Short Story Wednesday: the first will be last: "Time Enough at Last" author Ms. Lyn Venable's first published short story (known to indexers), "Homesick", GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, December 1952

Lyn, short for Marilyn, Venable, some of us have just learned (thanks to a Facebook post by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, which was cited in a discussion group by Gordon Van Gelder), died in March: 3 June 1927 to 31 March 2025, not quite 98 full years. A few years back, I read most of her published stories and wrote a SSW survey review of those I was aware of, but didn't get a chance to also read her first published story, "Homesick", so wrote about her most famous story (mostly due to its The Twilight Zone adaptation starring Burgess Meredith) "Time Enough at Last" and all her other stories known to have been published in fantasy and sf (and adjacent) magazines in the 1950s. I made a point of finally reading "Homesick" last night (as this is published), and it's not bad for a "first story", in Galaxy in 1952, when that magazine had become the best-selling and most influential sf magazine at that time; as it was the property of an Italian magazine publisher trying several new titles in its first attempt to crack the US market, it also appeared in translation in international editions. Venable would've been 25 at time of publication.

SSW: short stories by Lyn Venable (Marilyn A. Venable, 3 June 1927-31 March 2025): "Time Enough at Last" (the Twilight Zone favorite) and others: Short Story Wednesday

It involves a small, relatively elderly crew of US astronauts, caught in a bind once returned to Earth, and coping as best they can with apparently necessary confinement. The story can be read in the Galaxy issue here; it was illustrated (as were several other stories in the issue) by Edmund Emshwiller, and appeared along with the first installment of Clifford Simak's novel Ring Around the Sun; a story by Isaac Asimov, "The Deep", that remained one of his favorites among his own work (it also might be noted that Asimov notes in his memoirs that Simak was probably the most significant non-editorial influence on Asimov's fiction among all writers); another "first" story, by Howard L. Myers, which would remain his only story in a fantastic-fiction magazine (after a nonfiction feature in Astounding SF a few months earlier) till he began publishing again, as "Verge Foray", in 1967, and would continue to publish under both names in a productive if relatively short career; two notable stories by the still very new writer Robert Sheckley, one of them under the pseudonym "Phillips Barbee". The issue is rounded out by the usual columns: H. L. Gold's editorial, Willy Ley's nonfiction science column, and Groff Conklin's book reviews.

Gold was a US World War 2 veteran, who had gone through some awful battlefield experience which left him an agoraphobe for much of the next two decades, very much including his entire tune editing Galaxy; that the Venable story involves the necessary segregation of its astronaut crew, to some extent cut off from the rest of the world, was probably among the aspects that most thoroughly interested Gold about the story. And, like most editors, he was never averse to discovering new talent, with Venable being one of three new writers to have begun publishing in the last year or so in this issue.

A not necessarily fully effective cover, credited to a kind of photo process

--ISFDB credits the cover to Jack and Bob Strimban, and Sam Willig.

From the FictionMags Index:

Galaxy Science Fiction [v5 #3, December 1952] (35¢, 160pp, digest, cover by Camerage) []
• 2 · What’s New? · H. L. Gold · ed
• 4 · Ring Around the Sun [Part 1 of 3] · Clifford D. Simak · n.; illustrated by Sibley
• 73 · Homesick · Lyn Venable · ss; illustrated by Emsh
• 80 · The Reluctant Weapon · Howard L. Myers · ss; illustrated by Emsh
• 97 · For Your Information: Cause of the Ice Age · Willy Ley · cl
• 106 · The Leech · Phillips Barbee · ss; illustrated by Connell
• 124 · Galaxy’s Five Star Shelf · Groff Conklin · rc
• 124-125 · The Heads of Cerberus, Francis Stevens; Reading, Pa.: Polaris Press, 1952. 191 p. 52-27268. · Groff Conklin · br [Ref. Francis Stevens]
• 125-126 · The Creation of the Universe, George Gamow; New York: Viking, 1952. 147 p. 52-9319. · Groff Conklin · br [Ref. George Gamow]
• 126-127 · The Haploids, Jerry Sohl; New York: Rinehart, 1952. 248 p. 52-5571. · Groff Conklin · br [Ref. Jerry Sohl]
• 126-127 · Eidolon, Julius David Stern; New York: Messner, 1952. 246 p. 52-7410. · Groff Conklin · br [Ref. J. David Stern]
• 127 · Ship of Destiny, Henry J. Slater; New York: Crowell, 1951. 187 p. 52-817. · Groff Conklin · br [Ref. Henry J. Slater]
• 128 · Cost of Living · Robert Sheckley · ss; illustrated by Emsh
• 138 · The Deep · Isaac Asimov · nv; illustrated by Ashman

The ISFDB index of the same issue.

