Showing posts with label fandom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fandom. Show all posts

Friday, August 19, 2016

FFM: FANTASTIC STORIES, December 1971, edited by Ted White; THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, November 1971, edited by Edward Ferman



The Magazines:
The first issue of F&SF I read, five years and some months after it was published (in latest 1977 or earliest 1978), and the Fantastic that came out at the same time (a bimonthly v. monthly for the slightly older magazine), which I've never gotten around to reading till now. Let's see if nostalgia has much of an effect, or the lack of same leads to less sentimental grade inflation...

And two special issues...the anniversary issue for F&SF, which has usually been careful to note its anniversaries (and often offer All-Star specials to soften the blow of price rises--this the first 75c issue), and the first issue from a (happily short-term) new printer, apparently the same one printing the similarly ugly and gray-ink issues of former stablemate Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine of this period. Their previous printer suddenly inflated prices by some Large chunk at the last minute, and apparently Joseph and Edward Ferman, father and son and publisher and editor, expected a less distressing product with the new discount printers; presumably the EQMM folks at Davis Publications recommended their contractors as capable of doing the job in a pinch. As it happens, F&SF dumped the printers of this and the next several issues in favor of the printers used by Fantastic and Amazing, after Ted White put them in touch with each other.  Hence, both magazines in the early '70s and throughout the decade, like many paperbacks from the same era, had stiff/heavy stock, full-color cigaret ads bound into the middle of the issues...presumably, this bit of business helped defray printing costs. The Fantastic is also a special issue, albeit apparently one of lowest-selling of the magazine in that period, featuring as it did several up and coming writers who were participants in the DC-area "Guilford Writers Workshop"...which took its name in honor of, and jest regarding, the well-established Milford Writers retreat Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm would host annually in those years. Despite all of them going on to have at least sustained careers, none of the Guilford writers were names to conjure with in 1971, except among those Deeply into fantastic fiction. White himself was the first and most widely-published among the group including George Alec Effinger, Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann and Jack Haldeman (elder brother of Joe Haldeman). 

The Contents: the stories, visual art and nonfiction features:
I find it interesting that despite both contributing a fair amount of covers to various fantastic-fiction publications, both magazine issues and books, both Chesley Bonestell and Douglas Chaffee would gain their greatest renown and daily bread in related fields...Bonestell in astronomical art for nonfictional publication, Chaffee in game-related art (though early in his career, Chaffee worked for IBM, and US government agencies; both artists were engaged by NASA). Not that there were enough fiction magazines in this era to support any artist by themselves, even if Stephen Fabian and Vincent Di Fate were coming closest to doing so in the 1970s. Good, even if not the best, examples of both men's work.

Contents


Contents

For more of today's books (and magazines) please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, June 26, 2015

