science fiction, at least, could do best and uniquely. Even as a new reader of the new work in the field, it felt to me like Varley, while perhaps not the best creator of lapidary prose in the field at the time, was nonetheless otherwise ahead of (nearly if not) everyone else's curve in showing how a future life might be, indeed a quantum jump of his own in the way that, say, Stanley Weinbaum's work had been in the late 1930s in sf, albeit Varley was innovating in a now much richer and vastly more sophisticated tradition. 

And while the stories in the earlier collection averaged a bit more brilliant (and the next collection, Blue Champagne, would also have a slightly better if less startling batting average), the majority here are more than fine, such as "Robinson Crusoe" or "Picnic on Nearside", and the intentionally outrageous "Lollipop and the Tar Baby" (which features among other things a sentient black hole and is one of the most explicitly sex-driven of Varley's stories); all are worthy of standing with his other early short fiction (and most of it has been offered again in Varley's most recent and retrospective collections, The John Varley Reader and Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories). Original title story "The Barbie Murders" was the second account, after introduction in "Bagatelle", of police officer Anna-Louise Bach, whom as Varley has noted lives in a somewhat grittier future than that of most of his human-diaspora stories (I believe Mattel, the doll line's manufacturer, took issue with the book's first title, in part driving the retitling, not that the second title isn't a better one for the collection...wish we could say the same for the new cover). Both Berkley editions were released to coincide with first releases of the latter two novels cited in the blurb between Varley's name and the book title on the cover below.

But I will grant it's better than the Orion/Futura UK paperback cover on the first collection:

Though even that is vastly better than what Futura did with The Barbie Murders in their edition:

For swank, and eyewash, here are the somewhat more dignified and better covers Varley has had on his collections since: 



Though I will grant that none of the covers are absolutely brilliant, and this one particularly seems to me could've used another draft...

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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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...





































































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