Showing posts with label Fantastic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fantastic. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

20th Anniversary Issues: THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION October 1969, edited by Edward Ferman, and FANTASTIC August 1972, edited by Ted White: Short Story Wednesday

Perhaps unsurprisingly for 20th Anniversary issues of fantasy/sf magazines, or for any gathering of fiction, considerations of time (and, often, loss) loom large in the stories in these two issues. Slightly odd that two magazines which have been, at times at least in their previous histories, famous as homes for women writers in fantastica should produce "all-stag" anniversary celebration issues, albeit in the case of Fantastic, Alice (at conventions, going by nickname "Racoona") Sheldon was still hiding behind the "James Tiptree, Jr." pseudonym, and cover artist Jeff Jones was eventually to transition to womanhood and take on the name Jeffrey Catherine Jones in 1998; "Ova Hamlet" as the pseudonym Richard Lupoff used for his parody stories for Fantastic, mostly, was a Very open non-secret (part of the gag was that Lupoff was serving as interlocutor for the eccentric "Hamlet"). 

That said, these are impressive issues, helping to kick off good decades artistically for both magazines, and eventually financially for F&SF, at least.

The best stories in either issue are, I'd say at this hour, Robert Bloch's time-travel (of a sort) and definitely afterlife fantasy "The Movie People", which incorporates his love for film and his experiences as both youthful film fan and eventual professional screenwriter, and Tiptree's "Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket", very much a time-travel story and yet also deeply encoding some of her lived experience as a young debutante (and, to a much lesser extent, her later life as an OSS/CIA staffer). I haven't yet read the Conan pastiche by de Camp and Carter, nor this part of the eventual Ursus of Ultima Thule by Avram Davidson, but the introduction to the first part of the serial, giving some of the events in the previous segment published as a standalone story in the sf magazine Worlds of If, is indicative of Davidson in one of his favorite modes, writing about the origins of the mythology he's mining for the story, and the sort of thing he eventually would write at length in the essays collected as Adventures in Unhistory...which is highly recommended.

Barry Malzberg, the editor of Fantastic and stablemate Amazing before White, as well as contributor to this issue, would later collect the Tiptree story in his 2003 anthology The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time, as well as it being first collected in Sheldon/Tiptree's first, widely-hailed collection, Ten Thousand Light Years from Home. Bloch's "The Movie People" has also been widely collected, in his The Best of Robert Bloch and many other volumes, in translation as well as the original.

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more complete considerations of their objects of discussion and review, and a fine new poem she's composed commemorating the birthday of her late husband, the political science professor and historian Philip Abbott (whose favorite short story was E. M. Forster's seminal sf story, "The Machine Stops")...



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Wednesday, June 7, 2023

Short Story Wednesday: stories by Robert Bloch, Alice Sheldon ("James Tiptree, Jr."), David Bunch and Juan José Arreola, from the 28th Anniversary issues of FANTASTIC, edited by Elinor Mavor (July 1980) and THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, edited by Edward L. Ferman (October 1977)




6 • Prismatica • Samuel R. Delany · nv
  34 •   Review: Stolen Faces by Michael Bishop • review by Richard   Delap
  36 •   Review: A Little Knowledge by Michael Bishop • review by Richard Delap
   39 •   Review: New Dimensions 7 by Robert Silverberg • review by Richard Delap
    41 •   Review: Universe 7 by Terry Carr • review by Richard Delap
43 · What You See Is What You Get · Robert Bloch · ss
56 · The First Stroke · Zenna Henderson · ss
61 • Films: Star Wars • [Films (F&SF)] • essay by Baird Searles
64 · The Man Who Could Provide Us with Elephants [Mr. Secrett] · John Brunner · nv
95 · Brother · Clifford D. Simak · nv
113 · Caretaker · Manly Wade Wellman · ss
123 · Leaps of Faith · Michael Bishop · ss
139 · Science: The Subtlest Difference · Isaac Asimov · cl
150 · Time-Sharing Angel · "James Tiptree, Jr." (Alice Sheldon) · ss




Twenty-eight years is a slightly odd birthday for a magazine to celebrate, but as I've noted before here, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF) liked to have an "all-star" birthday issue every year, in the '70s and later not least to help soften the blow of a new newsstand price rise in some (many) years, while Fantastic was usually more blasé, even with "major" anniversary years...though this was to be the penultimate issue of the magazine, before its folding into the stablemate Amazing Stories, and not too long before the end of Ultimate Publications, which had published both titles and various spun-off magazines since 1965; Amazing (combined with Fantastic) would soon be sold to Dungeons and Dragons game publisher TSR, and would see a further cash infusion from Steven Spielberg renting title rights and options on the magazine's fiction for his (rather bad and shortlived, but guaranteed two seasons by NBC, which honored the contract) tv series Amazing Stories.  Despite title, these last few issues of Fantastic didn't feature very much sf, but the publisher was quite sure sf magazines always outsold fantasy magazines...and they usually had (I continue to suspect this is because fantasy readers were less likely to be aware there was a  literature of fantasy that could be seen as differentiated from fiction as a whole than sf or even horror readers were...at least till J. R. R. Tolkien began outselling everyone else in the '70s).