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

SSW: short stories by Lyn Venable (Marilyn A. Venable, 3 June 1927-31 March 2025): "Time Enough at Last" (the Twilight Zone favorite) and others: Short Story Wednesday (2 of 2)

Lyn Venable's work, as detailed by ISFDB (there are also chapbooks and podcast readings/possibly dramatizations cited for some of these stories), including that endlessly-rerun TZ adaptation...at least one US digital broadcast network, H&I, and one cable station, SyFy [koff], dusted it off again for their New Year's Serling marathons:

Featuring Lyn Venable's last? story (so far?)

Short Fiction

• Homesick (1952) can be read online here, and also appeared as:   
  • Translation: Le mal du pays [French] (1955)
  • Translation: Krank vor Heimweh [German] (1958)
  • Translation: 향수 [Korean] (2018) [as by 
    린 베너블^?
    ]
• Time Enough at Last (1953) can be read online here, and also appeared as:
  • Variant: Time Enough at Last (1953) [as by Lynn Venable]  (If's typo)
  • Variant: Time Enough at Last (1953) [as by Lynn A. Venable]
  • Translation: Endlich genug Zeit [German] (1987) [as by Lynn A. Venable]
  • Translation: 핵폭탄의 부작용 [Korean] (2017) [as by 
    마릴린 베너블^?
    ]
• Punishment Fit the Crime (1953) can be read online here
• The Missing Room (1953) can be read online here
• Doppelganger (1954) can be read online here
• Parry's Paradox (1955) can be read online here
• Grove of the Unborn (1957) can be read online here

Lyn Venable, as far as I can tell, has only published seven short stories in her career, all of them in a stretch in the early-to-mid/late 1950s (1952-1957).  The second to see print, and easily the most famous, was her 1953 story "Time Enough at Last" in If: Worlds of Science Fiction for January 1953, edited and published by James Quinn. The short story is less heavy-handed than The Twilight Zone adaptation, one of the most widely-loved of first-season episodes (1959, notably after Venable had apparently stopped publishing), though Burgess Meredith's crowd-pleasing performance probably helps there. The short story's Mr. Henry Bemis is competent at work and slightly better at getting around his controlling wife's resentment of his spending any time reading, vs. socializing or watching television with her...and the portrayal of atomic war and its aftermath is rather better-presented in the story than in the television episode (TZ Bemis seems to think he'll be able to leave books from a destroyed public library in stacks in the exposed rubble of the building and they not fall prey to weather, or other problems, for example...he's not quite so foolish in the short story). The current Wikipedia entry for Venable suggests that the story is akin to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which it is not, except to the degree that Bemis is kept from reading by (rather less overarching) villains. However, Venable does write in a mode that is not altogether unlike Bradbury's, and in a few of her stories with rather less fake naivete than RB might slip into...the ending of "Time Enough" has been roundly dismissed as cruel by at least one latter-day reviewer, rather than, as I suspect it was meant, as a metaphor for how much misery modern warfare and its potential for massacre place on even those who hope to find some way to cope with it. Seems a pity she didn't (or couldn't) continue into the early '60s, at very least, and no doubt be courted by Gamma magazine, the home of Bradbury (and Patricia Highsmith, both on rare occasion) and the "Little Bradburys", and perhaps be reprinted by Judith Merril in her anthologies.

Her other best story, I'd suggest, from my quick whip-around her published work (I've yet to read her first, "Homesick", a 1952 publication in Galaxy, at that point the most popular and widely-imitated of the US sf magazines, and [since launched by an Italian firm moving into the US market] one with several foreign-language editions as early as its second year of publication), perhaps surprisingly, is the one published in a magazine that made an attempt to present itself as an essentially nonfictional magazine about supernatural phenomena, Mystic, while regularly publishing fiction written in no way "nonfictionally"...and edited by the team of Ray Palmer and Bea Mahaffey who were also producing Other Worlds and its sf/fantasy spinoff titles, before Mahaffey left and Palmer threw his fate in with all-woo-woo "nonfiction" with his magazines Fate and  Other Worlds remade as Flying Saucers from Other Worlds. An historical borderline suspense/horror story (it can be interpreted as either "realistic" or "fantastic" depending on how much one trusts the characters' perception of events). "Doppelganger" involves a gravid woman in suddenly problematic labor, her desperate husband and the midwife, who in better times had helped deliver him, who is reluctantly called into service in the growing emergency...and what they make of the one baby delivered who is suddenly joined in his crib by a twin whom no one remembers from previously. 