FFB/M: MIMOSA edited by Nicki and Rich Lynch

wrap-around cover of issue 19 by Debbie Hughes
Mimosa hasn't been the only fanzine published over the decades to be about the history of  science fiction and fantasy fandom, and the offshoots from that diverse grouping, or to take the long view of fannish matters, but it might be one of the most diverse. Most of the earlier fannish publications that have attempted to deal with the history of fandom itself have striven to be reference works (such as the Fancyclopediae) or have been collections of usually one or a few writers' work in the fannish press (such as the giant Walt Willis issue of Warhoon or the various collections of the likes of Terry Carr's or Lee Hoffman's or others' fannish writing, etc.) Even such ambitious efforts since Mimosa folded (and had nearly all its contents posted online as well as cherrypicked for "fanthologies"), such as Earl Kemp's eI, have both taken on other matters as well and haven't exceeded the scope of what the Lynches managed to put together...winning six Hugo Awards for best fanzine while doing so. The magazine emphasized first-person accounts of various sorts of behavior, famous incidents and notable people who have been in the social and often scholarly (if usually informally so) whirl that is the fannish subculture, which has managed to spin off crime-fiction fandom (and, among other things, the Bouchercons), comic-book/graphic storytelling fandom, media fandom and "slash" fiction (so is responsible, indirectly or not so much, for Comic-Con, Grey and other similar fiction, and, of course, Trekkers and their fellow-fans), folk-music and punk-rock fanzines to a great and very
cover for #11 by Steve Stiles
influential degree, and to cross-pollinate with the likes of mail artists and the zine culture and the blogs that are often the heirs to zine culture. Meanwhile, Mimosa wasn't afraid to range a bit beyond the obvious, either, as with Richard Brandt's fine exploration of how Manos, the Hands of Fate was made and why, a piece that would've fit comfortably in any film or sophisticated humor magazine (as was its sequel). But nearly any article one dips into might be an education, and a fun read, about the 60+ years of convention, fanzine and related history or some small or not so small part of it...one might skim the best-of collections online at the link at the top of the article, and it's a pity the earliest issues haven't all been posted, though articles from them are included in the best-ofs. You'll even find a few letters from me of comment in the full issues posted, but despite being graciously asked if I'd contribute an article at one point or another, I (reasonably) modestly declined as too fringy a fan to have too much to contribute beyond perhaps recounting the thwarted attempts to get a 1982 or 1983 HonCon (in Honolulu) up and running since we tried to go through such channels as a University of Hawaii student government liberally sprinkled with evangelical Christians of a certain stripe, and frat/sor folk, neither of which blocs were too much in favor of that attempt (that I ran and won election, as part of the Green Slate, to the Associated Students of UH Senate in 1983 in part to hamper some of the more reactionary activities of the former group didn't make my pet project any more popular--Honolulu conventions eventually happened without me at hand).  It was, however, being reminded of music critic Linda Solomon's minor involvement in an incident between  jazz critic/editor/lots more Ted White and jazz critic/writer/lots more Harlan Ellison, in writing up the June Underappreciated Music post yesterday, that put me in mind of Mimosa, which, of course, published White's account of a jazz-fan's bet between the two men.

 For more traditional book selections, please see Patti Abbott's blog (and congratulations to her on her return from her first remote talk and signing of her new novel, in New York at the Mysterious Bookshop!)
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Friday, April 3, 2015

FFB: WHO KILLED SCIENCE FICTION? (SAFARI ANNUAL #1, 1960) edited by Earl Kemp

Cover illustration by Ed Emshwiller
In 2006,  Earl Kemp decided to post the assorted contents of his original SaFari Annual amateur press association (APA) publication, essentially subtitled Who Killed Science Fiction?, under which title it won the 1961 Hugo award for best fanzine, despite most of the membership of even the relatively small 1961 WorldCon not having much of an opportunity to read the publication. Like most APA magazines (APAzines), it had been mostly distributed to fellow members of its APA, the Spectator Amateur Press Society or SAPS, one of the more impressive of the APAs in the sf/fantasy fan/convention/fanzine community.  Since this first anniversary issue of SaFari was also a report on answers to a brief survey to writers and fans, of essentially How and If SF Was Killed and, if so, how might that be rectified, copies were distributed to those who had answered the survey, as well. And, as Earl Kemp notes in his annotations from an aborted 1980 reprint and expansion, and presentation of the 1980, 1960 and more content (including comments from elsewhere about the publication) as part of Kemp's online fanzine eI, he wanted to win a Hugo for something. And so he did.

 From Kemp's 1960 introduction:
For well over two years I had heard far too many people decrying the death of magazine science fiction, and like Bob Leman [later a notable writer of horror fiction], mourning the lack of critical soul-searching from within the field.

How shall I go about it? I determined first that I would restrict this critical colossus to the magazine field only and decided on five specific points of enquiry, which were:
 1) Do you feel that magazine science fiction is dead?
 2) Do you feel that any single person, action, incident, etc., is responsible for the present situation? If not, what is responsible?
 3) What can we do to correct it?
 4) Should we look to the original paperback as a point of salvation?
 5) What additional remarks, pertinent to the study, would you like to contribute?

