Friday's "Forgotten" Books: new links to reviews, citations and more

Below we have this week's crop of books and other literary expression deserving (and, infrequently, not so much deserving) more attention than they are currently getting. If I've missed your or someone else's FFB review, please let me know in comments...thanks to all the contributors and all you readers. Least-forgotten book this week is probably either the Steinbeck or the Grisham...two each from Stout and Hunter...

Next week, the list will be hosted again by Patti Abbott at her blog, and will have a special emphasis on the humorous crime fiction of Richard S. Prather. Be there (if you choose! And you should.). Aloha. 

Walter Albert: Murder Between the Covers by Elaine Viets

Mark Baker: C is for Corpse by Sue Grafton

Elgin Bleecker: Dick Francis's Gamble by Felix Francis

Ben Boulden: Breakfast at Wimbledon by Jack M. Bickham

Lucy Brown: favorite books read in 2015

Brian Busby: The British Barbarians by Grant Allen

David Cramner: three short stories by Haruki Murakami

Bill Crider: The Jungle Kids by Evan Hunter

Scott A. Cupp: The Will to Kill by Robert Bloch

William Deeck: The Broken Vase by Rex Stout

Martin Edwards: Death in the Dusk by Virgil Markham; Case for Three Detectives by "Leo Bruce" (Rupert Croft-Cooke)

Barry Ergang: Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (hosted by Kevin Tipple)

Curt Evans: Christmas Mourning by Margaret Maron

Barry Gardner: Scent of Evil by Archer Mayor

Jay Gertzman: Down There by David Goodis

Ed Gorman: Cut Me In by "Hunt Collins" (Evan Hunter, reissued as by Ed McBain)

"John Grant": While I Was Gone by Sue Miller

Rich Horton: Falcons of Narabedla & The Dark Intruder and Other Stories by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Jerry House: Mutiny (issue #2, October 1954) published by Aragon Magazines; Batman: Second Chances by Max Allan Collins, Jim Starlin and Jo Duffy

2016 Caldecott winner

Sam Juliano: Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear by Lindsay Mattick and Sophie Blackall

Tracy K: Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout

George Kelley: Worst Contact edited by Hank Davis

Margot Kinberg: A Time to Kill by John Grisham

Rob Kitchin: To Steal Her Love by Matti Joensuu; The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Kate Laity: The Devil's Mistress by J. W. Brodie-Innes

B. V. Lawson: The Killings at Badger's Drift by Caroline Graham

Steve Lewis: The Law of Second Chances by James Sheehan; Say Goodbye to April by Ken Pettus

Todd Mason: Fantastic and Amazing Stories as edited by Harry Harrison, and Great Science Fiction and Thrilling Science Fiction as Not edited by HH...(please see below)

Carol Matic: Spider Sparrow by Dick King-Smith

John F. Norris: The Case of the Phantom Fingerprints by Ken Crossen

Mathew Paust: Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (and others) by Robert Stone

Mildred Perkins: They All Love Jack by Bruce Robinson

J. Kingston Pierce: Xmas vixens

James Reasoner: Honkytonk Brand by Walker A. Tompkins

Richard Robinson: gift books

Gerard Saylor: X-Files: Trust No One edited by Jonathan Maberry

Steve Scott: The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper by John D. MacDonald

Wicked Women; courtesy Rex Parker

Jack Seabrook: A Butcher's Dozen of Wicked Women edited by Lee Wright, and the mystery of Emily Neff...

