Showing posts with label science fiction magazines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science fiction magazines. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

SSW: Guest Post: Paul Di Filippo on STARTLING STORIES, January 1952, edited by Samuel Mines

I was reading--literally only a few pages a night--an issue of Startling Stories, January 1952.  I finally finished it last night.  Let me see if I can cast my memory back over the weeks and see what I thought of these stories in a few words.


https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?60673 
cover by Earle K. Bergey(?)

•  6 • The Ether Vibrates (Startling Stories, January 1952) • essay by The Editor, Samuel Mines
• 10 • Journey to Barkut (Complete Novel) • serial by Murray Leinster (book publication as Gateway to Elsewhere 1954)
• 10 •  Journey to Barkut (Complete Novel) • interior artwork by Virgil Finlay
• 15 •  Journey to Barkut (Complete Novel) [2] • interior artwork by Virgil Finlay
• 21 •  Journey to Barkut (Complete Novel) [3] • interior artwork by Virgil Finlay
• 80 • The Great Idea • short story by Raymond Z. Gallun
• 80 •  The Great Idea • interior artwork by Paul Orban [as by Orban]
• 94 • Lost Art • novelette by A. Bertram Chandler
• 94 •  Lost Art • interior artwork by Peter Poulton
• 115 • The Wheel • short story by John Wyndham
• 115 •  The Wheel • interior artwork by Peter Poulton
• 121 • How Green Was My Martian • short story by Mack Reynolds
• 121 •  How Green Was My Martian • interior artwork by Vincent Napoli [as by Napoli]
• 127 •  Letter (Startling Stories, January 1952) • [Letters: L. Sprague de Camp] • essay by L. Sprague de Camp
• 140 • Review of the Current Science Fiction Fan Publications (Startling Stories, January 1952) • essay by Jerome Bixby
• 145 • Science Fiction Movie Review: The Day the Earth Stood Still • essay by uncredited
[can be read here]


The inside front cover ad is for a noir film, The Racket. Very nicely eclectic ad. Where are such ads in today's printzines? Asimov's SF getting income from some Amazon Prime advertising for Knives Out? Why not?

The big editorial news is the start of monthly publication. The rest of the editorial is a meditation on the state of SF sales and audience appeal. The letter column starts here, but the bulk of it is at the back of the book. The quality of the letters and the earnest effort and sense of camaraderie is of course impressive, and, I think, hardly equalled by the social media commentary that dimly substitutes for such correspondence today. de Camp has a letter here.
  
The Leinster piece runs for almost 80 pages and is a de Camp & Pratt (with echoes of Thorne Smith) fantasy romp about a staid fellow who finds his way to a magical Middle Eastern land full of djinn, and gradually becomes the Top Dog there. The humor of course might seem antiquated nowadays--lots of silliness around naked girl djinns--but the tale is light and frothy, going down easy, and even possessed of a few scenes of surreal estrangement.  Reprinted.

The Gallun story concerns a couple of dodgy conmen on Mars. A rube arrives with a lot of cash and an idea on how to revolutionize Mars-Earth transportation.  They seem to rook him, but eventually reveal benign intentions, and the rube is acclimated to Mars. Reprinted just once in a non-English publication.

The Chandler story concerns another scammer who can find any lost artwork a buyer can name. The trick is to travel in time to find the original piece. Our hero is an innocent rocket jockey they need for their mission. Much danger ensues, in present and past, but our hero emerges okay. Chandler, not a writer I would have previously deemed conversant with sex, devotes quite a few lines to the porn collection of one buyer. "There was a painting of what, at first glance, could have been some gorgeous tropical flower. At second and subsequent glances it wasn't." Whoa, ABC, does Commander Grimes know that his adventures are coming out of such a filthy typewriter?!? Reprinted just once in a non-English publication.

The Wyndham tale is post-apocalypse. The very notion and sight of any wheel is forbidden tech. A boy reinvents it, and is sentenced to death, but a wise elder claims the crime and punishment, allowing youth to survive for a perhaps better future. Much reprinted.

The only quasi-stinker is the Mack Reynolds story about a Martian advisor to some cardboard Hollywood guys who want to sell movies--excuse me, "wires"--on Mars. The tale is so full of silly Martian words that it makes for tough slogging. Never reprinted.

I was surprised to see Jerome Bixby reviewing fanzines, as I had not thought of him as a fanzine fan. [I noted to Paul that Bixby's column would've been written about when he was leaving his editorial post at Planet Stories and Jungle Stories, and briefly (iirc) taking one on at Galaxy magazine--so while perhaps no too much Of fan culture, certainly Aware of it--TM]

The art was very fine, making me miss any such illos in modern genre publications.

