Showing posts with label Harry Harrison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harry Harrison. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Short Story Wednesday: Carol Emshwiller and Bobbie Ann Mason select favorite stories of their own, "But Soft, What Light..." (1966) and "Memphis" (1988) respectively


New American Short Stories 2: The Writers Select Their Own Favorites edited by Gloria Norris, Penguin/New American Library/Plume 1989

Introduction / Gloria Norris
The Pacific / Mark Helprin -- (ss) The Atlantic Monthly March 1986
 Squirrelly's Grouper / Bob Shacochis -- variant form: "Fancy’s Grouper", (ss) Playboy March 1989
The Unfaithful Father / Judith Rossner -- (ss) Mademoiselle August 1986 
 Smorgasbord / Tobias Wolff -- (ss) Esquire September 1987 (Full Text)
 The Wars of Heaven / Richard Currey --  High Plains Literary Review, 1986
Temporary Shelter / Mary Gordon -- from her 1987 collection Temporary Shelter
Research / Max Apple -- (ss) Harper’s Magazine #1640, January 1987
 Lawns / Mona Simpson -- Iowa Review, 1984
Facing the Music / Larry Brown -- Mississippi Review, 1986
 Cooker / Frederick Barthelme --  (ss) The New Yorker August 10 1987
 A Lot in Common / Veronica Geng -- (hu) The New Yorker January 25 1988
 Orpha Knitting / Isabel Huggan -- Western Living, 1987
The Phantom of the Movie Palace / Robert Coover -- from his 1986 collection A Night at the Movies
Travel / Sue Miller -- from her 1987 collection Inventing the Abbotts and Other Stories
The Curse / Andre Dubus -- (ss) Playboy January 1988
 The Gift of the Prodigal / Peter Taylor -- (ss) The New Yorker June 1 1981
 Be-bop, Re-bop & All Those Obligatos / Xam Wilson Cartier -- excerpted from her 1987 novel Be-bop, Re-bop
Wejumpka / Rick Bass -- Chariton Review, 1988
Memphis / Bobbie Ann Mason --  (ss) The New Yorker February 22 1988
 Queen for a Day / Russell Banks -- from his 1986 collection Success Stories

Two anthologies, both the last in their sequences for editors Harrison and Norris, despite good reviews and an almost fool-proof concept for an anthology (or a short series of them)...get impressive authors to choose their own best, or at least for this purpose currently most favored, short fiction (a few novelettes or even a novella or two sneak into both volumes), and ask the writers to provide a headnote (Harrison's books) or an afterword (Norris's) to their story choices, which can lead to various sorts of amusement when not also enlightenment. Norris, perhaps shortsightedly, asked in both her volumes for stories published in the last three years or so that had remained favorites, making for anthologies that, for devoted fans of the writers in question (and regular readers of The New Yorker particularly), provided a litany of often familiar (and still fresh in memory) stories...Harrison, conversely, asked for overlooked stories from his contributors, which allowed them to range freely through their careers, and at times pick out something from their key developmental steps, as they were finding their way. 

Happily, Carol Emshwiller's 1966 story, as she describes in her headnote, takes on both her early attempts to move away from traditional plot and the increasing irritation she'd been feeling at the plethora of human-robot/AI romance stories she'd been reading, many of them ignoring the apparent warning of Lester Del Rey's early and much revered story on this subject that those who would seek out such a relation would tend to be emotionally stunted...one wonders what Emshwiller made of the technological developments already in place at the time of her death a few years ago allowing for greater ease of simulated romance and/or sex with hardware and software, if not quite up to the limited sentience of the stories (and similar narratives) in question. "But Soft, What Light..." not only posits an experimental robot and AI programmed to be a writer, but a machismic writer in the mode of Norman Mailer and his less flamboyant brethren, and its human companion, a young woman hired by the engineers and the robot's support staff in the Department of Contemplative and Exploratory Poetry to be its "vestal virgin"...and she displays all the self-deluding behaviors of the women who put up with "genius behavior" from their writing (or otherwise artistic) men, up to treasuring the knowledge that she is somehow loved by her artificial narcissist companion more than she worries about the minor and not so minor abuses she suffers, consistently excusing and praising her artificial guy. A blackly comic story, seemingly coming in part out Emshwiller's observations of too many women in the artistic communities she was a part of (with her painter and filmmaker husband and their Levittown house being a sort of Long Island bohemian locus).  Emshwiller notes that she considered this story also part of her attempt to write more bluntly and honestly about sex and the relations around those interactions, and she was surprised this particular story had never been picked  up for reprinting (after its first book publication here, it wouldn't be reprinted again, as far as I can tell, till Emshwiller included it in her 1990 collection The Start of the End of It All, and eventually in the first volume of her Complete Stories). She also notes that she didn't think this made her part of "the New Wave", though she enjoyed the work so tagged for the most part, since they had Agendas...not fully admitting that her agenda wasn't too far from those usually ascribed to the (admittedly somewhat amorphous) New Wave in sf.

