FFB: NO LIMITS edited by Joseph Ferman (Ballantine Books 1964); THE BEST OF TRIQUARTERLY edited by Jonathan Brent (Washington Square Press/Pocket Books 1982)

August 1964...aside from your servant, two other and more immediately impressive creations were introduced to a largely indifferent world. From Ballantine Books, an original publication collecting short stories, a novelet or three and a novella from the magazine Venture Science Fiction, which had published nine issues in 1957-58, before being formally merged with its elder sibling, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (which Mills became the editor of, as founding editor Anthony Boucher moved on; Mills had been assisting at F&SF, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and the other Mercury crime-fiction magazines; after publishing Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon" and much else at F&SF as editor, he moved on to become one of the more important literary agents of his time). From Northwestern University, issue #1 of a newly reformulated little magazine, TriQuarterly, which in its initial series, beginning in 1958, had essentially been a campus-bound magazine devoted to student and faculty contributions; Charles Newman, who had come to Northwestern as a professor in '63, wanted to make a more sophisticated and widely-appealing project of the magazine. 

Both magazines were consciously and rather successfully attempting to advance the art of literature. Robert P. Mills, as editor of Venture (Joseph Ferman was its publisher, as head of Mercury Press), was hoping to feature sophisticated adventure fiction (hence in part the title), but also, as the contents took shape, sexual themes and somewhat greater attention to bringing emotional resonance to satirical sf became common factors of Venture's fiction...not least in the several contributions from Theodore Sturgeon, but also in the work of Avram Davidson, Algis Budrys, Leigh Brackett, Judith Merril, Poul Anderson, Walter Miller and C. M. Kornbluth, among others. If the magazine might not have had No Limits, there were certainly fewer in several ways than other magazines had imposed. Newman for his part wanted to make TQ a home for post-modernist fiction and poetry, and attendant nonfiction. It would, through the next decade and a half and a bit more, take on innovations in format and offer special theme issues devoted to specific writers (such as Sylvia Plath, Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges) and international literature and genres of fictional form and beyond (such as the visual issue 32, "Anti-Object Art" [1975], which was Newman's last as editor, and with guest editors Lawrene Levy and John Perreault; the cardboard covers featured a pocket containing five cards of photographs of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty"); another issue was devoted to a narrative told in photographs.  

Venture had a UK edition (and an otherwise identical, two-months delayed Australian edition) from 1963-65, which published more issues than the two US editions combined, reprinted a different mix of stories from the US edition, and immediately added stories from F&SF, under the editorship of Ronald Wickers. The Fermans (Joseph's son Edward started editing F&SF and other Mercury Press magazines in the mid-'60s, including probably ghost-editing No Limits) relaunched Venture for another short run in 1969. TriQuarterly continued under the editorship of Elliott Anderson, eventually co-editing with Robert Onopa and Jonathan Brent, for the balance of the '70s. Then, in the wake of too many issues of interesting work (apparently the science fiction issue was the Last Straw, for a university which also cancelled its English department sf course reportedly for being too popular, following a western issue and one devoted to Love/Hate that featured some elegant but straightforward-seeming feminist adventure fiction), first Onopa, then Anderson, then Brent (who was formally editor of one issue only) were fired from the magazine and replaced by one Reginald Gibbons, who was very careful to minimize the achievements of the previous editors at every opportunity over his decade as editor, which resulted immediately in the magazine becoming much less innovative and much less widely-admired--more conventional and less important, and eventually in TQ becoming a grad-student-staffed webzine. The 20th anniversary issue/anthology, edited by Gibbons and Susan Hahn, doesn't at any point acknowledge this book. 

There are at least mildly classic stories in these anthologies, and at least several others in the case of each author that might've been opted for instead...Kornbluth's "The Education of Tigress Macardle" is the more humorous side of the same coin that inspired his unfinished story, completed by Frederik Pohl as "The Meeting" ("Two Dooms" might've been included

instead);  the stories by Davidson and Miller are among their best-remembered work, but others of theirs for the magazine are impressive, and the Sturgeon here could easily have been "Affair with a Green Monkey"...and so on. The at least near-classics in the TQ book include the Oates story, the Brautigan duo, and the Sayles; Elkin (in relation toward Nabokov) and Singer are elegantly represented; Baumbach's metafiction is clever; though Borges, Carol Emshwiller and many others had major stories in the magazine as well. MacMillan amounts to a key TriQuarterly "discovery", with the seeds of his first two novels as well as stories in his only collection gathered from the magazine; in the other, Asimov was happy enough with his story collected in the best-of to name a retrospective collection for it, and it probably should be noted that not only did Sturgeon's Educated Estimate (aka Law: 90% of everything is mediocre or worse) first get widespread audience in his (first recurring magazine) books

the 1969-70 US revival

column, but Asimov began a regular science column first in Venture, which moved over to F&SF upon the merger of the two, and that column helped spur Asimov's pop-science career, in many ways the primary work of his life till his last years, when fiction finally was paying even better. Sturgeon, for his part, would later have continuing book-review columns in Galaxy, National Review (!), and Hustler (!--though during Paul Krassner's editorship). Sturgeon was the kind of writer who could and did sell a short sf story to Sports Illustrated.

