Showing posts with label Thrilling Wonder Stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thrilling Wonder Stories. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Short Story Wednesday, Guest Post: Paul Di Filippo: THRILLING WONDER STORIES, Winter 1945, edited by Sam Merwin, Jr.

[TM notes: Paul posted this review in FictionMags, and it's reprinted with his permission. It should be noted that this was Sam Merwin's first issue of the magazine, after it had been edited by perhaps its worst editor, Oscar J. Friend, for several years.]




















Over the course of many weeks, I read a few pages each night of this zine:

Contents (view Concise Listing)

[to read this issue at the Luminist Archives]
[to read the issue at the Internet Archive]

I'll try to reconstruct a few thoughts.  Overall, I have to say this was a humdrum, just good-enough issue, with a couple of stinkers.

First, the cover is an accurate depiction of an event in "Fog Over Venus"--except that in the text, no women are involved, just burly construction workers.  But of course, the gal makes for a better cover.

• 6 • The Reader Speaks (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter 1945) • essay by Sergeant Saturn [sic--an editorial fiction, soon banished by new editor Merwin. TM]

The character of Sergeant Saturn, ringleader of the letters column, is absolutely bonkers.  His speech reads nowadays like someone suffering from glossolalia and fantastical delusions:

"Careful with the Xeno jug, Frogeyes, you're spoiling my space vest--and with dry-cleaners shot to Pluto and gone.  That's better, but less noise please. Old Wart-Ears is after my scalp since last issue."

I detect in this banter full of in-jokes and specialized jargon the roots of what Stan Lee did in his heyday at Marvel Comics. "Listen up, pilgrims--nuff said!"  I wonder if Lee was raised on TWS and other pulps of its ilk. [Seems likely. I will note my own first exposure to the characters gave "Wart-Ears"'s name as "Wartears", and I wasn't at all sure, given the era, that he/its name wasn't essentially "War-Tears"... TM]

In any case, though, these letter writers sure are lively and opinionated. They obviously go through a lot of work to compose their responses, all for egoboo and the glory of SF and TWS.  Most famous name [among the letter-writers] this time around is Chad Oliver.

Maybe modern zines should have such a fictional mascot. I fondly recall Pedro the Mule from my Boy's Life days. And of course the EC Comics horror figures, The Old Witch, etc.

F&SF could have "Old Sally Sturgeon, widow to one of the first Martian settlers." Asimov's could have "R. Tarheel Oliphant, cybernetic circus performer."  I don't know, I'm sure the Assembled Here can think up better mascots.

Lightspeed could have Tacky Yon, sentient photon.

• 11 • "Fog Over Venus" • novella by Arthur K. Barnes

Dueling entrepreneurs fight to tame the hell of Venus with a reliable transport system.  Explicit reference to Barnes's "Interplanetary Hunter".  Vivid, but a little drawn out.  The great men duke it out while the grunts do all the work.  Reprinted once, in 1955.

• 37 • "Castaways in Two Dimensions" • short story by Frank Belknap Long

Dan and Joan crash land on an asteroid, then enter the "Ul Dimension" with their robot Knobby.  The inhabitant of this space threatens, but they escape.  Ends with Joan kissing Knobby:  "a kiss so wet and vehement, it almost short-circuited him..."  Never reprinted.
• 46 • "Pi in the Sky" • novelette by Fredric Brown

The constellations start changing shape, confounding humanity.  They eventually form an advertising jingle. But our hero uncovers the fact that it was all a global illusion. Reprinted often.

