Showing posts sorted by relevance for query weird tales. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query weird tales. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday, July 3, 2024

Short Story Wednesday: WEIRD TALES, March 1943, edited by Dorothy McIlwraith: 20th Anniversary issue, featuring stories by Robert Arthur, Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury

A while back, I did a quick survey of the two U. S. newsstand fantasy fiction magazines, F&SF and Fantastic, that had produced 20th Anniversary issues in 1969 and 1972, respectively.  Both magazines made a bit of a fuss, as well they might, for as I realized as I thought about it that only one other primarily fantasy newsstand magazine in English, Weird Tales, had managed to get that far along...not even such notable colleagues as Famous Fantastic Mysteries, nor the little magazine Weirdbook, nor the UK's Science Fantasy had lasted two decades (one could suggest that Fantastic Adventures, which had been folded into its sibling Fantastic in 1954, after a couple of years of simultaneous publication, could count, but only by stretching the point).

The cover painting for this issue is definitely not among WT's best.

This issue can be read here.

The ISFDB index:

Cover art supplied by Galactic Central

Contents 

Weird Tales has few rivals in its influence among fantasy-fiction magazines. and those cited above might be most of that crew, if we add reference to Unknown Fantasy Fiction, Whispers and Famous Fantastic Mysteries and perhaps Beyond, Twilight Zone, Realms of Fantasy and Cemetery Dance, among a very few others.  And the periodical book series, such as Shadows...Gerald W. Page's volumes of the DAW Books annual The Year's Best Horror Stories were also notable for publishing some first-publication fiction of note.

But editor Dorothy McIwraith, and the publishers of WT, did nothing to commemorate the 20th anniversary, at least not in an advertised, formal way. But they did feature fiction, as in many issues, from several of the most popular of their regular contributors, among them here Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury and Robert Arthur (among others, but I've just read or reread their contributions to the issue), and none of them are the regulars' best work for the magazine...even given that Bradbury's story, "The Wind", is one of his better-known works of the era. However, as urgently as the story tries to get across the cosmic uncanniness of a seemingly malevolent spirit of Wind pursuing the protagonist, the haunting is a bit more clumsily over the top than persuasive, as presented. Likewise, Bloch's "A Bottle of Gin" (where the bottle in question actually contains a djinn, or "genie") is more frantic than genuinely witty, striving too hard for comic effect and the effort distracts. Arthur's "The Book and the Beast" is a bit more sure-footed than his colleagues' contributions, but is also straining for effect, and slight...I seem to remember from reading it elsewhere that the Henry Kuttner novelet, at least, is a slightly better showing, but I'll check back in about that...Bloch, Bradbury and Arthur at their best are brilliant. They are close to their worst with these stories, thus still readable but uncompelling, despite the reputation "The Wind" had at one point (Arthur even included it in one of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies in the '60s, where I first read it decades back).

For more of today's short fiction, please see Patti Abbott's blog.



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Tuesday, April 11, 2017

1962/63: Three fantasy fiction anthologies from Pyramid Books: THE UNEXPECTED edited by Leo Margulies, THE UNKNOWN edited by D. R. Bensen, SWORDS AND SORCERY edited by L. Sprague de Camp (and, from other publishers about then, BEYOND and THE FANTASTIC UNIVERSE OMNIBUS)


















In 1962, Pyramid Books was widely considered a second-string publisher of paperbacks, but had, in Donald R. Bensen, an intelligent and innovative editor, who among other things was commissioning (or editing himself) some impressive anthologies. The Unexpected was the first of four anthologies he'd buy from Leo Margulies (although the veteran pulp editor/publisher apparently farmed out the editing of at least the latter two to Sam Moskowitz), the first anthologies drawn from the pages of Weird Tales since the magazine folded in 1954, and, first published in 1961, it sold well enough to have a new edition, with a different cover reflecting the new standardized Pyramid design, the next year. Concentrating as it does on the later years of Weird Tales, it featured some of the most innovative and influential writers in fantasy and related fields still active at the time...with stories that were good to brilliant examples of the kind of new horror Dorothy McIlwraith's WT featured in the 1940s and into the 1950s, moving away from the neo-gothic work that the Farnsworth Wright issues had specialized in. 