Sadly, these anthologies were by no means pushed hard by their publishers... Ballantine was at one of its lower ebbs in '64, and while 50c for a slim, nine-story paperback wasn't extremely expensive, it wasn't cheap; $4.95 for a mass-market paperback, even with 20 stories ranging from vignettes to novellas, in 1982 was ridiculous (and earlier Washington Square Press releases at least had been published on heavier, perhaps acid-free paper and otherwise looked like their production value might begin to justify their inflated price, as with the similar Doubleday Anchor line of rack-sized paperbacks). A handsome-enough generic over on the Venture book (and no mention of the source magazine anywhere), and an even more generic cover (which has not been previously online) on the TQ. And while women contributors are underrepresented in both volumes (and didn't achieve parity in the magazines, either), at least neither volume is the completely stag affair too many anthologies of this sort had been in their years.

No Limits ed. Joseph W. Ferman (Ballantine, Aug ’64, pb, 192 pp)
• The Education of Tigress Macardle · C. M. Kornbluth · ss Venture Jul 1957
• All the Colors of the Rainbow · Leigh Brackett · nv Venture Nov 1957
• Now Let Us Sleep · Avram Davidson · ss Venture Sep 1957
• Vengeance for Nikolai · Walter M. Miller, Jr. · nv Venture Mar 1957
• The Seat of Judgment · Lester del Rey · ss Venture Jul 1957
• Buy Jupiter! · Isaac Asimov · ss Venture May 1958
• And Then She Found Him... · Algis Budrys · ss Venture Jul 1957
• Before the Talent Dies · Henry Slesar · nv Venture Sep 1957
• The Comedian’s Children · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Venture May 1958
• (courtesy the Contento/Stephensen-Payne indices)

(courtesy WorldCat)
The Best of TriQuarterly
Editor: Jonathan Brent
Publisher: New York : Washington Square Press publication of Pocket Books, 1982, pb, 310 pp
Introduction / Jonathan Brent
Two stories: Revenge of the lawn; A short history of religion in California / Richard Brautigan -- #5, Winter 1966
How I contemplated the world from the Detroit House of Correction and began my life over again / Joyce Carol Oates -- #15, Spring 1969
Notes on the present configuration of the Red-Blue conflict / Robert Chatain -- #16, Fall 1969
Three meetings with Vladimir Nabokov / Stanley Elkin -- #17, Winter 1970
Altele / Isaac Bashevis Singer -- #18, Spring 1970 (translated by Mirra Ginsberg)
From The Tunnel : why windows are important to me / William H. Gass -- #20, Winter 1971
The traditional story returns / Jonathan Baumbach -- #26, Winter 1973
The warden / John Gardner -- #29, Winter 1974
From Lookout Cartridge / Joseph McElroy -- #29, Winter 1974
Sacrifice / Ian MacMillan -- #40, Fall 1977
Autoclysms / Michael Anania -- #40, Fall 1977
The missing person / Maxine Kumin -- #42, Spring 1978
Caye / T. Coraghessan Boyle -- #42, Spring 1978
Blue day / Arnost Lustig -- #45, Spring 1979
The first clean fact / Larry Heinemann -- #45, Spring 1979
Two shoes for one foot / John Hawkes -- #46, Fall 1979
In the town of Ballymuck / Victor Power -- #47, Winter 1980
Walking out / David Quammen -- #48, Spring, 1980
Dillinger in Hollywood / John Sayles -- #48, Spring, 1980
Amarillo / Jonathan Penner -- #50, Winter 1981
Notes on Authors / Anon. (presumably Brent).

Index to Venture Science Fiction's US and UK iterations
Index to Triquarterly through 1997 and issue #100

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

Issue 20, Winter 1971

Speculators are wishing hard on this one now because of the Cormac McCarthy...

Issued as a two-volume set...Winter 1976...

 

Complementary covers (and issues!), above and below (the first issue of Venture)

Sturgeon's seemingly awkward title is masterfully employed in the story...

