Showing posts with label Fantasy and Science Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fantasy and Science Fiction. Show all posts

Friday, June 17, 2016

FFM: Silver Anniversary Issues of F&SF, edited by Edward Ferman (Mercury Press, October 1974) and FANTASTIC, edited by Ted White (Ultimate Publications, June 1977)


Aside from being magazines which shared the same rack spaces for almost three decades, and being the primary "openly" mixed fantasy and sf markets for short fiction in the US during most of those years (and with not a little interplay between their editorial staffs...for example, Ted White had served as assistant editor with Ed Ferman and Ferman's predecessor Avram Davidson at F&SF in the 1960s; White's Fantastic predecessor Barry Malzberg would co-edit with Ferman three impressive anthologies of new fiction, including the famously-tampered-with, by the publisher's editor in its first edition, Final Stage), one of the more obvious differences between The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Fantastic Stories was in how they treated their anniversaries... F&SF was careful to note every anniversary with a special issue of one sort or another, while Fantastic all but resolutely ignored their anniversaries, at least officially (while Fantastic's older stablemate Amazing, perhaps because it was the first and oldest no-bones-about-it sf magazine in the world, was careful to mark at least the five-year increments with some sort of note). Even given the banner across the top of this issue of Fantastic, no mention is made anywhere in the issue that this marks 25 years of publication...but it did.

And it's somewhat telling to compare the lineups between the two issues...even given there was no official "special" status given to the Fantastic, the contributors are a not-atypical mix of relative up-and-comers (James Sallis, Lisa Tuttle, Brian Lumley), established writers as well-known for their work at Fantastic and Amazing as anything else (Ted White, Robert F. Young), notable veterans with long relations with the magazine (Barry Malzberg, Lin Carter), and rather older veterans making some relatively rare appearances in the magazine (Marvin Kaye, Robert S. Richardson as "Philip Latham")...and the legend, columnist Fritz Leiber. While the F&SF issue is filled with veteran writers, most at least verging on legendary status, and having long, close associations with the magazine; Gordon R. Dickson perhaps the least so...and perhaps more indulgence given to allow for the old friends to stop in, such as running an Asimov "Black Widowers" story with the weak justification that J. R. R. Tolkien was key to the unfantasticated mystery involved, and a prose-poem vignette by Judith Merril (given both magazines' reputation for fostering the work of women writers, if even more so under respective earlier editors Anthony Boucher and Cele Goldsmith Lalli, interesting how they here have one woman contributor each).

 R. Bretnor's Papa Schimmelhorn story was the first in F&SF since the early 1950s, and only the second published since then, and as such, it's relatively easy to take, not quite as imbued with the clumsy "good-natured" "satirical" misogyny as the next two stories published in the sequence...the apparently irresistible aging, married lecher was still somewhat improbably magnetic to young women, while essentially spurning those of his own age (whether Bretnor suffered from Hefner Syndrome himself is a good question, particularly given the blatant attitudes toward women in the next two stories). However, Bretnor's extension of the basic schtick of Henry Kuttner's "Gallagher" stories, only with Schimmelhorn not so much needing to be drunk to invent as to allow his subconscious to take over to create the magic-science, is still capable to inspiring some humorous incidents, in this story set primarily in the time of Genghis Khan's conquering of most of the world known to him. 

 Also set in (albeit earlier) medieval times is probably the best-remembered story in the F&SF, the "posthumous collaboration" where Frederik Pohl completed a fragment from the papers of his old friend and writing partner C. M. Kornbluth, who'd died young in the late '50s...a story about a man with no sort of formal education, and of course before literacy was easily available to the peasantry, thinking in terms that anticipate science fiction and related speculation, but utterly unable to record them, or even share them with anyone who'd begin to understand...a story with built-in appeal to sf readers particularly back before social media could keep almost anyone from being less virtually lonely, at very least.  