In 1963, Bensen himself offered a companion, the first anthology (eventually of two Bensen would edit) drawn from Unknown Fantasy Fiction, later Unknown Worlds, to appear since the magazine's publisher had produced a magazine-format best-of, From Unknown Worlds, after World War II to test the waters for possible revival of the magazine. Unknown had folded in 1943 as a victim of relatively low sales during wartime paper restrictions. But while McIlwraith's WT was innovating in modern horror and fantasy, so, too, was Unknown featuring a lot of the kind of modern or "low" fantasy that Thorne Smith and John Collier, or Noel Coward, were writing or had written...nowadays, this kind of fiction is often considered "urban fantasy". The two magazines overlapped in appeal and shared many of their star contributors, even more after Unknown dropped off the market. Editor John Campbell apparently never completely got over the loss of the magazine, and even though his more durable science fiction magazine Astounding, later Analog, was famous for being the primary home for "hard" or scientifically rigorous sf, Campbell would slip at least some borderline fantasy into the mix for the rest of his time as editor.

 Though Weird Tales was best known for horror, and Unknown for contemporary fantasy, both featured no little adventure fantasy of the kind that had been tagged, in the early '60s by notable innovator Fritz Leiber, "sword and sorcery" fiction (in part after the model of "sword and sandal" historical drama, often with some fantasy and/or religious elements); L. Sprague de Camp, a writer of historical fantasy and one of those "completing" fragmentary Conan stories and pages left unfinished when creator Robert Howard committed suicide, put together the first anthology to feature the new term in its title...gathering a defining set of classic and more recent stories in the mode. De Camp would go on to do several more anthologies for Pyramid and eventually others. While Lancer Books had the collected Conan stories in the '60s, and Ballantine was publishing most of the more classic epic fantasy in the market, with some items of similar interest published by Avon, Ace and Berkley, among others, Pyramid had these widely-loved antholgies in its catalog.

The first, 1961 edition of The Unexpected:


One of the Berkley anthologies of similar interest is still the only anthology so far drawn exclusively from Beyond Fantasy Fiction, the first fantasy companion to Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, and in many ways a successor to Unknown, edited by one of that magazine's star contributors, H. L. Gold--for no obvious reason, the anthology was edited anonymously, and saw only one edition--which misidentifies its content as sf: 
    Beyond ed. Anon. (by Thomas A. Dardis) (Berkley Medallion F712, Jan ’63, 50¢, 160pp, pb)
    • 7 · The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse · Ray Bradbury · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Mar 1954
    • 15 · The Ghost Maker · Frederik Pohl · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Jan 1954
    • 27 · Can Such Beauty Be? · Jerome Bixby · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1953
    • 40 · The Real People · Algis Budrys · na Beyond Fantasy Fiction Nov 1953
    • 94 · The Beautiful Brew · James E. Gunn · nv Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1954
    • 117 · I’d Give a Dollar · Winston K. Marks · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction May 1954
    • 130 · The Root and the Ring · Wyman Guin · nv Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1954
    • 150 · Double Whammy · Fredric Brown · gp Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1954; Naturally, vi; Voodoo, vi
    • 153 · Talent · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1953

And one of the magazines Leo Margulies founded, in 1953, the same year that Beyond launched, Fantastic Universe, was for its seven-year run one of the few consistent markets for both sf and fantasy on U.S. newsstands, along with The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the more erratic Fantastic...which saw its own best-of published in hardcover in 1960, edited by its final editor, Hans Stefan Santesson, and reprinted in paperback in 1968 in the US (the UK edition appeared in 1962)...oddly, Santesson chose to ignore stories from the period before he edited FU, which made for a somewhat less representative...and less good...anthology. Also, the volume lacked what was probably Santesson's own translation of a Jorge Luis Borges story, the first published in a U.S. fantasy magazine...which appeared in a late issue of FU, offered about the same time the anthology was...





































































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Friday, October 16, 2020

FFM: WEIRD TALES, the Robert Bloch issue, Spring 1991, #300, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, illustrated by Gahan Wilson