All in all, with the Leinster as standout, a very pleasant reading experience. I envy the readers of 1952, who got installments of SS and other zines monthly.

reprinted with permission from the FictionMags discussion list.
Copyright © 2022 by Paul Di Filippo (on LJ)
for more of today's Short Story Wednesday entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog


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Saturday, February 9, 2019

some SF and political magazines, August 1964 (or as close as can be found)

If two queries amount to clamor (we have low thresholds here in blogland), a groundswell of Rick and Paul made me aware that though I thought I had done an August 1964 gallery of science fiction magazines at some point (as opposed to their compatriots in English devoted to fantasy and frequently also sf), as it turns out, I hadn't. And, as there's a remarkable lack of photos online of the summer 1964 issues of the political magazines that meant the most to me as I would read them later, or whose legacy would be important to me, here are some images from as close as I can get so far (I did include the anarchist/libertarian socialist  journal Our Generation, which in 1964 was still Our Generation Against Nuclear War, in with the general-interest intellectual magazines and the politically-savvy satire magazines last week...in part because it has a fine online archive)(and when a magazine, like Dissent, apparently skipped most of 1964 presumably out of budget or staff infighting woes, what can one do? The 1964 Anarchy below, by the way, is the offshoot from the UK anarchist newspaper Freedom, rather than an improbably early issue of the 1980s heavily Situationist/Deep Ecologist Anarchy: The Journal of Desire Armed)(nobody seems to archive/web-write much about The Progressive in the 1960s...).

If there's a magazine among sf magazines in English in 1964 that was providing the most bang for the pence without much attention given, it was probably the UK edition of Venture Science Fiction, which flourished briefly for several years after the similarly impressive, shortlived US original and in the mid-'60s was the de facto UK edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Perhaps an unfair comparison, as it was able to draw on the contents of both the US Venture and F&SF ranging back a number of years, cherry-picking as they might (and this Venture did run a scrap of fantasy...but, then, so did all the other sf magazines below):





































































And we can note the presence of one of the recently late Carol Emshwiller's stories. "Pelt", along with her nearly contemporaneous "Hunting Machine", is and are strong indictments of the ethics and cruelty of hunting for sport, at very least, and among her many vivid short stories.

 And to run through the rest of the field almost alphabetically and definitely by how long they had run by 1964:

 Amazing, during all its years running alongside Fantastic and to some extent Fantastic Adventures, was almost always not quite as good as its stablemate, in part because there usually was more magazine competition for sf stories than the fantasy fiction the companion was more open  to...but the August issue has a hell of a lineup, aside from the odd choices of Young and Rohrer, the latter about as new on the scene as Le Guin and Gottlieb, for the cover...and the September contributors are as impressive.




























































And another quick memorial, for the recently late George Locke.
Pretty good issues (at least the August, which I've read, but the September looks good) of the large-format Analog, albeit light on fiction...but if you're going to run only three pieces of fiction in an issue, having two of them be by Mack Reynolds and Damon Knight is a good idea (Knight's notable story "Semper Fi", which Campbell changed the title of, and Knight changed it back when it was reprinted). Haven't read the serial...I've only owned the August issue, and the author seems typical of the Analog writer who hasn't published much outside the magazine.
































Mass-market paperback-sized issues of New Worlds, early in the editorship of Michael Moorcock, and the July/August issue featuring the most famous story of his ex, Hilary Bailey, a brilliant writer. Eclectic mixes of writers...for example, few tend to refer to Joseph Green as a "New Wave" writer, but he's right at home here...and E. C. Tubb in the next issue...of course, the big arguments came later.








































































New Worlds SF, July-August 1964
Editor: Michael Moorcock (2/6, 128pp+, pb, cover by Cawthorn)
Frederik Pohl was probably at his editorial height at this point, as he as getting Galaxy and If about where he wanted them, except not monthly, and was given Worlds of Tomorrow as a sop for not being allowed to up the frequency of the other magazines...not what he was hoping for, but WoT became a place for long novellas and other items that literally or thematically wouldn't fit in the other magazines (though If was saddled with the atrocious Heinlein novel, and had a sudden switch to monthly for the August issue, then bimonthly again for September-October, then monthly in November for several years--publishers Robert Guinn and Sol Cohen were nervous); the only issues of The Best Science Fiction magazines were a bit of a trial balloon...the Best from WoT item probably not released till year's end, but this isn't clearly documented (the FictionMags Index suspects it was intended for 1965 release)...probably the best cover designs of this set, save the August If and the utterly functional Best Science Fictions.


































If, August 1964 
Editor: Frederik Pohl  
Cover: If, August 1964 (1964) • by Fetterly

















































































































































And, for the hell of it, here's the 1964 Hugo Award balloting results order for the professional magazines in sf and fantasy, World SF Convention membership tending to favor sf but not always, and demonstrating the dangers, for Cele Goldsmith, John Carnell and Frederik Pohl, at least, of having to run against yourself...

l
The second example from the left above dates from 1965.



























































































A rather impressive issue, beyond the most famous contribution, Susan Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'"

And, like The Paris Review, with CIA funding:
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