• 63 • "Stop, Thief!" • short story by Fox B. Holden

Ostensibly humorous short-short about an alien--Fuj--who wants to steal the Earth. Human hero stymies him, then send him to bother the Japs. Never reprinted.
• 68 • "I Get Off Here" • short story by Oscar J. Friend [as by Ford Smith]

In the 22nd century, the villain Hermes threatens nastiness via teleportation rays, but is stymied by Devore Ragon, operative of "the Solar Observance System, famous detective agency." But Hermes does escape, opening up room for a sequel, natch. Never reprinted.
• 76 • "They Sculp" • short story by Frank Belknap Long [as by Leslie Northern]

A little girl's father-inventor opens an interdimensional portal, and she and a local hobo go through it, to confront the resident aliens.  "It looked not unlike an enormous mummified bullfrog, agate-eyed and with folds of dead-black flesh..."  But the aliens are aesthetes, and the humans finally flee with an extremely valuable sculpture. The end. Never reprinted.
• 85 • "You'll See a Pink House" • short story by Wilm Carver

Our hero is the only one--thanks to brain damage--who can see a certain pink house. Everyone else thinks he's crazy. But he investigates and finds that the pink house is itself an alien entity, that there are millions around the globe, and that they suck elan vital from humans. The pink house kills the narrator, but he survives in astral form. He eventually descends into the the body of one Wilm Carver, SF author, types up the narrative we are reading--as a warning--then drifts off into the ether. Never reprinted.
• 92 • "De Profundis" • short story by "Murray Leinster"

Deep-sea sentient creatures exist, unknown to humanity--until a record-breaking bathyscaph penetrates, before encountering potential destruction. Inside are a husband and wife--as in Long's asteroid story--and the benthic creature can read their minds. He takes a liking to them and carries them to the surface, at some cost to himself. However, when he returns down below, he is regarded as crazy, imagining non-aquatic life. Much reprinted.

• 111 • The Story Behind the Story: "Fog Over Venus" • essay by Arthur K. Barnes

This listing only partial, since Brown also contributes a few paragraphs about his story.


Copyright © 2023 by Paul Di Filippo (on LJ)

For more of today's SSW reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, September 14, 2018

FFB: THE SHAPE OF THINGS edited by Damon Knight (Popular Library 1965); THE UNKNOWN 5 edited by D. R. Bensen (Pyramid 1964)

I've been ill for much of the week, so reduxing...with apologies...but these were among my less popular reviews of years past...


Friday, December 17, 2010

FFB: THE SHAPE OF THINGS, edited by Damon Knight (Popular Library, 1965)

from the Contento indices:
The Shape of Things ed. Damon Knight (Popular Library SP352, 1965, 50¢, 206pp, pb)
· Introduction · Damon Knight · in
· Don’t Look Now · Henry Kuttner · ss Startling Stories Mar ’48
· The Box · James Blish · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Apr ’49
· The New Reality · Charles L. Harness · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec ’50
· The Eternal Now · Murray Leinster · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Fll ’44
· The Sky Was Full of Ships · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Jun ’47
· The Shape of Things · Ray Bradbury · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Feb ’48
· The Only Thing We Learn · C. M. Kornbluth · ss Startling Stories Jul ’49
· The Hibited Man · L. Sprague de Camp · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Oct ’49
· Dormant · A. E. van Vogt · ss Startling Stories Nov ’48
· The Ambassadors · Anthony Boucher · ss Startling Stories Jun ’52
· A Child Is Crying · John D. MacDonald · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec ’48

This thin volume, without making much of a fuss about it, was the first (and [I incorrectly wrote back in 2010] perhaps still is the only) Best-of the Samuel Merwin and Sam Mines years of Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, the Other Good sf magazines of the late '40s and early '50s [Mines had actually published a The Best from Startling Stories that included fiction from TWS, during his run with the pulp titles]...magazines with not as distinct personalities as Astounding Science Fiction, John W. Campbell's revolutionary magazine being challenged finally, in part by writers and editors developed and inspired by Campbell but also by (as, for example, Bradbury) writers who were never too compatible with the ASF ethos, or Planet Stories, by the end of the 1940s not only the home of elegant space opera and a regular market for Leigh Brackett and others, but by those years fully as good and about as diverse as ASF...and such magazines stressing sophistication and good prose as Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and briefly also such others as Knight's own Worlds Beyond and Howard Browne's mixed bag of the early Fantastic and the upgraded Amazing.