Robert Bloch is, I would argue, the most important writer actually to have been a Weird Tales "discovery" though there is no denying that a sizable number of readers, as Fred Blosser noted indirectly today in comments, will suggest that his slightly older peer Robert E. Howard deserves that plaudit...Bloch's literary mentor and their mutual friend, H. P. Lovecraft, and most of  HPL's peers in largely making their names in the pages of WT such as Seabury Quinn, had all published some notable body of work before coming to "the Unique Magazine", and even such slightly younger peers as Ray Bradbury, who would begin contributing much of his best early work to WT a half-decade after Bloch, were spreading their contributions out to other markets to a greater degree than Bloch, who would be a stalwart contributor to, and soon a major star in, the Weird Tales firmament and remain so throughout the run of the "original" WT, until folding in 1954 (editor Martha Foley kept listing it as a consulted market for her annual volumes of Best American Short Stories into the 1960s, perhaps hoping that rights owner Leo Margulies would revive the magazine, as he kept hoping to do and finally did, briefly, in 1973). And Bloch's first major branching out was to contribute to a magazine hoping to be a more adventurous and less grim variation on WT, Strange Stories, one of a slew of new fantasy magazines founded by other publishers in the wake of Weird Tales in 1939, along with Unknown: Fantasy Fiction, Fantastic Adventures, and Famous Fantastic Mysteries, all of which Bloch would contribute notable work to in the years to come. Hence this, the most robust of the revivals of Weird Tales, offering the 300th issue (the numbering had been continued from the 1923-54 magazine through three previous short-term revivals) as a celebration of Bloch and his work.

More to come!
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Thursday, March 26, 2009

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: THE UNEXPECTED, edited by Leo Margulies (or Sam Moskowitz or D. R. Bensen, or perhaps some combination)



The Contento Index of this anthology:

The Unexpected ed. Leo Margulies (Pyramid G590, Feb ’61, 35¢, 160pp, pb)
6 · Introduction · Leo Margulies · in
7 · The Professor’s Teddy-Bear · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Weird Tales Mar ’48
17 · Legal Rites [Pohl as James MacCreigh] · Isaac Asimov & Frederik Pohl · nv Weird Tales Sep ’50
42 · The Strange Island of Dr. Nork · Robert Bloch · ss Weird Tales Mar ’49
60 · Mrs. Hawk · Margaret St. Clair · ss Weird Tales Jul ’50
67 · The Handler · Ray Bradbury · ss Weird Tales Jan ’47
76 · The Automatic Pistol · Fritz Leiber · ss Weird Tales May ’40
91 · The Unwanted · Mary Elizabeth Counselman · ss Weird Tales Jan ’51
102 · The Valley Was Still · Manly Wade Wellman · ss Weird Tales Aug ’39
115 · The Scrawny One · Anthony Boucher · vi Weird Tales May ’49
119 · Come and Go Mad · Fredric Brown · nv Weird Tales Jul ’49
154 · The Big Shot · Eric Frank Russell · ss Weird Tales Jan ’49

Of all the anthologies drawn from the fiction published in Weird Tales, this might be the only one (certainly the only one I've seen) which draws entirely from the Dorothy McIlwraith years of the magazine, 1940-1954. Given how often Farnsworth Wright, her predecessor (editor from 1924, after the magazine's weathervaning first year, to 1939), is often credited for all the Important and Creative work WT published, this was a pretty extraordinary idea for 1960 (published in early '61)...albeit most of the writers collected here were at least as potent commercial forces at mid-century as Lovecraft, Howard, or, certainly, Clark Ashton Smith or Seabury Quinn. (As well as being generally better artists, but that's my opinion, if one shared by any number of other not merely contrarian observers.)

This is a nice mix of classics (the Wellman, the Brown, to some extent the Sturgeon--a collection of Sturgeon's horror and suspense fiction is overdue, perhaps particularly as the Complete Stories project comes to a close--and the Leiber) and relatively obscure stories (most of the rest...nearly all of whose authors had written better-known fiction for WT, aside from Pohl and Asimov, whose minor but not-bad story was their only WT appearance--and only formal collaboration, I think, till their nonfiction book Our Angry Earth shortly before Asimov's death). That odd quality makes me wonder if Sam Moskowitz ghost-edited this one, as he did the other WT anthos attributed to Margulies and published by Pyramid at about the same time...Weird Tales and Worlds of Weird (the latter cited some months back by James Reasoner as his forgotten book). Then again, D.R. Bensen, who edited for that excellent paperback house Pyramid, and who was solely responsible for two fine anthologies from Unknown, might've done more than shepherd this one through the process (Pyramid did an impressive set of Harlan Ellison reissues in the mid 1970s, among much else, before being eaten up and spat out by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in the latest '70s as the Jove Books line...the elegant packaging of most 1970s Pyramid Books, at least the ones I remember, abandoned for some real insults to the eye). (Late bulletin: I'll have to admit the 1972 Pyramid edition of Robert Heinlein's The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, retitled for that issue 6xH, as in "Six by Heinlein," has a quite unappealing attempt at psychedelic cover illustration, as well as an awkward new title...I happened to pull this one out of a box this morning while looking for something else.)

