Showing posts with label Mack Reynolds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mack Reynolds. Show all posts

Saturday, September 17, 2022

SSW/FFB: stories by Fritz Leiber, Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson, C. B. Gilford, Mack Reynolds, Michael Avallone...and, supposedly, Boris Karloff: from THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, April 1958, edited by Anthony Boucher, and TALES OF THE FRIGHTENED, August 1957, edited by Lyle Kenyon Engel (and/or Michael Avallone) and related books and records...(pt. 4)

Further reviewing the small slew of late '50s f/sf/h fiction magazines begun with this post: Fantasy/Horror/SF fiction magazine issues from the 1950s fantastica "End of Summer": THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION April 1958 edited by "Anthony Boucher"; FANTASTIC April 1959 edited by Cele Goldsmith; FANTASTIC UNIVERSE April 1958 edited by Hans Stefan Santesson; TALES OF THE FRIGHTENED August 1957 edited by Lyle Kenyon Engel; SCIENCE FANTASY April 1958 edited by John Carnell (and INSIDE SF's F&SF/Mercury Press parody issue/September 1958, edited by Ron Smith, and MACABRE, Summer 1958, edited by Joseph Payne Brennan)

and continuing with these: Short Story Wednesday: Kit Reed, Margaret St. Clair, William F. Nolan, Avram Davidson, Richard Wilson, and others: April 1958 fantasy (and related) stories from THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASTIC UNIVERSE (part 2)

SSW: 1959 fantasy magazine fiction: Part 3: Kate Wilhelm, Harlan Ellison, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Gordon Dickson, Edward Wellen, Arthur & Irwin Porges: FANTASTIC, April 1959, edited by Cele Goldsmith (Lalli)



Note that the loving care with which this cover has been put together, as noted previously, includes attributing Poul Anderson's story to Mack Reynolds's pseudonym, and vice verse, and spelling Poul as "Paul"...also, an utter lack of page numbers on the issue's table of contents can't have helped a newsstand-browser's confidence...


But first, the two most famous stories in our April 1958 issue of F&SF: Fritz Leiber's cover story, "A Deskful of Girls" and the only story to follow it, Brian Aldiss's "Poor Little Warrior!".

So, Leiber's "A Deskful of Girls" pretty much blew my mind as a  teenager, first reading it around 14 or so years old in The Best of Fritz Leiber most likely, the 1974 volume that was released perhaps a bit prematurely, but Leiber at his best might well've been the best writer to come out of the fantasy/sf magazine community, ahead of such inspirations as Lovecraft and Heinlein, and ahead of such peers as Bradbury and Sturgeon and heirs such as Le Guin and Emshwiller and Russ, and his almost direct colleague in Lovecraft-mentorship (and HPL-transcendence), Robert Bloch. Rereading it this last week doesn't impress me much less, despite familiarity, and all the others, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates and all, who have similarly traced the passage through her later life that "Marilyn Monroe" took...though Leiber published his account of a rather obvious Monroe analog in 1958, with her rapacious "therapist"/"analyst" and the genuinely exploitive as well as supernatural means he has discovered for controlling her and other women "patients"--removing aspects of themselves through a kind of ritual that pulls parts of their selves away from them, in a kind of psychic yet tangible self that the story's protagonist refers to as "ghostgirls." The tangible selves, wispy as their physical form is, can be used by the villain of the piece in several fashions, explicitly and implicitly addressed, when he doesn't simply take them from his file drawer and toy with them, or show them off, as to his somewhat different male temporary victim, Leiber's protagonist, hired by an actor, whose relation with the Monroe-correspondent resembles Joe DiMaggio's post-divorce interaction, to discover what's going on with his ex-wife and this extortionist. The vicious psychologist/parapsychologist has his run-in with the Monroe character, and it doesn't go as he might've expected. It's a hell of story, and is by the slimmest thread tied into Leiber's Change War stories (a quick reference to some of the supernatural technology several characters employ being provided by the time-travelers involved in the the truer CW stories), but it's mostly a remarkably grounded horror story for its time, feminist in approach even when even the more sympathetic male characters fail to fully appreciate the what some women can and will do, in the face of various sorts of exploitation or paternalistic "protection"...Leiber coming from an acting family, himself mostly raised by the women in his family, and having a brief, peripheral Hollywood career himself might not've hurt his insights here.

