Showing posts with label Jody Scott. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jody Scott. Show all posts

Friday, July 13, 2018

FFB: THE BEST FROM FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION 11th Series edited by Robert P. Mills (Doubleday 1962); THE GHOUL KEEPERS edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid 1961)

Two weeks ago, I reviewed Robert Mills's first of three annual best-of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction volumes, from his years of editorship of the magazine, whose name is usually abbreviated F&SF, and one of two Leo Margulies anthologies taken mostly from Dorothy McIlwraith's term as editor of Weird Tales (WT), including its revivals easily the next longest-running and certainly a similarly major influence on fantasy and horror (and to some extent suspense and science fiction) writing over the decades. This time, Mills's third and last annual volume, which managed to get the least ugly cover from the nonchalant Doubleday art department I recall among the whole series' run, by the talented but sparsely-employed Roger Zimmerman, and the less-elegantly, but punningly, titled other Margulies volume from Pyramid. 

 The lineup in the Margulies volume is perhaps just slightly less impressive than in the previous one, but only just so; the lineup in the Mills if anything managing to be slightly better, if, again, only by some intangible fraction. And Ace Books even let the poetry and Mills's headnotes actually be reprinted in full in their reprint of this volume, apparently...only three poems this time, the Walt Whitman classic in lieu of an editorial introduction. (In the UK, Panther was less generous in their paperback reprint, excising the Reeves poetry and the stories by Evelyn E. Smith, John Anthony West and [Ms.] Jody Scott, the latter two the younger contributors to the book; the West had been apparently first published in the UK in a 1961 collection of his short stories, Call Out the Malicia, which was the source of West's three F&SF stories before Dutton reprinted his collection in the US in 1963.) The least well-known writers in the WT book are Harry Altschuler, later the literary agent who made such a famously bad deal for Robert Bloch with the purchasers of dramatic rights to Psycho for Alfred Hitchcock's production company (and was fired by Bloch soon after), and Helen W.(einbaum) Kasson, the sister of the short-lived but highly influential sf and fantasy writer Stanley G. Weinbaum, one of small cadre of siblings of more famous writers who made their own mark, such as also Mary Pangborn or to some extent Jane Aiken Hodge (one could probably also, perhaps unfairly as with Hodge, cite Hugh and Robert Benson, E. F. Benson's bothers, but that's more like a Bronte Sisters situation).
The most famous stories in each volume: an easy choice for the Mills, as "Harrison Bergeron" has almost certainly passed "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" as Kurt Vonnegut's single most famous and widely-reprinted story, and this account of a human world where all people are artificially restrained if they demonstrate any greater talent or attractiveness than anyone else is the close correspondent in familiarity to Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon" in Mills's first volume, the Ninth. In the Margulies, it's a bit closer, but the Robert Bloch lead-off story "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is probably the champion by a hair, and it's a clever and very hardboiled sort of suspense story, not supernatural horror except from the point of view of its benighted protagonist, who thinks he's been rescued from his homeless, abandoned state by an angelic woman and a generous but Satanic man, and how things go very wrong for everyone involved. It's appeared in a large number of Bloch's own collections, and in at least four anthologies which have seen multiple editions, including this one.  The lead story in the Mills is Avram Davidson's very funny "The Sources of the Nile", in which a busy but underpaid writer (not a situation unfamiliar to Davidson himself) stumbles across a family who anticipate trends to a fabulous degree, and almost grabs a brass ring of fame and fortune with them...but an underestimated villain manages to snatch them away...and marry the writer's neglected womanfriend, to boot. Plot is not the strong point in this story, as with many of Davidson's best, so much as often hilarious, acutely observed detail and anecdote, obscure references deftly woven in...and, as with the Bloch story, a beautiful blond woman as the protagonist's obsession, though in the Davidson story understood all too well by her would-be swain as opposed to misunderstood almost completely.

