FFB: HARRY HARRISON! HARRY HARRISON!: A MEMOIR by Harry Harrison (Tor 2014); DAVID G. HARTWELL: IN MEMORIAM edited by Kevin J. Maroney, Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer (NY Review of Science Fiction/ICFA 2016)

The image is of a small stainless-steel rat, a
reference to HH's most sustained fictional series
character, and his unflattering nickname...

I've mentioned Harry Harrison's memoir here some weeks back, in the course of describing his brief editorial career at the Ultimate Publishing Co., when he edited Fantastic Stories and Amazing Science Fiction Stories in 1967-68; its perhaps too adorable title is a harkening to one of the most famous novels in Harrison's career, Make Room! Make Room!, adapted poorly for film as Soylent Green. Reading it through, one is struck by how obviously it was a first draft, as it is presented here...passages are redundant or unclear, and a large part of the book, not quite the latter half, is devoted to essay drafts that Harrison had intended to more seamlessly blend into the narrative of the book, devoted to his relation with John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor essentially the most important to Harrison emotionally and, for some of his early fiction-writing career, financially (even if Damon Knight and Hans Stefan Santesson were also to play major roles for Harrison similarly), and to the circumstances around some of HH's most important books. I was also impressed by how little of the main narrative of the book is about writing or his writing process, or even his

Harrison's third novel, and first crime-
fiction (and ghosted) book.

interaction with fellow writers, editors and fans in the science fiction and related communities, even though they are touched on as events warrant, as opposed to the adventures Harrison, his wife Joan and their children (eventually) have in living abroad and coming back to the States, as well as the formative experiences of Harrison's childhood and mostly unpleasant experiences as a draftee into the World War II US Army (Harrison doesn't let us forget how much he hated his military experience and the military mindset, among other sorts of officiousness). It's definitely memoir rather than autobiography, as certain matters are elided altogether (Harrison's first wife, Evelyn, is not mentioned anywhere in the text), and others are dealt with only as much as necessary (such as Harrison's career as a comics artist and writer, and eventually packager for some of the lower-rent comics publishers of the early 1950s). We do learn a fair amount about how the Harrison family was able to make do, sometimes comfortably and sometimes less so, as voluntary expatriates in the 1950s in Mexico, Italy, Denmark and the UK, and about Harrison's partnership with Brian Aldiss in a number of projects (including the anthology Hell's Cartographers, which includes a shorter but more polished memoir by Harrison, among five other autobiographical essays by sf writers including Aldiss's).  His passions, not least his love and admiration for his second and lifelong wife, are marked, as are such enthusiasms as for Esperanto and how they might help from time to time. The similarities to such other late memoirs by Harrison's colleagues as I. Asimov and the also to-have-been-rewritten entries in Frederik Pohl's The Way the Future Blogs (named in its turn for Pohl's much earlier memoir) are there, though Harrison maintains in this book a lot of the circumspection that one finds in Pohl's The Way the Future Was and to some extent in Asimov's earlier two-volume autobiography; Pohl in his blogging and Asimov particularly in his third autobiography, written as he was going into his final months, were often more plainspoken. This was clearly not quite the book Harrison hoped to publish, but it remains valuable and engaging.

David G. Hartwell was the editor for this and other Harrison books at Tor, among the many editorial posts and valuable work Hartwell had contributed over his half-century in and around the fantastic-fiction field (as noted previously on this blog, among his projects had been The Little Magazine, a notable journal for poetry particularly and not at all restricted to the fantasticated). Hartwell fell while carrying bookshelves on a stairwell, and never regained consciousness, earlier this year, and the suddenness of his death was not a little of what one feels in the remembrances in this special issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction, made available, at least temporarily, for download without charge; NYRSF is one of the literary children of Hartwell's, which he co-founded, and -edited for almost three decades. While he wasn't the only progenitor of the more literate work published in the fields over that time, he might've been the most consistently on-hand, and his interests ranged from keeping oral traditions alive on through to keeping an editorial hand in with all the media through which fiction is offered, not least being one of the editors of the short-fiction forum Tor.com. It is through one of the remembrances here, for example, that one might learn why Harry Harrison doesn't mention his first wife Evelyn at all in his book; their brief marriage was marked by her acting out sexually in ways that were rather extreme even for the rather bed-hopping community that the sf community could be in the early 1950s.  What the various and impressive set of celebrants in the special issue do get across more importantly is the depth of the loss, personally and professionally and in terms of scholarship, the death of Hartwell creates in the field. This will probably not be the final form of this memorial, but it's an excellent start for the kind of task no one looks forward to taking on, except for the opportunity to say what should be said.