"TomCat": The Pleasure Cruise Mystery by Robin Forsythe

Prashant Trikannad: 2015 reading

A. J. Wright: Stephen Gresham's novels



Todd Mason on 
Harry Harrison's editorial work at Ultimate Publications, 1967-1968

Harry Harrison is one of the more protean figures in the history of sf; much as with his friend Mack Reynolds (I believe...I still need to pick up his memoirs volume , Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!), he was a world traveler who often would write lighthearted (or very grim) but always intelligent adventure fiction, such as the Stainless Steel Rat series (or the Deathworld series), and was closely allied with John W. Campbell, Jr. artistically and sentimentally (editing Campbell's collected editorials from the latter's time at Astounding Science Fiction and Analog) while also willing to foster the most surreal and/or nonlinear narrative in speculative fiction as an editor, in such venues as the British  SF Impulse magazine and perhaps even more in selecting for (with increasing input from Brian Aldiss, who soon became co-editor) the Best SF annual for Berkley and Putnam from 1968-1975. Harrison first became an editor of fiction magazines in the 1950s, not too long after the 1950 sale of his first short story, "Rock Diver," to Damon Knight at Worlds Beyond Science-Fantasy magazine, briefly taking over the surviving titles that Lester Del Rey had been editing (the first magazine to be titled Science Fiction Adventures and the soon-folded Rocket Stories) in 1953...while still a relatively new fiction-writer, he was already a veteran packager and artist in the comics field.  While both were living in Europe (Harrison in Denmark) in the mid '60s, Harrison and Aldiss had put together two

Fantastic featured more reprints still during
Harrison's year than Amazing would, and was
at least as afflicted by the cheap European cover
images Cohen had bought rights to for both.

impressive issues of a critical magazine, SF Horizons; when Harrison and his family returned to the US after some years abroad, among the first work Harrison took up part-time was as editor of Fantastic and Amazing Stories, as they were published by Sol Cohen, who did much of the putting together of the magazines from his house (and his wife would mail out the subscription copies from a desk in their basement, one reason Cohen never pushed too hard for subscriptions with the magazines while he owned them). The remarkably small stipend Cohen was paying his first editor, schoolteacher Joseph Wrzos, who went by Joseph Ross for convenience's sake in his editorial work, was perhaps not enough to keep Ross in the job by the end of 1967, after about two years of putting the magazine together on a micro-budget. Nonetheless, Ross's

magazines had presented some remarkable new fiction, such as a short version Avram Davidson's The Phoenix and the Mirror and Roger Zelazny's "For a Breath I Tarry", as "salvage markets" that mixed the few new stories in with reprints selected initially by Ross, long-term fan and assistant Arnie Katz, and Cohen. Cohen had bought the magazines from Ziff-Davis because ZD had for decades been buying all serial rights to the stories they published, and Cohen was thus legally able to reprint, without any further payment, any story from the back issues of the magazines whose inventory he'd also purchased..a practice which made him rather unpopular with the new Science Fiction Writers of America and with other writers, jointly and severally. When Harrison, who already had been writing a book-review column for several issues of Amazing, accepted the post of editor for Amazing and Fantastic, Cohen not only continued to publish a fair amount of reprinted fiction in the magazines, but had also started several more, often irregularly-issued and frequently-retitled magazines completely devoted to reprints, such as Great Science Fiction and The Most Thrilling Science Fiction Ever Told

(which would rather quickly become simply Thrilling Science Fiction). With Harrison, already a "name" writer in the field, taking on the two older titles, Cohen (according to Harrison in correspondence with historian Mike Ashley) offered to phase out the reprints in those magazines if Harrison would allow his name to be put on the covers of the reprint-only magazines as editor, and write a brief editorial or so. Harrison took the deal, and the issues with Harrison cover-bannered as editor are Not Bad, certainly not the haphazard collections of yard goods Cohen would often throw together in later years of the reprint magazines, but were in no way actually edited by Harrison. And Cohen didn't keep his end of the bargain...the reprints continued in Fantastic and Amazing, and soon Harrison left Ultimate Publications, with the advent of his annual Best-of, and, beginning 1970, an anthology series devoted to new fiction, Nova. (Meanwhile, Barry Malzberg had an even shorter term as editor of F & A, and Ted White came in 1969, to stick with the magazines for a decade and to eventually see, in 1972 issues, the end of the reprints...Cohen by that time finally relented and had started making token payments to writers for reprints in the surviving reprint-magazines.)(Harrison notes in his memoir that he'd suggested Malzberg as a temporary substitute for him, and Cohen decided to fire Harrison rather than accept a leave of absence.)