Bobbie Ann Mason's protagonist Beverly is only slightly better off with her choice of life-partner, father of their two children and now ex-husband, a man who, like Beverly, isn't too sure of what he wants but has certainly lurking dread of what he doesn't want, and has some difficulty figuring out how to actively work for the former rather than letting resentment allow him to act out abruptly and sullenly (though, at least, not violently so much as to a certain degree selfishly, something Beverly realizes she isn't immune to, either, though she tries to be less disruptive and sulking than her ex). To further complicate matters, they aren't done with each other sexually, at least not in terms of both lust and empathy, and share custody of the children...which will be made more difficult as he intends to take a job in South Carolina, quite some distance away from their current abodes in western Kentucky, not too far a drive from Memphis, TN. The story is rich in details of their lives and those of their friends and extended families, and elegantly casual references to pop music and science-fictional films and related matters. Beverly is as effortfully trying to find a reasonable life for herself and help those around her find one as well, as much as the relentlessly nameless protagonist of Emshwiller's story is trying to invest herself in the notion of her self-abnegating sacrifice being for the Greater Good for her artificial partner and the great works it's going to be capable of, Real Soon Now. Mason notes in her afterword to the story that she envisioned a catastrophic ending for Beverly in the first draft, which among other unsatisfying respects left the impression of Beverly punished for leaving her husband; the next draft ended with what she suggests is The English Department ending: "Beverly was gazing at tantalizing visions of ambiguity in the reflections of the sky in the picture window"...and in final form Mason simply had Beverly going about the business of life, including that pertaining to her ex. 

Emshwiller, more in farce than minimalism in her story, has the budding AI/robot poet compose:
I love you.
"Let me count the ways."
One, two
Three, four
Ear neck leg Adam's apple
(Five)

Wrinkle under arm
Big toe. That's seven
But that's not all. 

Let one who can count, count,
And in a microsecond, 
To thousands.
Charms have never been better catalogued
Than this
From whorl of fingertip through pubic hair line
I love you.

Its later work is slightly more adept, if no less comically so.

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


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Friday, November 24, 2017

FFB: Terry Carr, ed: SCIENCE FICTION FOR PEOPLE WHO HATE SCIENCE FICTION (Doubleday 1966); Harry Harrison, ed: THE LIGHT FANTASTIC (Scribner's 1971)


Missionary Work

 Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction was Terry Carr's first solo anthology to be published, after a volume or two of his work with Donald Wollheim on their Best of the Year sf volume for Ace Books; The Light Fantastic: Science Fiction Classics from the Mainstream (sic: there is not now, nor has there ever been, a true mainstream of literature) was not Harry Harrison's first antho, but his first, as well, was an sf BOTY, in his case for Putnam/Berkley, with Brian Aldiss as increasingly co-editing junior partner in the first volume or so. Perhaps the same impulse that drives one to work on annual showcases makes putting together this kind of "instructional" anthology particularly attractive, even beyond the usual "this is important, or at very least interesting" thrust of nearly any anthology assembled with care,...in the cases of these two fine anthologies, the instructional thrust can be executively summarized as "Open your eyes." (The appended "fool!" is only occasionally barely audible, though almost impossible to completely suppress, as well.)