For more of what should be said about today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

FFM: TRIQUARTERLY #49: SCIENCE FICTION edited by Jonathan Brent, David G. Hartwell, Elliott Anderson and Robert Onopa (Northwestern University Press 1980)

TriQuarterly #49 was meant to be another of the series of adventurous theme issues the Northwestern University-based little magazine had been publishing through the latter '70s; Elliott Anderson and Robert Onopa had put together issues devoted to western fiction and "Love and Hate" and their immediate predecessor (with whom they'd served as assistant editors) had helmed an issue subtitled "Prose for Borges"...so putting together an issue devoted to sf didn't seem too outlandish a project, particularly since Onopa had already published an sf novel, The Pleasure Tube, which had been purchased for publication by Berkley Publishing by their then editor, David Hartwell, in 1978, though Hartwell had left Berkley to begin the Timescape imprint at Pocket Books by the time the novel had been published in 1979, and the new administration took as little care getting it into presentable shape as a publishing package as possible, with the almost comically inane blurb, "Beyond the Star Range: Infinite Sex and Ultimate Horror" plastered prominently across the shoddily-concocted cover of a seriously-intended and rather innovative novel that, among other things, had no part of itself taking place Beyond the Star Range, wherever that might reside. Hartwell, for his part, had been editing and publishing, with others originally as Quest, The Little Magazine for fifteen

years, beginning a half-decade before he began contributing to the academic literature about sf in the early '70s, simultaneously embarking on his impressive editorial career in sf and fantasy fiction, which was abruptly terminated by his accidental death on 20 January of this year.  This would be Hartwell's only credit with the magazine, and Onopa would be separated from it after this issue, with Anderson and Brent both out the door as well by 1981 so that insurgent editor Reginald Gibbons could instead run the magazine into a Safe mediocrity with solemn promises never to do something so outlandish as a theme issue devoted to sf again.  But seeking this out at the University of Hawai'i library, while I was in high school down the street in Honolulu, was my first conscious interaction with the work of Onopa or Hartwell, though I'd seen some of the other books Hartwell had put together for Berkley, of course, including their edition of Fritz Leiber's Night's Black Agents. (Or nearly so, as I'd seen Hartwell's brief article in First World Fantasy Awards some years before; I was aware of his editorial work with Gregg Press and the quickly-folded magazine Cosmos, as well.)

So, a quick look at the contents of the issue that would so nettle some the subscribers to and defenders of the faith around TQ at Northwestern (courtesy ISFDB):

4 •  Paradise Charted • interior artwork by Algis Budrys

5 • Paradise Charted • essay by Algis Budrys

76 •  On Science Fiction • interior artwork by Richard Powers [as by Richard M. Powers]

77 • On Science Fiction • poem by Thomas M. Disch [as by Tom Disch--as he usually signed his poetry]

80 •  Small Mutations (excerpt) • interior artwork by Vincent Di Fate [as by Vincent DiFate]

81 • Small Mutations (excerpt from Blakely's Ark) • shortfiction by Ian MacMillan

116 •  In Looking-Glass Castle • interior artwork by Carl Lundgren

117 • In Looking-Glass Castle • shortstory by Gene Wolfe

130 •  Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (excerpt) • interior artwork by Jack Gaughan

131 • Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (excerpt) • shortfiction by Samuel R. Delany