Amazon purchase links:

FFM: TRIQUARTERLY #49: SCIENCE FICTION edited by Jonathan Brent, David G. Hartwell, Elliott Anderson and Robert Onopa (Northwestern University Press 1980)

TriQuarterly #49 was meant to be another of the series of adventurous theme issues the Northwestern University-based little magazine had been publishing through the latter '70s; Elliott Anderson and Robert Onopa had put together issues devoted to western fiction and "Love and Hate" and their immediate predecessor (with whom they'd served as assistant editors) had helmed an issue subtitled "Prose for Borges"...so putting together an issue devoted to sf didn't seem too outlandish a project, particularly since Onopa had already published an sf novel, The Pleasure Tube, which had been purchased for publication by Berkley Publishing by their then editor, David Hartwell, in 1978, though Hartwell had left Berkley to begin the Timescape imprint at Pocket Books by the time the novel had been published in 1979, and the new administration took as little care getting it into presentable shape as a publishing package as possible, with the almost comically inane blurb, "Beyond the Star Range: Infinite Sex and Ultimate Horror" plastered prominently across the shoddily-concocted cover of a seriously-intended and rather innovative novel that, among other things, had no part of itself taking place Beyond the Star Range, wherever that might reside. Hartwell, for his part, had been editing and publishing, with others originally as Quest, The Little Magazine for fifteen

years, beginning a half-decade before he began contributing to the academic literature about sf in the early '70s, simultaneously embarking on his impressive editorial career in sf and fantasy fiction, which was abruptly terminated by his accidental death on 20 January of this year.  This would be Hartwell's only credit with the magazine, and Onopa would be separated from it after this issue, with Anderson and Brent both out the door as well by 1981 so that insurgent editor Reginald Gibbons could instead run the magazine into a Safe mediocrity with solemn promises never to do something so outlandish as a theme issue devoted to sf again.  But seeking this out at the University of Hawai'i library, while I was in high school down the street in Honolulu, was my first conscious interaction with the work of Onopa or Hartwell, though I'd seen some of the other books Hartwell had put together for Berkley, of course, including their edition of Fritz Leiber's Night's Black Agents. (Or nearly so, as I'd seen Hartwell's brief article in First World Fantasy Awards some years before; I was aware of his editorial work with Gregg Press and the quickly-folded magazine Cosmos, as well.)

So, a quick look at the contents of the issue that would so nettle some the subscribers to and defenders of the faith around TQ at Northwestern (courtesy ISFDB):

4 •  Paradise Charted • interior artwork by Algis Budrys

5 • Paradise Charted • essay by Algis Budrys

76 •  On Science Fiction • interior artwork by Richard Powers [as by Richard M. Powers]

77 • On Science Fiction • poem by Thomas M. Disch [as by Tom Disch--as he usually signed his poetry]

80 •  Small Mutations (excerpt) • interior artwork by Vincent Di Fate [as by Vincent DiFate]

81 • Small Mutations (excerpt from Blakely's Ark) • shortfiction by Ian MacMillan

116 •  In Looking-Glass Castle • interior artwork by Carl Lundgren

117 • In Looking-Glass Castle • shortstory by Gene Wolfe

130 •  Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (excerpt) • interior artwork by Jack Gaughan

131 • Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (excerpt) • shortfiction by Samuel R. Delany

162 •  When They Find You • interior artwork by Michael Whelan

163 • When They Find You • (1977) • novelette by Craig Strete

178 •  Ginungagap • interior artwork by Don Maitz

179 • Ginungagap • novelette by Michael Swanwick

212 •  The Pressure of Time • interior artwork by Frank Kelly Freas [as by Frank Kelly Frease--a typo]

213 • The Pressure of Time • (1970) • novelette by Thomas M. Disch

258 •  The White Donkey • interior artwork by Rowena Morrill

259 • The White Donkey • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin

262 • Contributors: • essay by uncredited

The long essay by Budrys is brilliant (and, as was his wont, not as kind to the general run of academic writing about sf as he could have been) and the fiction contributions, including the reprints by "Craig Strete" and Thomas Disch, as well as the new fiction by Michael Swanwick (his first story, and widely hailed) and such veterans of literate sf as Wolfe, Le Guin and Delany...and the novel excerpt by MacMillan, a fellow professor of Onopa's at the University of Hawai'i, who had already had a story from TQ in a The Pushcart Prizes volume, and would soon have another in the 1982 volume of The Best American Short Stories but hadn't yet been praised by Kurt Vonnegut as "the Stephen Crane of World War II"--that would happen after he published Proud Monster, his second novel, fixed up from a series of vignettes he wrote at Onopa's suggestion ("In the middle '70s, Bob Onopa and Elliott Anderson ran TriQuarterly, which was the best literary magazine of that decade" as Macmillan noted in a 1990 interview, in which he mentioned studying at the Iowa Writer's Workshop with R. V. Cassill and Vonnegut)...all an utterly creditable package. Onopa, having heard that I had already had a bad run-in with MacMillan, thought it best to shoo me toward the 600-level graduate writing seminar rather than take MacMillan's 400-level course after Onopa's 300-level, which I'd taken in my second semester as a freshman...the grad seminar had been set to be taught by humorist Jack Douglas, who'd tapped out, and Hawai'i-resident writer A. A. Attanasio had been recruited by Onopa to take it on (among much else, Attanasio had published poetry in the 1970s in The Little Magazine). Life can be full of improvisation, and last-minute, fateful decisions...and had been delivering not a few aggressively improvised decisions at the turn of the '80s to Robert Onopa's literary career...and I certainly benefited from some of his rather more benevolent professorial improvisations.