But, for a while, Startling and Thrilling Wonder, as burdened by their pulp-era titles as was Astounding or Amazing (at least Fantastic, and its predecessor Fantastic Adventures, and Weird Tales had descriptive titles that had some specific relevance to their content), were publishing a range of often fascinating and innovative material, including the likes of Philip Jose Farmer's The Lovers, which dealt directly with tragic interspecies romance and helped establish Farmer's reputation, and the contents of this volume...ranging from James Blish's elegant technological "problem" story (how do you rescue a city encased in an impenetrable force-field?) to Ray Bradbury's whimsical notion of a woman who gives birth to an apparently healthy blue pyramid, to Charles Harness's typical blend of space-opera and mind-blowing philosophical and cosmological speculation...Harness is yet another underappreciated writer in the field, except among those who really love and know This Kind of Thing...his influence on his younger contemporaries Jack Vance and Poul Anderson, particularly, seems pretty clear to me.

I've read that on the strength of this kind of material, Startling managed to become for a while the best-selling of sf magazines, presumably outselling Astounding, just starting to drift due to Campbell's fascination with Dianetics, psi powers, and other matters from the fringes of science, and Amazing, just after Howard Browne dumped the lunatic-fringe-stroking Shaver Mystery material (akin to Ancient Astronauts and the more irresponsible UFOlogy coverage then just coming into vogue, with, as with Dianetics and other pop mysticism, some past-life regression elements) that Browne's predecessor Ray Palmer had used to put that magazine into the circulation stratosphere...and before the insurgence in late 1950/early 1951 of Galaxy.

And yet, these magazines from the Thrilling Group pulp chain, which had been morphed (essentially) into the paperback publisher Popular Library, had been so thoroughly eclipsed, a dozen years after the titles were merged and folded, so that the packaging for this book didn't even bother to mention them...as opposed to highlighting the kinds of writers and fiction they were publishing. (Popular Library had published several Wonder Story Annuals in the '50s and '60s, to test the waters, apparently, for the old title.) That legacy stands...even if this volume is now as obscure, certainly to the average reader, as the magazines it draws from.

 Also about Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and the Thrilling Group
Also about Damon Knight

Friday, January 30, 2009

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: THE UNKNOWN 5 edited by D. R. Bensen (Pyramid 1964)


This fine and somewhat influential collection is for several reasons newly, sadly relevant...it has a cover and a new (in 1964) illustration by John Schoenherr for the previously-unpublished story in the collection, the Asimov...but the other illustrations were from the pages of the original story appearances in Unknown and (its later title) Unknown Worlds, by the recently late (in 2009) Ed Cartier. (In fact, Schoenherr, best known for his Dune and other Analog and also wild-animal/landscape painting, is the [in 2009] only living contributor to the book.) (When Pyramid was bought in the latest ‘70s by HBJ, this anthology was re-issued with an absolutely hideous, by intention, Rowena Morrill cover.)

Also, it was published 45 years ago this month…in its turn 21 years after the folding of Unknown Worlds, in it's turn founded 70 years ago, with much nostalgic and not so nostalgic reminiscence in editor D.R. Bensen’s introduction, who notes that in the US-still-neutral WW2 years, the ads in Unknown and other fiction magazines lent themselves to suggesting ways to keep that $30/week job, rather than such late 1963 concerns as nuclear war (the introduction was clearly written before the Kennedy assassination). Today, of course, we’re much further along, and often most concerned with keeping that $600-900/week job.