162 •  When They Find You • interior artwork by Michael Whelan

163 • When They Find You • (1977) • novelette by Craig Strete

178 •  Ginungagap • interior artwork by Don Maitz

179 • Ginungagap • novelette by Michael Swanwick

212 •  The Pressure of Time • interior artwork by Frank Kelly Freas [as by Frank Kelly Frease--a typo]

213 • The Pressure of Time • (1970) • novelette by Thomas M. Disch

258 •  The White Donkey • interior artwork by Rowena Morrill

259 • The White Donkey • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin

262 • Contributors: • essay by uncredited

The long essay by Budrys is brilliant (and, as was his wont, not as kind to the general run of academic writing about sf as he could have been) and the fiction contributions, including the reprints by "Craig Strete" and Thomas Disch, as well as the new fiction by Michael Swanwick (his first story, and widely hailed) and such veterans of literate sf as Wolfe, Le Guin and Delany...and the novel excerpt by MacMillan, a fellow professor of Onopa's at the University of Hawai'i, who had already had a story from TQ in a The Pushcart Prizes volume, and would soon have another in the 1982 volume of The Best American Short Stories but hadn't yet been praised by Kurt Vonnegut as "the Stephen Crane of World War II"--that would happen after he published Proud Monster, his second novel, fixed up from a series of vignettes he wrote at Onopa's suggestion ("In the middle '70s, Bob Onopa and Elliott Anderson ran TriQuarterly, which was the best literary magazine of that decade" as Macmillan noted in a 1990 interview, in which he mentioned studying at the Iowa Writer's Workshop with R. V. Cassill and Vonnegut)...all an utterly creditable package. Onopa, having heard that I had already had a bad run-in with MacMillan, thought it best to shoo me toward the 600-level graduate writing seminar rather than take MacMillan's 400-level course after Onopa's 300-level, which I'd taken in my second semester as a freshman...the grad seminar had been set to be taught by humorist Jack Douglas, who'd tapped out, and Hawai'i-resident writer A. A. Attanasio had been recruited by Onopa to take it on (among much else, Attanasio had published poetry in the 1970s in The Little Magazine). Life can be full of improvisation, and last-minute, fateful decisions...and had been delivering not a few aggressively improvised decisions at the turn of the '80s to Robert Onopa's literary career...and I certainly benefited from some of his rather more benevolent professorial improvisations.

For more of today's books rather than magazines, and more formal reviews than elegies, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

FFB: THE DARK DESCENT edited by David Hartwell (Tor, 1987)

The first of Hartwell's survey anthologies (the sfnal The Ascent of Wonder would, as I didn't quite note correctly before, would follow in 1996,  with a title echoing that of this volume), today's bug-crusher was issued at the height of the "horror boom" of the latter '80s, an efflorescence of horror publishing of brilliant to horrible but entirely too often indifferent work that Tor as a publisher was to no small extent a contributor...albeit Tor's offerings did lean in the brilliant to indifferent direction, while the batting average of, say, Zebra Books was considerably worse (but, boy, did Zebra know how to deploy a shiny foil cover).  The Dark Descent tries to be a reasonably comprehensive attempt to encompass the literary history of its field, and its successes are mostly in that it's a good, if idiosyncratic, collection of fiction, mixing chestnuts with some very odd, if at times gratifyingly challenging, selections from canonical writers in the field, and capped with a remarkably unbalanced historical survey article as introduction, which agrees heartily with Stephen King, already ridiculously over-represented in such a book by three stories in a volume that can find room for only one each from Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, Dennis Etchison, Joyce Carol Oates, John Collier or, for goodness's sake, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood or M. R. James (and an odd selection from Poe): that horror is at heart a reactionary approach to fiction, one which defines The Other as inherently monstrous and which must be destroyed for a return to normalcy. This is woefully incomplete as an assessment of horror fiction (or horror in art generally), and indicative of the kind of limitation of insight which mars King's work (among other factors) entirely too often...as Rosemary Jackson, and not she alone, has noted, horror fiction is as liable to highlight the monstrous inherent in society, and how the Other is victimized by that normalcy (see the most obvious Shirley Jackson chestnut, albeit I'd class "The Lottery" as more akin to horror than horror per se, or the Gilman chestnut included here--arguably ditto!)...as well as, as with every other mode of art,  horror having the ability to take even more points of view which take neither position explicitly.