 The Carr anthology brings together accessible, intelligent, (at the time) not terribly overexposed mostly sf stories (H.L. Gold's synesthesia tale "The Man with English" certainly is arguably fantasy, and Arthur Clarke's "The Star" introduces supernatural elements of the most widely accepted sort in Christendom)...Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" hadn't quite become common coin by the mid '60s, and the Damon Knight story, despite "To Serve Man" having become a much-loved Twilight Zone episode, was nearly as famous as Knight's other early joke story, and even more sapiently pointed). While "What's It Like Out There?" remains The cited example of What Else Edmond Hamilton could do aside from planet explosion, and the Wilmar Shiras a slightly odd choice in this set of encouraging the outlanders to try some of the pure quill. Algis Budrys, in reviewing this one at the time, noted that people who hate sf hate reading, and the only way to get them to take up this book would be for it to be socially necessary to have on their coffee-table or equivalent (as Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five and Stranger in a Strange Land and to a lesser extent at that time Dune and No Blade of Grass and The Child Buyer would be)...but the thoughtful reader who thought they hated sf somehow (probably more common in '66 than today, if not much moreso) could find some diversion here, at very least. Or, by the end of the decade, could enjoy making a joke about reading up on the topic in their Funk & Wagnalls paperback edition.

 Harry Harrison attempts a slightly more double-edged trick, in getting the (presumably well-meaning ignorant) snobs against sf to consider reading the form, and to get similar snobs within the sf-reading community to look beyond the commercial labels for the pure quill wherever it's actually found. Harrison, too, gets in some work in this "sf" context that is arguably (the Cheever, the Greene) or almost inarguably (the Lewis, the Twain) fantasy rather than sf, though the sort of fantasy that sf people usually find agreeable, even leaving aside the time-travel paradox introduced in Anthony Burgess's "The Muse" (Burgess, of course, couldn't leave sf alone any more than C. S. Lewis could, and saw no more reason to do so than Lewis, I'm sure). And, of course, Gerald Kersh and Jorge Luis Borges had no qualms about being considered writers of fantasticated fiction, as long as no one insisted that was all they did or could do, and, happily, no one has...if anything, Kingsley Amis, that passionate advocate for sf so labeled, has seen his advocacy and contributions to the literature all but forgotten in favor of his Angry Young Man (and Older Man) satire, even when careful to have Lucky Jim a reader of Astounding Science Fiction magazine back when Analog was still called that.

 It's a funny old world, and there's no shortage of ignorance of all sorts, but that's what this FFB exercise is here to combat, in its small and often nostalgic way. I liked both these anthologies a lot as a kid, and would still like them if I was first to open them today. What more could we ask?

 Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction ed. Terry Carr (Doubleday LCC# 66-24334, 1966, $3.95, 190pp, hc); Also in pb (Funk & Wagnalls 1968).

 7 · Introduction · Terry Carr · in
11 · The Star [Star of Bethlehem] · Arthur C. Clarke · ss Infinity Science Fiction Nov ’55
21 · A Sound of Thunder · Ray Bradbury · ss Colliers Jun 28 ’52
37 · The Year of the Jackpot · Robert A. Heinlein · nv Galaxy Mar ’52
79 · The Man with English · H. L. Gold · ss Star Science Fiction Stories #1, ed. Frederik Pohl, Ballantine, 1953
91 · In Hiding [Timothy Paul] · Wilmar H. Shiras · nv Astounding Nov ’48
135 · Not with a Bang · Damon Knight · ss F&SF Win/Spr ’50
143 · Love Called This Thing · Avram Davidson & Laura Goforth · ss Galaxy Apr ’59
157 · The Weapon · Fredric Brown · ss Astounding Apr ’51
163 · What’s It Like Out There? · Edmond Hamilton · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec ’52