For more of today's books rather than magazines, and more formal reviews than elegies, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

FFB: Redux (further memories of Frederik Pohl, Harry Harrison and other good people): HELL'S CARTOGRAPHERS edited by Aldiss & Harrison; WORLDS OF IF: A Retrospective Anthology, Pohl, Greenberg & Olander, ed. (Bluejay '86); TQ 20 (TriQuarterly 20y), Gibbons & Hahn, ed. (Pushcart '85); Terry Carr, ed: SCIENCE FICTION FOR PEOPLE WHO HATE SCIENCE FICTION (Doubleday 1966); Harry Harrison, ed: THE LIGHT FANTASTIC (Scribner's 1971)

Next week I hope to Rejoin the Blogging, if everyone hasn't forgotten about the memes I've been involved with...but Bill Crider's thoughtful review of HC did spur me to do at least a bit more to remind us all what we've lost with the passing of Frederik Pohl in recent months, and such other good people as Harry Harrison and Terry Carr over the years recent and too long ago...thanks for your indulgence, and all the kind thoughts recently commented on this blog and elsewhere...

Friday, April 22, 2011

FFB: HELL'S CARTOGRAPHERS edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss (Harper & Row/Wiedenfield & Nicholson 1975)

Among their collaborative projects in the 1970s, along with most notably the Best SF annual published by Berkley, Briton Brian Aldiss and US world-traveler Harry Harrison co-edited and -published the critical and literary-historical journal SF Horizons, an engaging and contentious magazine that was reprinted in boards by the late '70s so that I could find it at one or another Hawaiian library, and would make it's own even more obscure Friday Book...but among the offshoots of that effort was this anthology of autobiographical and procedural essays by six important writers in the sf field, including the editors themselves. And these essays, in their turn, were at least the seeds of Damon Knight's group memoir The Futurians and Frederik Pohl's personal The Way the Future Was, if not also of the longer or collected memoirs since published by Aldiss and Robert Silverberg.

Writers are rarely averse to producing autobiography at some length or in some format, but this was, I think, the first selection of autobiographical essays by sf writers to be published, at very least by large commercial publishing houses. I'd seen Alfred Bester's first, "My Affair with Science Fiction," for it appeared first in Harrison's anthology, otherwise given to first-publication of fiction,Nova 4 (1974), sadly the last of that fine series, and the paperback edition of which, from Manor Books of all people (and they did an unusually elegant job with it), was the first book I ever gave my father as a birthday gift, to his surprise. Bester, in his usual breezy style, takes us on a quick trip through his early writing experiences (his first published short story is repurposed at submission to win a contest at Thrilling Wonder Stories that Robert Heinlein was considering entering with his first published short story, "Lifeline," till Heinlein noted that selling the same story toAstounding Science Fiction, if he could, would make slightly more money than the contest prize; as Bester elsewhere recalls saying to Heinlein much later, "I won that contest and you made ten dollars more than I did."), how he came along with TWS editor Mort Weisinger when he moved over to DC Comics and worked with other writers on all but Batman "and Rabinowitz" scenarios for a few years, before breaking into radio-drama and nonfiction writing, particularly for Holiday magazine, all the while continuing to publish increasingly sophisticated and adventurous sf and fantasy (and how John Campbell's embrace of Dianetics helped chase Bester away from his magazine). Harrison followed a similar path, though he started professionally in comics, and sold his first short story to Damon Knight at Worlds Beyond in 1951; oddly enough, Knight also started professionally as much a visual artist and illustrator as he did writer, with his first professional publication being a cartoon in Amazing Stories in 1940 (among his more notable illustration jobs was for Weird Tales's reprint of Lovecraft's "Herbert West, Reanimator" in the March, 1942 issue, the same one that features Robert Bloch's "Hell on Earth," noted here recently; the HPL story had first appeared in the little magazine Home Brew).

I had read Knight's and Pohl's books previously, so their essays were interesting mostly for the small counterpoints to the longer texts, but hadn't read too much autobiography at that point from the youngest contributor to the book, Robert Silverberg, nor from the only non-Yank contributor, Brian Aldiss, and so Silverberg's journeyman passage through the men's sweat magazines and similar markets rather than comics nor primarily the pulps (though Silverberg would contribute to many of the last of the pulps as that format of magazine faded with the passing of the 1950s, and their children the digest-sized fiction magazines flourished) is a counterpoint, as was Aldiss's early experience of American fiction magazines (in the post-war era, often dumped on the British equivalents of five and dime stores after serving as ballast in cargo ships, and comparable to the influence of American records on the young musicians in Britain of the '50s and '60s) and his career as someone just a bit to the side of the Angry Young Men but like them willing to explore every sort of literature if it looked at all interesting or fruitful, while particularly devoting himself to developing his work in sf...the title of this book echoes that of once Angry Young Man Kingsley Amis's collection of lectures recast as essays, New Maps of Hell, one of the important works of criticism about sf to arise at the turn of the 1960s, along with such collections of critical pieces as Knight's In Search of Wonder and James Blish's The Issue at Hand (and Blish would probably be in this book, but was in the process of dying from cancer and the effects of cancer surgery while it was being prepared; Aldiss notes that Michael Moorcock begged off, as the only requested contributor to do so out of what Aldiss considers excessive modesty...though perhaps insufficiently-cooled anger by the mid-'70s over what had happened to Moorcock's baby New Worlds magazine might also have played a part).

