Wednesday, January 10, 2024

SSW: MIDNIGHT GRAFFITI edited by Jessica Horsting and James Van Hise (Warner Books 1992); THE WAYS WE LIVE NOW: CONTEMPORARY SHORT FICTION FROM THE ONTARIO REVIEW edited by Raymond J. Smith (Ontario Review Press 1986): Short Story Wednesday



Executive summary:
Anthologies from two of the more notable little magazines of their era; OR having lasted a third of a century, and this, the only anthology from it so far, drawing on its first dozen years, the magazine ending with the death of its editor and co-publisher Raymond Smith, as cofounder and widow Joyce Carol Oates chose not to continue it. MG having been more of a mayfly in the horror small press, but having gathered an impressive roster of contributors, with the editors and publisher continuing their writing careers afterward, if perhaps not robustly (not sure if their romantic/domestic partnership continues, another parallel); the book apparently includes reprints from the magazine and fiction perhaps still in inventory after the last issue of the initial run was published in 1992, or solicited for the book--with one story already a reprint when published in the magazine, and another possibly resold to Pulphouse after MG's long delays in publishing (two more issues, one a 1994 "special" and the 1997 other one apparently mostly nonfiction, sporadically followed the book's publication); for its part, the OR book includes a Margaret Drabble story (and not a hundred-word vignette) published two years before in the UK edition of Cosmopolitan, but not previously in North America. Both books rather neglected, even at time of release, with only two editions each...hardcover and apparently trade paperback editions of the Smith volume released by OR Press, and a mass market paperback original release from Warner Books and a Doubleday Book Clubs edition in hardcover for the MG volume. In their introductions, Raymond J. Smith and Jessica Horsting go out of their way to note how very much concerned with the world of today the fiction in their magazines has tended to be, perhaps even more so than that of most comparable magazines in the eclectic literary magazine and the horror and suspense fields (both magazines with dollops of satirical and other sorts of fantasy included), with these selections perhaps highlighting that tendency, which might even be why they seemed a good pair for an essay about just that (Raymond Smith even revising Trollope's novel's title to fit his anthology's tendencies); it's not as if, say, Conjunctions nor Whispers was oblivious to such concerns, but perhaps not quite as intent on being attuned to them. Also notable is the degree to which talented writers, from those who never need worry where their next meal was coming from to rather new and usually promising professionals, would place work with the magazines which presumably paid modestly if at a reasonable going rate. Smith is relatively restrained in presentation, running the stories alphabetically by author, and offering only brief contributor notes in the last pages, including the datum that Oates "helps edit" OR; Horsting is more intent on curation, breaking stories into themed batches, each with a brief introduction by her; each story also has an uncredited headnote, where perhaps an invisible hand of Van Hise is felt. Also notable is how starkly textual how both books feel, compared to the imagery, illustration, photography or otherwise, their magazines featured in each issue.

Both magazines leaned toward shorter fiction, rather than novellas or serialized or even excerpted novels; when one removes the dust jackets from both the hardcover volumes, one finds that the OR volume is red with black lettering on the spine, the MG black with red lettering, making for a sort of visual harkening to Stendhal jointly and severally. Unsurprisingly, Ways is a better-built volume, sewn in cloth-covered boards on better paper but with slightly less easy-to-read typesetting;  the book club edition of the other has a then-typical D-day glue binding on less sturdy boards containing slightly cheaper paper, but also depends on the more thoroughly professional typeface choices in play at Warner Books, and with fewer words per page, probably has about as much content as the thinner volume.

Neither book was too thoroughly reviewed, as far as I can tell, at time of release...the OR volume seems not to have been reviewed in such a way that I've found indexes for those reviews at all, while MG received a number of mostly unimpressive Goodreads responses and not too much more, though Will Errickson's womanfriend Ashley Louise did guest-review it for his blog in 2010.