Margulies, of course, had purchased the WT inventory and rights from Short Stories, Inc., after the latter's 1954 collapse, and briefly published a Weird Tales magazine revival in 1973-74, with Moskowitz as editor (Margulies had more sustained success with Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, which he published from 1956 up till his death in the latter 1970s (it lasted for several more years in other hands), and his other projects in the post-pulp era included Satellite Science Fiction in the latter '50s, The Man from U*N*C*L*E Magazine [and The Girl...] during the TV series' runs, a revival of Zane Grey Western Magazine around the turn of the 1970s, and Charlie Chan Mystery Magazine in the early '70s).

Mary Elizabeth Counselman and particularly Margaret St. Clair have been entirely too overlooked in recent years, as have, to a lesser extent, Eric Frank Russell and Anthony Boucher, though at least as a critic and fan of crime fiction, Boucher is in print and memorialized by the annual world convention. Of the four, Counselman didn't publishe much fiction outside of WT...while St. Clair was able to get almost naked horror into Galaxy magazine at its early '50s first peak. John Campbell used the excuse of a Russell novella to found his fantasy magazine, Unknown, which had a fruitful interplay with McIlwraith's WT. And, of course, Bloch and Bradbury were the hottest stars of McIlwraith's WT, here represented by insufficiently representative stories, but they'll do.

See if you can find a copy, pehaps without the shillings and pence sticker...it shouldn't be be too hard.

Find more Friday Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott's blog
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Friday, May 3, 2013

FFB: Some anthologies from WEIRD TALES, a quick survey:

What's good about it: It's a typically entertaining (for editor Peter Haining) slice through the history of the original magazine, and features facsimile pages reprints, and an attempt to give the flavor of what reading the magazine itself was like.

 What's less good: A weakness or a strength or both, depending on how one looks at it (and also typical of Haining anthologies): it avoids the chestnuts for less-often reprinted work from the magazine, and thus is less representative than it could and perhaps should be.

 (all indices, except where noted, from ISFDB:)

 5 •  Weird Tales (masthead) • (1941) • interior artwork by Hannes Bok
7 • Introduction (Weird Tales) • (1976) • essay by Peter Haining
20 •  Weird Tales • (1936) • interior artwork by Margaret Brundage (variant of Cover: Weird Tales, March 1936)

What's good about it: Another fine anthology mining mostly  (but by no means entirely) under-reprinted and overlooked work from the magazine. Not quite facsimile reprinting, but the original illustrations are often included. The average quality of the fiction here perhaps just a skosh better than in the Haining.

What's less good: The same problem applies...not as representative of the magazine as it could be, by avoiding the popular classics as much as possible. Though that is definitely less of a problem here.


What's good about it (and less so): Bang for your buck, certainly, even though if by its nature emphasizes the shorter stories from the magazine. As a result, of course, it slights a Lot of the best work from the magazine, but is part of a series of short short story and vignette anthologies from its editors and publisher, and is (if I remember correctly) the only one where all the contents were taken from one magazine (including some reprints that magazine offered in its issues). Rather bad cover.


  • What's good about it: The earliest of the WT retrospectives to make an effort to include examples from the various revivals of the title, post-1954; a nice, fat collection of (as with most) a preponderance of less-well-known work.
What's less good: Avoiding the classics does tend to misrepresent the magazine, or in this case magazines (and a periodical book series). 
What's good about it: One of the co-founders of the 1990s revival checks in with another anthology which covers the range of the magazine's revivals...

What's less so: ...but does so mostly by slighting the earlier versions of the magazine in favor of the 1990s revival. Again, an attempt to collect less familiar work, or in this case sweeten the pot of a best-of the most recent revival (a little less than half the book is from the most recent version), leaves a rather incomplete picture of the magazine and its legacy.