So, a key book in the history as well as about the history of the science fiction field, and good fun as well as touching and startling at times, and consistently illuminating.

For more of today's "forgotten" books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Friday, September 16, 2011

FFB: WORLDS OF IF: A Retrospective Anthology, Pohl, Greenberg & Olander, ed. (Bluejay '86); TQ 20 (TriQuarterly 20y), Gibbons & Hahn, ed. (Pushcart '85)

Nearly contemporary issues:

(sadly, with this many illustrations, a Blogger page looks much different even when viewed on such browsers as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and MS Explorer...accounting for some cropped, but expandable, images on Firefox, at least...)

Executive summary: Two impressive slices through the first two decades of two important, but not always sufficiently respected, fiction magazines. If, aka Worlds of If, ran from 1952-1974, with some weak attempts at revival afterward (at the end of 1974, it was merged into its longterm stablemate Galaxy, which itself staggered into folding and sporadic revival by 1980); even at its weakest points editorially under original publisher James Quinn, If was an elegantly-produced magazine, and while the later publishers at the "Digest Productions"/Guinn/Galaxy group and UPD Publications varied in their investment, it was often striking later as well. TriQuarterly began as a relatively modest physical production, though less so in content in 1964, and had made itself into one of the most visually as well as literarily impressive of little magazines throughout the 1970s thanks to founding editor Charles Newman and successors Elliot Anderson and Robert Onopa, the latter being rewarded by being unceremoniously dumped for daring to treat "popular fiction" as essentially no different from "literary fiction"; TQ never quite recovered its spirit, though it did continue, and is now a webzine.



What's good about these anthologies:Take a quick look at their contents, below. As the material about each magazine in their respective volumes makes clear, the not terribly well-measured consensus view about these two magazines was that they were very well in their way, but not the Serious Contenders that were, say, the hidebound 1969 Analog or The Hudson Review , nor even the resolutely lively contemporary issues of The Paris Review or Galaxy, when If and TQ had also been hitting their very comparable high-quality marks for some years, would continue in If's case till merger in 1975 and in TriQuarterly's case was allowed to continue doing so for another half-decade. Again, look below at the evidence. In addition to the good to great fiction in the If volume, you get a plethora of reminiscences by the writers and editors, some taken not long before these folks died or otherwise became incapable of comment (the book was also delayed for several years). The material about the magazine is less generous in the TQ, perhaps in part because the book's editors were also TQ's editors after the shameful putsch in 1980, but to help make up for that, the selection of poetry and artwork as well as fiction is even larger.

What's not so great about these anthologies: Don't let your book be the last Bluejay book nor the second Pushcart anthology of material the Pushcart folks didn't shape for themselves...because signs of haste and slipshoddery will be evident all over the productions, beginning with the covers. Both manage to have half-good covers, with some boldish graphics not employed quite properly...clearly the white space in the If was meant to hold some writers' names, and the TQ would work better if the cover gave a legible indication what "TQ" meant...the contributors' names in both cases are almost illegible on the back cover, if the casual browser gets past the front cover. The "If" in the one should've been larger, to resemble the magazine's frequent logo; the spine of the TriQuarterly jacketdoesn't have the title "TQ 20" on it anywhere. It takes some effort to get much more clumsy than this.

Unfortunately, the bad packaging gives way in the If to some very blatant typos (Charles Beaumont's The Hunger and Other Stories becomes the "Hunter"; the Zelazny here is incorrectly cited as the only story he published in If; there's a more unforgivable one that I'll have to find again--it's Martin Greenberg's contention that Larry Niven was rare in being conversant in both "hard" science fiction and adventure fantasy...as if Poul Anderson and at least arguably Jack Vance and the predominance of the contributors to the magazineUnknown didn't rather roundly contradict that). Perhaps even more of a mixed bag is the uncorrected nature of a number of the memoirs; several contributors, Algis Budrys for one and P.J. Farmer to a gross extent, manage to get historical facts out of order (Budrys misremembers Fairman as the editor after Quinn), but mostly the disagreements between the nonfiction contributors are reasonable disagreements of judgment, and useful assessments. (One which definitely caught my eye detailed editor Larry Shaw's run-ins with Evan Hunter, whom he found unpleasant, not least when Shaw sought to have him correct an error in his famous, overrated story "Malice in Wonderland," and Hunter replied, "Well, it's only science fiction, after all." A kind of irresponsibility I tend to find in all the Hunter [McBain, et al.] fiction I've read.)