 Jack Vance's "The Seventeen Virgins" was incorporated much later into the novel Cugel's Saga, the second Cugel novel and the third in the Dying Earth sequence of somewhat episodic novels, "fixed up" from linked short stories that were in part published separately before each novel was presented to the public. The Ellison story is probably the next-best-remembered story in the book, one of the more intensely personally ones he was writing in the '70s; the Dick story one of those collected in his last great selection of short fiction published during his lifetime, The Golden Man. The F&SF has no book review column for this issue, but the regular film (Baird Searles) and popular science (Asimov) columns, and Gahan Wilson's cartoon, are joined by a relatively rare editorial from Ferman. 

 In the Fantastic, the lead-off novella is the second of Marvin Kaye's "Incredible Umbrella" stories about the not quite hapless J. Adrian Fillmore, who with the magical bumbershoot finds himself passing through  various fictional "universes," often rather charmingly mixing characters from the likes of Dracula and the Sherlock Holmes stories. Modeled in part on the somewhat similar fantasies about Harold Shea by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp, they are a bit less subtle than their model at its best, but, like the Bretnor, the short novel makes for a reasonably diverting read. De Camp himself is profiled in this issue, in a pendant to the series of profiles of fantasy writers he himself had been contributing to Fantastic beginning in 1971, leading to, among other things, his somewhat controversial biographical and critical writing about H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Instead of the usual terrible Carter sword and sorcery story in the issue, Brian Lumley's brief, unreprinted series has its second entry; much more promising were the relatively early stories by Lisa Tuttle and James Sallis, and the well-populated if somewhat brief reviews by Fritz Leiber, often dealing with Lovecraftiana in one way or another (Leiber being one of the last as well as one of the most important writers to join the correspondents in the "Lovecraft Circle"); Ramsey Campbell was one of the great "discoveries" of Lovecraft's great acolyte, and publisher, August Derleth, and Frights one of the most important of the early all-original horror fiction anthologies.
  • Fantastic, June 1977
    (View All Issues) (View Issue Grid)
  • Editor: Ted White
  • Year: 1977-06-00
  • Publisher: Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc.
  • Price: $1.00
  • Pages: 134
  • Binding: digest
  • Cover: Steve Fabian
  • Notes: Vol 26, No 2. Page count includes a stiff-paper cigaret advertising insert. Page 66 precedes the ad and page 69 follows it. "Miracle Elixir" is listed as "The Miracle Elixir" in the table of contents. "The Earth Books" is not listed in the table of contents. The Circulation Statement on p. 55, filed 10/01/1976, gives an average total paid circulation of 19,630.
For today's books, and perhaps some more magazines and other sorts of literature, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

The oddly early 24th annish of Fantastic and the regularly scheduled F&SF  24th might've been Even Better, even given the unimpressive covers...

Yellow not always the best default color choice.

 Note early James Lincoln Warren story at bottom, left.















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Friday, May 27, 2016

FF(Fantasy Fiction)M: FANTASTIC, FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, THE HAUNT OF HORROR: August/September 1973


Three issues from the shank of each magazine's run under these editors...of course, editor (and eventual tv producer) Gerard F. "Gerry" Conway wouldn't get too much chance to do more with his prose magazine than this second issue of  The Haunt of Horror, which would be folded before the prepared third issue could be printed (Marvel soon offered a large-format black and white comic book with that title, to join a series they'd already started and advertise in the Haunt digest issues). Rather sobering to realize that of these three magazines, Haunt almost certainly had the largest budget...while not a lavish one by any means...contemporary issues of Analog (from Conde Nast) and Vertex (from Mankind Publishing, also publishing slick magazines. if lower-budget ones) and even the slowly cheapening Galaxy/If group of magazines at paperback publisher UPD were somewhat more impressively produced than any of these three, as the two more durable magazines were already, or about to become, literal cottage industry, put together over home-office tables. 

 Though the fiction they were publishing was about as good as that in any other fiction magazine in 1973.  Of course, when we look at the more talented contributors to these issues, that isn't too surprising...including knowing that "John K. Diomede" in two of the issues is a pseudonym for George Alec Effinger. The F&SF leads off with "Peregrine: Alflandia" as a fragment, not quite as free-standing as advertised by Edward Ferman's blurb, of the Secundis sequel to Peregrine: Primus by Avram Davidson. Essentially as the first chapter, it's a great teaser, even if Davidson was having so much fun with his more rustic characters' accents and idiosyncratic syntax, that it can be a little daunting at first, if clearly Davidson enjoying himself and sharing much of that joy. Basically, though, it's expert setting development and introduction of the first important characters, but the story is just starting to happen when the chapter ends. Set as it is in an alternate Mitteleuropa of the late 1800s, it has some of the feel of the (even better) Eszterhazy stories, which would begin appearing not much later.  