Unknown, of course, was the fantasy-fiction companion to the hugely influential sf magazine Astounding, as mentioned in previous posts, and during its 3.5-year run it was the other major pole in fantasy-fiction publishing in the pulps and pulp-like magazines to the similarly legendary Weird Tales (in Unknown Worlds's later years, it was published in a larger size and with better paper than the pulps, with a fairly staid cover format that looked more like The Atlantic Monthly at the time than like the pulps…all factors which might’ve led to its folding in 1943, when paper supplies were getting tight and publisher Street and Smith cut back on several fronts.) Actually, 1939, when Unknown was founded, was a good year for fantasy magazines, with Ziff-Davis first offering Fantastic Adventures (though it was originally primarily a science fiction magazine), the Thrilling Group/Standard Magazines launching the shortlived Strange Stories, and the Munsey magazine group beginnin Famous Fantastic Mysteries, primarily a reprint magazine but publishing some notable original fiction. But in the early ‘40s, the post-Lovecraft/Robert Howard/Clark Ashton Smith Weird Tales and Unknown were the most prominent titles devoted exclusively to fantasy. It’s often been thus since—when Unknown folded, both WT and eventually Fantastic Adventures gained new, good contributions and contributors…even if the latter never completely shed hack adventure fiction cheek by jowl with the better work. When WT folded for the first time in 1954, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had arisen beginning in 1949 and continuing to the present, while FA was folded into the more ambitious new Fantastic in 1954…though, unfortunately, the tendency toward hack was simply transferred over to Fantastic for the next several years (the notable Beyond Fantasy Fiction sprung up for its run from 1953-1955 as a companion to Galaxy Science Fiction). However, F&SF and Fantastic remained the most visible and consistent markets for new fantasy till Fantastic’s first run ended in 1980 (it was merged with its sf stablemate Amazing Stories, and has been revived spottily since).

Which is a long way ‘round to get to the news that F&SF, now in its 60th year, is dropping frequency to bimonthly status for the first time since the early ‘50s, and that Realms of Fantasy, which has held that “other fantasy magazine" status for 15 years, has been rather abruptly folded by its publisher (April’s will be the last issue); the revived Weird Tales, probably the next most visible US fantasy magazine, seems to be continuing, even as Fantastic will supposedly be relaunched again.

In his headnote for one of the stories within, Bensen notes that the axolotl in the Cartier illustration included with the Sturgeon story is the adult form of the “mud puppy,” apparently the then fairly recent subject of a running joke in Mad magazine…which, coincidentally, is dropping its frequency this year from monthly to quarterly, as Time Warner cuts back at its DC/Mad comics division…

So, finally, to the book’s literary content, an attempt to, even more than with its predecessor The Unknown, concentrate on stories that had not been reprinted from the magazine…including a previously unpublished lead-off story by Isaac Asimov, “Author! Author!” This had been in inventory at Unknown Worlds when the magazine folded, and Asimov had never placed it elsewhere, and it's an amiable if slightly stiff tale of a writer literally haunted by his insufferable detective character, who attempts to steal his creator’s life.

Cleve Cartmill, busy over several decades as a ghost-writer for the likes of Leslie Charteris and possibly Henry Kuttner, as well as under his own name (and famously at the center of a WW2 investigation of his atomic bomb story for Astounding, “Deadline”), has a clever if perhaps excessively folksy deal with the devil story with “The Bargain”…Stephen Vincent Benet or Manly Wade Wellman might well’ve done a bit better with this story…perhaps this kind of thing requires a three-name byline.

Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Hag Seleen” follows (originally published, with some justice, as by Sturgeon and James Beard [not the chef]), a good example of Sturgeon’s work for the magazine, but not among the greatest (such as “It,” considered here previously as part of Knight’s The Dark Half, or “Shottle Bop”). Sturgeon’s child characters could sometimes be a bit cute, and this is an example.

Alfred Bester’s novella “Hell is Forever” might be the earliest published example of Bester’s devotion to “dazzlement” as a technique…keeping this, and such later work as The Demolished Man and “5,271,009,” moving at a breakneck pace with sudden flashes of invention and deft turns of plot. He hasn’t mastered it yet, in this tale of a Hellfire Club-like group who find themselves damned to customized private hells after they wade into deeper water than they expected…but the work is both rewarding fun and promising for what he would go on to do…including a number of other novels, the last and most purely criminous reconstructed by Charles Platt for posthumous publication, Tender Loving Rage.