The responses to these questions, discretely and collectively depending on the answerer, were the heart of the eventual issue. 

 Why was there such a sense of a murdered science fiction in the air, that as many agreed with the premise behind the questions, even if only partially...and that so many editors in the magazine field responded? Well...relatively briefly: In the late 1940s, in the relatively flush years in the US after WW2 and increasingly flush years in science
Along with the brilliant Knight and MacLean,
features PJ Farmer's "Mother" and Evan Hunter.
fiction circles particularly, the fiction magazines at the core of the fandom-engaged field were on an uptick in sales and quality, even as more and more sf was being published in book form and in the general-interest magazines of the era, such as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. The war and its aftermath didn't force a new sobriety nor maturity on popular culture as a whole, but certainly greater sophistication was suddenly likely to be appreciated, and the new technology sweeping into the culture and its implications for the future meshed with the desire in the sf magazines generally to achieve at least the kind of sophistication demonstrated by the crime-fiction magazines or the better western titles...and so they did. Thrilling Wonder Stories and particularly its younger stablemate Startling Stories moved away from the more juvenile aspects of pulp sf throughout the latter 1940s and began publishing such challenging work as "The Lovers" by Philip Jose Farmer and "What's It Like Out There?" by Edmond Hamilton; Astounding Science Fiction, though unfortunately allowing L. Ron Hubbard to gain his first wide exposure for Dianetics (among other "fringe science"--though Amazing also was a booster of UFOria and similar crackpottery), also continued to feature sophisticated, often engineer-friendly writing; Ziff-Davis's Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, consistently the most juvenile of the more prominent pulps under editor Ray Palmer, were turned over to Howard Browne, who fitfully upgraded them with genuinely good stories mixed in with the usual pseudonymous notional adventure tales, while Palmer went on to found Other Worlds and Imagination, both also somewhat better than his work at ZD; founded in 1952, Browne's Fantastic was both more sophisticated than the other ZD fiction magazines and initially hugely successful. Planet Stories, the first great home of Ray Bradbury's sf as well as the space opera of the brilliant Leigh Brackett and many others, upgraded with the efforts of assistant editor Jerome Bixby and company; the legendary Weird Tales continued to offer good work, up till folding in 1954, and Donald Wollheim finally had a budget and publisher support with the Avon Fantasy Reader, founded 1947 and arguably a periodical book rather than a magazine per se, but still very much like a magazine, and a good one (the similar Avon Science Fiction Reader soon followed, and the two titles would be merged briefly after Wollheim left Avon for Ace). The Magazine of Fantasy, after several years of planning, finally launched as a similar companion to Ellery Queen's
the second issue, 1950
Mystery Magazine and American Mercury in 1949, and added "and Science Fiction" to its title with the second issue. Even as F&SF mixed in a number of reprinted stories in each issue, as did EQMM, the reprint magazines Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels continued offering a few notable original stories, such as Robert Bloch's "The Man Who Collected Poe." Other new magazines started to pop up, some as impressive as Damon Knight's Worlds Beyond Science-Fantasy, featuring Jack Vance's The Dying Earth, and some as minor as the semi-professional Fantasy Book...which nonetheless managed to publish, in an issue with a short ghost story collaboration by Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl and a story from fellow future bestselling novelist Alfred Coppel, an item called "Scanners Live in Vain" by someone calling himself "Cordwainer Smith." A few pulp sf titles that had been suspended in the face of WW2 paper restrictions, such Super Science Stories and Future Fiction, were revived (and Future and its stablemates would feature some impressively innovative work on a tiny budget throughout the decade)...and an Italian publisher of romance comics, doing well in most of the rest of Europe, tried breaking into the US market, and to round out their portfolio let their advisor H. L. Gold try, among other things, an sf magazine called Galaxy...not exclusively devoted to satirical sf, but that was the way to play it, and an instant success, suddenly passing Amazing, Astounding and Startling to become the best-selling sf magazine, and one of the best-selling fiction magazines of any stripe. That simply, of course, accelerated the flood of imitations from other publishers, some not bad (Fantastic Universe, or the first magazine called Science Fiction Adventures--all of three of which have been not bad!), some terrible (Vortex Science Fiction, and the first issues of If, edited by Paul Fairman and resembling nothing so much as the dullest issues of the Ray Palmer Amazing, despite even a very minor Theodore Sturgeon story in the mix).