The Light Fantastic ed. Harry Harrison (Scribner’s, 1971, hc)
· Introduction—The Function of Science Fiction · James Blish · in
· The Muse · Anthony Burgess · ss The Hudson Review Spr ’68
· The Unsafe Deposit Box · Gerald Kersh · ss The Saturday Evening Post Apr 14 ’62
· Something Strange · Kingsley Amis · ss The Spectator, 1960; F&SF Jul ’61
· Sold to Satan [written Jan 1904] · Mark Twain · ss Europe and Elsewhere, Harper Bros., 1923
· The End of the Party · Graham Greene · ss The London Mercury Jan ’32
· The Circular Ruins [1941] · Jorge Luís Borges; trans. by James E. Irby · ss Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962
· The Shout · Robert Graves · ss The Woburn Books #16 ’29; F&SF Apr ’52
· The Door · E. B. White · ss The New Yorker, 1939
· The Machine Stops · E. M. Forster · nv Oxford and Cambridge Review Nov ’09
· The Mark Gable Foundation · Leo Szilard · ss The Voice of the Dolphins, and Other Stories, Simon & Schuster, 1961
· The Enormous Radio · John Cheever · ss The New Yorker May 17 ’47
· The Finest Story in the World · Rudyard Kipling · nv Contemporary Review Jul, 1891
· The Shoddy Lands · C. S. Lewis · ss F&SF Feb ’56
· Afterword · Harry Harrison · aw

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, March 25, 2016

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.
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Friday, January 8, 2016

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: new links to reviews, citations and more

Below we have this week's crop of books and other literary expression deserving (and, infrequently, not so much deserving) more attention than they are currently getting. If I've missed your or someone else's FFB review, please let me know in comments...thanks to all the contributors and all you readers. Least-forgotten book this week is probably either the Steinbeck or the Grisham...two each from Stout and Hunter...

 Next week, the list will be hosted again by Patti Abbott at her blog, and will have a special emphasis on the humorous crime fiction of Richard S. Prather. Be there (if you choose! And you should.). Aloha. 

 Walter Albert: Murder Between the Covers by Elaine Viets

 Mark Baker: C is for Corpse by Sue Grafton

 Elgin Bleecker: Dick Francis's Gamble by Felix Francis

 Ben Boulden: Breakfast at Wimbledon by Jack M. Bickham

Lucy Brown: favorite books read in 2015

 Brian Busby: The British Barbarians by Grant Allen

David Cramner: three short stories by Haruki Murakami

 Bill Crider: The Jungle Kids by Evan Hunter

 Scott A. Cupp: The Will to Kill by Robert Bloch

William Deeck: The Broken Vase by Rex Stout

 Martin Edwards: Death in the Dusk by Virgil Markham; Case for Three Detectives by "Leo Bruce" (Rupert Croft-Cooke)

 Barry Ergang: Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (hosted by Kevin Tipple)

 Curt Evans: Christmas Mourning by Margaret Maron

Barry Gardner: Scent of Evil by Archer Mayor

 Jay Gertzman: Down There by David Goodis

Ed Gorman: Cut Me In by "Hunt Collins" (Evan Hunter, reissued as by Ed McBain)

 "John Grant": While I Was Gone by Sue Miller

 Rich Horton: Falcons of Narabedla & The Dark Intruder and Other Stories by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Jerry House: Mutiny (issue #2, October 1954) published by Aragon Magazines; Batman: Second Chances by Max Allan Collins, Jim Starlin and Jo Duffy
2016 Caldecott winner
Sam Juliano: Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear by Lindsay Mattick and Sophie Blackall

 Tracy K: Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout

 George Kelley: Worst Contact edited by Hank Davis

 Margot Kinberg: A Time to Kill by John Grisham

 Rob Kitchin: To Steal Her Love by Matti Joensuu; The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

 Kate Laity: The Devil's Mistress by J. W. Brodie-Innes

 B. V. Lawson: The Killings at Badger's Drift by Caroline Graham

 Steve Lewis: The Law of Second Chances by James Sheehan; Say Goodbye to April by Ken Pettus

Todd Mason: Fantastic and Amazing Stories as edited by Harry Harrison, and Great Science Fiction and Thrilling Science Fiction as Not edited by HH...(please see below)

 Carol Matic: Spider Sparrow by Dick King-Smith

John F. Norris: The Case of the Phantom Fingerprints by Ken Crossen

 Mathew Paust: Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (and others) by Robert Stone

 Mildred Perkins: They All Love Jack by Bruce Robinson

 J. Kingston Pierce: Xmas vixens

 James Reasoner: Honkytonk Brand by Walker A. Tompkins

 Richard Robinson: gift books

Gerard Saylor: X-Files: Trust No One edited by Jonathan Maberry

 Steve Scott: The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper by John D. MacDonald
Wicked Women; courtesy Rex Parker

 Jack Seabrook: A Butcher's Dozen of Wicked Women edited by Lee Wright, and the mystery of Emily Neff...

