Showing posts with label Edward Wellen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edward Wellen. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 7, 2022

SSW: Kate Wilhelm, Harlan Ellison, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Gordon Dickson, Edward Wellen, Arthur & Irwin Porges: FANTASTIC, April 1959, edited by Cele Goldsmith (Lalli)

The third in a series of posts about select set of late '50s issues of fantasy and related-fiction magazines: 

The first can be read here: Fantasy/Horror/SF fiction magazine issues from the 1950s fantastica "End of Summer": THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION April 1958 edited by "Anthony Boucher"; FANTASTIC April 1959 edited by Cele Goldsmith; FANTASTIC UNIVERSE April 1958 edited by Hans Stefan Santesson; TALES OF THE FRIGHTENED August 1957 edited by Lyle Kenyon Engle; SCIENCE FANTASY April 1958 edited by John Carnell (and INSIDE SF's F&SF/Mercury Press parody issue/September 1958, edited by Ron Smith, and MACABRE, Summer 1958, edited by Joseph Payne Brennan)

Not yet reviewed, though described in the first post's overview...and a more eye-catching cover than than the Fantastic sports!

The second, here: Short Story Wednesday: Kit Reed, Margaret St. Clair, William F. Nolan, Avram Davidson, Richard Wilson, and others: April 1958 fantasy (and related) stories from THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASTIC UNIVERSE (part 2)

Can be read here.

The first thing one might note about the April 1959 issue of Fantastic, beyond the notional cover, is that the issue became Even More an all-star issue in time than it was upon release...Arthur Porges (usually without his brother) might be the most obscure of the professional writers assembled here, and he can be remembered for the more clever stories he saw published in fantasy, sf and crime fiction magazines, such as "$1.98" in F&SF in 1954 (Irwin presumably helped develop the gimmick in "A Touch of the Sun", as he never published his own fiction in magazines, though he did publish essays). Kate Wilhelm and Harlan Ellison went on to become major writers in several fields; Wilhelm's first published story, "The Pint-Sized Genie"  had been pulled out of the "slush pile" by Goldsmith during her assistant-editor days and was published in Fantastic, though she had already sold her notable story "The Mile-Long Spaceship" to Astounding SF, it would be published later; I remain somewhat amused that she thus limned small and large, fantasy and sf, in her earliest career; Ellison had, during Goldsmith's predecessor-editor Paul Fairman's term, been one of the writers with a contract to produce a certain amount of fiction each month for a flat fee, and that was that, making for a fair amount of on-the-job training. Edward Wellen was a consistently interesting writer of crime fiction and some speculative fiction (often with a criminous aspect as well), and while Jack Sharkey, who had his first published short story in the previous, March 1959, issue of Fantastic, never wrote too much of lasting value in fantastica, he did go on to become one of the most successful playwrights among those who provided mostly one-act plays for community theater and similar productions, published by Samuel French, Inc. Rog Phillips was, along with William P. McGivern, among the rather good writers who often provided the best copy as regulars in the Ray Palmer years of Fantastic's older siblings Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures. And, other cover Names Jack Williamson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Gordon R. Dickson had already established their often influential careers, Williamson already one of the grand old writers in the fields, his work first appearing in the 1920s.

Another thing one might note is that while the previously reviewed F&SF and Fantastic Universe 4/58 issues were toward the end of their editors' runs (several issues before Anthony Boucher turned over the magazine to Robert P. Mills, barely more than twice as many issues before FU was abruptly folded in 1960, having published only the first installment of Fredric Brown's novel The Mind Thing), this was only the fifth issue Cele Goldsmith served as editor of...though throughout her run on Fantastic and Amazing, "editorial director" Norman Lobsenz wrote the editorials and blurbs for the magazines (sexism and ageism will out, particularly in the latter '50s and early '60s). Previously, I wondered if Paul Fairman's departure, and the end of  his quota system of gathering staff stories, led to a sudden shortage of fiction and a related dearth of interior illustration, and this issue suggests that might well've been the case...a largish number of Coming Soon stories from major writers mentioned in a house ad in this issue are in fact included in this issue.