To ignore, say, Philip Dick's "Upon the Dull Earth" or "The Father Thing"  for "...Tempunauts" or Sturgeon's "It" or "Shottle Bop" for "Bright Segment" is to make an interesting argument, and certainly two inclusions each by Jackson, Thomas Disch and Robert Aickman are both more justified than three from King and, at least in Disch or Aickman's case, less commercially savvy, and should be applauded...but this is not an impeccable selection as a result, and its use as a text seems to have receded...I hope to suggest that the overpraise it received at time of release, such as the late Charles Brown's capsule review included with the index below, and its relative obscurity a quarter-century later (if in-print status), in the wake of such newer rodent-crushers as (George Kelley's selection this week) the VanderMeers' The Weird, are both unfair...if not as unfair as the greater obscurity such near-contemporaneous volumes as the Pronzini, Malzberg and Greenberg item have fallen into (perhaps in part due to the fact that Tor survives, and Arbor House doesn't--and the Pronizini, et al., is also in print, if under slightly different title than it was).

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

The Dark Descent ed. David G. Hartwell (Tor 0-312-93035-6, Oct ’87, $29.95, 1011pp, hc) Massive anthology of horror stories. It attempts to trace the history of horror short fiction as well as covering the contemporary field. There is also a long, insightful introduction, and the head notes to each story actually try to say something about the literature and the author’s place in it. This should be considered the reference work on horror short fiction, and will probably remain so for many years. Highly recommended. (CNB)