"TomCat": The Pleasure Cruise Mystery by Robin Forsythe

 Prashant Trikannad: 2015 reading

 A. J. Wright: Stephen Gresham's novels



Todd Mason on 
Harry Harrison's editorial work at Ultimate Publications, 1967-1968

 Harry Harrison is one of the more protean figures in the history of sf; much as with his friend Mack Reynolds (I believe...I still need to pick up his memoirs volume , Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!), he was a world traveler who often would write lighthearted (or very grim) but always intelligent adventure fiction, such as the Stainless Steel Rat series (or the Deathworld series), and was closely allied with John W. Campbell, Jr. artistically and sentimentally (editing Campbell's collected editorials from the latter's time at Astounding Science Fiction and Analog) while also willing to foster the most surreal and/or nonlinear narrative in speculative fiction as an editor, in such venues as the British  SF Impulse magazine and perhaps even more in selecting for (with increasing input from Brian Aldiss, who soon became co-editor) the Best SF annual for Berkley and Putnam from 1968-1975. Harrison first became an editor of fiction magazines in the 1950s, not too long after the 1950 sale of his first short story, "Rock Diver," to Damon Knight at Worlds Beyond Science-Fantasy magazine, briefly taking over the surviving titles that Lester Del Rey had been editing (the first magazine to be titled Science Fiction Adventures and the soon-folded Rocket Stories) in 1953...while still a relatively new fiction-writer, he was already a veteran packager and artist in the comics field.  While both were living in Europe (Harrison in Denmark) in the mid '60s, Harrison and Aldiss had put together two
Fantastic featured more reprints still during
Harrison's year than Amazing would, and was
at least as afflicted by the cheap European cover
images Cohen had bought rights to for both.
impressive issues of a critical magazine, SF Horizons; when Harrison and his family returned to the US after some years abroad, among the first work Harrison took up part-time was as editor of Fantastic and Amazing Stories, as they were published by Sol Cohen, who did much of the putting together of the magazines from his house (and his wife would mail out the subscription copies from a desk in their basement, one reason Cohen never pushed too hard for subscriptions with the magazines while he owned them). The remarkably small stipend Cohen was paying his first editor, schoolteacher Joseph Wrzos, who went by Joseph Ross for convenience's sake in his editorial work, was perhaps not enough to keep Ross in the job by the end of 1967, after about two years of putting the magazine together on a micro-budget. Nonetheless, Ross's
magazines had presented some remarkable new fiction, such as a short version Avram Davidson's The Phoenix and the Mirror and Roger Zelazny's "For a Breath I Tarry", as "salvage markets" that mixed the few new stories in with reprints selected initially by Ross, long-term fan and assistant Arnie Katz, and Cohen. Cohen had bought the magazines from Ziff-Davis because ZD had for decades been buying all serial rights to the stories they published, and Cohen was thus legally able to reprint, without any further payment, any story from the back issues of the magazines whose inventory he'd also purchased..a practice which made him rather unpopular with the new Science Fiction Writers of America and with other writers, jointly and severally. When Harrison, who already had been writing a book-review column for several issues of Amazing, accepted the post of editor for Amazing and Fantastic, Cohen not only continued to publish a fair amount of reprinted fiction in the magazines, but had also started several more, often irregularly-issued and frequently-retitled magazines completely devoted to reprints, such as Great Science Fiction and The Most Thrilling Science Fiction Ever Told
(which would rather quickly become simply Thrilling Science Fiction). With Harrison, already a "name" writer in the field, taking on the two older titles, Cohen (according to Harrison in correspondence with historian Mike Ashley) offered to phase out the reprints in those magazines if Harrison would allow his name to be put on the covers of the reprint-only magazines as editor, and write a brief editorial or so. Harrison took the deal, and the issues with Harrison cover-bannered as editor are Not Bad, certainly not the haphazard collections of yard goods Cohen would often throw together in later years of the reprint magazines, but were in no way actually edited by Harrison. And Cohen didn't keep his end of the bargain...the reprints continued in Fantastic and Amazing, and soon Harrison left Ultimate Publications, with the advent of his annual Best-of, and, beginning 1970, an anthology series devoted to new fiction, Nova. (Meanwhile, Barry Malzberg had an even shorter term as editor of F & A, and Ted White came in 1969, to stick with the magazines for a decade and to eventually see, in 1972 issues, the end of the reprints...Cohen by that time finally relented and had started making token payments to writers for reprints in the surviving reprint-magazines.)(Harrison notes in his memoir that he'd suggested Malzberg as a temporary substitute for him, and Cohen decided to fire Harrison rather than accept a leave of absence.)
Harrison's first Amazing was the December 1967 issue. his first Fantastic the January 1968. He would edit five issues of each. The Spring and Summer 1968 issues of Great SF and the Summer '68 Most Thrilling were attributed to Harrison. His first Amazing featured the second installment of Frank Herbert's The Santaronga Barrier, begun in Ross's last issue, and also new stories by notable veterans Kris Neville and Charles Harness, and Soviet writer Gennady Gor in translation...and Harrison's editorial noting the death of Amazing founder Hugo Gernsback, and a new essay by Gernsback that Cohen apparently hadn't gotten around to publishing previously. The issue was topped off with reprints from Mack Reynolds, Lester Del Rey and Ray Bradbury...an impressive lineup. Less impressive, perhaps, was a reprint from the Gernsback Amazing, vintage 1928, by Charles Cloukey. The first issue of Great SF attributed to Harrison has a good set of contributors, as well, with the mild exception of Albert Teichner. These are the two issues I have before me at the moment, purchased some months ago at a community booksale to benefit the Pennsylvania SF Society. 