Harrison's first Amazing was the December 1967 issue. his first Fantastic the January 1968. He would edit five issues of each. The Spring and Summer 1968 issues of Great SF and the Summer '68 Most Thrilling were attributed to Harrison. His first Amazing featured the second installment of Frank Herbert's The Santaronga Barrier, begun in Ross's last issue, and also new stories by notable veterans Kris Neville and Charles Harness, and Soviet writer Gennady Gor in translation...and Harrison's editorial noting the death of Amazing founder Hugo Gernsback, and a new essay by Gernsback that Cohen apparently hadn't gotten around to publishing previously. The issue was topped off with reprints from Mack Reynolds, Lester Del Rey and Ray Bradbury...an impressive lineup. Less impressive, perhaps, was a reprint from the Gernsback Amazing, vintage 1928, by Charles Cloukey. The first issue of Great SF attributed to Harrison has a good set of contributors, as well, with the mild exception of Albert Teichner. These are the two issues I have before me at the moment, purchased some months ago at a community booksale to benefit the Pennsylvania SF Society. 

indices courtesy ISFDB:
Amazing Stories, December 1967

• Editor: Harry Harrison
• Year: 1967-12-00
• Publisher: Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc.
• Price: $0.50
• Pages: 148

• 4 • Continuity • [Editorial (Amazing Stories)] • essay by Harry Harrison
• 6 • The Forest of Zil • shortstory by Kris Neville
• 7 •  The Forest of Zil • interior artwork by Jeff Jones
• 11 • The Million Year Patent • shortstory by Charles L. Harness
• 12 •  The Million Year Patent • interior artwork by Jeff Jones
• 24 • The Smile • (1952) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• 24 •  The Smile (reprint) • (1952) • interior artwork by Lawrence [as by L. Sterne Stevens]
• 30 • An Unusual Case • shortstory by Gennady Gor (trans. of Необычайная история 1966) [as by Gennadiy Gor]
• 34 • Santaroga Barrier (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Frank Herbert (book publication as The Santaroga Barrier 1968)
• 45 •  Santaroga Barrier (Part 2 of 3) • interior artwork by Gray Morrow
• 67 •  Santaroga Barrier (Part 2 of 3) [2] • interior artwork by Gray Morrow
• 88 • Stacked Deck • (1952) • shortstory by Lester del Rey
• 88 •  Stacked Deck (reprint) • (1952) • interior artwork by Ed Emshwiller [as by Ed Emsler]
• 102 • Luvver • [Luvver] • (1950) • shortstory by Mack Reynolds
• 102 •  Luvver (reprint) • (1950) • interior artwork by uncredited
• 113 • Sub-Satellite • (1928) • shortstory by Charles Cloukey
• 126 • Science Fiction that Endures • essay by Hugo Gernsback
• 141 • The Future in Books (Amazing Stories, December 1967) • [The Future in Books] • essay by Harry Harrison
• 141 •   Review: The Best of Amazing by Joseph Ross • review by Harry Harrison
• 142 •   Review: Space Gypsies by Murray Leinster • review by Harry Harrison
• 143 •   Review: Spectrum V by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest • review by Harry Harrison
• 143 •   Review: The Universes of E. E. Smith by Ron Ellik and Bill Evans • review by Harry Harrison
• 143 •   Review: An Illustrated History of the Horror Films by Carlos Clarens • review by Harry Harrison
• 143 •   Review: Chthon by Piers Anthony • review by Harry Harrison

Great Science Fiction, Spring 1968

• Publisher: Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc.
• Price: $0.50
• Pages: 132