The TQ basically reshoots the pages of the magazine for the book; the typefaces are unmistakable, and so any typos in the original magazine run are presumably reproduced here (I haven't spotted any blatant ones yet); and, again, as little as possible is said about the purge of Anderson and Onopa from the magazine; in fact, Onopa is neither reprinted (he contributed interesting fiction, as well) nor mentioned. Very much down the memory hole.
Above, a 1974 issue; below, one of the last Anderson/Onopa issues, from 1980.


These books are valuable documents, if not quite what they could've been; the magazines treated, as their staffs were, with insufficient respect once again. And, in part as consequence, they are long out of print. But they will reward you if you seek them out, and they won't cost you too much...unless you don't look for the bargains. The better work represented here is even worth a premium price.

Below: some If covers through the years (including one from when Keith Laumer was still a bit more of an audience favorite than Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.):


















































Fact (I believe) about If: it employed more book-publisher editors as its editor or associate/assistant editor than any other sf magazine has, before or since: founding editor Paul Fairman might make the weakest link (in several ways!) by being the editor in charge of the Ziff-Davis fiction magazines later when they published the one volume/issue of Amazing Stories Science Fiction Novels, Henry Slesar's novelization of 20 Million Miles to Earth (I wouldn't be surprised if Fairman eventually edited books for others, as well). James Quinn (Handi-Books--or did he not wield an editorial hand there as well as publishing?), Larry Shaw (Lancer Books), Damon Knight (Berkley), H. L. Gold (Galaxy Novels), Frederik Pohl (Ace, Bantam), Judy-Lynn Benjamin/Del Rey and Lester Del Rey (Ballantine/Del Rey), Ejler Jakobsson (Award and other UPD lines), and James Baen (Ace, Baen Books).

courtesy the Locus Index:
Worlds of If: A Retrospective Anthology ed. Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg & Joseph D. Olander (Bluejay 0-312-94471-3, Dec ’86, $19.95, 438pp, hc) Anthology of 24 stories. This is the last Bluejay book.

1 · Introduction · Frederik Pohl · in
6 · As If Was in the Beginning · Larry T. Shaw · ar, 1986
19 · Memoir · Philip K. Dick · ms
20 · The Golden Man · Philip K. Dick · nv If Apr ’54
50 · Memoir · Robert Sheckley · ms
51 · The Battle · Robert Sheckley · ss If Sep ’54
57 · Last Rites · Charles Beaumont · ss If Oct ’55
71 · Game Preserve · Rog Phillips · ss If Oct ’57
85 · The Burning of the Brain · Cordwainer Smith · ss If Oct ’58
95 · Memoir · Algis Budrys · ms
103 · The Man Who Tasted Ashes · Algis Budrys · ss If Feb ’59
117 · Memoir · Poul Anderson · ms
119 · Kings Who Die · Poul Anderson · nv If Mar ’62
147 · Memoir · Fred Saberhagen · ms
148 · Fortress Ship [Berserker] · Fred Saberhagen · ss If Jan ’63
158 · Father of the Stars · Frederik Pohl · ss If Nov ’64
177 · Trick or Treaty [Jame Retief] · Keith Laumer · nv If Aug ’65
202 · Memoir · R. A. Lafferty · ms
203 · Nine Hundred Grandmothers · R. A. Lafferty · ss If Feb ’66
214 · Memoir · Larry Niven · ms
216 · Neutron Star [Beowulf Shaeffer] · Larry Niven · nv If Oct ’66
234 · Memoir · Roger Zelazny · ms
235 · This Mortal Mountain · Roger Zelazny · nv If Mar ’67
272 · Memoir · Harlan Ellison · ar *
289 · I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream · Harlan Ellison · ss If Mar ’67
305 · Memoir · Samuel R. Delany · ms
306 · Driftglass · Samuel R. Delany · ss If Jun ’67
324 · Memoir · Isaac Asimov · ms
326 · The Holmes-Ginsbook Device · Isaac Asimov · ss If Dec ’68
336 · Memoir · Philip José Farmer · ms
338 · Down in the Black Gang · Philip José Farmer · nv If Mar ’69
359 · Memoir · Robert Silverberg · ms
361 · The Reality Trip · Robert Silverberg · ss If May ’70
378 · Memoir · James Tiptree, Jr. · ms
379 · The Night-Blooming Saurian · James Tiptree, Jr. · ss If May ’70
385 · Memoir · Theodore Sturgeon · ms
388 · Occam’s Scalpel · Theodore Sturgeon · nv If Aug ’71
409 · Memoir · Clifford D. Simak · ms
410 · Construction Shack · Clifford D. Simak · ss Worlds of If Jan/Feb ’73
424 · Memoir · Craig Kee Strete · ms
427 · Time Deer · Craig Kee Strete · ss Red Planet Earth #4 ’74
433 · Afterword: Flash Point, Middle · Barry N. Malzberg · aw

courtesy WorldCat:
TQ 20 : twenty years of the best contemporary writing and graphics from TriQuarterly magazine
Editors: Reginald Gibbons; Susan Hahn
Publisher: Wainscott, NY : Pushcart Press, ©1985.
Description: 667 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

