Showing posts with label Lisa Tuttle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lisa Tuttle. Show all posts

Saturday, July 8, 2023

FFB: WFC: WORLD FANTASY CONVENTION 2007 souvenir book: convention guests of honor and special guests Carol Emshwiller, Lisa Tuttle, Kim Newman, "Moebius"/Jean Henri Gaston Giraud, Joseph Bruchac, Barbara & Christopher Roden, George Scithers, Betty Ballantine, Diana Wynne Jones, and more; edited by Lorna Carlson & Chris Logan Edwards



Index slightly amended from the ISFDB listing:

  • 4 • The Committee (World Fantasy Convention 2007) • essay by uncredited
  • about Carol Emshwiller:
  • 7 • Dancing with Carol • essay by Gavin J. Grant
  • 7 • A Conversation with Carol Emshwiller • interview of Carol Emshwiller • interview by Liz Holliday
  • 11 • Carol Emshwiller Bibliography • essay by uncredited
  • about Lisa Tuttle:
  • 13 • Looking for Lisa • essay by George R. R. Martin
  • 16 • Lisa Tuttle Bibliography • essay by uncredited
  • about Kim Newman:
  • 19 • 20 Years Ago • essay by Paul J. McAuley
  • 21 • Kim Newman Bibliography • essay by uncredited
  • about "Moebius"/Jean Henri Gaston Giraud:
  • 23 • Moebius: The Art of the Numinous • essay by Stephen Hickman
  • 25 • Moebius & Gir • essay by Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr.
  • 25 •  Moebius & Gir • interior artwork by "Moebius"/Jean Henri Gaston Giraud
  • 27 •  From the Book "Le Chasseur Déprime" • (2007) • interior artwork by "Moebius"/Jean Henri Gaston Giraud
  • 28 •  "Manipulation" • (2003) • interior artwork by "Moebius"/Jean Henri Gaston Giraud
  • 29 •  "Arzach" • interior artwork by "Moebius"/Jean Henri Gaston Giraud
  • 30 •  From the Book "Inside Moebius Tome 3" • (2007) • interior artwork by "Moebius"/Jean Henri Gaston Giraud
  • 31 •  Study form the Animated Film "Little Nemo" • interior artwork by "Moebius"/Jean Henri Gaston Giraud
  • 32 •  "Les Maîtres Du Temps" • interior artwork by "Moebius"/Jean Henri Gaston Giraud
  • 33 •  From the Book "40 Days Dans Le Désert B" • (1999) • interior artwork by "Moebius"/Jean Henri Gaston Giraud
  • 34 •  "L'Homme À L'Étoile D'Argent" • (1967) • interior artwork by "Moebius"/Jean Henri Gaston Giraud
  • about Joseph Bruchac:
  • 37 • Joseph Bruchac — Storyteller • essay by uncredited
  • 38 • Joseph Bruchac Bibliography • essay by uncredited
  • about Barbara and Christopher Roden, of Ash-Tree Press (among other work):
  • 41 • Dig Us No Grave • (1986) • essay by Ramsey Campbell • Fantasy Review, March 1986
  • 44 • Ash-Tree Press Titles • essay by uncredited
  • 44 •  The World, the Flesh, & the Devil (cover) • interior artwork by Jason Van Hollander (variant of cover art for The World, the Flesh, & the Devil 2006)
  • 44 •  Shadows and Silence (cover) • (2000) • interior artwork by Jason Van Hollander (variant of cover art for Shadows and Silence)
  • 44 •  The Attic Express and Other Macabre Stories (cover) • (2007) • interior artwork by Keith Minnion (variant of cover art for The Attic Express and Other Macabre Stories)
  • 44 •  The Captain of the 'Pole-Star': Weird and Imaginative Fiction (cover) • (2004) • interior artwork by Paul Lowe (variant of cover art for The Captain of the 'Pole-Star': Weird and Imaginative Fiction)
  • 45 •  The Undying Monster (cover) • (2006) • interior artwork by Jason Van Hollander (variant of cover art for The Undying Monster)
  • 45 •  Nightmare Jack and Other Stories (cover) • interior artwork by Douglas Walters (variant of cover art for Nightmare Jack and Other Stories 1998)
  • 45 •  The Passion Play and Other Ghost Stories (cover) • (2006) • interior artwork by Keith Minnion (variant of cover art for The Passion Play and Other Ghost Stories)
  • 45 •  A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings (cover) • interior artwork by Paul Lowe (variant of cover art for A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings 2001)
  • 46 •  Hauntings: The Supernatural Stories (cover) • (2002) • interior artwork by John Singer Sargent (variant of cover art for Portrait of Vernon Lee 1881)
  • 46 •  The Executor And Other Ghost Stories (cover) • (1996) • interior artwork by Douglas Walters (variant of cover art for The Executor And Other Ghost Stories)
  • 46 •  Mr Justice Harbottle and Others: Ghost Stories 1870–73 (cover) • (2005) • interior artwork by Douglas Walters (variant of cover art for Mr Justice Harbottle and Others: Ghost Stories 1870–73)
  • 46 •  Conference with the Dead (cover) • (2000) • interior artwork by Douglas Walters (variant of cover art for Conference with the Dead 1996)
  • 47 •  Acquainted with the Night (cover) • (2004) • interior artwork by Jason Van Hollander (variant of cover art for Acquainted with the Night)
  • 47 •  The Five Jars (cover) • (1995) • interior artwork by Antony Maitland (variant of cover art for The Five Jars)
  • 47 •  At Ease with the Dead (cover) • (2007) • interior artwork by Jason Van Hollander (variant of cover art for At Ease with the Dead)
  • 47 •  Cold Harbour (cover) • (2007) • interior artwork by Jason Van Hollander (variant of cover art for Cold Harbour)
  • about George Scithers (editor/publisher of Amra and Owlslick Press, founding editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine [now Asimov's Science Fiction], later editor of Amazing Stories and the revived Weird Tales magazine, among other work):
  • 49 • Even More About George Scithers (Beyond His Innate Wickedness) • essay by Darrell Schweitzer
  • 53 • Profile • essay by Holly Ordway
  • 54 • Bibliography • essay by Guy Gavriel Kay
  • about Betty Ballantine (cofounder of Ballantine Books, among other work): 