The Wilhelm and Ellison stories share a certain sense of their writers still trying to refine their approaches. Ellison's "The Abnormals" ("The Discarded" being his preferred title) has a reasonably good sense of propulsion and demonstrates his concern for outsiders and enjoyment of flashy grotesqueries. It features a fairly easy-to-anticipate twist in the plot. Wilhelm's "The Ecstasy of It" demonstrates her interest from the beginning of her career in grounding her stories in day-to-day realities for her characters, notably in this case an insecure torch singer and a philosophical pianist traveling with a small press corps to interact with a first Mars colony, somewhat improbably all-male, and what befalls them. The title refers mostly to what appears to be an illness that strikes several of the characters in the colony, leaving them temporarily unwilling to do anything but enjoy their sudden esthetic appreciation for things generally. Thus also an early example of Wilhelm's fascination with diseases and similar infections that can leave at least some of the afflicted better off than previously. This, and a consistent general engagement with science that is often expressed in how it affects specific individuals, which will also recur in her work (including some of her crime fiction, such as the impressive Death Qualified).

Fantastic was making one of its occasional moves toward being a Mostly fantasy-fiction magazine at this point (and Norman Lobsenz's typically breezy, shallow editorial is about his mulling what kind of classic monster he would prefer to be, between a ghoul, a vampire or a werewolf, settling on the last), and most of the shorter stories are Goldsmith's favorite sort of fantasy, mildly surreal contemporary fantasy...probably part of he reason her magazines were home to some early "new wave" fiction (though she was also a champion of Fritz Leiber's work, including his high fantasy and more traditional horror, among no few others, in years to come, as well as numbering Ursula K. Le Guin and Thomas M. Disch among her many '60s"discoveries"). Edward Wellen's "Hear a Pin Drop" involves a prisoner seeking to retain his sanity in the face of unceasing solitary confinement and darkness, and how things go very oddly; Gordon Dickson's "After the Funeral" is a horror story involving a mixture of ESP research and a haunting; Marion Zimmer Bradley's "A Dozen of Everything" is a mildly amusing deal-with-djinn tale, fairly typical of her lighter-mode stories, and with just enough twist at the end to not be wholly predictable. While the Porges brothers' story is one of the sf "problem stories" Arthur Porges loved to write, along with the not-dissimilar "locked room"/impossible crimes kinds of mysteries he also published copiously, this one a little less dependent on a high-school physics class gimmick than most problem stories, if also acceptably far-fetched and slightly more devoted than usual to fleshing out its caricature characters...in a sense, it's barely sf, since it could conceivably happen and would be arguably possible with the technology of the time, albeit it's unlikely. I shall catch up with the balance of stories in the three issues so far, including the brilliant Leiber and famous Brian Aldiss story in the F&SF, and the other magazines' contents, Soon!

for more of this week's Short Story Wednesday entries, 
!Miercoles!
Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Friday, August 23, 2013

FFB: edited by Avram Davidson: THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION January 1964


Donald Westlake, Mack Reynolds, Damon Knight, Edward Wellen, Allen Kim Lang's possibly best story, part of Fritz Leiber and Avram Davidson's longterm argument about the merits of H.P. Lovecraft's work...alongside Davidson and MZ Bradley reviewing some important and some  underappreciated (or even Forgotten) texts of fantastic fiction...so, what was so special about this issue?
 
from ISFDB:

The January 1964 issue of F&SF gets to be significant to, well, particularly me from the confluence of several notable contributions within (as well as having the cover date kicking off what would be Avram Davidson's last year of editorship, his being the best set of issues the magazine would see so far, the best from the magazine that has averaged the best among the long-running fantastic fiction magazines in English even in the face of strong competition for that plaudit)(and several of the best magazines in other languages were either launched as their national/language editions of F&SF or affiliated with the Yank magazine early on, notably the French Fiction and important Swedish, Japanese and Spanish magazines).