• 2 • It's Easy to Be Great • (1968) • essay by Harry Harrison
• 4 • I-C-a-BeM • (1961) • novelette by Jack Vance [Vance's title for this is "The Augmented Agent" TM]
• 4 •  I-C-a-BeM • (1961) • interior artwork by Dan Adkins
• 22 •  I-C-a-BeM [2] • (1961) • interior artwork by Dan Adkins
• 35 •  I-C-a-BeM [3] • (1961) • interior artwork by Dan Adkins
• 46 • Entrance Exam • (1956) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
• 47 •  Entrance Exam • (1956) • interior artwork by uncredited
• 58 • Control Group • [Marco 4] • (1960) • shortstory by Roger Dee
• 70 • The Forelife Myth • (1963) • shortstory by Albert Teichner
• 70 •  The Forelife Myth • (1963) • interior artwork by Lee Brown Coye
• 84 • Made in Archerius • (1960) • shortstory by Neal Barrett, Jr.
• 84 •  Made in Archerius • (1960) • interior artwork by Mel Varga [as by Varga]
• 101 • The Hero • (1956) • shortstory by Milton Lesser
• 103 •  The Hero • (1956) • interior artwork by Dick Shelton
• 116 • The Red Telephone • (1960) • shortstory by John Jakes
• 116 •  The Red Telephone • (1960) • interior artwork by Grayam

Harrison apparently notes in his memoirs that John W. Campbell, Jr., after their long working relation in the 1960s and Harrison editing his editorials collection, wanted Harrison to succeed him as editor (Algis Budrys mentioned in writing that Campbell had made the same desire known about and to young Budrys in the latter 1950s, when they were working closely); Harrison edited the memorial anthology for Campbell, Astounding, but one suspects that Conde Nast, in looking for a new editor upon Campbell's sudden death, preferred as smooth a transition and as little change in the magazine as possible, as Frederik Pohl, also a candidate to succeed Campbell, noted in his memoir The Way the Future Was. Pohl's work at the Galaxy group of magazines, if less decidedly than Harrison's with the Best SF series, was rather more diverse and less engineer-stroking than JWC's magazine had  remained, and Ben Bova, the eventual editorial replacement, managed to both broaden and improve Analog, but less abruptly than the veteran editors would've (perhaps less thoroughly, as well, but that would not necessarily be the opinion of long-term Analog readers). Harrison's career as a (to paraphrase) slow, therefore necessarily commercial, writer, continued fruitfully until his death in 2012.

Paul Bley, Pierre Boulez: Rest in Glory: Saturday Music Club on Wednesday in memoriam

Paul Bley, November 10, 1932–January 3, 2016 
JazzTimes obituary

Pierre Boulez, March 26, 1925–January 5, 2016 

Gramophone obituary

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

This week's selections of insufficiently (or sometimes not quite insufficiently) appreciated items of film, television, radio, stage, and other dramatic performing arts productions. If I've missed your, or someone else's review, citation, etc., please let me know in comments. Thanks to all the contributors and to you readers.

Anne Billson: Rep: Older Films I Saw in Theaters in 2015

Anonymous: The Double Life of Veronique; The Lady Eve

Bhob Stewart: Ryan Larkin; Hunger by Peter Foldes; Alicia Minor's "Cannibal Holocaust"

The Big Broadcast: 3 January 2016

Bill Crider: Secret of the Incas [clip, albeit w/spoilers]

Brian Arnold: Popeye: "Spinach Greetings"

BV Lawson: Media Murder

Colin: Santa Fe Passage

Comedy Film Nerds: Year's End

The Cracked Podcast: Movies Which Would Be Better from a Different POV

Cynthia Fuchs: Left on Purpose; Missing People

Dan Stumpf: It's in the Bag [and previous takes: Walter Albert's and my own]


David Vineyard: The Yellow One

Dorian Bartolucci: His Kind of Woman

Elgin Bleecker: Cold in July

Eve: Leatrice Joy Gilbert Fountain

Elizabeth Foxwell: The Unholy Four (aka The Stranger Came Home); Red Nightmare

Evan Lewis: Captain Midnight (a 1955 tv episode)

Gary Deane: 11 for 2015

George Kelley: Brooklyn; Carol

Gilligan Newton-John: Benji (the audio/storybook adaptation); Take This Job and Shove It; four obscure action films (some NSFW imagery); Ice Capades 1975

Iba Dawson: Miles Ahead; Macbeth (2015)