  • 57 • Tribute to Betty • essay by Frederik Pohl
  • 57 • Profile • essay by Charles N. Brown
  • 58 •  Starchild (cover) • (1965) • interior artwork by Bill Edwards (variant of cover art for Starchild)
  • 59 •  The Secret Oceans (cover) • interior artwork by Jeffrey Mangiat (variant of cover art for The Secret Oceans 1994)
  • about Diana Wynne Jones:
  • 61 • On Discovering Diana Wynne Jones • essay by Neil Gaiman (slightly revised from its appearance in the Boskone 32 Program Book, 1995)
  • 64 • Gone ... But Not Forgotten: 2005—2007 • short obituaries by Stephen Jones
  • 67 •  A Wrinkle in Time (cover) • (1983) • interior artwork by Diane Dillon and Leo Dillon (variant of cover art for A Wrinkle in Time)--see below.
  • 78 • World Fantasy Award Nominees: 2007 • essay by uncredited
  • 80 • International Horror Guild Award Nominees: 2007 • essay by uncredited
  • 82 • Past World Fantasy Convention Award Winners & Nominees (World Fantasy Convention 2007) • essay by uncredited
  • 105 • History of the World Fantasy Conventions (World Fantasy Convention 2007) • essay by uncredited
  • 109 • Membership List (World Fantasy Convention 2007) • essay by uncredited
  • back cover •  "Arzach" [2] • interior artwork by "Moebius"/Jean Henri Gaston Giraud     
  • the Diane and Leo Dillon new-edition cover for the L'Engle: 
  • The Awards and Shortlists (courtesy SFADB): Where and When: World Fantasy Convention, Saratoga Springs, NY : November 4, 2007
  • Eligibility Year: 2006
    Judges: Gavin J. Grant, Ed Greenwood, Jeremy Lassen, Jeff Mariotte, Carsten Polzin
    Life Achievement
    Novel
    Novella
    • Winner: “Botch Town”, Jeffrey Ford (The Empire of Ice Cream)
    • Dark Harvest, Norman Partridge (Cemetery Dance)
    • “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire”, Ysabeau S. Wilce (F&SF Jul 2006)
    • “The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train”, Kim Newman (The Man from the Diogenes Club MonkeyBrain)
    • “Map of Dreams”, M. Rickert (Map of Dreams Golden Gryphon)
    Short Fiction
    • Winner: “Journey Into the Kingdom”, M. Rickert (F&SF May 2006)
    • “Another Word for Map is Faith”, Christopher Rowe (F&SF Aug 2006)
    • “Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”, Geoff Ryman (F&SF Oct/Nov 2006)
    • “A Siege of Cranes”, Benjamin Rosenbaum (Twenty Epics All-Star Stories)
    • “The Way He Does It”, Jeffrey Ford (Electric Velocipede #10, Spr 2006)
    Anthology
    Collection
    Artist
    Special Award, Professional
    Special Award, Non-professional
    • Winner: Gary K. Wolfe, for reviews and criticism in Locus and elsewhere
    • Leslie Howle, for her work at Clarion West
    • Leo Grin, for The Cimmerian
    • Susan Marie Groppi, for Strange Horizons
    • John Klima, for Electric Velocipede
    •  below, a 1990 World Fantasy Award trophy, for Jack Vance, in the Gahan Wilson-designed H. P. Lovecraft statue format in use from 1975 till 2015:The purpose of a convention souvenir book is more a matter of a token of appreciation, usually, rather than a lasting monument. Even one, such as this one, with some full-color panels of Moebius's comics work, on heavy, slick paper (as opposed to the rather good if stiff non-clay-coated pages of the rest of the large-format booklet)...something to read while, if waiting alone for a panel or ceremony or speech or reading to start, one sits in audience chairs or otherwise has a downtime moment. Also, to give those who don't know why this person or that one might be speaking or performing, some information...even if the good Ramsey Campbell essay, from his long-running "Ramsey Campbell, Probably" column, barely mentions the Rodens' Ash-Tree Press, at the very end of a survey of 20th Century, including then-recent, attempts to praise the ghost-story tradition, while prematurely burying it...Ash-Tree and the Rodens being singled out as a shining example of those not doing so (though illustrated, as noted above by ISFDB, with a number of Ash-Tree edition covers, in black and white photos). The Campbell column is the best piece of prose in the book, but this doesn't make the heartfelt, if at times insufficiently copy-edited, other short essays and interviews unworthy nor inutile, but someone certainly should've corrected Carol Emshwiller's memory-slip, in a valuable late interview with her, that had her most supportive early editor Robert A. W. Lowndes taking her stories for Thrilling Wonder Stories, a science-fiction magazine with a pulp-legacy title that was also featuring rather sophisticated fiction in the early 1950s...as then edited by Samuel Merwin, then Samuel Mines, while Lowndes was editing rather lower-budget magazines for Louis Silberkleit's Columbia Publications, such as Science Fiction Stories and Double-Action Detective and several western titles. The interviewer overconfidently refers to them as pulps, when the vast majority of her early sales were to digest-sized magazines, which proliferated in the '50s as the pulp format was being phased out.
      A not-unique example of an issue with a Carol Emshwiller story within, and with a cover by Edmund Emshwiller (for the Scortia story) with the married couple as the models.
    • Carol Emshwiller, unsurprisingly, is proud of her offspring who are writers, not least that her son Peter writes egalitarian portraits of female as well as male characters, given how she was raised as a "defective boy" in her family of brothers...and recalls the various frustrations and impediments that dogged her even as she would manage to publish distinctive and acclaimed work, as consistently as life would allow. 