 indices courtesy ISFDB:
Amazing Stories, December 1967

Great Science Fiction, Spring 1968
Harrison apparently notes in his memoirs that John W. Campbell, Jr., after their long working relation in the 1960s and Harrison editing his editorials collection, wanted Harrison to succeed him as editor (Algis Budrys mentioned in writing that Campbell had made the same desire known about and to young Budrys in the latter 1950s, when they were working closely); Harrison edited the memorial anthology for Campbell, Astounding, but one suspects that Conde Nast, in looking for a new editor upon Campbell's sudden death, preferred as smooth a transition and as little change in the magazine as possible, as Frederik Pohl, also a candidate to succeed Campbell, noted in his memoir The Way the Future Was. Pohl's work at the Galaxy group of magazines, if less decidedly than Harrison's with the Best SF series, was rather more diverse and less engineer-stroking than JWC's magazine had  remained, and Ben Bova, the eventual editorial replacement, managed to both broaden and improve Analog, but less abruptly than the veteran editors would've (perhaps less thoroughly, as well, but that would not necessarily be the opinion of long-term Analog readers). Harrison's career as a (to paraphrase) slow, therefore necessarily commercial, writer, continued fruitfully until his death in 2012.
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Friday, May 15, 2015

FFB redux: BEST SF '71 ed. by Harry Harrison & Brian Aldiss (Berkley 1972); YEAR'S FINEST FANTASY ed. by Terry Carr (Berkley 1978)

Redux, due to attendance to a funeral and prepping the house for guests, at this link. Back with new next Friday.

 Please see Patti Abbott's list of old and mostly new FFB reviews here.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: BEST SF '71 ed. by Harry Harrison & Brian Aldiss (Berkley 1972); YEAR'S FINEST FANTASY ed. by Terry Carr (Berkley 1978)



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Friday, April 10, 2015

FFB: SF HORIZONS, edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison (1964 and 1965 issues; facsimile reprint in boards 1975, Arno Press)

 Here's Brian Aldiss in 1964:

 I avoid the usual term "mainstream" which erroneously suggests two things: a) that all sf writers are equal in aim, attitude and ability, and b) that all other writers are equal in aim, attitude and ability, and that all their works are homogenous.

 That this line appears in a footnote to an essay about the literary difficulties in writing good sf, using an early novel by Jack Williamson as a jumping off point (while making copious note of the similarities of too much of the work still being written and published in the early-mid 1960s), leaves open the question of how formative reading that in 1979 might've been for the 15yo me, or even more likely, how much I would've found it utterly apropos, an excellent and all but thrown-away statement of a point most people (as it turns out) won't even argue with, so ingrained in their worldview that there's an Us and a Them and the demarcations are clear (except when they aren't). (Romance-fiction fans and writers these days might be the most disturbing example of accepting a ghetto mentality, as Judith Merril might've been the first to put it in re: fantasy and sf, inasmuch as so many of them buy into the writer's guideline commercial notion that it Isn't Really a Romance if it doesn't have a Happily Ever After, or potentially HEA, ending. Romeo and Juliet ain't no romance, you fool...just look at that ending.)