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Cattle Empire; the GetTV network, et al.; classic Xmas films

Jack Seabrook, Peter Enfantino, John Scoleri, Jose Cruz and Gilbert: 2015 favorites, new and reissued

Jackie Kashian: Brock Wilbur on Silent Hill and other horror-oriented video games; Kashian and Laurie Kilmartin's new podcast

Jacqueline T. Lynch: classic Xmas films

Jake Hinkson: 2015, old and new films

James Branscome: 2015 discoveries of older films

James Clark: Flight of the Red Balloon

James Reasoner: Mr. Moto Takes a Chance

Janet Varney: Aya Cash

Jerry House: The Scarecrow (1920 film)

John Grant: The Painted Lady; Mystery of the 13th Guest 

Jonathan Lewis: Hero and the Terror;  You and Me

Karen Hannsberry: Convicted; The Criminal Code

Kate Laity: The Ealing Comedies

Ken Levine: Wayne Rogers; how US broadcast networks might get out of their slump

Kevin Pollak's Chat Show: Kelly Carlin

Kristina Dijan: Jack the Ripper (1959 film); The Life of Jimmy Dolan; Highway Dragnet; A Matter of Life and Death; December films

Laura G: The Letter; And Now Tomorrow; Cy Endfield; Hitler's Children; Dial Red O; Pillow to Post

Lucy Brown: The First of the Few

Marty McKee: Truck Turner; Escape 2000 (aka Turkey Shoot)

Mildred Perkins: Fido

Mystery Dave: The Aviator

Patricia Nolan-Hall: The Absent-Minded Professor

Patti Abbott: Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams; Michael Caine; One and Done


Pop My Culture: Matt Mira

Rick: Homicidal; 2015 most popular posts

Robert/Television Obscurities: WCBW (later WCBS) schedule, Week of 29 June 1941; Code 3 (tv series); The Ghostbreaker (1967 telefilm/pilot)

Rod Lott: On Her Bed of Roses; House of Long Shadows; Fantastic Four (2015 film); Shriek of the Mutilated

Rupert Pupkin: Figures in a Landscape

Ruth Kerr: Borderline

Sachin Gandhi: 2015 Top Ten films, and honorable mentions

Scott A. Cupp: Them!

Sergio Angelini: film noir

Stacia Kissick Jones: The Earth vs. the Flying Saucers; The Discoverers

Stephen Bowie: The "Vast Wasteland" at 50

Steve Lewis: Confidentially Yours [aka...]; Ghost Story: "The New House" (pilot)

Todd Mason: Fred Allen memorialized by Toshiko Akiyoshi, Cyd Charisse and Ann Landers among more likely folk; recent television series in "less-traveled" pathways:
The Man in the High Castle (Amazon)
Midtown (TuffTV broadcast/Amazon streaming)
Everyone's Crazy But Us (Funny or Die/YouTube streaming)
The Hotwives of Atlanta (Hulu)
No, You Shut Up! (Fusion cablecast/YouTube streaming)
W/Bob & David (Netflix)
The Price of More (Crackle streaming)
Falcón (CinéMoi cable/streaming)
Spotless (Esquire Network/streaming)
Flesh and Bone (Starz)

Vienna: The Letter

Wallace Stroby: The Five Best Heist Films You've Never Seen

WTF: Gloria Steinem and Kliph Nesteroff

Friday's Forgotten Books for a New Year: the links to reviews, citations and more

Happy New Year, and a happy birthday to the list/roundelay originator and poobah Patti Nase aka Patricia Abbott!


Below we have this week's crop of books and other literary expression deserving (and, infrequently, not so much deserving) more attention than they are currently getting. If I've missed your or someone else's FFB review, please let me know in comments...such as the bumper year-end crop from Martin Edwards (Patti missed one, I missed several more). 