I've written previously about Mack Reynolds's cover story "Pacifist" being one of the stories that has helped shape my thinking about the world, posing the basic questions at the heart of utilitarianism as well as pacifism, rather neatly and with force and wit. At 13, bracing stuff. James Sallis thought so, too, when he, a bit older than I was at first reading, put together his fine first anthology, The War Book (1969), and it's one of the two Reynolds stories that newbie anthologist Martin Harry Greenberg and his collaborators used to bookend the contents of their Political Science Fiction (1974), not the last time Greenberg would reprint the story.

 Donald Westlake's "Nackles" is a Christmas horror story, about an anti-Santa rather more dire than Krampus, published not long after Westlake's denunciation of the sf and fantasy publishing scene, hence the use of his little joke of a pseudonym, Curt Clark (Westlake would never be able to divorce himself from fantastic fiction, however frustrating he found the commercial realities there early on, as such late work as Humans demonstrates).  Another story with a kind of sneaking influence in the culture...CBS's refusal to film an adaptation for the revived The Twilight Zone led to Harlan Ellison's resignation from that series.

Allen Kim Lang has had what critic John Boston has termed a "stealth" career in sf and fantasy, most of his publications in the 1950s and '60s (Lang is still alive, but apparently hasn't published in quite some time); Algis Budrys praised his work, and the unflashy nature of it, particularly in his one published novel, Wild and Outside. Though "Thaw and Serve" is decidedly flashy, and in tone reminiscent of the nearly contemporaneous Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange and certainly anticipatory of the rather goofier film Demolition Man in its depiction of a thug awakened from cryogenic storage in a nearly utopian future. One of the many proto-New Wavish (or, as Boston has joked, in this case rather more punkish instead) stories that Davidson, like Cele Goldsmtih/Lalli, published in their magazines in the early '60s, it would not only have fit comfortably in Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions a few years later but might even have had some influence on Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog"...this is another story that has stuck with me from early reading, as have the Westlake and the Reynolds.

 The other stories have not been as memorable to me, and I should revisit them.  Though Damon Knight would not write a fully satisfying novel till his rather late CV, despite his brilliance in all shorter forms, there was always something interesting about the earlier attempts. Edward Wellen, like Davidson, Westlake and to some extent Reynolds (and a lesser extent yet Wenzell Brown) an amphibian between crime fiction and fantastic fiction, and fond of doing work that sat firmly on the boderlines between both, has been reviewed here previously (a later contribution to the magazine, in fact); Robert Lory would be particularly productive in writing sequels of sorts to Dracula and other horror work, in novel series and otherwise, in the 1970s. Valentina Zhuravlyova not only wrote sf on her own but also, to get around the anti-Jewish bigotry of some aspects of the Soviet publishing sector, lent her name to her husband's fiction for publication (at least at home)...G.S. Altschuller is better remembered now for his formulation of the metatechnological observations known as TRIZ , or TIPS.

And the wittily, even offhandedly erudite book reviews by editor Davidson are supplemented in this issue by those of Marion Zimmer Bradley, not yet quite the institution she would become, and Fritz Leiber, in part engaging in a casual but heartfelt debate with Davidson over the merits of not just the interests H. P. Lovecraft pursued in his fiction, but in the qualities of the fiction itself (Davidson remained unconvinced...both Davidson and Leiber are vastly better and more profound writers than HPL was able to be, despite Lovecraft's extraordinarily important work in exploring existential horror, and his direct mentoring of the young Robert Bloch and, much more briefly but tellingly, Fritz Leiber as well in the latter's fledgling career as a writer).  And, of course, Asimov's science essay, of which he published, all told, 399 in consecutive issues of F&SF, and which column he credited as being the bedrock of his pop-science (and extensions) nonfiction-writing career (though Asimov and Davidson had a somewhat cool relation; Davidson's humanistic Orthodoxy and Asimov's utter atheism while being of Jewish ancestry was one source of occasional tension).

And, to add to the personal if not so much the intrinsic value of this rather impressive issue, it would've been the one on the newsstands at about the time I was being conceived. 

That noted, please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books (and possibly a few more magazine issues or other not-quite-books)...this week's entry by Jerry House is a review of The Eureka Years:  Boucher and McComas's Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1949-1954, edited by Annette Peltz McComas, about the origins of the magazine and its first five years of publication (and collecting some impressive stories published in those issues, among much else).
Posted by at 13 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)