While the Aldiss story is good early work by him, an interesting mix of what Boucher correctly suggests is a Bradburyian lavishness in the prose (but with a lighter and more jazzily discursive touch than Bradbury usually managed), but also a kind of rather contemporary consideration of what might drive a married man to go back in time to be a "Poor Little Warrior!", hunting a brontosaurus on what amounts to a potted safari...but one that isn't quite as foolproof as one might desire in a distracting vacation...in his case to help him forget about his failing relation with his wife, which is touched upon in terms that take the story in a vaguely Updike or Amis or Philip Roth direction (rather than the more thoroughly mournful flavor John Cheever gave such matters in fantasies such as "The Enormous Radio"). This is not the story that will make me forget such early Aldiss as "Let's Be Frank", but I can see why it's an old favorite of many.

This ever-more impressive F&SF issue can be read here. While the highly uneven, but not altogether negligible latter issue of Tales of he Frightened can be read here.

Tales of the Frightened was one of three fiction magazines that Lyle Kenyon Engel and Republic Features Syndicate launched in 1957, along with one in 1956, all four seeing only two issues each, and each with a somewhat better covers on their first issues than their second issues would offer:

both issues of American Agent

and both issues of their slightly older cousin...

TotF, at least, was tied to an essentially stillborn syndicated radio series of short fillers, read by Boris Karloff, written by Michael Avallone...who probably was the actual editor of at least the two fantastica magazines (Engel is listed in them as Editorial Director), even as Avallone had been credited as editor of the two slightly earlier issues (1956-57) of Private Investigator Detective Magazine, both featuring Avallone's series detective Ed Noon (and please see below for Avallone's reported account), and Avallone also the likely author of some of the stories bylined by the utterly obscure among contributors to the magazines...when they weren't by other old pros such as Mack Reynolds, also in hiding. (American Agent apparently had a similarly planned unsuccessful radio run, getting as far as hiring veteran actor Lee Bowman as lead, according to the inside and outside back-cover blurbs for six planned Republic Features syndicated radio series--the others non-fictional or joke-laden in content--but as far as I know at this point, none of the others saw even raw recordings for the eventual initial pair of record albums, nor the book collecting the prose form of the radio vignettes, that the horror package would eventually produce). At least one report online has Republic Features Syndicate going under in '57, hence the end of the magazines (while Peter Enfantino reports at the link below that Avallone recalled a distributor's workforce-strike killed them--which seems unlikely, given the haphazard packaging of the second issues, unless the strike predated their preparation, but perhaps Avallone misremembers the stock-speculation-driven collapse of the dominant magazine distributor of the time, the American News Co.) and lack of radio penetration for whatever was actually recorded. Engel went on to decades of book packaging, Avallone to decades of writing. And the single vignettes in both issues of TotF attributed (more or less) to Karloff are Avallone's, from the radio vignette series and as collected in the book.

Peter Enfantino reviews (in 2010) the Michael Avallone collection of vignettes and the issues of the magazine here...and reaffirms my suspicion (and might well've been my initial source for it) that Avallone ghost-edited the magazines for Engel...Enfantino identifies the "Mark Dane" story in the issue as also Avallone's.

And this is apparently the first edition of the Avallone book (1963):

and these the Karloff recordings, the Mercury LP "Volume 1", also from '63: Side 1

Side 2

And Volume 2, complete:

The stories I've read first in the Frightened issue have run to those by my old favorites, unsurprisingly...crime-fiction writer (and more than occasional horror-fiction writer for such CF magazines as Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in its early decades) C. B. Gilford, whose story is this issue isn't the only one to cross-over from crime fiction to horror. "The Lucky Coffin" of the title confers a sort of immortality, apparently, on those wise enough to have purchased it...including the parsimonious, cantankerous (to say the least) and generally unpleasant uncle of the protagonist, and his long-suffering fiancee, and what it takes to make their dreams come to fruition. A fine and cheerful story, about the morally bankrupt.