 Even better as well is the first of the too-short series of Arcana stories by Janet Fox, in the Fantastic issue, "A Witch in Time," where she demonstrates how much she's learned from the best of the sword and sorcery writers before her, and matches all but the very best of their work. Fox had published her first professionally-published fiction only a few years before, with the Magazine of Horror in 1970, and was already doing impressive work, even if her hand would grow a bit surer over the next several years. I can only wish she had published more. Meanwhile, one of her models, Fritz Leiber, reviews as his only book in this issue's column Henry Mazzeo's fine anthology of horror fiction Hauntings, illustrated by Edward Gorey, and notes something I'd failed to fully perceive over the years (probably in part because I first read the book when I was nine years old), that taken together, as they are presented on the dust jacket, the Gorey illustrations present their own narrative.

 And Leiber is of course present in the Haunt of Horror issue as well, with the second half of his first novel, Conjure Wife, reprinted justly as a classic. I will have more to say about all three issues (as you might well guess, given the bare bones on display here) with more time to devote to the task, but I will note the most annoying ads in all three issues are the stiff cigaret center inserts in all three, put in these and not a few paperbacks of the era (Dell Books, particularly, stick in my memory thus) by their printer/binders in collaboration with the publishers, as tobacco companies began to cope with losing access to tv and radio advertising in the U.S. True brand in the F&SF, Kent in the other two...even more enervating than the $20 astrological chart ads in the Fantastic (particularly considering how far $2o went in 1973) or the "anti-gravity device" or the "ESP laboratory" offered among the less savory classified ads in the F&SF (the pitches in the Fantastic tended toward witchcraft and related Hidden Knowledge, usually less expensively).
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Thursday, May 12, 2016

Fantasy magazines in English, August 1957 cover-dates...

Sadly, not a review I could write quite yet if I wanted to, since I don't have any of these issues so far, but August 1957 is one of those dates for which there were at least two more magazines available than would be the next month...and it's notable that all the magazines, as they usually did, feature at least some arguable science fiction along with the fantasy fiction, with the possible exception of Dream World. The sf audience had been somewhat more self-aware than the fantasy audience for some years among magazine readers, as sales figures for the magazines that emphasized sf or fantasy tended to suggest. Another 1957 issue I don't have is of the most famous little magazine devoted to fantasy of that year, Joseph Payne Brennan's Macabre, where the second issue is dated Winter and where none of the stories nor poetry gathered has been reprinted, any more than most of what's cited below, except Brennan's own contribution, in a small-press collection of his work, many years later. Perhaps it was an uninspired season....