But "Punishment Fit the Crime" is a reasonably good variation on an Isaac Asimov sort of robot story, where a very specialized robot behaves in such a way that it is the one who needs protection from humans. This was Venable's one story in Other Worlds, and her only pair of stories to sell to the same editors, vs. "one-shots" in all her other markets.  

While "The Missing Room" is a rather deft more-or-less straightforward sf story she sold to Weird Tales, which, under editor Dorothy McIlwraith, always open to certain kinds of science fiction with a menacing element to it...an open house in a future (perhaps even still) suburb (commuters use personal helicopters) turns out to be a kind of alien's specimen trap. That Venable sold most of her large handful of stories to editors who were women or men who were particularly interested in publishing women writers (Hans Stefan Santesson at Fantastic Universe, Quinn at If, and certainly Ray Palmer and Galaxy's H. L. Gold weren't unwilling to publish women writers--given both her approach and subject matter, I'm a bit surprised that Anthony Boucher never took one of her stories for F&SF).  Her last two stories are a notch lower in originality, at least, with her one story in a non-U.S. magazine, the UK Authentic Science Fiction item "Parry's Paradox", being a mildly clever but slight time-travel tale, and the Big Twist in the ending of her otherwise rather nicely-detailed story of a first-encounter with another humanoid species, "Grove of the Unborn", being a rather too foreseeable twist.  

For more of today's Short Stories, please see Patti Abbott's blog, and/or the post just before this one, Paul Di Filippo on an issue of Lester Del Rey's magazine Space Science Fiction.

FFB/SSW: THE SEVENTH GALAXY READER edited by Frederik Pohl (Doubleday 1964); THE BEST FROM FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, 14th Series, edited by Avram Davidson (Doubleday 1965); SWORD & SORCERY ANNUAL edited by Sol Cohen (and Cele Goldsmith Lalli) (Ultimate Publications 1975); PERCHANCE TO WAKE: YET MORE SELECTED STORIES FROM SCIENCE FANTASY edited by John Boston and Damien Broderick (Surinam Turtle Press 2016)

the final cover painting by Hannes Bok

Lee Brown Coye

Agosta Morol

The Shock of the New...

Fantasy and sf in the fiction magazines devoted to them trended ever more sophisticated from their introduction in the US and UK in the 1920s and '30s, and in other English-language countries (though most other Anglophone countries usually featured simply local editions of the US or UK magazines), till by the 1950s the good ones averaged on par with the run of more sophisticated 

Virgil Finlay

commercial and little magazines. Hugo Gernsback reprinted the likes of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe in his early issues of his pioneering (in 1926) Amazing Stories, which was otherwise largely built, at first, on a tradition of notional technology anecdotes in his early electronics magazines.  (But Gernsback was also happy to feature an Edgar Rice Burroughs "John Carter of Mars" story for the only 
issue of his Amazing Stories Annual). F. Orlin Tremaine innovated as successor to Harry Bates and the latter's Astounding Stories of Super Science; John W. Campbell Jr. refined and continued those advances away from standard pulp adventure, and had the title changed from Tremaine's Astounding Stories to Astounding Science-Fiction, and then eventually to Analog (which it remains today);  Sam Merwin, Jr. likewise in the latter '40s  into the '50s improved on the efforts of his predecessors (at Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, the latter-day versions of Gernsback's second set of sf magazines), Dorothy McIlwraith's Weird Tales (where she widened that magazine's remit beyond the kind of neo-gothic horror and purple overstatement that her predecessors favored, even as impressive as Farnsworth Wright's best editorial work had been), and even the young Frederik Pohl, at his promising magazines Astonishing Stories and Super-Science Stories, demonstrating their initially 19-year-old editor's  quick learning curve but also his openness to  the larger literary world, and as the most financially sound and widely-read of the magazines edited by the young lions of the Futurian Society of New York, a fan/ aspiring pro group of writers, editors, artists, agents and more who included a large number of the most notable conscious artists in fantastic fiction, albeit all still very young in the 1930s and '40s. Judith Merril, freelancing anthologies and establishing the second, and often controversial, sf and fantasy best-of-the-year annual, Donald Wollheim, at Avon Books, then Ace Books, then DAW Books, Robert Lowndes, at Columbia Publications and other low-budget publishers, and Larry Shaw in magazines and at Lancer Books, were among the other most prominent editors among the Futurians.