 And all these magazines were paying, some very well for the time indeed. And even the low-paying "salvage markets" both needed copy and were there to offer extra income to sf writers who would have to simply toss multiply-rejected stories into a drawer or fireplace previously. It had been noted by several writers who worked in that period that one could, for the first time, make a career from writing sf (without being the author of a bestselling novel or several, such as Aldous Huxley, Philip Wylie or C. S. Lewis).

 Meanwhile, as noted above, a number of publishers were starting or vastly expanding their sf book lines as the 1950s began; Ballantine Books particularly was willing to pay well for original work, and for serials and collections of shorter work from the magazines, and others (including Lion Books and Fawcett) would to one degree or another follow suit.

And while most of the sf films being made in the 1950s were pretty dire, a few weren't, and a few of those were even loosely or closely based on fiction from the magazines, including The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing (from Another World).  Television was even more unlikely to feature too much of adult interest, at least in the US, but there were odd exceptions (Richard Matheson had at least one story adapted for Studio 57 by the end of the decade, and, early on, several sf writers made some decent money scripting the kids' show Captain Video). More sophisticated was some of the dramatic anthology work on network radio in the early '50s, most notably Dimension X and its continuation X Minus 1, which mostly adapted sf stories from the magazines rather well and with professionalism.

 And some writers and other creative people would look to sf, as Alfred Bester and others have noted, as a means for making coded statements about current events in the most repressed years of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's ranting and the clumsy inquests of the House Un-American Activities Committee. All this, and at least some critical attention being paid to sf from "outside" as well as "inside" the writers/fandom community all contributed to a sense of great optimism and some considerable artistic achievement by the mid 1950s...but also a contraction of the market, for various reasons, by the end of the 1950s, and the reasons are certainly discussed directly and indirectly in the Kemp compendium. Amusingly, some of the prime movers of the renaissance, to the degree that there has been (at least several partial ones over the decades) are among the contributors, or are multiply cited...Cele Goldsmith/Lalli at Ziff-Davis's Fantastic and Amazing, Avram Davidson, soon to become editor of F&SF, and Frederik Pohl at the Galaxy magazine group among the prime movers in the US, and Ted Carnell helping overcome the slump through his work in his UK magazines Science Fantasy and New Worlds (and, briefly, one of the Science Fiction Adventures mentioned above).

 For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Thursday, August 19, 2010

Friday's "Forgotten" Books, College Edition: DREAM MAKERS II: Interviews by Charles Platt; ESSENTIAL WORKS OF ANARCHISM, edited by Marshall Shatz



I matriculated at the University of Hawaii, Manoa as a prospective triple-major (English, Political Science, and an interdisciplinary Planetary Science major), in the Honors Program, and proceeded to take on 18-21 credits per semester of the most challenging courses I could make my way into for the first two semesters, while going in every direction that looked interesting extracirricularly. I was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Hawaii Review, the only literary magazine on campus in those years before Manoa, as an 18-year-old frosh; that appointment was rescinded by the Board of Publications for essentially frivolous reasons and against their own rules, without my (or my successor) being able to get the funds from the BOP to produce any issues. That, while enervating, was lost a bit in the rush of three friends and my campaign, as the Green Slate, for the student Senate of the Associated Students of UH...there were 19 senatorial slots in the College of Arts and Sciences, and 24 candidates. My friend Keiko was easily elected, and I came in 19th, so barely was; our running-mates Darius and Greg placed in the last five in vote totals. We were all motivated to one degree or another by opposition to the Maranatha Christian-cult incumbents on the Senate, who were able to ram through various questionable bills and resolutions in my freshman year; we foiled some of their further attempts, despite most of the executive offices in the new administration being held by Maranathans who had been senators the previous year (Keiko transferred to Barnard College at Columbia U over the summer, but Greg, whose brother was a newly elected Maranathan senator, and Darius were able to enter the senate as Keiko and others dropped out...one of the two School of Engineering senators, Kevin, was an ally on some of these matters, and was also, like Keiko, a punk-rock enthusiast rather more seriously than I was...as a favor, later, in part to thank him for letting me crash with his family, I bankrolled in part his concert event, the Second Pacific Nu Musik Festival, which was a watershed in Hawaiian punk and new wave events). I also became, more by default than anything else, the president of the Honolulu Science Fiction Society.

