Sunday, July 12, 2015

2015 Shirley Jackson and Thriller Awards

***Winners:

The nominees 
for the (newly-awarded)
2014 Shirley Jackson Awards are:

NOVEL
  • ***Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (FSG Originals)
  • Bird Box, Josh Malerman (Ecco)
  • Broken Monsters, Lauren Beukes (Mulholland)
  • Confessions, Kanae Minato (Mulholland)
  • The Lesser Dead, Christopher Buehlman (Berkley)
  • The Unquiet House, Alison Littlewood (Jo Fletcher Books)

NOVELLA
  • The Beauty, Aliya Whiteley (Unsung Stories)
  • Ceremony of Flies, Kate Jonez (DarkFuse)
  • The Good Shabti, Robert Sharp (Jurassic London)
  • The Mothers of Voorhisville, Mary Rickert (Tor.com, April 2014)
  • ***We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory (Tachyon)

NOVELETTE
  • “The Devil in America,” Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com, April 2014)
  • ***“The End of the End of Everything,” Dale Bailey (Tor.com, April 2014)
  • “The Husband Stitch,” Carmen Maria Machado (Granta)
  • “Newspaper Heart,” Stephen Volk (The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, Spectral Press)
  • “Office at Night,” Kate Bernheimer and Laird Hunt (Walker Art Center/ Coffee House Press)
  • “The Quiet Room,” V H Leslie (Shadows & Tall Trees 2014, Undertow Publications/ChiZine Publications)

SHORT FICTION
  • “Candy Girl,” Chikodili Emelumadu (Apex Magazine, November 2014)
  • ***“The Dogs Home,” Alison Littlewood (The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, Spectral Press)
  • “The Fisher Queen,” Alyssa Wong (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May/June 2014)
  • “Shay Corsham Worsted,” Garth Nix (Fearful Symmetries, ChiZine Publications)
  • “Wendigo Nights,” Siobhan Carroll (Fearful Symmetries, ChiZine Publications)

SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION
  • After the People Lights Have Gone Off, Stephen Graham Jones (Dark House)
  • Burnt Black Suns:  A Collection of Weird Tales, Simon Strantzas (Hippocampus)
  • ***Gifts for the One who Comes After, Helen Marshall (ChiZine Publications)
  • They Do The Same Things Different There, Robert Shearman (ChiZine Publications)
  • Unseaming, Mike Allen (Antimatter Press)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY
  • Letters to Lovecraft, edited by Jesse Bullington (Stone Skin Press)
  • ***Fearful Symmetries, edited by Ellen Datlow (ChiZine Publications)
  • The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, edited by Mark Morris (Spectral Press)
  • Shadows & Tall Trees 2014, edited by Michael Kelly (Undertow Publications/ChiZine Publications)
  • The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron, edited by Ross E. Lockhart and Justin Steele (Word Horde)
Scott Edelman, videographer: On July 11, 2015 at Readercon, Kit Reed, Elizabeth Hand, Ellen Datlow, Maria Dahvana Headley, Kelley Eskridge, and Julia Rios participated in a panel that produced so many laughs it was tough holding my Flip camcorder steady!
ITW 2015 Thriller Awards Nominees  [winners*]

We’re thrilled to announce the finalists for the 2015 ITW Thriller Awards:

BEST HARDCOVER NOVEL

*Megan Abbott – THE FEVER (Little, Brown and Company)
Lauren Beukes – BROKEN MONSTERS (Mulholland Books)
Joseph Finder – SUSPICION (Dutton)
Greg Iles – NATCHEZ BURNING (William Morrow)
Chevy Stevens – THAT NIGHT (St. Martin’s Press)

BEST FIRST NOVEL

Ray Celestin – THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ (Mantle)
Julia Dahl – INVISIBLE CITY (Minotaur Books)
Allen Eskens – THE LIFE WE BURY (Seventh Street Books)
*Laura McHugh – THE WEIGHT OF BLOOD (Spiegel & Grau)
Andy Weir – THE MARTIAN (Crown)