 Cover images, indices and background information from the FictionMags Index and ISFDB. Click on cover images to enlarge.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in one of the last Anthony Boucher-edited issues, has a range of rarely-reprinted fiction in it, and may be one of the more heavily sfnal issues of Boucher's solo editorship. Robert Heinlein's "The Menace from Earth" is the most famous story here, and the only one I've read is Isaac Asimov's pun vignette "A Loint of Paw"...the Walter M. Miller, Jr., cover story, "The Lineman," took a while to be reprinted, and a while longer to be gathered finally in a Miller collection, his 1980 career Best-of. The one I'm most curious about is a collaboration between Damon Knight and Kenneth Bulmer, "The Day Everything Fell Down"...like most of the stories here, either not reprinted or reprinted only in the French edition of F&SF, Fiction. I'll look forward to reading Boucher's take on this set of books, and an instance of Joseph Samachson/William Morrison's "The Science Stage" theater reviews not paired with Charles Beaumont's "The Science Screen" (the other way around was far more common).
Fantastic had for its August number one of the sleazier covers it could boast of, which, considering some of the competition thus, is pretty impressive. Also typically for a Paul W. Fairman issue, from his middle year as editor of sorts, this features an impressive set of writers producing what is probably not even close to their best work: three stories, under three bylines, by Henry Slesar, one each from Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg and G. Harry Stine. Not a single story so far reprinted except by the less discriminating issues of Sol Cohen's second-run magazines after he bought the Ziff-Davis rights. No obvious evidence that Ed Valigursky's cover painting illustrated any of the stories. Perhaps for the best, if so.
Fairman also got to supervise word-lengths, if he didn't delegate that task to his eventual successor Cele Goldsmith, for the new and folded with this third, August, issue magazine, Dream World. Jerry House has warned readers here that there is no real reason to try to read this title at all, except perhaps for the two marquee items in the first issue, a Thorne Smith reprint and a P. G. Wodehouse original story, and I wouldn't be surprised if I was to agree if I try. More unreprinted stories by Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg and in this one Stephen Marlowe/Milton Lesser, under a less-remembered pseudonym "Adam Chase"...your guess is as good as mine who contributor "Forest Norton" might be (perhaps even a one-story writer by that name), though if G. F. Vandenberg was a pseud, it was a reasonably frequently-employed one by someone.  DW ran a sheaf of cartoons in the back pages of this issue. Jerry doesn't cite them in his regular bad jokes feature. 
Also vanished with the August issue, its second, was Tales of the Frightened, which was tied up eventually with an abortive radio reading series featuring Boris Karloff (though what Karloff ended up reading to record were vignettes by Michael Avallone, who also was able to publish several editions of his texts in paperback, including two vignettes in the issues of the magazine, attributed in the issues to Karloff himself...the Karloff recordings were eventually released on a record album). A whole lot more unreprinted stories by notable writers, usually signing their usual bylines, in this magazine put together by book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel. Two of the other stories in this issue managed to get a reprint, the one Mack Reynolds put his usual byline on (he also wrote one as by "Mark Mallory") and one Avallone signed his name to was reprinted in Sam Moskowitz's anthology of stories involving Edgar Allan Poe as a character. First issue of Tales had a decent-enough cover...they didn't even try on the second...aside from typoing Poul Anderson's name on that cover. Despite a banner claim of All New fiction, one story here is a reprint, A. Bertram Chandler's, from the Scottish magazine Nebula Science Fiction. "Claude Ferrari" certainly sounds like a pseudonym...but so does "Sidney Porcelain," yet that apparently was that writer's usual byline, at very least.
In England,  the one "open" fantasy-fiction magazine to have an August 1957 issue was Science Fantasy, the stablemate of the better-remembered sf magazine New Worlds, which also offers an apparently not-bad but unexceptional issue, with two stories reprinted from the U.S. magazine Future Science Fiction and one original story that got a little reprint attention, Brian Aldiss's (which also didn't make it into one of his own collections till decades later). John Boston, in his and Damien Broderick's critical study of the magazine, Strange Highways, notes that the Pressle cover story is pretty weak (despite a fine cover), while the Lowe story and the two American reprints are rather better.

While not as durable as Science Fantasy, much less Fantastic nor the only survivor here, F&SF, Fantastic Universe did run through most of the 1950s, usually seen as a reasonable salvage market for material that didn't quite make the F&SF cut, and less disliked a magazine than at least the Fairman Fantastic was by many constant readers...even when editor Hans Stefan Santesson, as he does in this issue, thoroughly indulges his fascination with (and makes a commercial pitch via) UFOlogy articles. Meanwhile, there's one story in this issue which is wildly better remembered than any other with this month-date except the Heinlein, William F. Nolan's sf/horror story "Small World"; otherwise, a mix of work by eventual veterans in fantastic fiction and rather unprolific folks...and perhaps the ugliest cover of the five, despite being the work of a past master, Virgil Finlay. (As a magazine title, Fantastic Universe has been, with some justice, cited as one of the more ridiculous among the professional magazines in the field's history...but it does suggest both fantasy and sf...and it's an oddly cheerful phrase, taken one way...the more-cosmic sequel to It's a Wonderful Life...)
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