So it would be hard to blame my reading in those Hawaiian years for my extraordinarily mixed record as a student in 1982-1983, when after three semesters I dropped out of the UH, halfway through my incumbency, and having taken writing courses with Robert Onopa (a 300-level course as a second-semester freshman) and A. A. Attanasio (a graduate seminar in my sophomore year's first and only Hawaiian semester). But I was certainly still reading The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the horror-fiction magazine and anthology series Whispers and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and while growing decreasingly happy with the tack The Atlantic was taking, this new incarnation of Harper's was interesting. As was, among the books I was quite happy to find, the now rather obscure collection of interviews with and profiles of sf and fantasy writers called Dream Makers II, the second such volume, assembled by the ever-contentious Charles Platt, who nonetheless with these books was channeling the rather more openhearted and professionally smooth approach of one of his idols, Alfred Bester, who loved writing sf but loved writing and editing (and particularly profiling) for Holiday magazine in its glory years in the 1960s about as much. Platt's first volume did reasonably well, for a collection of interview-based essays, and Platt was able to get backing to touch base with a similar range of writers for the second volume, including such folks as the half-paralyzed and sporadically enraged Keith Laumer, grimly determined to get past the strokes that hadn't yet utterly incapacitated him; Joanna Russ explicitly Outing herself as lesbian, still a relatively bold move in 1983 even if not much of a suprise to those who'd been reading her more autobiographical work; Jerry Pournelle expressing his appreciation for Mussolini and the Fascists, and revealing that he had been, briefly, after his service in the US military in the Korean War, a member of the US Communist Party, largely out of disgust with what he'd just experienced (and, one gathered, his still-strong fetish for Order and Hierarchy), and generally reading how a second set of major writers in the field felt they should present themselves and their work, and what Platt made of them as interview subjects, usually in their homes when they were game to have him over. Fascinating stuff, and certainly Platt's piece on Theodore Sturgeon in this volume didn't make it any easier to miss (what would turn out to be) Sturgeon's last writers' workshop, on one of the neighbor islands, which I couldn't afford to attend so didn't apply for (this was in a period of trying to make my way without taking more money from my parents, which turned out not to work so very well in the depressed job market of 1983-84 Honolulu/Oahu).

Well, having left Hawaii to rejoin my parents, brother and cat, who had moved in '83 to the DC suburbs in Virginia, I got some jerk jobs and began saving money to return to school there, going on to fill out some core requirements at Northern Virginia Community College in 1985, where in working on the campus paper I met Frank Lawrence, my Green/libertarian-left political interests didn't lessen, and in reading a column in Utne Reader about a Canadian journal that sounded particularly interesting, I sent off for a copy of Our Generation, the libertarian socialist and anarchist magazine, which in that issue featured long essays by Noam Chomsky and Murray Bookchin, and shorter pieces (iirc) by George Woodcock and Janet Biehl, among others. Our Generation would soon be supplemented by such more local productions as Social Anarchism, which I would eventually contribute to editorially, and such more farflung publications as The Match! (from an eccentric DIY publisher in Arizona) and Freedom (the anarchist newspaper/newsletter of long standing out of England), and I cast about and supplemented reading the likes of Emma Goldman's massive and often breathtaking Living My Life and Woodcock's and Chomsky's and Daniel Guerin's books, and the likes of Sonia Johnson's political memoirs, with anthologies such as Marshall Shatz's slightly potted but useful and interesting Essential Works. It was nice to have early work by such a Green mover and shaker as Daniel Cohn-Bendit handily cheek-by-jowl with that of Paul Goodman, and both brought together with such progenitors as Proudhon and Bakunin, Kropotkin and Godwin. As with Johnson, not a few of the feminists I was reading voraciously as well, very much including Joanna Russ and the all but anarchist Ursula Le Guin, were echoing much of what the left-libertarian foremothers had noted, applying it to new circumstances. Both on my last academic campus, George Mason University, and off, I grew more involved with the anarchist, libertarian-socialist, Green and other activities at hand, and helped start a few. Very busy times. And some very good reading, to say the least.