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL NOVEL

Shelley Coriell – THE BURIED (Forever)
Robert Dugoni – MY SISTER’S GRAVE (Thomas & Mercer)
James R. Hannibal – SHADOW MAKER (Berkley)
Rick Mofina – WHIRLWIND (Harlequin MIRA)
*Vincent Zandri – MOONLIGHT WEEPS (Down & Out Books)

BEST SHORT STORY

Richard Helms – “Busting Red Heads” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine)
Stephen Ross – “Pussycat, Pussycat” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine)
Gigi Vernon – “Show Stopper”, MYSTERY WRITERS OF AMERICA PRESENTS ICE COLD: TALES OF INTRIGUE FROM THE COLD WAR (Grand Central)
Bev Vincent – “The Honey Trap”, MYSTERY WRITERS OF AMERICA PRESENTS ICE COLD: TALES OF INTRIGUE FROM THE COLD WAR (Grand Central)
*Tim L. Williams – “The Last Wrestling Bear in West Kentucky” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine)

BEST YOUNG ADULT NOVEL

*Elle Cosimano – NEARLY GONE (Kathy Dawson Books)
Kristen Lippert-Martin – TABULA RASA (EgmontUSA)
Meredith McCardle – THE EIGHTH GUARDIAN (Skyscape)
Victoria Schwab – THE UNBOUND (Disney-Hyperion)
Kara Taylor – WICKED LITTLE SECRETS (St. Martin’s Griffin)

BEST E-BOOK ORIGINAL NOVEL

Sean Black – POST (Sean Black Digital)
Layton Green – THE METAXY PROJECT (Sixth Street Press)
Michael Logan – WANNABES (Michael Logan)
*C.J. Lyons – HARD FALL (Legacy Books)
Gil Reavill – 13 HOLLYWOOD APES (Alibi)

Congratulations to all the finalists!

2015 ThrillerMaster: Nelson DeMille

 The 2015 ITW Thriller Award Winners will be announced at ThrillerFest X, July 11, 2015, at the Grand Hyatt (New York City.
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Friday, July 10, 2015

FFB/M: GALAXY: THIRTY YEARS OF INNOVATIVE SCIENCE FICTION edited by Frederik Pohl, M. H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander (Wideview/Playboy Press 1980)...and the other US sf and fantasy magazines, along with the first issue of GALAXY, October 1950

The default assumption about sf in the 1950s is that it really kicked into gear with the introduction of Galaxy magazine with the October, 1950, issue. The further insistence is that Galaxy formed a triumvirate of elite magazines with the rather new The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (founded 1949) and Astounding Science Fiction, the magazine edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor who'd done the most to encourage good sf in the 1940s...the most, but not by himself, and not to the exclusive degree he's usually credited with.  And there wasn't a trio of completely superior magazines for the decade, even if those three were the most consistently good in the first half of the decade (by decade's end, Astounding was sliding into what Campbell acolyte Algis Budrys called its Tin Age, and Galaxy had passed from being the dominant sf magazine in sales and influence into a pale shadow of itself, as founding editor H. L. Gold had basically had to turn over the magazine to his most assiduous contributor, Frederik Pohl, who spent years rebuilding; even F&SF was feeling a bit less distinctive than it had, after founding co-editor Anthony Boucher stepped down; Robert P. Mills, who had edited the impressive sibling magazine Venture Science Fiction, took over F&SF in time to publish "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes, but his was not quite as pathbreaking an F&SF as his successors, particularly Avram Davidson and then Edward Ferman, would offer in the 1960s).