And "The Crest of the Wave," Jane Rice’s tale of a murdered thug’s posthumous retribution for his murder, is a good, if unextraordinary, example of that kind of borderline crime-story horror, with fine detail.

In short, this gives a good sense of what a good issue of Unknown was like, if not (nor could it quite be) an example of the absolute best the magazine published.

It should probably be mentioned that Bensen’s one sf novel was named for the letter column in Unknown, And Having Writ…

    The Unknown 5 ed. D. R. Bensen (Pyramid R-962, Jan ’64, 50¢, 190pp, pb)

For newer reviews of rather older books, 
please see Patti Abbott's blog...
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Monday, July 27, 2015

BEST FROM STARTLING STORIES, THE SHAPE OF THINGS, WONDER STORIES 1957 and other reprints from the Thrilling Group science fiction titles

After Standard Magazines/Better Publications shut down their Thrilling Group pulp magazines in 1955, they concentrated their activities mostly in the Paperback Library division of the Ned Pines organization...but James Hendryx, Jr. was given the task over the next decade to edit reprint magazines (with a couple of stories reprinted from the slicks rather than pulp back issues): two almost identical issues of Wonder Stories (the first in digest format, the second in pulp size) and eventually three issues of Treasury of Great Science Fiction Stories (with the last cutting the title down), also in pulp format.  (Treasury also had a western fiction companion.)
Cover painting by Richard Powers
Contents:
Contents:


































Contents:
Contents:








































































Contents:
And the anthologies drawn from the Thrilling Group magazines:
cover painting by Alex Schomberg







































The Best from Startling Stories ed. Samuel Mines (Henry Holt LCC# 53-8980, 1953, $3.50, 301pp, hc) Also as Startling Stories and Moment Without Time
    • vii · Foreword: Blueprint for Tomorrow · Samuel Mines · in
    • ix · Introduction · Robert A. Heinlein · in
    • 1 · The Wages of Synergy · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Startling Stories Aug 1953
    • 61 · The Perfect Gentleman · R. J. McGregor · ss Startling Stories Sep 1952
    • 81 · Moment Without Time · Joel Townsley Rogers · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Apr 1952
    • 113 · The Naming of Names · Ray Bradbury · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Aug 1949
    • 135 · No Land of Nod · Sherwood Springer · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec 1952
    • 163 · Who’s Cribbing? · Jack Lewis · ss Startling Stories Jan 1953
    • 173 · Thirty Seconds — Thirty Days · Arthur C. Clarke · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec 1949
    • 207 · Noise · Jack Vance · ss Startling Stories Aug 1952
    • 225 · What’s It Like Out There? · Edmond Hamilton · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec 1952
    • 255 · Dormant · A. E. van Vogt · ss Startling Stories Nov 1948
    • 279 · Dark Nuptial · Robert Donald Locke · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Feb 1953
Cover painting by Eugene Berman





































    • Introduction · Damon Knight · in
    • Don’t Look Now · Henry Kuttner · ss Startling Stories Mar 1948
    • The Box · James Blish · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Apr 1949
    • The New Reality · Charles L. Harness · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec 1950
    • The Eternal Now · Murray Leinster · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Fll 1944
    • The Sky Was Full of Ships · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Jun 1947
    • The Shape of Things · Ray Bradbury · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Feb 1948
    • The Only Thing We Learn · C. M. Kornbluth · ss Startling Stories Jul 1949
    • The Hibited Man · L. Sprague de Camp · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Oct 1949
    • Dormant · A. E. van Vogt · ss Startling Stories Nov 1948
    • The Ambassadors · Anthony Boucher · ss Startling Stories Jun 1952
    • A Child Is Crying · John D. MacDonald · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec 1948
My review of The Shape of Things
Indices and images from ISFDB and Homeville.
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