    The other essays in the booklet tend to be more or less good brief introductions to the works of the convention guests highlighted, including Neil Gaiman's slightly updated appreciation of Diana Wynne Jones (originally written for her 1995 appearance at the Boston annual convention Boskone), and certainly Darrell Schweitzer's, about his long-term work colleague and friend George Scithers, is easily among the most fully-informed about its subject, though several others (such as Stephen Hickman on "Moebius"/Giraud and Locus co-founder Charles Brown on the hugely innovative and accomplished Betty Ballantine) provide some data-points that were new to me (I've never been the biggest fan of Heavy Metal magazine, the US version of Moebius's most prominent market, Metal Hurlant, but he has been among the most influential artists of theirs, if not the single most influential comics artist of his generation). George R. R. Martin on Lisa Tuttle was more in the nostalgic, jokey mode of much fannish writing; Paul J. McAuley just a bit more formal, not too much, in his piece on Kim Newman; the anonymous profile on Joseph Bruchac more briskly professional, though touching rather well on the variegated nature of his career. 

    As a further reminder of how ephemeral this was meant to be, the glue holding the cover onto the spine completely gave way as I finished reading it this morning, though I think it can be reapplied carefully. I didn't attend this convention (I managed to drop in on one earlier WFC), but was kindly given this volume. along with others, some years back by Kate Laity, who was lightening her load.
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    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 from a non-specialty press in the US.
    • 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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