Contents:
Preface/1964-1984 --
Forward / Charles Newman --
Fragments from the unpublished death fantasy sequence of Judgment day / James T. Farrell --
To friends in East and West "A New Year's greeting" / Boris Pasternak --
Three essays / Roland Barthes --
Two stories / Richard Brautigan --
In a hole / George P. Elliott --
Two poems / Anne Sexton --
Why is American poetry culturally deprived? / Kenneth Rexroth --
Storm still / Brock Brower --
TV / Howard Nemerov --
Two essays / E.M. Cioran --
The fly / Miroslav Holub --
Two poems / Vasko Popa --
A damned man / Aleksander Wat --
From the wave / Thom Gunn --
Meeting hall of the Sociedad Anarquista, 1952 / Irving Feldman --
Few things to say / John Frederick Nims --
The town / C.P. Cavafy --
Tuesday siesta / Gabriel García Márquez --
The sea / Jorge Luis Borges --
The doll queen / Carlos Fuentes --
From unusual occupations / Julio Cortázar --
Montesano unvisited / Richard Hugo --
Possibility along a line of difference / A.R. Ammons --
Life / Jean Follain --
Footprints on the glacier / W.S. Merwin --
The Eagle Exterminating Company / James Tate --
The double dream of spring / John Ashbery --
Toward a new program for the university / Christopher Lasch --
Three meetings / Stanley Elkin --
Three / W.S. Merwin --
Pain / Maxine Kumin --
That's what you say, Cesar? / Andrew Glaze --
Enigma for an angel / Joseph Brodsky --
Two poems / Osip Mandelstam --
To Edward dahlberg / Jack Kerouac --
Confessions / Edward Dahlberg --
From The tunnel: why windows are important to me / William H. Gass --
The wheel / Aimé Césaire --
A tale from Lailonia / Leszek Kolakowski --
Men fought / Jorge Luis Borges --
Meredith Dawe / Joyce Carol Oates --
From Ninety-two in the shade / Thomas McGuane --
Torpid smoke / Vladimir Nabokov --
My encounters with Chekhov / Konstantin Korovin --
Commitment without empathy : a writer's notes on politics, theatre and the novel / David Caute --
Human dust / Agnes Denes --
Heart attack / Max Apple --
The reurn of Icarus / David Wagoner --
With Uncle Sam at Burning Tree / Robert Coover --
Gala / Paul West --
The sewing harems / Cynthia Ozick --
Two shoes for one foot / John Hawkes --
Coyote hold a full house in his hand / Leslie Marmon Silko --
Dillinger in Hollywood / John Sayles --
Walking out / David Quammen --
Where is everyone? / Raymond Carver --
Hunters in the snow / Tobias Wolff --
From A flag for sunrise / Robert Stone --
Embryology / Magdalena Abakanowicz --
Going to the dogs / Richard Ford --
Editorial / Reginald Gibbons --
Dear Lydia E. Pinkham / Pamels White Hadas --
Somg of napalm / Bruce Weigl --
Three prose pieces / Stephen Berg --
Had I a hundred mouths / William Goyen --
From Steht noch dahin / Marie Louise Kaschnitz --
Prayer for the dying / Willis Johnson --
Don't they speak jazz? / Michael S. Harper --
Aubade / Roalnd Flint --
The third count / Andrew Fetler --
In the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried / Amy Hempel --
June harvest / W.S. Di Piero --
Ambush / John Morgan --
Instructions to be left behind / Marvin Bell --
Gill Boy / Dennis Schmitz --
From A minor apocalypse / Tadeusz Konwicki --
The belly of Barbara N. / Wiktor Woroszylski --
Two poems / Stanislaw Baranczak --
Isaac Babel / R.D. Skillings --
The story tellers / Fred Chappell --
Night traffic near Winchester / Dave Smith --
Sweet sixteen lines / Al Young --
Father and son / Morton Marcus --
His happy hour / Alan Shapiro --
The last class / Ellen Bryant Voigt --
Two poems / C.K. Williams --
Recovering / William Goyen --
On welfare / William Wilborn --
Two poems / William Heyen --
The hooded legion / Gerald McCarthy --
Snowy egret / Bruce Weigl --
Three epigrams / Elder Olson --
Interview with Saul Bellow / Rockwell Gray, Harry White and Gerald Nemanic --
Fulfilling the promise / Lisel Mueller --
The Aragon ballroom / John Dickson --
The city / Lorraine Hansberry --
The address / Marga Minco --
Departures / Linda Pastan --
He, she, all of them, ay / John Peck

Friday, February 3, 2012

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, even beyond the usual "this is important, or at very least interesting" thrust of nearly any anthology assembled with care, particularly attractive...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, 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 andSlaughterhouse-Five and Stranger in a Strange Land and to a lesser extent at that timeDune 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 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 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.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

1968: Judith Merril and Kate Wilhelm put together an ad against the Vietnam War...