• 1 · Introduction · David G. Hartwell · in
• 15 · The Reach [“Do the Dead Sing?”] · Stephen King · ss Yankee Nov ’81
• 31 · Evening Primrose · John Collier · ss, 1940
• 40 · The Ash-Tree · M. R. James · ss Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Edward Arnold, 1904
• 50 · The New Mother · Lucy Lane Clifford · ss Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise, Macmillan and Co., 1882
• 59 · There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding · Russell Kirk · nv Frights, ed. Kirby McCauley, St. Martins, 1976
• 85 · The Call of Cthulhu [Inspector Legrasse] · H. P. Lovecraft · nv Weird Tales Feb ’28
• 108 · The Summer People · Shirley Jackson · ss Charm Sep ’50
• 118 · The Whimper of Whipped Dogs · Harlan Ellison · ss Bad Moon Rising, ed. Thomas M. Disch, Harper & Row, 1973
• 132 · Young Goodman Brown · Nathaniel Hawthorne · ss New England Magazine Apr, 1835
• 142 · Mr. Justice Harbottle [“The Haunted House in Westminster”; Martin Hesselius] · Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu · nv Belgravia Jan, 1872
• 167 · The Crowd · Ray Bradbury · ss Weird Tales May ’43
• 175 · The Autopsy · Michael Shea · nv F&SF Dec ’80
• 203 · John Charrington’s Wedding · E. Nesbit · ss Temple Bar Sep, 1891
• 209 · Sticks · Karl Edward Wagner · nv Whispers Mar ’74
• 225 · Larger Than Oneself · Robert Aickman · nv Powers of Darkness, Collins, 1966
• 245 · Belsen Express · Fritz Leiber · ss The Second Book of Fritz Leiber, DAW, 1975
• 255 · Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper · Robert Bloch · ss Weird Tales Jul ’43
• 268 · If Damon Comes · Charles L. Grant · ss The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VI, ed. Gerald W. Page, DAW, 1978
• 278 · Vandy, Vandy [John] · Manly Wade Wellman · ss F&SF Mar ’53
• 291 · The Swords · Robert Aickman · nv The Fifth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, ed. Robert Aickman, Fontana, 1969
• 312 · The Roaches · Thomas M. Disch · ss Escapade Oct ’65
• 321 · Bright Segment · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Caviar, Ballantine, 1955
• 339 · Dread · Clive Barker · nv Clive Barker’s Books of Blood v2, Sphere, 1984
• 368 · The Fall of the House of Usher · Edgar Allan Poe · ss Burton’s Gentlemen’s Magazine Sep, 1839
• 382 · The Monkey · Stephen King · nv Gallery Nov ’80
• 410 · Within the Walls of Tyre · Michael Bishop · nv Weirdbook #13 ’78
• 431 · The Rats in the Walls · H. P. Lovecraft · ss Weird Tales Mar ’24
• 445 · Schalken the Painter · Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu · nv Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, James McGlashan, 1851; revised from an earlier story in Dublin University Magazine May ’39.
• 460 · The Yellow Wallpaper · Charlotte Perkins Gilman · ss New England Magazine Jan, 1892
• 472 · A Rose for Emily · William Faulkner · ss The Forum Apr ’30
• 480 · How Love Came to Professor Guildea [“The Man Who Was Beloved”] · Robert S. Hichens · na Pearson’s Magazine Oct, 1897
• 513 · Born of Man and Woman · Richard Matheson · vi F&SF Sum ’50
• 516 · My Dear Emily · Joanna Russ · nv F&SF Jul ’62
• 532 · You Can Go Now · Dennis Etchison · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Sep ’80
• 541 · The Rocking-Horse Winner · D. H. Lawrence · ss The Ghost-Book, ed. Cynthia Asquith, London: Hutchinson, 1926
• 553 · Three Days · Tanith Lee · nv Shadows #7, ed. Charles L. Grant, Doubleday, 1984
• 576 · Good Country People · Flannery O’Connor · ss Harper’s Bazaar Jun ’55
• 591 · Mackintosh Willy · Ramsey Campbell · ss Shadows #2, ed. Charles L. Grant, Doubleday, 1979
• 602 · The Jolly Corner · Henry James · nv The English Review Dec ’08
• 629 · Smoke Ghost · Fritz Leiber · ss Unknown Oct ’41
• 641 · Seven American Nights · Gene Wolfe · na Orbit 20, ed. Damon Knight, Harper & Row, 1978
• 680 · The Signalman · Charles Dickens · ss All the Year Round Christmas, 1866
• 690 · Crouch End · Stephen King · nv New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Arkham, 1980
• 712 · Night-Side · Joyce Carol Oates · nv Night-Side, 1977
• 731 · Seaton’s Aunt · Walter de la Mare · nv The London Mercury Apr ’22
• 753 · Clara Militch · Ivan Turgenev · nv Dream Tales and Prose Poems, Macmillan, 1897
• 793 · The Repairer of Reputations · Robert W. Chambers · nv The King in Yellow, New York & Chicago: F. Tennyson Neely, 1895
• 817 · The Beckoning Fair One · Oliver Onions · na Widdershins, Secker, 1911
• 864 · What Was It? · Fitz-James O’Brien · ss Harper’s Mar, 1859
• 874 · The Beautiful Stranger · Shirley Jackson · ss Come Along With Me, Viking, 1968
• 880 · The Damned Thing · Ambrose Bierce · ss Tales from New York Town Topics Dec 7, 1893; Weird Tales Sep ’23
• 887 · Afterward · Edith Wharton · nv The Century Jan ’10
• 909 · The Willows · Algernon Blackwood · na The Listener and Other Stories, London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907
• 944 · The Asian Shore · Thomas M. Disch · nv Orbit 6, ed. Damon Knight, G.P. Putnam’s, 1970
• 970 · The Hospice · Robert Aickman · nv Cold Hand in Mine, Scribner’s, 1975
• 995 · A Little Something for Us Tempunauts · Philip K. Dick · nv Final Stage, ed. Edward L. Ferman & Barry N. Malzberg, Charterhouse, 1974