And so, as the new magazines of the 1950s entered the scene, including the four magazines represented in this review essay, the bend toward increasing literary excellence and ambition was already established ...the best of the new magazines, and the best work in the field published in the 1950s, was able to match the standards of fiction published in any other forum on a consistent basis, even given there was still a fair amount of relatively trivial and weak fiction also made available, as in every other field of fiction as well. By the early/mid '60s, the groundwork laid by the increasing urbanity and prose facility of fiction published in magazines such as Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, and Science Fantasy had been building steadily on the good work of and in the previous issues of the same magazines, and not a few other allied periodical titles and anthologies of new work, and book publishers open to novels of ambition, at least fitfully... was resulting in some of what is collected in the books, and one special retrospective magazine issue, we consider here.

The four editors, or the three editors and a small cluster of editors at Science Fantasy in the early/mid-'60s the fiction collected here springs from, were doing, under some stressful limitations and not always fully successfully, some of the most important editorial work in fantastic fiction of their time. Frederik Pohl, officially the editor of Galaxy and its recently-acquired sibling If from 1962, had been responsible for an increasing amount of the editorial work behind the scenes since the late '50s, as Pohl's literary agency and Galaxy founding editor H. L. Gold were both facing extreme difficulty. Pohl had been a key supporter of Gold, as agent and as a contributor of fiction, from the magazine's founding in 1950, and was unsurprisingly tapped to serve.  Galaxy and If under his initial official editorship faced tough times; one strategy he took to help the magazines weather slowing sales was to buy a certain amount of acceptable-to-good fiction at a new low rate of payment for stories, 1c/word, then immediately afterward begin editing more selectively, seeking better work at Galaxy's initial 1950 rate of three cents per word...and mix the better work in with the readable till reader support could be, he hoped, regained.

At The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, or F&SF, increasingly frequent contributor Avram Davidson was asked in 1962 to become its fourth editor, and third solo editor, the first in that position to not have been either a co-founder or an old hand around the magazine. Davidson as editor was often seen as willing to explore eccentricity even more than had predecessors Robert P. Mills and founding editors "Anthony Boucher" and J. Francis McComas, but he managed to publish a considerable amount of pathbreaking fiction; he remains my favorite of the editors of the magazine, in a very impressive field. 

Similarly, Cele Goldsmith (later married and signing herself Cele Lalli, and later yet Cele Goldsmith Lalli) had joined the magazine staff at Ziff-Davis in the mid '50s with the primary task of editing a short-lived magazine called Pen Pals which was devoted to just that, facilitating new mail correspondents. She was also tasked with assisting the ever-more nonchalant fiction magazine editor on staff, Howard Browne, who had been founding editor of Fantastic, but whom increasingly spent his on-the-clock time at the offices writing his own fiction for publication elsewhere. Goldsmith didn't know very much about fantasy or sf as fields, but was the conscientious presence on the staff, as Browne was succeeded by an old writing colleague of his, and founding editor of  If, Paul W. Fairman, if anything even more oblivious to the quality of the magazine he was barely editing. Goldsmith would comb through the "slush pile" of unsolicited manuscripts, and found as a result, among other work, what would be Kate Wilhelm's first published story, which Fairman disinterestedly published along with the fiction he bought unread from his five "regulars": Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Milton Lesser (before he legally changed his name to Stephen Marlowe), Randall Garrett and Henry Slesar, a very talented quintet who were not usually offering their best work to an editor who wanted manuscripts on-time and unproblematic much more than he wanted them good. Others, including Fairman himself, would also contribute, particularly for some special issues devoted to wish-fulfillment fantasy that led up to a short-lived spinoff magazine called Dream World. Goldsmith learned a lot about what to do and more of what not to.

All of these items have been packaged on the cheap--standard practice at Doubleday in the '60s when not dealing with their "lead titles", and Ultimate and Surinam Turtle Press were and are all but one-person shops, Ultimate a retirement job for publisher Sol Cohen and STP kind of an avocational project of Richard Lupoff's.