The remarkable balance of the contributors to both books deserves some quick annotation, at least: in the F&SF book, Jay Williams was best known then and probably remains so for his young-readers' novels about Danny Dunn; Evelyn Smith was a contributor to most of the fantasy magazines, and number of sf magazines particularly in the 1950s, and particularly to, initially, Anthony Boucher's F&SF before Mills. Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson and Clifford D. Simak need little introduction to most readers of fiction from sf and fantasy magazines; Anderson and Dickson notably collaborated early on (particularly on the humorous "Hoka" stories), and Simak was one of the primary models that Asimov patterned his fiction after, in the latter's early career. "Cordwainer Smith" was the pseudonym Paul Linebarger, and eventually his wife Genevieve Linebarger as well if mostly in collaboration, used for their speculative fiction writing, most of it within a series called the "Instrumentality of Mankind". Charles G. Finney, best remembered for his novel The Circus of Dr. Lao, which has been influential on a number of writers, ranging from Ray Bradbury through Jonathan Lethem (Pyramid editor D. R. Bensen prominently blurbed their edition of Finney's The Ghosts of Manacle as "The damnedest book you ever read"); Jody Scott, whose first story this was, went on to write at least four novels, with one published only recently, a decade after her death, as a part of a loose, bitterly satirical series of science-fantasies, and one, a recent-past historical novel set during the Free Speech Movement activism at UC Berkeley, published only so far as an edited novella in an issue of Escapade magazine. John Anthony West, who died in February, and devoted much of his later life to speculative Egyptology, was one of several writers over the decades mostly to publish a few stories over a stretch of years mostly in F&SF, albeit all his F&SF stories were reprints from a UK collection and his three later short fictions in the field were sold to Damon Knight, and to Ben Bova at Omni; Rosser Reeves was one of the more important innovators in advertising in the '60s and '70s, who contributed three poems to F&SF at the turn of the '60s, and one short story to the last, April 1960, issue of Robert Lowndes's Future Science Fiction. And this John Berry, as opposed to the large handful of other literary John Berrys who lived and published through the latter half of the 20th Century, is perhaps best-known for his Macmillan Prize-winning first and only novel, Krishna Fluting (1959).

 While in the WT volume, along with Bloch, stalwarts of the Dorothy McIlwraith years of the magazine Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury have stories in, as they did in the previous one, Sturgeon's the one sf story in the book; this was usually Edmond Hamilton's bailiwick in WT, as the primary contributor, along with (to some extent) H. P. Lovecraft, of what earlier editor Farnsworth Wright liked to call the "weird-scientific" stories in the magazine; his story here is more in dark fantasy mode. One of the Gavagan's Bar club/pub-stories of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, accomplished fantasists and historians both, is included, as well as one of the Jules de Grandin psychic investigator stories by Seabury Quinn, throughout the pulp years apparently the most popular feature of Weird Tales with readers. Henry Kuttner is represented, and represents the heroic fantasy tradition in the magazine, with one of his Elak of Atlantis stories, not quite as famous as his eventual wife Catherine L. Moore's "Jirel of Joiry" stories, nor Robert E. Howard's several series featuring Conan, or other adventurers, but still notable. Weinbaum Kasson and, perhaps oddly, Altshuler (with his only story in the fantastic press, apparently, perhaps his only published story) round out the book.  Thus, The Ghoul Keepers is perhaps a shade less impressive than its predecessor, as noted before (though the Bloch story here is certainly a better one), the 11th Best from F&SF at least as good as the 9th (and easier to find in an unabridged edition). 


























































































For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog
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Friday, February 10, 2012

FFB: STORYTELLER by Kate Wilhelm (2005); CREATING SHORT FICTION by Damon Knight; (1981/1985/1997); callback to Donald Westlake and Jody Scott rarities



Next week, The Donald Westlake Symposium among the FFB crowd...here's my review from some ways back (almost three years...goodness) of two all-too-forgotten works, novellas by (Mr.) Donald Westlake ("Call Me a Cab") and (Ms.) Jody Scott ("Down Will Come Baby") that were never reprinted from their initial magazine appearances, his in Redbook when that magazine still published ficiton, hers in Escapade in its last issues as a rather sophisticated Playboy imitator, while Barry Malzberg was editing there (a short tenure, just before his much less well-paid short tenure as editor of Fantastic and Amazing).

I didn't finish the book I was likely to write up this week, so instead I'll briefly cite two which are definitely in print, from a rather less coincidental gender-pairing, Kate Wilhelm and the late Damon Knight, married for decades and also partners in creation of the Clarion Writers' Workshops, now a multi-site annual tradition and the most sustained program within, but not restricted to, fantastic-fiction writing instruction. Much of Knight's primarily instructional Creating Short Fiction and Wilhelm's mix of instruction and memoir (favoring the former) Storyteller comes out of their experiences with Clarion, as well as their larger working lives as highly analytical fiction-writers, and to some degree (Knight vastly moreso over the years than Wilhelm) editors (though Wilhelm has been in her turn a much more prolific fiction-writer than Knight was, after his most productive years in the 1950s and early '60s).

Knight is clear and concise and witty as he lays out the various approaches to and strictures of short-fiction writing, and the highlight of the book, for me is the way in which he presents his fine novelet "Four-in-One" and breaks down what he was doing with it, and how, at every step of its conception and writing. Wilhelm is more meditative, if no less witty, as she deals with basic questions of both literature and writing instruction specifically (excerpts of her book have been posted, with permission, thus: "Can Writing Be Taught?"; "Trivia vs. Writing Real Stories"; and "My Silent Partner". They are, together, an excellent distillation of what the two have taken away from their instructional experiences, and useful and a pleasure to read in a way that the best criticism tends to be, as well...illuminating and genuine fun.