Walter Albert: Dead Guy's Stuff by Sharon Fiffer

Sergio Angelini: Rogue Moyle by James Ballantyne as "I Retru Grade"

Frank Babics: "The Sound of Murder" by Donald Westlake

Ben Boulden: High Stakes by Carolyn Hart

Brian Busby: 10 favorite older books purchased in 2015

Curt Evans: Christmas Corpus by Margaret Maron; The Player on the Other Side by Theodore Sturgeon and Frederic Dannay as by "Ellery Queen" among other treasures

Bill Crider: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois

Scott A. Cupp: Night of the Jabberwock by Fredric Brown

Martin Edwards: Penhallow by Georgette Heyer; Paul Temple and the Front Page Men by Francis Durbridge; We Shot an Arrow by George Goodchild and Carl Bechhofer Roberts; Something Like a Love Affair by Julian Symons

Fred Fitch: Donald Westlake's work in the 1980s.

Barry Gardner: The Heat Islands by Randy Wayne White

Ed Gorman:  The Quarry novels by Max Allan Collins

John Grant: Surfeit of Lampreys by Ngaio Marsh

Rich Horton: Our Man in Space by Bruce W. Ronald/Ultimatum in 2050 A.D. by Jack Sharkey; The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne by William J. Locke

Jerry House: Into Plutonian Depths by Stanton Coblentz

Tracy K: classic and contemporary collections and anthologies

George Kelley: The Secret of Satan's Spine by Will Murray (as Kenneth Robeson)

Margot Kinberg: The Dead Pull Hitter by Alison Gordon

Rob Kitchin: The Getaway by Jim Thompson; Reykjavik Nights by Arnaldur Indridason; The Music Lovers by Jonathan Valin

Steve Lewis: The Disappearance of Archibald Forsyth by Ian Alexander

Todd Mason: The Sense of the 60's edited by Edward Quinn and Paul J. Dolan; A Personal Demon by David Bischoff, Rich Brown and Linda Richardson (please see below)

Carol Matic: Five Children and It by E. Nesbit (and Nesbit and the Fabians)

Neer: 11 vintage crime novels; books on the Mahabharat

Mathew Paust: Lila: An Inquiry into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig

James Reasoner: The Ham Reporter by Robert Randisi

Richard Robinson: The Corpse in the Snowman by Nicholas Blake

Gerard Saylor: Worm by Anthony Neil Smith

Steve Scott: "No Grave Has My Love" by John D. MacDonald

Kevin Tipple: ...A Dangerous Thing by Bill Crider

"TomCat": The Cornish Coast Murder by "John Bude" (Ernest C. Elmore)

David Vineyard: Ann Sheridan and the Secret of the Sphinx (among others in its series) by Kathryn Heisenfelt





Todd Mason on
The Sense of the 60's, edited by Edward Quinn and Paul J. Dolan (The Free Press/Macmillan, 1968)

the back cover features a similar array of
other contributors' names...

I'm not absolutely certain, but it seems likely that this was a book assigned to my father, who fitfully took classes at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in the period we lived in that city, in order to get his BS degree in electrical engineering (he was in practical terms already an engineer, officially in those years a technician, on his way through engineering management to retire in air traffic systems design and planning on the national scale in the Federal Aviation Administration ...sometime toward the end of  his career, he took the exams that allowed him an equivalency of an MS in electronics engineering).

So, throughout my childhood, this text, with its relatively short items reprinted from a variety of sources, was kicking around the bookshelves of the house. It fascinated me, though to someone who turned five years old in 1969, it wasn't quite as easy to assimilate as, say, the multi-volume Time-Life pictorial history This Fabulous Century. But picking it up again, it's pretty impressive how much it helped nudge my thinking along, in its (frankly, often not terribly deep, slightly potted, though still rather engaging) panorama of takes on the society around us in 1967-68 and years just previous (though where are the "other" civil rights movements already often heard from by 1967, other than peaking around corners here?)...and, of course, the more sophisticated contemporary and other references were often simply puzzling to me at 8 or 11. But some of it was very striking, all of it seemed worth grappling with. (And it's notable that by time of publication, both King and RFK were still alive.)