This was an excellent project that probably didn't sustain itself financially, while its editor/publishers were trying to make a living from writing...Damon Knight and Lester Del Rey similarly, in the late 1950s, produced two issues of a Science Fiction Forum that calls out for reprint or posting online, but hasn't seen any yet, as far as I know, even though Knight revived the title for one of the publications of the Science Fiction Writers of America when he co-founded it in the mid '60s. Before SF Horizons, there was PITFCS and Xero; since, we've certainly had Monad and SF Eye, and others that have had a similar ambitious remit (a few, such as Richard Geis's Science Fiction Review/The Alien Critic, Andrew Porter's Algol/Starship, and Douglas Fratz's Thrust/Quantum, which have occasionally approached the same adventurous feel). Maybe Inside SF/Riverside Quarterly as well...if your magazine lasts any length of time, it has to change names (SF Eye began as Science Fiction Eye). 

 If you pick up the facsimile volume, or the original issues, today, you'll have access to some of  James Blish's criticism (collected since in volumes from Advent: Publishers), but in its natural environment, cheek by jowl with an excellent interview with C. S. Lewis and Kingsley Amis conducted by Brian Aldiss, and a good one with William Burroughs conducted anonymously (but by someone, I'm told possibly James Blish, who met Burroughs at a meeting of the New York City-based Hydra Club, a periodical gathering of writers and fans that flourished in the 1950s into the '60s); Burroughs is quick to note how much he admires the work of Theodore Sturgeon, Eric Frank Russell (rather unsurprisingly) and (perhaps more surprisingly) C. S. Lewis, in whose work Burroughs sees a strong kinship with his own. I'm not sure the Aldiss essays here (as by him and by "C. C. Shackleton," a regular pseudonym of his often for more satirical writing) have all been collected elsewhere, but one hopes so (the long take on three contemporary UK writers--Lan Wright, Donald Malcolm and J. G. Ballard--is utterly engaging); the editorial in the second issue, attributed to both Harrison and Aldiss, is a particularly acute brief analysis of the great appeal of what has come to be known as the technothriller, albeit ranging as far as Advise and Consent in the then-current crop, and tracing their roots through John Buchan's espionage novels as well as Ian Fleming's incidentally tech-obsessed entries. Harrison's close reading of an F. L. Wallace novel, and issue-taking with Blish's criticism of Aldiss's "Hothouse" stories in the first issue, seems unlikely to have been reprinted elsewhere so far, and that's a pity. Okuno Takeo and Francesco Biamonti's short surveys of sf in Japan and Italy are useful snapshots (Biamonte notes that Umberto Eco had devoted a chapter in a then recent book to how he felt Italian sf should be developed), the kind of coverage that Charles Brown was later keen to continue in Locus magazine, in dealing with international sf and fantasy worldwide. 

 For those who seek out the Arno Press reprint: be aware that the text pages are on acid-free paper, but for some reason the endpapers are not. That atop not reprinting the magazine covers in the book, for no obvious reason, and slapping on what I suspect is a slightly expensively embossed and cutesy cover, perhaps one used on all the Arno SF line at the time; their books were clearly meant for the library trade, and before recently purchasing this copy, I'd first read a copy I borrowed and reasonably promptly returned to the Hawaii State Library's central branch, all those years ago.

Images and indices courtesy ISFDB:
Title: SF Horizons 
Authors: Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss 
Year: 1975 
Publisher: Arno Press
Notes: Photographic reprint of the two issues of the British journal/fanzine, originally published in 1964 and 1965.
Library binding on acid-free paper, less than five hundred copies printed.
No price or pub month in book.
Book cover artist not credited.



Please see a recollection of the first set of FFB links, and the rest of this week's ttiles, on this celebration of the first seven years of Friday Books at Patti Abbott's blog.
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