The Seventh Galaxy Reader ed. Frederik Pohl (Doubleday, 1964, $3.95, 247pp, hc) Cover: Roger Zimmerman

Introduction · Frederik Pohl · in

For Love · Algis Budrys · nv Galaxy Jun 1962

Come Into My Cellar · Ray Bradbury · ss Galaxy Oct 1962

The Tail-Tied Kings · Avram Davidson · ss Galaxy Apr 1962

Crime Machine · Robert Bloch · ss Galaxy Oct 1961

Return Engagement · Lester del Rey · ss Galaxy Aug 1961

Earthmen Bearing Gifts · Fredric Brown · vi Galaxy Jun 1960

Rainbird · R. A. Lafferty · ss Galaxy Dec 1961

Three Portraits and a Prayer · Frederik Pohl · ss Galaxy Aug 1962

Something Bright · Zenna Henderson · ss Galaxy Feb 1960

On the Gem Planet [Casher O’Neill] · Cordwainer Smith · nv Galaxy Oct 1963

The Deep Down Dragon · Judith Merril · ss Galaxy Aug 1961

The King of the City · Keith Laumer · nv Galaxy Aug 1961

The Beat Cluster · Fritz Leiber · ss Galaxy Oct 1961

An Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas · Margaret St. Clair · nv Galaxy Dec 1961
The Big Pat Boom · Damon Knight · ss Galaxy Dec 1963

The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: 14 ed. Avram Davidson (Doubleday, 1965, hc; 251pp, $4.50) Cover: Tom Chibbaro

• Introduction · Avram Davidson · in
• Sacheverell · Avram Davidson · ss F&SF Mar 1964
• Trade-In · Jack Sharkey · ss F&SF Jun 1964
• The Illuminated Man · J. G. Ballard · nv F&SF May 1964
• A Bulletin from the Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Research at Marmouth, Mass. · Wilma Shore · ss F&SF Aug 1964
• Automatic Tiger · Kit Reed · ss F&SF Mar 1964
• The Court of Tartary · T. P. Caravan · ss F&SF Dec 1963
• Touchstone · Terry Carr · ss F&SF May 1964
• Thaw and Serve · Allen Kim Lang · ss F&SF Jan 1964
• Nada · Thomas M. Disch · ss F&SF Aug 1964
• Into the Shop · Ron Goulart · ss F&SF Apr 1964
• A Rose for Ecclesiastes · Roger Zelazny · nv F&SF Nov 1963
• Olsen and the Gull · Eric St. Clair · ss F&SF Sep 1964
• Dark Conception · Louis J. A. Adams · ss F&SF Nov 1964
• The Compleat Consumators · Alan E. Nourse · ss F&SF Apr 1964
• The House by the Crab Apple Tree · S. S. Johnson · nv F&SF Feb 1964
• The Girl with the Hundred Proof Eyes · Ron Webb · ss F&SF Jul 1964
• Fred One · James Ransom · ss F&SF Apr 1964

Sword & Sorcery Annual [1975] ed. Sol Cohen (75¢, 132pp, digest, cover by Steve Fabian)

• 4 · Queen of the Black Coast [Conan] · Robert E. Howard & L. Sprague de Camp · nv The Coming of Conan, Gnome 1953; lightly edited by de Camp from the story of the same name (Weird Tales May 1934).
• 24 · L. Sprague de Camp: Sword and Satire · Sam Moskowitz · bg Amazing Stories Feb 1964
• 34 · The Pillars of Chambalor [Brak] · John Jakes · ss Fantastic Mar 1965
• 50 · Master of Chaos [Earl Aubec] · Michael Moorcock · ss Fantastic May 1964
• 64 · The Mirror of Cagliostro · Robert Arthur · nv Fantastic Jun 1963; adapted from Arthur’s TV script “The Prisoner in the Mirror” broadcast on Thriller 5/23/61.
• 94 · The Cloud of Hate [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] · Fritz Leiber · ss Fantastic May 1963
• 107 · The Masters · Ursula K. Le Guin · ss Fantastic Feb 1963
• 127 · Horseman! · Roger Zelazny · vi Fantastic Aug 1962 

• Perchance to Wake: Yet More Selected Stories from Science Fantasy
• Editors: Damien Broderick, John Boston 
• Date: 2016-01-19 ISBN: 978-1-60543-874-0 [1-60543-874-X]
• Publisher: Surinam Turtle Press; Price: $20.00; Pages: 259 Cover design by Fender Tucker