Tables of Contents:

For the Platt, from WorldCat:
The first anthology.

Description: xv, 300 p. : ports. ; 21 cm.
Contents:
Jerry Pournelle --
Larry Niven --
Christopher Priest --
William S. Burroughs --
Arthur C. Clarke --
Alvin Toffler --
John Sladek --
D.M. Thomas --
Keith Roberts --
Andre Norton --
Piers Anthony --
Keith Laumer --
Joe Haldeman --
Fritz Leiber --
Robert Anton Wilson --
Poul Anderson --
Jack Vance --
Theodore Sturgeon --
L. Ron Hubbard --
Joanna Russ --
Janet Morris --
The best of/third edition.
Joan D. Vinge --
Harry Harrison --
Donald A. Wollheim --
Edward L. Ferman --
Kit Reed --
James Tiptree, Jr. --
Stephen King.
Responsibility: by Charles Platt.

for the Shatz, from the table of contents in the online version, link above:
Preface ix

Introduction xi

Part I. Anarchism in Theory: Classics of Anarchist
Thought 1
WILLIAM GODWIN: The Father of Anarchism
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice 3

MAX STIRNER: Individualist Anarchism
The Ego and His Own 42

PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON: Mutualist
A Bantam mm paperback!
Anarchism
General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth
Century 81

MICHAEL BAKUNIN: Revolutionary Anarchism
God and the State 123
Statism and Anarchy 155

PETER KROPOTKIN: Anarchist Communism
The Conquest of Bread 184

LEO TOLSTOY: Christian Anarchism
The Kingdom of God Is Within You 229


Part II. The Mind of the Anarchist: Memoirs and
Autobiographies 267
PETER KROPOTKIN : The "Repentant
Nobleman"
Memoirs of a Revolutionist 269

EMMA GOLDMAN: Anarchism and the
Liberated Woman
Living My Life 312

ALEXANDER BERKMAN: "Propaganda by
the Deed"
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist 356

RUDOLF ROCKER: The Anarchist "Melting Pot"
The London Years 393


Part III. Anarchism in Practice: Firsthand
Descriptions 423
JOSIAH WARREN: The Cincinnati Time Store
and the Modern Times Colony
Practical Details in Equitable Commerce 425
Practical Applications of the Elementary Principles
of "True Civilization" 443

VOLINE: Nestor Makhno and Anarchism in the
Russian Revolution
The Unknown Revolution 450

FRANZ BORKENAU: The Anarchists in the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Cockpit 484


Part IV. Anarchism Today: Anarchist Themes in
the Contemporary World 515
HERBERT READ: Anarchism and Man's
Freedom
Existentialism, Marxism and Anarchism 517

DANIEL GUÉRIN: Workers' Self-Management
of Industry
Anarchism 539

DANIEL AND GABRIEL COHN-BENDIT:
Anarchism and Student Revolt
Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative 553

ROEL VAN DUYN: The Kabouters of Holland
Proclamation of the Orange Free State 569

PAUL AND PERCIVAL GOODMAN: Restoration
of the Community
Communitas 575


Suggestions for Further Reading 598
Index of Persons 601


For more "forgotten" books in the midst of college-years memoirs, see Patti Abbott's blog for a guide to the other participants...
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