Even better, and dealing with a similar class of anti-hero, is Poul Anderson's "Mr. Tiglath", the name offered by a dealer in persons trapped, like genies, in bottles of various sorts, and whom can be put to various uses. It's unsurprisingly best not to make such deals, even if Mr. Tiglath might not be Satan himself so much as an associated figure, and eventually meeting the prices one might pay. The story has excellent detail and even makes a reasonable case why the protagonist might be foolhardy enough to take the chance.

The attributed Mack Reynolds vignette, the joke-story "Dead End", is pun-laden enough so that Isaac Asimov and co-editors snapped it up for Microcosmic Tales, largely devoted to vignettes, but as Peter Enfantino similarly noted a dozen years ago, it's rather an anemic pun, to not quite make another myself, even if it is one of the few stories here to ever be reprinted. The other Reynolds story, attributed to "Mark Mallory", is a slightly clumsy bit of supernatural hugger-mugger called "The Man Who Stole His Body", in which the spirit of an accomplished surgeon strikes a desperate bargain with his guide on the way to an afterlife, and tries to convince another surgeon on staff at his hospital to perform extreme measures to keep his potentially dead body alive. Quite beyond the supernatural elements of the story, the narrative would like us to accept that a modern surgical suite would have rusty, as opposed to perhaps recently-used and in need of cleaning, instruments at tableside, or that either the rushed living or the living dead doctor would look upon the seconds, at most, to pull on surgical gloves to make a lick of difference, even while eschewing scrubbing up for several minutes beforehand. It verges on being a clever conceit of a story, but one can see why Reynolds stuck a pseudonym on this one over even the mildly clever if forced pun story.

The Avallone vignette in this issue, headnoted with an advisory that the radio series was meant to be broadcast as The Frightened, is attributed only to Karloff, as if he were writer as well as narrator. As reprinted in the various formats of the Avallone collection Tales of the Frightenend, this one leads off the book, under the title "The Man in the Raincoat"...we are, I think, supposed to realize the strange man in the titular coat has an oddly-shaped umbrella somewhat suggestive of a scythe, but that is not spelled out in the story, such as it is as published here (or as recorded). The apparently two other Avallone stories here, one mildly reprinted, might well average better, and I will see soon.
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Friday, August 23, 2013

FFB: edited by Avram Davidson: THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION January 1964


Donald Westlake, Mack Reynolds, Damon Knight, Edward Wellen, Allen Kim Lang's possibly best story, part of Fritz Leiber and Avram Davidson's longterm argument about the merits of H.P. Lovecraft's work...alongside Davidson and MZ Bradley reviewing some important and some  underappreciated (or even Forgotten) texts of fantastic fiction...so, what was so special about this issue?
 
from ISFDB:

The January 1964 issue of F&SF gets to be significant to, well, particularly me from the confluence of several notable contributions within (as well as having the cover date kicking off what would be Avram Davidson's last year of editorship, his being the best set of issues the magazine would see so far, the best from the magazine that has averaged the best among the long-running fantastic fiction magazines in English even in the face of strong competition for that plaudit)(and several of the best magazines in other languages were either launched as their national/language editions of F&SF or affiliated with the Yank magazine early on, notably the French Fiction and important Swedish, Japanese and Spanish magazines).

I've written previously about Mack Reynolds's cover story "Pacifist" being one of the stories that has helped shape my thinking about the world, posing the basic questions at the heart of utilitarianism as well as pacifism, rather neatly and with force and wit. At 13, bracing stuff. James Sallis thought so, too, when he, a bit older than I was at first reading, put together his fine first anthology, The War Book (1969), and it's one of the two Reynolds stories that newbie anthologist Martin Harry Greenberg and his collaborators used to bookend the contents of their Political Science Fiction (1974), not the last time Greenberg would reprint the story.