...and it appears in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and in Galaxy, Worlds of If and International Science Fiction magazines (the latter three of which are published by the same publisher, Robert Guinn of the Galaxy Publishing Co., and edited by Frederik Pohl, the first edited by Edward Ferman and published by his father Joseph Ferman), along with a corresponding ad from "hawks" who are moved by Wilhelm and Merril's canvassing.

Frank Hollander was kind enough to transcribe the lists from the ads for the FictionMags list:


We the undersigned believe the United States must remain in Vietnam to
fulfill its responsibilities to the people of that country.

Karen K. Anderson
Poul Anderson
Harry Bates
Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
J. F. Bone
Leigh Brackett
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Mario Brand
R. Bretnor
Fredric Brown
Doris Pitkin Buck
William R. Burkett, Jr.
Elinor Busby
F. M. Busby
John W. Campbell
Louis Charbonneau
Hal Clement
Compton Crook
Hank Davis
L. Sprague de Camp
Charles V. de Vet
William B. Ellern
Richard H. Eney
T. R. Fehrenbach
R. C. FitzPatrick
Daniel F. Galouye
Raymond Z. Gallun
Robert M. Green, Jr.
Frances T. Hall
Edmond Hamilton
Robert A. Heinlein
Joe L. Hensley
Paul G. Herkart
Dean C. Ing
Jay Kay Klein
David A. Kyle
R. A. Lafferty
Robert J. Leman
C. C. MacApp
Robert Mason [not my father, but the Vietnam vet who would eventually write the novelsWeapon and Solo, and the memoir Chickenhawk]
D. M. Melton
Norman Metcalf
P. Schuyler Miller
Sam Moskowitz
John Myers Myers
Larry Niven
Alan Nourse
Stuart Palmer
Gerald W. Page
Rachel Cosgrove Payes
Lawrence A. Perkins
Jerry E. Pournelle
Joe Poyer
E Hoffmann Price
George W. Price
Alva Rogers
Fred Saberhagen
George O. Smith
W. E. Sprague
G. Harry Stine (Lee Correy)
Dwight V. Swain
Thomas Burnett Swann
Albert Teichner
Theodore L. Thomas
Rena M. Vale
Jack Vance
Harl Vincent
Don Walsh, Jr.
Robert Moore Williams
Jack Williamson
Rosco E. Wright
Karl Würf

We oppose the participation of the United States in the war in Vietnam.

Forrest J Ackerman
Isaac Asimov
Peter S. Beagle
Jerome Bixby
James Blish
Anthony Boucher
Lyle G. Boyd
Ray Bradbury
Jonathan Brand
Stuart J. Byrne
Terry Carr
Carroll J. Clem
Ed M. Clinton
Theodore R. Cogswell
Arthur Jean Cox
Allan Danzig
Jon DeCles
Miriam Allen deFord
Samuel R. Delany
Lester del Rey
Philip K. Dick
Thomas M. Disch
Sonya Dorman
Larry Eisenberg
Harlan Ellison
Carol Emshwiller
Philip José Farmer
David E. Fisher
Ron Goulart
Joseph Green
Jim Harmon
Harry Harrison
H. H. Hollis
J[oan]. Hunter Holly
James D. Houston
Edward Jesby
Leo P. Kelley
Daniel Keyes
Virginia Kidd
Damon Knight
Allen Lang
March Laumer [Keith Laumer was still in active service, I believe, and probably constrained from adding a signature to either]
Ursula K. Le Guin
Fritz Leiber
Irwin Lewis
A. M. Lightner
Robert A. W. Lowndes
Katherine MacLean
Barry Malzberg
Robert E. Margroff
Anne Marple
Ardrey Marshall
Bruce McAllister
Judith Merril
Robert P. Mills
Howard L. Morris
Kris Neville
Alexei Panshin
Emil Petaja
J. R. Pierce
Arthur Porges
Mack Reynolds
Gene Roddenberry
Joanna Russ
James Sallis
William Sambrot
Hans Stefan Santesson
J. W. Schutz
Robin Scott [Wilson, not yet retired from the CIA, already working on the first Clarion Workshops]
Larry T. Shaw
John Shepley
T. L Sherred
Robert Silverberg
Henry Slesar
Jerry Sohl
Norman Spinrad
Margaret St. Clair
Jacob Transue
Thurlow Weed
Kate Wilhelm
Richard Wilson
Donald A. Wollheim

Contributions to help meet the expense of future ads are welcomed, and
should be sent to:

Judith Merril or Kate Wilhelm Knight
P. O. Box 79
Milford, Pennsylvania 18337