 ...and, from a 2009 FFB review:

The Contento Index of this anthology:

The Unexpected ed. Leo Margulies (Pyramid G590, Feb ’61, 35¢, 160pp, pb) 
6 · Introduction · Leo Margulies · in 
7 · The Professor’s Teddy-Bear · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Weird Tales Mar ’48 
17 · Legal Rites [Pohl as James MacCreigh] · Isaac Asimov & Frederik Pohl · nv Weird Tales Sep ’50 
42 · The Strange Island of Dr. Nork · Robert Bloch · ss Weird Tales Mar ’49 
60 · Mrs. Hawk · Margaret St. Clair · ss Weird Tales Jul ’50 
67 · The Handler · Ray Bradbury · ss Weird Tales Jan ’47 
76 · The Automatic Pistol · Fritz Leiber · ss Weird Tales May ’40 
91 · The Unwanted · Mary Elizabeth Counselman · ss Weird Tales Jan ’51 
102 · The Valley Was Still · Manly Wade Wellman · ss Weird Tales Aug ’39 
115 · The Scrawny One · Anthony Boucher · vi Weird Tales May ’49 
119 · Come and Go Mad · Fredric Brown · nv Weird Tales Jul ’49 
154 · The Big Shot · Eric Frank Russell · ss Weird Tales Jan ’49 

Of all the anthologies drawn from the fiction published in Weird Tales, this might be the only one (certainly the only one I've seen) which draws entirely from the Dorothy McIlwraith years of the magazine, 1940-1954. Given how often Farnsworth Wright, her predecessor (editor from 1924, after the magazine's weathervaning first year, to 1939), is often credited for all the Important and Creative work WT published, this was a pretty extraordinary idea for 1960 (published in early '61)...albeit most of the writers collected here were at least as potent commercial forces at mid-century as Lovecraft, Howard, or, certainly, Clark Ashton Smith or Seabury Quinn. (As well as being generally better artists, but that's my opinion, if one shared by any number of other not merely contrarian observers.)

This is a nice mix of classics (the Wellman, the Brown, to some extent the Sturgeon--a collection of Sturgeon's horror and suspense fiction is overdue, perhaps particularly as the Complete Stories project comes to a close--and the Leiber) and relatively obscure stories (most of the rest...nearly all of whose authors had written better-known fiction for WT, aside from Pohl and Asimov, whose minor but not-bad story was their only WT appearance--and only formal collaboration, I think, till their nonfiction book Our Angry Earth shortly before Asimov's death). That odd quality makes me wonder if Sam Moskowitz ghost-edited this one, as he did the other WT anthos attributed to Margulies and published by Pyramid at about the same time...Weird Tales and Worlds of Weird (the latter cited some months back by James Reasoner as his forgotten book). Then again, D.R. Bensen, who edited for that excellent paperback house Pyramid, and who was solely responsible for two fine anthologies from Unknown, might've done more than shepherd this one through the process (Pyramid did an impressive set of Harlan Ellison reissues in the mid 1970s, among much else, before being eaten up and spat out by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in the latest '70s as the Jove Books line...the elegant packaging of most 1970s Pyramid Books, at least the ones I remember, abandoned for some real insults to the eye). (Late bulletin: I'll have to admit the 1972 Pyramid edition of Robert Heinlein's The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, retitled for that issue 6xH, as in "Six by Heinlein," has a quite unappealing attempt at psychedelic cover illustration, as well as an awkward new title...I happened to pull this one out of a box this morning while looking for something else.)

Margulies, of course, had purchased the WT inventory and rights from Short Stories, Inc., after the latter's 1954 collapse, and briefly published a Weird Tales magazine revival in 1973-74, with Moskowitz as editor (Margulies had more sustained success with Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, which he published from 1956 up till his death in the latter 1970s (it lasted for several more years in other hands), and his other projects in the post-pulp era included Satellite Science Fiction in the latter '50s, The Man from U*N*C*L*E Magazine[and The Girl...] during the TV series' runs, a revival of Zane Grey Western Magazine around the turn of the 1970s, and Charlie Chan Mystery Magazine in the early '70s). 

Mary Elizabeth Counselman and particularly Margaret St. Clair have been entirely too overlooked in recent years, as have, to a lesser extent, Eric Frank Russell and Anthony Boucher, though at least as a critic and fan of crime fiction, Boucher is in print and memorialized by the annual world convention. Of the four, Counselman didn't publish much fiction outside of WT...while St. Clair was able to get almost naked horror into Galaxy magazine at its early '50s first peak. John Campbell used the excuse of a Russell novella to found his fantasy magazine, Unknown, which had a fruitful interplay with McIlwraith's WT. And, of course, Bloch and Bradbury were the hottest stars of McIlwraith's WT, here represented by insufficiently representative stories, but they'll do.

See if you can find a copy, perhaps without the shillings and pence sticker...it shouldn't be be too hard.

Find more Friday Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott's blog

...and more to come with this post, as well...
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