For more of this week's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Thursday, April 9, 2009

Friday's "Forgotten" Short Fiction: Donald Westlake's "Call Me a Cab" and "Down Will Come Baby" by Jody Scott

Ms. Jody Scott: "Down Will Come Baby" Escapade magazine, July 1968 
Mr. Donald Westlake: "Call Me a Cab" Redbook magazine, June 1979

At left, the eventual (2022) release of the novel form of the Westlake.

We have here two unreprinted shorter works (essentially still true in 2022), as far as I can tell...and I have no good idea why they weren't ever given another shot at finding their audiences. The Scott is cut down from her first novel to about a 40K-word novella, edited into its current form by Escapade editor Barry Malzberg in a marathon session that, if I remember correctly, halved its length (and was so down to the wire that the paste-up manages to repeat a few paragraphs and puts a page or so slightly out of order). It's still a compelling, possibly somewhat autobiographical account of a young woman, unwilling to fit anyone else's expectations of what her behavior or aspirations should be, but not any less insecure for that, and with a keen sense for what sort of bullshitters of all stripes (student radicals, burnouts, artists, businesspeople, et al.) surround her on and around the Berkeley campus on the cusp of the repression of the Free Speech Movement and what followed. Having such a keen sense doesn't keep her from falling for a bullshitter or two, mind you. None of the adorableness of The Catcher in the Rye, much less The Strawberry Statement, here...a lot of the people around her are playing for high stakes, and usually not fairly...even when the stakes involve putting up with them till one's soul shrivels. And there's no stalking away in morally superior dudgeon, either, for her...there is realization of the kinds of compromises we all make with each other, institutions, life.

 Jody Scott sporadically published further fiction, including two novels released in book form...Malzberg recommends them here, from a column of "forgotten" and curious items in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.















As the respective covers suggest, a somewhat larger clothing allowance for cover models at '70s Redbook than at '60s Escapade, but similar budgets for eyeliner.

Donald Westlake was also an iconoclast, albeit one who played the game in the publishing world more sustainedly. Like Scott, not one to suffer fools gladly in his fiction, he offers here a charming if slightly improbable romantic road story, in which a a capable young woman can't quite figure out her ambivalence toward marrying her fiance, who awaits her arrival from NYC to LA with her yes or no. Being picked up by a gentle and Mostly pro-feminist cabbie, himself a youngish dropout (31 to her 29) from the fast lane who now pushes a hack for his father's small company, she has a brainstorm...rather than fly across country, and have to make up her mind and formulate her reasons in six or seven hours, she hires the cabbie to driver her across country, giving her a week to get her thoughts in order. Along the way, they run into a not too surprising but well-described set of circumstances, including a demonstration of how important her position is that gets them into a discussion of class and sex that unnerves them both, and a growing mutual attraction despite their best efforts otherwise. Her decision leaves her in a position not altogether unlike that of Scott's protagonist, but much more sure of herself and far happier, if not unalloyedly so...this notion of not conforming to other's expectations and desires has its cost, even if the fiancee and the cabbie, at story's end, will likely be at least friends going forward.

 Westlake makes notably much of how similar to the point of identical Holiday Inns in the late '70s were to each other, so I have to wonder if this not altogether flattering product placement (it never occurs to them to stop at a Ramada nor a Quality Inn) wasn't a means of ensuring a roadtrip by Westlake might be written off taxwise as research. But, as I mentioned, it's a charming story, with only one brief bit of too-cute comedy that Westlake occasionally indulged in in his early work, the rest up to his usual standards of amused, sharp observation.

Perhaps Westlake thought his "novel" (as Redbook calls it) was too explicitly tailored to a romance-oriented audience, or perhaps he thought he might expand it further (though it's hard to see how it would profitably go beyond the 25K words or so of its current novelet state), or just wouldn't fit in among his more criminous short fiction in his relatively few collections. [Late bulletin (2012): Apparently, Westlake wrote this one up as a filmscript or at least as a treatment, and there might well be an actual novel-length manuscript version among his papers, as well.][Later bulletin (2022): And so there was.]

 They are both awaiting rediscovery...the woman writer's sharply critical condemnation of human exploitation in a men's skin magazine (albeit a sophisticated one), and the man's slightly but not altogether more muted tribute to untraditional values and feminist and pro-feminist masculist aspiration in a fairly traditional women's domestic-life magazine (albeit one with a proud and, for at least some years further, sustained tradition of offering fiction, including ambitious fiction, long after most of the competition had dropped same. Albeit a "novel" as long as Westlake's, even when written by a writer of his stature, was presented in microprint in the back pages of the issue.)

 You could do much worse.

 See Patti Abbott's blog for links to other "forgotten stories" for this week. And thanks to Barry and Joe for letting me among others know of the existence of these stories, and providing copies of them.



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