• 11 • Introduction (Perchance to Wake) • essay by Damien Broderick
• 17 • Bring Back a Life • (March 1965) • novelette by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham]
• 39 • Vashti • (May 1965) • novella by Thomas Burnett Swann
• 75 • The Wall • (November 1965) • short story by Josephine Saxton
• 83 • Beyond Time's Aegis • (November 1965) • novelette by Brian Stableford and Craig A. Mackintosh [as by Brian Stableford and Craig Mackintosh]
• 113 • The Circulation of the Blood • (March 1966) • novelette by Brian W. Aldiss [as by Brian Aldiss] [appeared a few months earlier in an anthology, Window on the Future, edited by Douglas Hill]
• 143 • You and Me and the Continuum • (March 1966) • short story by J. G. Ballard
• 153 • The Run • (May 1966) • short story by Christopher Priest
• 163 • Corfe Gate • [Pavane] • (July 1966) • novelette by Keith Roberts
• 219 • Stop Seventeen • (November 1966) • short fiction by Robert Wells
• 229 • Mantis • (January 1967) • short fiction by Chris Boyce

--More to come...

For more of today's Short Story Wednesday entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog...

FFS(&E&RP): some uncollected Wilma Shore short stories (and essays and one radio play) online (and one Joseph Payne Brennan poem)

Two blogposts over the last half-decade isn't Too much to devote to the late, brilliant Wilma Shore, whose career is briefly limned here and here, so here's a third...along with, in the latter, links to the un-"protected" online archives of the magazines that ran these items (and a couple of posts offering both the script and the recording of the playlet she wrote with her husband for Orson Welles's CBS radio series).  An amusing set of magazines, too...there are a few other writers, but no too many, who might tie together the folded but extremely influential sf magazine Galaxy (which published among so much else Damon Knight's "To Serve Man", the first form of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Frank Herbert's Dune Messiah and Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Day Before the Revolution"--Galaxy in its first decade particularly was the home of the kind of satire Kingsley Amis dubbed the "comic inferno"--eventual editor Frederik Pohl was Amis's choice as the best of 1950s sf writers), Good Housekeeping (now ever more a "service" magazine at well over a century of publishing), and the Communist-sponsored quasi-revival of the more broadly radical and also hugely influential magazine The Masses, retitled for the new decade The New Masses.  All of these stories are worth reading, the essays as well, and the playlet just a bit slight and humorously sentimental, but not extraordinarily so (and probably pitched just so to Welles or at least at his request). 

"Goodbye Amanda Jean" is a savage bit of satire, set in a version of 1970 U.S. that allows hunting humans for meat, but where killing just for sport is frowned upon, to say the least (and shooting a teenage girl pedestrian from a moving car, rather than from a stopped one or on one's own feet, is utterly illegal if possibly not prosecuted); Shore barely allows the reader time to gather much at all before Amanda Jean's father has failed to shield his daughter from a crosstown neighbor of sorts, and has, still stunned, accepted a side of the kill for dressing and refrigeration. The loss and injustice of it all still rankles him, and it might just be time to take retribution into his own hands...while staying more inarguably within the law. Bloodsport was in the air at the turn of the '70s, and Shore's story is unrelenting and as plausible as sending National Guard units onto various state university campuses and pointlessly dragging out a war in Vietnam while expanding it to neighboring countries. More startling to me is how much this story, which after appearance in Galaxy has only been reprinted in Robert Silverberg's anthology Alpha 2, and which I've read for the first time this week, prefigures the nature and the method of the satire I applied in one of my better stories, "Bonobos," published a decade back in Claude Lalumiere's webzine Lost Pages...my story, as human/bonobo behavioral crosses might suggest, is as drenched in sex as this one is in violence, and is by intention funnier than Shore's story, but Shore's is the better story, and the laughter here is meant to have what Avram Davidson once referred to as a big bubble of blood in it, in describing a similarly incisive satire. A number of people to whom I've recently mentioned the Shore story remember it well, from reading it decades back. 