Midnight Graffiti

edited by Raymond J. Smith (Ontario Review Press, 1986; 0-86538-054-6, x+301pp, hc; 978-0865380554 tp)
        Details supplied by Dennis Lien, augmented by TM.
    • ix · Preface · Raymond J. Smith
    • 1 · Molly’s Dog · Alice Adams · ss The Ontario Review 21, Fall 1984/Winter 1985
    • 12 · The Man from Mars · Margaret Atwood · ss The Ontario Review 6, Spring/Summer 1977
    • 29 · Saving the Boat People · Joe David Bellamy · ss The Ontario Review 21, Fall 1984/Winter 1985
    • 45 · Town Smokes · Pinckney Benedict · ss The Ontario Review 25, Fall 1986/Winter 1987
    • 58 · My Life as a West African Gray Parrot · Leigh Buchanan Bienen · ss The Ontario Review 15, Fall 1981/Winter 1982
    • 69 · At the Krungthep Plaza · Paul Bowles · ss The Ontario Review 13, Fall 1980/Winter 1981
    • 74 · The Black Queen · Barry Callaghan · ss The Ontario Review 13, Fall 1980/Winter 1981
    • 77 · Homework · Margaret Drabble · ss Cosmopolitan (UK) November 1975; The Ontario Review 7, Fall 1977/Winter 1978
    • 84 · Death’s Midwives · Margareta Ekström · ss; translated by Linda Schenck, The Ontario Review 20, Spring/Summer 1984
    • 93 · Fruit of the Month · Abby Frucht · ss The Ontario Review 20, Spring/Summer 1984
    • 102 · A Pure Soul · Carlos Fuentes · ss; translated by Margaret S. Peden, The Ontario Review 12, Spring/Summer 1980 
    • 116 · The Harvest · Tess Gallagher · ss The Ontario Review 19, Fall 1983/Winter 1984
    • 129 · Some Gifts · Reginald Gibbons · ss The Ontario Review 5, Fall 1976
    • 137 · Black Cotton · William Goyen · ss The Ontario Review 17, Fall 1982/Winter 1983
    • 144 · Any Sport · William Heyen · ss The Ontario Review 24, Spring/Summer 1986
    • 152 · The Mango Community · Josephine Jacobsen · ss The Ontario Review 20, Spring/Summer 1984
    • 168 · A Metamorphosis · Greg Johnson · ss The Ontario Review 8, Spring/Summer 1978
    • 178 · On This Short Day of Frost and Sun · Maxine Kumin · ss The Ontario Review 5, 1976
    • 185 · Baby · Joyce Carol Oates · ss The Ontario Review 23, Fall 1986/Winter 1987
    • 199 · Confessions of a Bad Girl · Bette Pesetsky · ss The Ontario Review 23, Spring/Summer 1985
    • 209 · Tea Party · Sarah Rossiter · ss The Ontario Review 15, Fall 1981/Winter 1982
    • 221 · Shadow Bands · Jeanne Schinto · ss The Ontario Review 23, Fall 1985/Winter 1986
    • 235 · Rough Strife · Lynne Sharon Schwartz · ss The Ontario Review 7, Fall 1977/Winter 1978
    • 252 · The Girl Who Loved Horses · Elizabeth Spencer · ss The Ontario Review 10, Spring/Summer 1979
    • 267 · The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud: A Story · Daniel Stern · ss The Ontario Review 24, Spring/Summer 1986
    • 273 · Mourning · Robert Taylor, Jr. · ss The Ontario Review 14, Spring/Summer 1981
    • 281 · Interviews with Insufficiently Famous Americans · John Updike · vi series 
    •     281 · The Counselor · vi The Ontario Review 12,  Spring/ Summer 1980
    •     283 · The Widow · vi The Ontario Review 16, Spring/Summer 1982
    •     285 · The Undertaker · vi The Ontario Review 15, Fall 1981/ Winter 1982
    • 287 · A Lesson in the Classics · Gloria Whelan · ss The Ontario Review 18, Spring/Summer 1983
    • 299 · Contributors · Anon · bi

  • The stories: as too often, life has been less cooperative than I'd like in rereading the stories in either volume over the last week, but among those I refreshed my memory of, it's amusing to compare the fantasy stories "My Life as a West African Gray Parrot" by Leigh Buchanan Bienen and "Bob the Dinosaur Goes to Disneyland" by Joe Lansdale (the book never gives him his middle initial); the Buchanan Bienen, by a writer who had been and remains primarily a lawyer (particularly involved with women's rights cases, which informs the story), professor and author of legal volumes, as well as contributor of short fiction and critical essays to little magazines, involves said parrot, being as many non-human animals in the story a karmic? reincarnation of a human, recounting her less that joyous life with a human married couple who looked upon their purchased bird as  more conversation piece and investment than pet; all the reincarnated animals in the story, such as her keepers' tomcat, can converse with each other (somehow), but apparently another non-human animal she interacts with has not been blessed with reincarnation from human form nor a common language. While the Lansdale involves a present of a wife to a husband of an inflatable T. rex toy, which upon inflation begins to act like a young child, not altogether like Pinocchio, but unsurprising in this to its new "parents"...the plastic dinosaur quickly becomes obsessed with the prospect of going to the original Disney theme park and meeting the cartoon characters and the like, an excursion Bob's parents enable with perhaps surprising results. Animal/toy fantasy, a bird with an old soul awaiting its next incarnation and an artificial youngster recapitulating human childhood and adolescence. The Lansdale is funnier, if slighter, and has been reprinted more often; the Buchanan Bienen was included in the O. Henry Prize Stories volume for 1983, and both are a bit eccentric even for their first publication sites. 

Both books have a triptych of short fictions, the OR example by John Updike (arguably the "biggest name" in the Smith volume--though Oates, Margaret Atwood and Carlos Fuentes are among the many potential challengers there, particularly in 2024) and the MG being three of four stories by R. V. Branham, not quite a "discovery" of the horror/dark fantasy magazine (he'd gone through the Writers of the Future program and had sold several stories to Gardner Dozois's editorship of Asimov's Science Fiction), but the only fiction contributor to have two distinct entries in the Horsting/Van Hise volume. Not even Neil Gaiman, much less at time of the anthology's publication Lansdale, was as close as they are now to being nearly as prominent as Stephen King among the MG volume's contributors, which does have a rather lopsided representation of male to female contributors, vs. that of the OR.

  • Jessica Horsting



James Van Hise






















Raymond Smith and Joyce Carol Oates


To read some individual issues and contents of those issues, please see
and

For more of today's Short Story reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.


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Expanded Short Story Wednesday lists: 3/10 January 2024


Patricia Abbott: "A Conversation with My Father" by Grace Paley New American Review #13, 1971; Stuart Dybek: "We Didn't" Antaeus Spring 1993, edited by Daniel Halpern (as read by Dybek on video) and "Blue Island" The New Yorker, 24 August 2023










 




James Reasoner: Spicy Zeppelin Tales by Will Murray






--TM
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Wednesday, January 3, 2024

SSW: short stories by Lyn Venable (Marilyn A. Venable, 3 June 1927-31 March 2025): "Time Enough at Last" (the Twilight Zone favorite) and others: Short Story Wednesday (2 of 2)

Lyn Venable's work, as detailed by ISFDB (there are also chapbooks and podcast readings/possibly dramatizations cited for some of these stories), including that endlessly-rerun TZ adaptation...at least one US digital broadcast network, H&I, and one cable station, SyFy [koff], dusted it off again for their New Year's Serling marathons:

Featuring Lyn Venable's last? story (so far?)

Short Fiction

Lyn Venable, as far as I can tell, has only published seven short stories in her career, all of them in a stretch in the early-to-mid/late 1950s (1952-1957).  The second to see print, and easily the most famous, was her 1953 story "Time Enough at Last" in If: Worlds of Science Fiction for January 1953, edited and published by James Quinn. The short story is less heavy-handed than The Twilight Zone adaptation, one of the most widely-loved of first-season episodes (1959, notably after Venable had apparently stopped publishing), though Burgess Meredith's crowd-pleasing performance probably helps there. The short story's Mr. Henry Bemis is competent at work and slightly better at getting around his controlling wife's resentment of his spending any time reading, vs. socializing or watching television with her...and the portrayal of atomic war and its aftermath is rather better-presented in the story than in the television episode (TZ Bemis seems to think he'll be able to leave books from a destroyed public library in stacks in the exposed rubble of the building and they not fall prey to weather, or other problems, for example...he's not quite so foolish in the short story). The current Wikipedia entry for Venable suggests that the story is akin to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which it is not, except to the degree that Bemis is kept from reading by (rather less overarching) villains. However, Venable does write in a mode that is not altogether unlike Bradbury's, and in a few of her stories with rather less fake naivete than RB might slip into...the ending of "Time Enough" has been roundly dismissed as cruel by at least one latter-day reviewer, rather than, as I suspect it was meant, as a metaphor for how much misery modern warfare and its potential for massacre place on even those who hope to find some way to cope with it. Seems a pity she didn't (or couldn't) continue into the early '60s, at very least, and no doubt be courted by Gamma magazine, the home of Bradbury (and Patricia Highsmith, both on rare occasion) and the "Little Bradburys", and perhaps be reprinted by Judith Merril in her anthologies.

Her other best story, I'd suggest, from my quick whip-around her published work (I've yet to read her first, "Homesick", a 1952 publication in Galaxy, at that point the most popular and widely-imitated of the US sf magazines, and [since launched by an Italian firm moving into the US market] one with several foreign-language editions as early as its second year of publication), perhaps surprisingly, is the one published in a magazine that made an attempt to present itself as an essentially nonfictional magazine about supernatural phenomena, Mystic, while regularly publishing fiction written in no way "nonfictionally"...and edited by the team of Ray Palmer and Bea Mahaffey who were also producing Other Worlds and its sf/fantasy spinoff titles, before Mahaffey left and Palmer threw his fate in with all-woo-woo "nonfiction" with his magazines Fate and  Other Worlds remade as Flying Saucers from Other Worlds. An historical borderline suspense/horror story (it can be interpreted as either "realistic" or "fantastic" depending on how much one trusts the characters' perception of events). "Doppelganger" involves a gravid woman in suddenly problematic labor, her desperate husband and the midwife, who in better times had helped deliver him, who is reluctantly called into service in the growing emergency...and what they make of the one baby delivered who is suddenly joined in his crib by a twin whom no one remembers from previously. 


But "Punishment Fit the Crime" is a reasonably good variation on an Isaac Asimov sort of robot story, where a very specialized robot behaves in such a way that it is the one who needs protection from humans. This was Venable's one story in Other Worlds, and her only pair of stories to sell to the same editors, vs. "one-shots" in all her other markets.  

While "The Missing Room" is a rather deft more-or-less straightforward sf story she sold to Weird Tales, which, under editor Dorothy McIlwraith, always open to certain kinds of science fiction with a menacing element to it...an open house in a future (perhaps even still) suburb (commuters use personal helicopters) turns out to be a kind of alien's specimen trap. That Venable sold most of her large handful of stories to editors who were women or men who were particularly interested in publishing women writers (Hans Stefan Santesson at Fantastic Universe, Quinn at If, and certainly Ray Palmer and Galaxy's H. L. Gold weren't unwilling to publish women writers--given both her approach and subject matter, I'm a bit surprised that Anthony Boucher never took one of her stories for F&SF).  Her last two stories are a notch lower in originality, at least, with her one story in a non-U.S. magazine, the UK Authentic Science Fiction item "Parry's Paradox", being a mildly clever but slight time-travel tale, and the Big Twist in the ending of her otherwise rather nicely-detailed story of a first-encounter with another humanoid species, "Grove of the Unborn", being a rather too foreseeable twist.  


For more of today's Short Stories, please see Patti Abbott's blog, and/or the post just before this one, Paul Di Filippo on an issue of Lester Del Rey's magazine Space Science Fiction.

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Guest SSW: Paul Di Filippo on SPACE SCIENCE FICTION magazine, September 1952, edited by Lester Del Rey: Short Story Wednesday (1 of 2)

It took me months to work my way thru this 'zine at a page or two per night.  If I seem hazy on the earlier stories in the TOC, that might be why!  But I think I have given good valuations of them all. Overall, a decent issue with lots of entertainment but no classics and only one or two stinkers.


First the cover, then the TOC, with my brief comments interlineated:



1). The Del Rey lead-off story would have made a great Twilight Zone episode. A lone astronaut is sent to the Moon, and his promised return-trip vessel never shows. He manages (shades of Andy Weir) to survive and return to Earth, but back on Earth no one knows of him or his mission. The bulk of the story is an exercise in paranoia and weirdness, and the hurried conclusion—some unknown force is erasing all traces of any attempt by mankind to attain the stars—is weak by comparison. Basically never reprinted.
2). Simak’s piece has been much reprinted. In a post-scarcity world, our hero feels useless—and even more so when he discovers that mankind is part of a zoo exhibit of some sort.
3). Conan!  What more need be said!  [Uncredited "posthumous collaborator"] L. Sprague De Camp’s short intro opines that this must’ve been “one of the first Conan stories to be written.”  A satisfying amount of gratuitous slaughter.
4). “Michael Sherman” was really R.A.W. Lowndes. Never reprinted. This is the worst thing I have read in a long time. In trawling thru old zines, I try to read every word and not skim, but I had to skip sections here after a while, as the story goes on for what seems an infinite span without anything happening. Our hero has some kind of secret, and is pursued on a cultish planet by authorities, until he isn’t, because he joins the establishment, but is always at risk of falling afoul of the strange customs. The kicker is that—like the Star Trek episode where the natives are reciting a garbled U.S. Declaration of Independence—the three rival planets here derive their culture from three forms of office shorthand! “Gregg, Pittman and Speedwriting.”
5). "Leinster" gives us a competent but perfunctory tale.  A basically Asperger’s-type hero sacrifices love to achieve FTL travel. Basically never reprinted.
6). Jakes’s tale was about his 18th short fiction sale. A vignette about the sad fate a mutant boy. Never reprinted.
7). Pratt’s story has some sardonic humor and satire, as it chronicles a reconnaissance expedition into the territory of a former enemy that had been blockaded for decades while a deliberately deployed war virus has been allowed to run rampant. Some nice biopunk ideas still topical today. Of course, the “superior” invaders are quickly bamboozled and the table is turned. Sparsely reprinted.
8). Society is ruled by a Van Vogtian system that tests all citizens for their moral qualities. Thomas depicts the ramifications of this nicely—imagine politicians who are altruistic and trustworthy!—but then wraps the conceit in the notion that omnipotent aliens secretly watching Earth will utilize the system to deem humanity worth saving or needing destruction. This part seems unnecessary and at odds with the core conceit. Never reprinted.
And, elsewhere, John Boston was moved to comment on the Lowndes-story assessment:
Sherman/Lowndes's "A Matter of Faith" was later booked by Avalon in 1961 as BELIEVERS' WORLD, presumably with some expansion, even allowing for the large type and wide margins that publisher favored.  Interestingly (well, not very), Lowndes was editing their SF line at the time.  I had a similar reaction to yours 60-plus years ago, though unencumbered by any self-imposed obligation to finish it, and I didn't.   

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