Back in 1937, Street & Smith editors F. Orlin Tremaine and Desmond Hall were being kicked upstairs...founding editors of Mademoiselle and inheritors of Harry Bates's Astounding Stories when it was bought by their employers from a failing pulp chain, Clayton. As they were put in charge of the magazine group, they made good choices in hiring successors: Betsey Blackwell and John Campbell. Both helped revolutionize their respective magazine genres (and both remained editors, through the Street & Smith sale to Conde Nast, and on till 1971).  For its part, Astounding was already the best-selling sf magazine shortly after founding in 1930, where Harry Bates slanted his magazine toward rococo adventure (Amazing would outsell it for a while by the late 1940s, as would Startling, Galaxy and, for at least one issue, Fantastic not long after; the corporate clout of S&S and, later, Conde Nast would help ASF in later years); Tremaine and Hall had upgraded the magazine, featuring a lot of adventure fiction as well but also offering a fair amount of pop-science articles and accompanying "thought-variant" stories, some of the most important of these written by young engineering student John Campbell, who was also writing adventure fiction and science articles under his own name, and the more quiet and speculative stories as "Don A. Stuart."  He turned out to be an inspired choice to serve as the Astounding (ASF) editor, further improving the general tenor of how sf was written in the magazines, striving even more than the Tremaine/Hall issues to feature what Campbell suggested might read like contemporary fiction of the future.  Campbell introduced some of the most important writers in the field (and helped others, such as Clifford Simak and Jack Williamson, and H. L. Gold, find new modes) and was only beginning, in 1950, to demonstrate some boredom with editing the magazine, and a desire to explore "fringe science" in ASF's fiction as well as articles that would become more pronounced over the course of the 1950s. By the late 1940s, some of the best and most innovative sf was appearing in other magazines on a more frequent basis...though the reputation and standing Campbell had achieved in the 1940s made it difficult for fans and some readers to wrap their heads around the concept that All That Was Best about sf wasn't necessarily invented at Campbell's desk. This tendency has persisted. Part of the reason Galaxy would loom so large in fandom in the early 1950s was that at first it was allowing many of the best of the ASF writers to explore themes and approaches that were no longer, or never had been, welcome at Astounding; in the annotations in the Pohl anthology, Budrys notes that his joy at working as editorial assistant at Galaxy was, at first, that it was almost--almost--like helping produce another issue of ASF every month...but when it became clear that editor Gold had different ideas of what he wanted to do with Galaxy than to simply run a more diverse ASF, young Budrys was puzzled, even hurt...and eventually dismissed from his job there. "And high time," Budrys states.

 A large part of what Gold wanted to do with Galaxy was to make the magazine's fiction accessible to readers who hadn't been sf readers all their lives...he wanted to draw in Stephen Vincent Benet and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and Philip Wylie readers, and even readers who wouldn't specifically seek out their sort of non-coterie sf, but did like the Jack Finney as well as John O'Hara or Conrad Aiken kind of writing that could be found in magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. Campbell had made some similar noises, but his kind of sf still catered to the "insider," who either had read or was ready to read as much previous "in-group" sf as possible, and whose ideas of story construction tended to resemble those of Rudyard Kipling or H. G. Wells more than Flannery O'Connor's.  Galaxy wasn't quite as kind to self-conscious literary exploration as was F&SF (which in its turn was very much like a fantasticated version of its stablemate, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, in focusing on good prose and reprints from outside the "genre" tradition mixed with new material with similar earmarks), but was certainly interested in new and different ways to offer exciting and often satirical fiction...not least with the technically sophisticated fiction Alfred Bester was publishing with them in the early 1950s. Ray Bradbury, who had never been too natural a fit at ASF, was very much so at both F&SF and, to only a slightly lesser extent, Galaxy. And Galaxy was a natural home for the ex-Futurians, whom, as I'd mentioned last week, often tried (even as young and green writers and editors) to take the innovations of John Campbell's magazine one step further in the direction of mordancy and general literary sophistication, in their own 1940s magazines...and were a natural source of fiction by 1950 even for ASF, but really started to flower in Galaxy.

 Galaxy's first decade in PDF format.

 Hence, much of what is most striking about the 1980 retrospective anthology, Galaxy, which saw print even as Galaxy the magazine was about to fold, after years of decreasingly adept financial management:  
    Galaxy ed. Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg & Joseph D. Olander (Playboy 0-87223-568-8, 1980, $10.95, 465pp, hc, cover by Tommy Soloski) [a terrible cover, but one which does illustrate Damon Knight's "To Serve Man"...the source of the Twilight Zone episode]
    subtitle: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction .
(index courtesy the Homeville/Locus indices)

As one reads over the contents list of this anthology, those who know what Galaxy published might be surprised at how many of the most famous stories are missing; that was intentional on the part of the editors, who were hoping to highlight some of the best of the less-famous fiction the magazine offered. And there is some attempt to reflect the work of each editor of the magazine (Pohl was de facto editor from about 1958, when Gold was dealing with various health and welfare setbacks, through 1969, with help in his last years from Judy-Lynn Benjamin, later J-L Del Rey), but the last three editors by 1980, John J. Pierce, Hank Stine and Floyd Kemske, don't have any selections in the book...Galaxy was in steep decline by Pierce's editorship, though, for example, he was able to publish Pat Murphy's second story and a "lost" Cordwainer Smith novelet, as completed by his widow. Gold, Pohl, Ejler Jakobssen and the latter's second (after Benjamin/Del Rey left) assistant and successor, James Baen (later of Ace, Tor and Baen Books) are the editors whose terms are represented above.  The "Galaxy Book Shelf" essay is an abbreviated form of one of Budrys's most famous for the magazine, detailing some of his adventures in the days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and what that event, and its aftermath, meant for the world...and to what degree sf helped shape the perceptions of that event and similar ones.  Budrys notes US Rep. Gerald Ford was in a photo Budrys arranged for a trade industry group at one point in the events detailed, and certainly Ford eventually was embroiled in some of the sort of crisis Budrys was treating with here. The stories collected tend to range from the engagingly readable to the brilliant; some of the memoirs are a bit thin or even a little enigmatic without some prior knowledge, but others help provide just that background, not least the accounts of just how demanding an editor Gold was. 
edited by Jerome Bixby;
"Bradbury * Poul Anderson* St. Clair" and a
lead novella by Alfed Coppel, later notable for
mildly sfnal suspense novels such as 34 East.

 But, as I hope to suggest in the balance of the essay as planned, Galaxy, and even Galaxy and F&SF and ASF together,  had nothing like a lock on the best of sf and fantasy published even in the magazines on the newsstands with them, nor even the most sophisticated...as, for example, Mary Gnaedinger featured a story by André Maurois in the October 1950 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries (even as F&SF ran a different story in their Summer issue), Graham Greene's "The End of the Party" was in the first issue of Damon Knight's Worlds Beyond, and the semi-professional salvage-market magazine Fantasy Book published its best issue early in 1950, featuring the first story by Paul "Cordwainer Smith" Linebarger, "Scanners Live in Vain"...this alongside magazines all over the field featuring notable early stories by Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Margaret St. Clair, John D. MacDonald, Kris Neville and others. 

 This was an impressive time for the sf and fantasy magazines, the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the new decade; even with the warning signs such as an early "Dianetics" article by L. Ron Hubbard in Campbell's Astounding, and science columnist Willy Ley forced by the publisher for his first Galaxy column to deal with "flying saucers," things would get even better before they got worse....

for more prompt and less foolhardily ambitious (than this one was meant to be, but isn't, yet) FFB entries today, please see Patti Abbott's blog

 The previous FFB entry about the similar Worlds of If anthology, from a similar team, and a TriQuarterly retrospective, as well...
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Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Not solely spoken words: strands joined in/by rap and since: Saturday Music Club on Wednesday


from art-song recitative through gospel singing speech and on through other spoken rhythms to music explorations and traditions, a slice through some of the strands that were drawn upon when rap began to take its own shape in the latest 1960s/earliest 1970s in the work of Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets...and then beyond.


Marti Newland (with Artis Wodehouse): Rain Song (composed by Will Marion Cook, 1912)


Rev. W. A. Donaldson and Congregation: "Baptizing Scene"
Marion Williams: "Didn't It Rain"


The Memphis Jug Band: "On the Road Again"


Chris Bouchillon: "Talking Blues"
Woody Guthrie: "Talking Blues"

Pete Seeger (of the Almanac Singers): "Talking Union"

King Pleasure (with Blossom Dearie and James Moody et al.): "Moody's Mood for Love"
Langston Hughes: "The Weary Blues"

Lord Buckley: "The Nazz"
Ken Nordine: "White"

Champion Jack Dupree: "[Going Down to] Big Leg Emma's"
Willie Dixon: "Walking the Blues"


Halim El-Dabh: "Leiyla and the Poet" (1959)

Steve Reich: "It's Gonna Rain" (1965)

The Last Poets: Made in Amerikkka (excerpt) (NSFW language at points)


Gil Scott-Heron: "Brother"

Gil Scott-Heron Band: "Johannesburg" (live, British tv, 1976)

 Gil Scott-Heron: "Comment #1 (Who Will Survive in America?)"  (NSFW language at points)

Gil Scott-Heron Band: 1984 German concert

U Roy: "Natty Rebel"


Salt N Pepa: "You Showed Me"


Public Enemy: "She Watch Channel Zero"


Beatnigs (later Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy): "Fight Fire with Fire"

The Go! Team: "Keys to the City" and more

Ana Tijoux and Shadia Mansour: "Somos Sur"


Zedbazi: "Zamin Safe"

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Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links to the reviews

Baby Face with Barbara Stanwyck
This week's selections (reviews and citations at the links below) of undeservedly (and a few deservedly) under-appreciated audio/visual experiences...as always, thanks to all the contributors and you readers...and to John Grant and Ellen Datlow for  pointers. 

Allan Fish: The Childhood of Maxim Gorky

Anne Billson: Russ Meyer

Bill Crider: Destination Moon [trailer]

BV Lawson: Media Murder

Charlie Ricci: Love and Mercy

Colin: Edge of Eternity

Comedy Film Nerds: Filip Hammar on What Happened, Miss Simone?, et al. 

Cynthia Fuchs: Amy; Escobar: Paradise Lost

 Elgin Bleecker: Laura

Elizabeth Foxwell: O.S.S.

Evan Lewis: Lightnin' Bill Carson

Gary Deane: Mickey Rooney noir

George Kelley: Star Trek Fan Collective: Time Travel

Helen Lewis: "Bitch Better Have My Money" (a music video)

Iba Dawson: Olivia de Havilland

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Jack Webb

Jackie Kashian: Eli Olsberg on T. J. Hooker

 Jacqueline T. Lynch: Mary Wickes

Jaimie Grijalba: Nobody Knows

Jamie Uhler: Come and See

 James Reasoner: Holiday

 Jeff Flugel: Black Belt Jones; Hot Potato

 Jerry House: Frankenstein (1910 film)

John Grant: Double Exposure; "The Candidate" (2010);  

Jonathan Lewis: Tarzan's Magic Fountain; The Last Outpost; Hong Kong

Kate Laity: Tea: The Dark Side of the Cup

Kliph Nesteroff: Jackie Curtiss

Kristina Dijan: Blood Money; Star of Midnight

Laura: Banjo; Janet Leigh

Lucy Brown: Murder on a Honeymoon

Martin Edwards: Crime Writers Association Daggers Ceremony

Marty McKee: Revenge of the Ninja; Invasion USA

 Mystery Dave: All Night Long  [my 2012 review]

Patrick Murtha: The Blue Beetle (radio series)

Patti Abbott: Petrocelli

Pearce Duncan: Hellraiser: Inferno

Pop My Culture: Ilene Graff

Randy Johnson: The Window; Poker with Pistols

 Rick: Stairs in films

Rod Lott: Point of Terror; Doctor Death: Seeker of Souls

Sam Juliano: Winter in Wartime; 1776

 Stacia Jones: Results

Stephen Bowie: Better Off Ted

Steve Lewis: Mystery Liners

Victoria Loomes: Barbara Stanwyck's Bad Girls

 Walter Albert: Georges Méliès 

Yvette Banek: Lured
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Sunday, July 5, 2015

9 Songs, Give or Take: Saturday Music Club on Sunday

Annie Ross: "Love for Sale"


 Jane Monheit Quartet: "How About You"


 Nellie McKay: "I Want to Get Married"


 Evie Ladin & Keith Terry: "Sugar Baby"


 Terre Roche: "Warriors"


 Terre Roche and Robert Fripp: "Mary"


Kasey Lansdale and CJaye Lerose: "Heart Like Mine"


Ana Tijoux (con Juanito Ayala et al.): "Creo en ti"


 Mary Mack: polkas and comedy
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Friday, July 3, 2015

FFB: THE MEN FROM ARIEL by Donald A. Wollheim (NESFA Press 1982)

A collection of the more obscure short fiction by the writer, editor, publisher and man-about-fantastic fiction Donald A. Wollheim:

 courtesy the Homeville/Locus indices, with corrections:
    The Men from Ariel Donald A. Wollheim (NESFA Press 0-915368-19-6, 1982, 116pp, hc) cover illustration by Michael Whelan; book design by D. Christine Benders
Wollheim has been one of the most important editors in the history of fantastic fiction, and one of the most durable. As he notes in the prefatory matter for this slim volume, published as a convention commemorative by the New England SF Association and their NESFA Press on the occasion of Wollheim's selection as Guest of Honor at their annual "con" Boskone, he was briefly, back in the 1930s when fandom was small and easy to poll, the most popular fannish personality, soon to lose that honor back to Forrest J Ackerman. Although Wollheim had participated in some proto-fannish International Scientific Association activities (most notably some mildly stunty experiments in model rocketry), he notes he first grew active in fandom as it was coalescing in 1934 because Wonder Stories publisher Hugo Gernsback was putting off paying him for his first published short story, "The Man from Ariel", and Wollheim wondered if he was the only writer so deprived. It turned out that he wasn't, and he and a number of other contributors to the Gernsback magazines sued and received a lump sum settlement.  This led fairly directly to Wollheim co-founding the fannish group the Futurians, which included a remarkable number of the budding writers, editors and artists in sf and fantasy in New York City at the time, and moving onto his early editorial achievements: editing and publishing the early major fanzine The Phantagraph, the early "semiprozine" Fanciful Tales and, in 1941, editing the no-budget pulp magazines Cosmic Stories and Stirring Science Stories (which along with Frederik Pohl's Astonishing Stories and Super-Science Stories and Robert Lowndes taking over at Columbia Publications' Science Fiction and its stablemates, were the first newsstand magazines dominated by and showcasing the work of the Futurians).  But even more important than this, Wollheim was able to publish, in 1943, The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction, and follow that with, for Viking Press, the Portable Novels of Science (1945--note that the term sf still at that point seemed an odd neologism to Viking and their editors at the Portable series)...two of the earliest widely-distributed volumes to package sf for an adult audience under that rubric; the Pocket volume was hugely popular. 
In 1947, he began editing for Avon Publications, while there publishing the first anthology of original fantastic fiction in mass-market paperback:
...and founding anthology series/all but magazines the Avon Fantasy Reader and the Avon Science Fiction Reader, and the more no-bones-about-it and less durable magazines Out of This World Adventures (the first pulp sf/fantasy magazine to have a full-color comics component bound into the middle of the two published issues) and 10 Story Fantasy (where the only issue famously included eleven stories...one of which was the first version of "The Sentinel", the seeds of what Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick would develop into their respective versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey). Wollheim would edit and/or publish, aside from the cited volumes and "magabooks" above, a large number of the earliest horror-fiction anthologies in mass-market paperback as well, beginning at Avon. 

 In 1952, Wollheim left Avon to become the primary editor for Ace Books, where he would remain until 1971, when he left the failing Ace (mismanaged by its new owners) to establish DAW Books in partnership with the New American Library, which he would edit for and run till shortly before his death in 1990. At Ace and DAW, he did much of his most enduring and important editorial work, providing the most consistent program of sf, fantasy and to some extent horror publishing in those decades, often innovatively if not, while at Ace, necessarily with the most generous of budgets or payment to writers. (While at Ace in the mid 1960s, he also brought on Terry Carr as an assistant editor, who helped Ace go onto further important work, not least with the Ace Science Fiction Specials imprint).  Wollheim, as he notes in the book we soon return to, was also one of the, if not the, most prolific editor of western books in the U.S. for most of his time at Ace, as well as handling their contemporary mimetic fiction and nurse/romance lines; Carr would be the primary editor for Ace Gothics, which helped make that category a major force in paperback publishing in the latter 1960s and early 1970s.  At DAW, Wollheim continued and broadened his approach to providing a range of work in fantastic fiction, from straightforward adventure fiction through some rather literarily ambitious writing, and a continuing interest in international writers and their work. 

 Throughout these years, Wollheim never considered writing his primary occupation, and (his daughter and successor at DAW, Betsy Wollheim, notes) he tended to be modest about his fiction. But, nonetheless, he was an engaging writer, often likely to write (in his adult work, rather than his YA novels) vignettes with an abiding sense of strangeness to them; "The Man from Ariel" (as in the moon of the planet Uranus), his first story as noted above, is certainly in this mode: the narrator encounters, on a misty night, a hapless astronaut from a humanoid civilization on the distant moon, who manages through a sort of telepathy to convey his (as Wollheim calls him) adventure in attempting to orbit Uranus, but through miscalculation slingshotting his craft in toward the Sun, and happening to crash-land on Earth...but at least somewhat triumphant that he was able to share his experience, as he dies of crash-related injury, with an intelligent alien on this blue planet. Not too shabby, even if it hadn't been written by a 19-year-old in 1934.  His most famous stories (included in his first collection), "Mimic" (the source of the film) and "The Rag Thing," are more explicitly sf-flavored horror (Wollheim was a great admirer of Lovecraft), but otherwise share a sense of atmosphere and an elegantly deliberate build of their strangeness, even as they improve on his early work.

"The Lost Poe" is a Lovecraftian approach to the tale of a cursed story, that compels self-destruction not only to originator Edgar Allan, but to anyone who reads it.  "Who's There?" is a nice horror vignette, with a different sort of "slingshot" ending; it seems odd that Wollheim had difficulty placing either of these stories, which saw first publication in this book, but he does take the opportunity to bemoan how sparse the market for fantasy and horror short fiction could be throughout the first two decades of his editorial career.  "The Hook" was inspired by the experience of an LA-based sf/fantasy fan, which Wollheim almost certainly correctly suspects also inspired Ray Bradbury's contemporaneously-published "The Long After Midnight Girl"...in Wollheim's story, he deals sensitively, if a bit tentatively, with the confusing transvestite desires that torment the insecure young male protagonist; Ed Wood and Eddie Izzard probably would approve. It's also notable that both the Wollheim and Bradbury were published originally in short-lived erotica magazines...despite being not so much erotic as about tragedy around sexual anxiety.  "Still Life" was a mild favorite of Wollheim's among the filler stories he wrote for his Avon colleagues' comic books (to get magazine postage rates for subscriptions, comic books at least through the 1950s needed to run all-text items, usually very trivial vignettes, as part of every issue's content; Patricia Highsmith and Mickey Spillane are among the most famous writers to have begun their professional careers doing this kind of writing in
half of an Ace Double, by
(Ms.) Lee Hoffman
bulk)...Wollheim wasn't sure which comic published it, and my quick and dirty search of Avon horror comics posted online, at least, didn't turn it up. "Colt Cash Cache" is a pleasant if unremarkable western story, which Wollheim placed with one of Robert Lowndes's Columbia western pulps, with a mostly guessable twist ending, but some nice detail. "Miss McWhortle's Weird" is, as Wollheim proclaims in his headnote, a bit of a poison-pen parody of Dorothy McIlwraith, the third editor of Weird Tales (and simultaneously editor of Short Stories magazine); Wollheim counts himself as among those who preferred WT as run by her predecessor, Farnsworth Wright (I vastly prefer McIlwraith's issues), but Wollheim's lampoon seems a little double-edged: "They [the writers favored by Wright's correspondent among the characters here] took such unbearably long times to get started, they were always long-winded, sometimes they would toil over the most trivial points, and they wrote nasty letters about any editing that had been done." This can be seen as both exemplary of the philistinism of the McIllwraith analog (and her model), and as an utterly accurate complaint about the general tenor of Wright's magazine.  Though perhaps it's notable that Wollheim placed this story with August Derleth, a veteran contributor of all three WT editors of the original magazine's run, and his magazine that was a bit of a legatee of the Weird Tales geist, if less so than Derleth's earlier, more elaborate The Arkham Sampler.

 Wollheim continues in the double-edged mode for the balance of the stories here; his parody of Lovecraft, the most enduring star of Wright's issues, rather hilariously has every other character as well as the narrator endlessly, imprecisely referring to sinister things they cannot, Dare Not go into nor describe at this time; this one went to another 1960s heir to WT, Lowndes's Magazine of Horror.  "Ishkabab" and "The Rules of the Game" are both rather acute, if slightly belabored, critiques of imperialism that seem to have rather casual bits of seemingly unconscious racism built in...until one recalls that the narrative voice in both cases is that of an observer less sophisticated than he seems to think himself.  The North American reporter in Guyana in the latter story, particularly, is keen to pat himself on the back to a remarkable degree; he fumbles the relation between tides and seismic shifting rather completely, while otherwise proving to be a bit of a dolt, so one is inclined to suspect that Wollheim is trying to demonstrate just what a dolt he is. This story was originally slated for The Last Dangerous Visions, and the dangerous part might well be not just the mockery of the imperialist mindset
but the embrace of Immanuel Velikovsky's doubletalk as legitimate theory about Biblical and other old accounts of improbable events. Wollheim suggests that this might be his last short story, as he hadn't written any more by 1982 in the eleven years since Harlan Ellison demanded revisions, so Wollheim, happy with it in the current form, placed it with New Writings in SF instead; and the evidence of ISFDb's list of publications (showing only the trunk stories published in this volume, and collaborations probably also dating back some decades with Ackerman and the long since late C. M. Kornbluth appearing after "Rules") suggests that Wollheim's prediction was correct...thus this book includes both his first and last stories.
That Joan Aiken...and a gothic with
a review blurb...

 I've been posting this In Progress as I've been writing it over the course of the morning, and George Kelley commented on perhaps the first half, that Wollheim might have been the most influential single editor in sf (and, as I've suggested above, he wasn't altogether uninfluential in the fields of horror, fantasy and even western fiction, as well as a collaborator in the explosion of neo-Gothic romance a quarter-century ago. He was a sustained and eclectic editor (tempered by pragmatism), having been a major market for Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, Ursula K. Le Guin and others. Backhandedly, the Ace edition of The Lord of the Rings (taking advantage of the fact it hadn't been properly copyrighted in the U.S.) helped draw attention  to the trilogy and to J. R. R. Tolkien at the beginning of the steep uptick in his popularity. And, as I mentioned in my response to George, the Futurians (a fan group which was breaking up as they moved into their professional roles at the cusp of the 1940s and particularly World War II) provided a relatively sophisticated, if relatively inexperienced and often underfunded, challenge to John Campbell's artistic vision of sf and fantasy (in his other magazine, Unknown, later Unknown Worlds) in that period, as well as to Dorothy McIlwraith's new broom at Weird Tales, starting in 1940.  At that point, the other sf and fantasy magazines on the stands had their audiences, but (with the exception of F. Orlin Tremaine's shortlived Comet and, to an ever-increasing extent over the decade, Mary Gnaedinger at Famous Fantastic Mysteries), Ray
Palmer's Amazing and Fantastic Adventures, the new Planet Stories, Mort Weisinger's Thrilling Wonder Stories and its stablemates (with the weak exception of Strange Stories, which was WT watered down) were all aimed at relatively undiscriminating audiences, largely juvenile; the attempt at a "spicy" sf magazine in Marvel Tales and its stablemates, which were essentially "shudder pulps" with slightly less pseudo-horror flourish, might not've been as juvenile but were pretty sophomoric. The Futurian magazines, Pohl's, Wollheim's and Lowndes's, all were seeking to replicate the best of what they found in Campbell's magazines, but also brought a slightly broader artistic sensibility to the effort...if Campbell was an engineer by training and otherwise an autodidact and rather instinctive in his artistic choices, the Futurians were striving to become worldly intellectuals, and some degree succeeding. Their example, and the new post-War sobriety of the latter 1940s, probably also helped the sudden increase of sophistication of the Thrilling Group magazines, as editorial control was turned over to Samuel Merwin, Jr.; Howard Browne found it difficult to sustain interest in Amazing and FA, but did, with Fantastic and fitfully with the others, move in a more sophisticated direction with the Ziff-Davis magazines. Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury were joined by other artists of note as Jerome Bixby began editing at Planet Stories...and all this before or just as we saw the introduction of the clangorous new approaches with The Magazine of Fantasy (and Science Fiction, as it expanded with the second issue) and Galaxy in 1949-1950.  I'll probably have some more to say about these developments next week.

 Please see Patti Abbott's blog, for the list of this week's links to reviews.


The two front covers of an early Ace Double...one cover on each side of the book, and the
texts upside down in relation to each other
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