 Donald Westlake's "Nackles" is a Christmas horror story, about an anti-Santa rather more dire than Krampus, published not long after Westlake's denunciation of the sf and fantasy publishing scene, hence the use of his little joke of a pseudonym, Curt Clark (Westlake would never be able to divorce himself from fantastic fiction, however frustrating he found the commercial realities there early on, as such late work as Humans demonstrates).  Another story with a kind of sneaking influence in the culture...CBS's refusal to film an adaptation for the revived The Twilight Zone led to Harlan Ellison's resignation from that series.

Allen Kim Lang has had what critic John Boston has termed a "stealth" career in sf and fantasy, most of his publications in the 1950s and '60s (Lang is still alive, but apparently hasn't published in quite some time); Algis Budrys praised his work, and the unflashy nature of it, particularly in his one published novel, Wild and Outside. Though "Thaw and Serve" is decidedly flashy, and in tone reminiscent of the nearly contemporaneous Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange and certainly anticipatory of the rather goofier film Demolition Man in its depiction of a thug awakened from cryogenic storage in a nearly utopian future. One of the many proto-New Wavish (or, as Boston has joked, in this case rather more punkish instead) stories that Davidson, like Cele Goldsmtih/Lalli, published in their magazines in the early '60s, it would not only have fit comfortably in Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions a few years later but might even have had some influence on Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog"...this is another story that has stuck with me from early reading, as have the Westlake and the Reynolds.

 The other stories have not been as memorable to me, and I should revisit them.  Though Damon Knight would not write a fully satisfying novel till his rather late CV, despite his brilliance in all shorter forms, there was always something interesting about the earlier attempts. Edward Wellen, like Davidson, Westlake and to some extent Reynolds (and a lesser extent yet Wenzell Brown) an amphibian between crime fiction and fantastic fiction, and fond of doing work that sat firmly on the boderlines between both, has been reviewed here previously (a later contribution to the magazine, in fact); Robert Lory would be particularly productive in writing sequels of sorts to Dracula and other horror work, in novel series and otherwise, in the 1970s. Valentina Zhuravlyova not only wrote sf on her own but also, to get around the anti-Jewish bigotry of some aspects of the Soviet publishing sector, lent her name to her husband's fiction for publication (at least at home)...G.S. Altschuller is better remembered now for his formulation of the metatechnological observations known as TRIZ , or TIPS.

And the wittily, even offhandedly erudite book reviews by editor Davidson are supplemented in this issue by those of Marion Zimmer Bradley, not yet quite the institution she would become, and Fritz Leiber, in part engaging in a casual but heartfelt debate with Davidson over the merits of not just the interests H. P. Lovecraft pursued in his fiction, but in the qualities of the fiction itself (Davidson remained unconvinced...both Davidson and Leiber are vastly better and more profound writers than HPL was able to be, despite Lovecraft's extraordinarily important work in exploring existential horror, and his direct mentoring of the young Robert Bloch and, much more briefly but tellingly, Fritz Leiber as well in the latter's fledgling career as a writer).  And, of course, Asimov's science essay, of which he published, all told, 399 in consecutive issues of F&SF, and which column he credited as being the bedrock of his pop-science (and extensions) nonfiction-writing career (though Asimov and Davidson had a somewhat cool relation; Davidson's humanistic Orthodoxy and Asimov's utter atheism while being of Jewish ancestry was one source of occasional tension).

And, to add to the personal if not so much the intrinsic value of this rather impressive issue, it would've been the one on the newsstands at about the time I was being conceived. 

That noted, please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books (and possibly a few more magazine issues or other not-quite-books)...this week's entry by Jerry House is a review of The Eureka Years:  Boucher and McComas's Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1949-1954, edited by Annette Peltz McComas, about the origins of the magazine and its first five years of publication (and collecting some impressive stories published in those issues, among much else).
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