Quinn and Dolan, in the course of other work together and separately, would produce similar anthologies, the next year with Relevances, and a decade later with The Sense of the 70's, but I didn't grow up with either of those, and have barely seen a copy of the latter volume; WorldCat, the source of this index, doesn't have a breakdown of either of those volumes' contents. Certainly this book was my first exposure to folks ranging from Lenny Bruce (through Albert Goldman's interpretation to be sure) to Paul Goodman and on over to Susan Sontag and back toward Bruce Jay Friedman. I doubt I knew who Stokely Carmichael nor Sargent Shriver were before first beginning to dive in...I might've known already (probably did) of Rachel Carson and Konrad Lorenz, from sources including other Time/Life Books (notably the Nature Library series).

Description:

xii, 528 pages 21 cm

Contents:

Part I. The sense of the sixties -- Growing up absurd --"human nature" and the organized system / Paul Goodman -- The mystical militants / Michael Harrington -- The student state of mind / Michael Vincent Miller -- The risk is juvenocracy / Lewis S. Feuer -- The new radicals and "participatory democracy" / Staughton Lynd -- A prophetic minority : the future / Jack Newfield -- Part II. The legacy -- Inaugural address / John F. Kennedy -- Romans / Murray Kempton and James Ridgeway -- Kennedy without tears / Tom Wicker -- Part III. The scene -- Notes on "camp" / Susan Sontag -- The pump house gang / Tom Wolfe -- The Peace Corps / Sargent Shriver -- Psychadelics : you can't bring the universe home / Paul Velde -- I hear America singing; or "Leaves of grass" revisited, like / Jean Sheperd -- Sex and secularization / Harvey Cox -- Part IV. The people -- The Bogart vogue : character and cult / Gerald Weales -- Martin Heidegger : the turning point / William Barrett -- The sign in Jimmy Breslin's front yard / Jimmy Breslin -- He's a happening : Robert Kennedy's road to somewhere / Andrew Kopkind -- Pope John XXIII / Thomas Merton -- The comedy of Lenny Bruce / Albert Goldman -- Part V. The Negro -- "I have a dream ..." / Martin Luther King, Jr. -- The March on Washington / Murray Kempton -- Manchild in the promised land / Claude Brown -- My Negro problem --and ours / Norman Podhoretz -- Who speaks for the Negro? / Robert Penn Warren -- Power and racism / Stokely Carmichael -- Part VI. God -- The end of Theism? / John A.T. Robinson -- The future of belief / Leslie Dewart -- The theology of pathos / Abraham Heschel -- Faith in search of understanding / John Updike -- Part VII. War and peace -- The dangers of a military-industrial complex / Dwight D. Eisenhower -- In defense of thinking / Herman Kahn -- Ecce homo! / Konrad Lorenz -- Open letter to President Johnson / Robert Lowell -- Jeremiah and the people problem / Leonard Kriegel -- Part VIII. Man and science -- Alamogordo, mon amour / William L. Laurence -- Genetics and the survival of the unfit / Lucy Eisenberg -- The silent spring / Rachel Carson -- Escape to the endless frontier / Don K. Price -- Man, work, and the automated feast / Ben B. Seligman -- Part IX. Literature -- Black humor / Bruce J. Friedman -- Muse, spare me / John Barth -- Writing American fiction / Philip Roth -- King Lear or Endgame / Jan Kott -- Is there a tragic sense of life? / Lionel Abel -- Part X. The sense of the future -- Culture and technology / Marshall McLuhan -- The future of man / Teilhard de Chardin -- The statues of Daedalus / Michael Harrington.