The newer of the two stories from The New Masses, "The Story of Dorothy Anstable", is a much more muted affair, but has an early example of the kind of overbearing stage mother, living through her family, who will recur in some of Shore's other stories; Dorothy also is fortunate enough to have her story retold by her rather slow-witted elder brother, so by the end, we're (or at least I'm) not exactly sure of all the details of how thoroughly her mother's obsession with the daughter's reliable promptness and attendance record, and the minor but Official recognition of it and the petty fame that has accrued with that, has derailed her daughter's life, but we have some sense of it. The least of these stories, but it still has a bit of a chill to it. Speaking of a bit of a chill, the story is immediately followed by an example of historical blank verse, about George Custer and Crazy Horse and their encounter, by none other than the relatively young Joseph Payne Brennan...never much of a poet, and sometimes a rather clumsy constructor of prose but not by any means always, and clearly like his Arkham House editor and publisher August Derleth at least an occasional contributor to the politically radical press. Wilma Shore and Joseph Payne Brennan, both praised by Avram Davidson, though AD liked Shore's work better.

"Some Day I Have to Buy a Hat" is a much more probable item to have sold to Good Housekeeping, the account of an obstetric nurse doing a favor for a young patient of her boss's private practice, during World War II, in the face of the disruption the war was causing. A far more humane tale than the first two, albeit by necessity just as cognizant of the ugly realities of its times, if also noting that some tragedy can be ameliorated, to some extent, by the kindness of relative strangers. (Shore's essay "What Happened to the Slicks?" notes that this kind of story, not at all shying away from what was happening in a world at war, was now something found in women's magazines that might previously have preferred more purely escapist, if also feminism-tinged, fare. ) It's notable that her story is the first piece of fiction one finds in the GH issue, blurbed by them "A story on the hard-boiled side, but there's a fair chance you'll like it." Shore later stories would get cover credits at the magazine.

"Decision" is the oldest of these stories, and much more deftly and complexly deals with racism, classism, sexism and the exigencies of Getting By under unfeeling bureaucracy and general inequity than something like the fairly recent film The Help, not too tough for a good short story written by an observer as sharp as Wilma Shore was when this was published in 1941, when the clumsy US bureaucracies were still coping as they did with the leftovers of the Great Depression, not quite yet also coping with US involvement with the war.  The last lines are almost inexorable, and still sting today. 
You can do much worse than visit with these stories and more, and the occasionally reprinted stories and memoirs, in one anthology or occasionally several, including the O. Henry Award Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories and the Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction's volumes over the decades, that await you from Ms. Shore's not so small set of contributions, along with those behind paywalls and the like from The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, The Nation, The Antioch Review, Women's Studies Quarterly, The Ladies Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, or seeking out her two books, the short story collection Women Should Be Allowed and the apparently charming, Edward Lear-ish children's picture story Who in the Zoo? Perhaps I'll need to do more than I have so far to advocate and excavate here. 

Much more traditional books and more reviewed at links collected at Patti Abbott's blog.

Fantasy Records swipes F&SF logo for earliest releases...then takes on GALAXY less actionably...

...or, why Kingsley Amis's comparison of the histories of jazz and sf was better than he gave himself credit for:

from the Jazz Research blog:

The popular science fiction magazine mentioned in Len Lyons notes was THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION and the first 78 RPM singles released by the new label used the exact logo type and design that the magazine used on its cover.

The magazine owners no doubt sent the Weisses a “Cease and Desist” letter and the now familiar Fantasy logo was introduced on subsequent pressings released by the new label as seen on the examples of Fantasy 504 and 505 above [as the full post appears at the Jazz Research blog].


When the Weiss brothers launched a second label in 1951 they borrowed the name from another science fiction magazine, GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, and came up with their own typeface to avoid any copyright problems like the one they encountered with Fantasy. (The author would like to thank reader Alan Parr for bringing this to his attention.)

Phoebe and Jack Gaughan: two digest-sized magazine covers

painting by Phoebe and Jack Gaughan

Two striking covers I'd not seen before today, one definitely a collaboration between Phoebe and Jack Gaughan, the latter the overworked staff artist for the Galaxy group of fiction magazines in their early years as properties of UPD, Universal Publishing and Distributing, best known for erotica publishing but moving into less "shady" lines such as Tandem and Award at the turn of the 1970s...while, shall we put it, not really keeping the accounting books too well.

painting by Jack Gaughan

But Mr. Gaughan did some brilliant work for them, which I've highlighted here before, but I wasn't aware of Ms. Gaughan's work...but, then, I haven't yet taken the opportunity to read my recently-purchased copy of Luis Ortiz's biography and collection of images, Outermost.






A short film profiling Phoebe Gaughan, RIP 2017.