F&SF was edited and published in 1977 by Edward Ferman, who had inherited the business from his father, and by this point ran the magazine from his family's house in Cornwall, CT; younger Ferman had been editing since 1964, publishing beginning in 1970. While in 1980, Elinor Mavor was just settling in as the editor of Fantastic and Amazing, having had her first issues of the magazines assembled hurriedly after long-term publisher Sol Cohen retired at the end of 1978, and turned the reins over to his junior partner Arthur Bernhard, who had never seen eye-t0-eye with 1969-79 editor Ted White, and who replaced him with the illustrator and staff layout person Mavor, who had a certain lack of confidence going in, even more so than her most widely-hailed predecessor at the magazines when they were published at Ziff-Davis, Cele Goldsmith Lalli (Mavor even signed herself "Omar Gohagen" to begin with, thinking women editors were unlikely to be accepted in sf and fantasy circles...not particularly true ever, but particularly not by the '70s).

And for whatever reason, I'd not actually picked up either of these issues and given them a read-through, despite a good line-up of genuinely all-star contributors to the F&SF issue, and a not-bad selection of writers in the Fantastic. While the F&SF had the standard, illustration-free (except for Gahan Wilson's monthly cartoon, and the column headers Wilson had devised for the rotating-cast book-review, Asimov science-essay, and Baird Searles film and related media review columns) easy to read if a bit staid text-laden pages, Mavor was trying, as best the minimal budget she had would allow, to mix in not only illustration (White's issues had had often excellent illustrators and cover artists) but to remake the layout more in the fashion of most magazines at the turn of the '80s, with some filler nonfiction devoted to contributor biographies and (instead of the story headnotes White would provide, or Ferman, in their magazines) short ending notes that detailed what drew her to take the item the reader had just finished...author photographs included when handy. 

So, I chose for this week's entry to check out two stories in each issue, the F&SF's Robert Bloch ("What You See is What You Get") and Alice Sheldon ("Time-Sharing Angel"), still signing her work (mostly) "James Tiptree, Jr." and the Fantastic's David Bunch ("New Member") and a translation, by Marijane Osborn, of a 1952 story by Mexican fabulist Juan José Arreola, titled rendered in English as "Parable of Barter".

Consistent readers here will know that I'm a lifelong fan of Bloch's and might recall I've liked Bunch's work nearly as long...sadly, both men's entries here are not close to their best work. The Bloch is simply a misfire, a gimmick story that telegraphs its final twist (which is as at least as old as the telegraph, despite being a story about a sort of haunted Polaroid camera); the Bunch is drowning in his love of alienating small details, so much so that his usually pointed critique is all but lost. One can enjoy them as very minor examples of what these artists could do, but one will enjoy almost anything else they wrote more readily.

The "Tiptree" and the Arreola are better; the Sheldon story is not her best, but it does demonstrate the bleakness of her assessment of humanity's probable fate, as well as taking a suitably (and not atypically) off-the-wall means of staving that fate off; it's included in a couple of her key collections. The Arreola gives us a sense of why his work is compared to that of Borges, though perhaps less (at least in this translation of this story) exacting in his vision, but at least as playful, and if anything (like Sheldon!) with a somewhat dimmer view of human foibles, and the means of being (not quite literally) damned if one does or one doesn't.

There are other features and fiction that look promising (certainly more so than the killer B stories) in the two issues, even if Richard Delap is probably my least favorite of the recurring book reviewers in 1970s F&SF issues, and my interest in role-playing games is limited (nice to see this early interest from a pro fantastica magazine, even one on such a tight budget, in this then-growing field).

And then, after seeing the link to this post on a Facebook discussion group, Darrell Schweitzer was moved to comment (and graciously gave permission to reprint that comment here):

Interesting to see something of mine (the serial in FANTASTIC) showcased like this. It makes me feel like a museum piece. But it was ... yikes!... forty-three years ago. As for how stretched the budget for FANTASTIC was, Elinor Mavor asked me to cut "The White Isle" by 13,000 words, because they could not afford to pay for a 53,000 word story. I made a simpler counter-offer, that they should pay for what they could and take the rest for free. Nothing could be more attractive to the editor of a starveling magazine that the prospect of about 15 pp. of free copy. Not a comma was dropped. When Arthur Bernhard proposed to fold the magazine with the April 1980 issue, I also (from obvious self-interest) wrote to him and argued that as a fantasy magazine, FANTASTIC served a very special purpose and should be allowed to continue. So it limped on for two more issues, finished my serial, and ended with an "excerpt" (actually the first installment) of Marvin Kaye's THE AMOROUS UMBRELLA.  [I replied that, in a sense, Darrell had, as part of the staff, with George Scithers, editing the TSR Amazing Stories incorporating Fantastic, he was in a way editing Fantastic himself not too long after.]

And for more of this week's Short Story Wednesday entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog.


And, just for swank, here's what quarterly Fantastic and monthly F&SF were offering at about the same time as the reviewed issues of their counterparts above:

Fantastic, December 1977, edited by Ted White

Not actually the 26th Anniversary issue (which would be the July 1978 issue)...



This might be my least-favorite David Hardy painting...even Jove nods...
A far better Hardy painting, more typical of his work.
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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!
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