A Personal Demon 

by David Bischoff, Rich Brown and Linda Richardson (Signet/New American Library, 1985); adapted from a series of novelets and short stories in the magazine Fantastic, 1976-78, published as by "Michael F. X. Milhaus"  in the magazine as edited by Ted White, who provides a useful afterword to the Signet volume.  White tells us the basic idea for the stories had developed in bull sessions between White and Rich Brown and others as early as 1964, when Brown suggested in the course of a discussion of raising demons, and the customary spell that binds the summoned demon to Hell forever for not actually appearing (as nonexistent demons would tend not to), that there might be, for story purposes, essentially only one last demon available for summoning. But no one got around to getting anything down on paper about an amateur demonologist and the (essentially) good-natured succubus he at first accidentally raises...till White and the writers found themselves working together in a DC-area writers' workshop, and Brown and White (together, they made Tan, though not Cecelia nor Amy) were reminded of the unwritten stories. Aside from White serving as real-time editor in the workshop sessions, the three writers did various drafts with further input from the fellow workshoppers, and a small hoax/back-story about "Milhaus" was devised, that he was a long-term reader of Fantastic and its

Stephen Fabian's cover for "A Trick of the
 Tail" in its original form; The Boss
 shows up to reclaim Anathae the demon..

predecessor magazine Fantastic Adventures, and that "Milhaus" felt the sense of story, concocted purely as diversion, was largely missing from the more ambitious fiction White's magazine currently published. (White notes he was plumping for fiction that might resemble a mixture of Thorne Smith, P. G. Wodehouse and turn-of-the-1950s frequently-contributing FA fantasist Charles Myers, who wrote  a series of stories prefiguring the tv series Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie [and like them Thorne Smith-lite] about a female supernatural sprite named Toffee, and the hapless mortal man she was fond of.) "Milhaus" published a couple of letters in the magazine, along with "his" fictional contributions...this was not long after The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction began publishing, first with the novel Venus on the Half-Shell, stories by Philip Jose Farmer which (with no explanation) purported to be by characters in various Kurt Vonnegut stories (Venus was published as if by Kilgore Trout, for example); Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, not long after, published a couple/few stories by someone calling themselves "Edmundo Hamiltowne"

(clearly a joke based on writer Edmond Hamilton's name), who remains a somewhat obscure figure; it was in the air in the '70s in the fiction magazines. Adding to the nostalgic fun, the "Milhaus" stories of the demon Anathae and her somewhat overwhelmed human companion Willis Baxter featured explicatory footnotes, a device harkening back to pulp editor Ray Palmer's days at Fantastic Adventures and its older sf companion Amazing Stories, where exposition-dumps were pulled out of the main body of the story to streamline the action...it was actually a habit established by Palmer's more tech-oriented predecessor editor, T. O'Connor Sloane, to allow for more elaborate scientific argument for (and against!) hypotheses or gadgetry employed in the stories in Sloane's Amazing than would fit gracefully into the already too-often nearly graceless stories. "Milhaus" footnotes even included a bit of argument with White, in his own counter-footnotes. After a couple of stories had been published, the footnote conceit was

dropped, and in the stories as revised for this volume they are completely absent. The novel as presented in 1985 is mostly fun, even if the occasional Comedy of Humors bits of business (anthropology professor Baxter's pseudonym for his more outre publications is "Raymond de la Farte") fall very flat (even as half-nods to fellow fantasist and essayist L. Sprague de Camp, in this case). The ephebophilia inherent in the work (also in the air even more openly in the 1970s than even now), as Anathae as described in the story resembles a horned and tailed demon version of an attractive 15yo girl more than either cover painting would suggest, might barely be given a pass still with the knowledge that Rich Brown's decade-long marriage was quietly breaking up, and had started rather romantically (in a desperate way) when the young adult Brown had taken in his soon-to-be girlfriend and fiancee when she was still a mid/late teen, and had to flee her abusive family household. But it's the kind of fantasy that would've fit in well, in such Smith-influenced magazines as Unknown Fantasy Fiction or Beyond, as well as the better issues of Fantastic Adventures or Imagination (with more, if not a lot more, sexual explicitness than those magazines would've dared), and there is, as White notes, a certain grappling with moral and ethical issues running through it that surprised even the authors as the stories took shape. I'm glad I've been able to read, finally, in this form, the stories in the series I'd previously missed as well as how the earlier ones, particularly, were revised for publication in novel form.

And, for this week, we leave you with the cover for the original Thrilling Mystery magazine version of the Fredric Brown novel Scott Cupp reviews at the link above: