Thursday, April 14, 2016

A "Throwback Thursday" rumination on a night in 1957, and 1970s/80s new radio drama in the US (including imports)

On the night of 9 January 1957, in Milwaukee, WI, you could at 8pm have chosen to watch on television the NBC station WTMJ Channel 4 with an in-color broadcast of Kraft Television Theater: "Six Hours of Terror" starring Theodore Bikel; on the NTA Film Network station WITI Ch. 6 the film Gangway for Tomorrow (1943, with Robert Ryan and John Carradine--a Racket Squad repeat would follow at 9:30); The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet on the ABC station, WISN-TV12, or on the still somewhat experimental CBS-owned UHF station WXIX 19, The Millionaire (episode "The Story of Nancy Wellington" featuring Anita Louise). You couldn't yet tune in WMVS TV10, the National Educational Television station that would go on-the-air later in the year, after some local and national resistance from the commercial stations and their allies, but support from among others the Socialist Party Mayor of Milwaukee from 1948-1960, Frank Zeidler; among the first programs it would carry would be The Friendly Giant, from Madison, WI public station WHA, a series that would run nationally on NET for at least a dozen years (PBS then took over) and on the CBC till 1984, and in repeats afterward (apparently a Kukla, Fran & Ollie-esque puppet sketch and music series mostly for children). Or you could've opted to tune in, at 8pm, WTMJ-AM, the NBC Radio station, and listened to the first broadcast of X Minus One's adaptation of the Theodore Sturgeon story "A Saucer of Loneliness"; unless you were listening to the CBS radio station instead for The World Tonight newscast, followed at 8:30 pm by, no kidding, Amos & Andy, still in production; I probably would've stuck with NBC radio for the Nelson Olmsted dramatic reading series Sleep No More at 8:30 (featuring A. M. Burrage's "The Waxwork" and Ambrose Bierce's "The Man and the Snake"). 

 8pm on a winter Wednesday night in the Midwest.


My mother was often indulgent of my childhood requests for such things as books, magazines and records, but not always, and one item she did not agree to buy for me was the Vanguard Records omnibus album of the Olmsted Sleep No More readings on LP he'd done for them:











































While I hardly ever make an effort to see 60 Minutes any more, I have been finding myself, while on the road in the 7pm hour on Sundays, listening to it on the CBS Radio station KYW-AM (Philadelphia). (I will have to watch eventually and soon to see how Morley Safer looks these days; he sounds every minute of his 85 years of age.) It reminds me of when, my family having just moved to Hawaii in 1979 and living in each other's pockets in a one-bedroom condo in Waikiki for the summer, if I was bored with the late-season Mission: Impossible repeat my parents were watching on cable in the living room, and I didn't feel like going down to the lobby of Discovery Bay and reading a back issue of Fantastic or Fantasy and Science Fiction I'd bought at Froggy's that week, I might go into my parents' room and listen to the CBS Radio drama series, The Sears Radio Theater and The CBS Radio Mystery Theater, running from 8p-10p weeknights on the Honolulu CBS station...when Hawaii finally got an NPR station, listening to the various dramatic series they would try out...catching The World Tonight on CBS Radio in the '80s when not instead catching the Pacifica Evening News or All Things Considered on the DC public stations (I think I pretty much completely missed Monitor on NBC)...and I felt the loss of broadcast access to Pacifica when Temple University's station dumped its affiliation over Mumia Abu-Jamal doing commentary for the network (In my first year in Philadelphia, I was the local presenter of Radio  Nation and The Progressive magazine's Second Opinion on WPPR-FM in the second hour of my Sunday shift, 10p-Midnight...Sweet Freedom the radio series...much as I had been in Fairfax County, VA, on WCXS/WEBR for some years previous...the only downside to being on 8-10p Sundays in the DC area was in missing some of The Big Broadcast on WAMU.) 60 Minutes works reasonably well on the radio, and you can do worse while driving than to parse how as well as what they choose to tell us about whatever they're talking about.

 Archives of episodes for streaming, or at worst samples and approximations:
The CBS Radio Mystery Theater
(The) Zero Hour
Earplay
Hollywood Theater of the Ear: 2000x
Sears Radio Theater; Mutual Radio Theater
The Lord of the Rings
Nightfall
Bob and Ray (1950s-70s); NPR 1987 episode 
NBC Monitor in the 70s; Gene Rayburn as host interviewing  Jean Shepherd; penultimate Monitor  hour w/Bob & Ray
Firesign Theater radio series episodes
Nick Danger on The Daily Feed
The Credibility Gap (tv sketch)
Le Show
National Lampoon Radio Hour episode; clips
The Fourth Tower of Inverness episode; ZBS
Pacifica Radio Archive
Mind's Eye Theater (Pacifica): "The Girl Had Guts" (dramatic reading of the Theodore Sturgeon story)
General Mills (later CBS) Radio Adventure Theater: episodes
The End of the Road
A Prairie Home Companion
Star Wars
LA Theater Works: recent episodes and more

and on FaceBook, Kim Jones was nostalgic about a series of fillers, which I'd missed altogether: 
Ellery Queen's Minute Mysteries



The National Radio Theater of Chicago and The Hollywood Theater of the Ear 




Michael McKean and Harry Shearer of the Credibility Gap respond to the Kent State shootings:
Pacifica Radio Archives: drama
Mind's Eye Theater
General Mills' Radio Adventure Theater head base





and ongoing (here and here): 

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Friday, April 8, 2016

FFM: FANTASTIC: STORIES OF IMAGINATION, April 1963, edited by Cele Goldsmith (Ziff-Davis); THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, February 1964, edited by Avram Davidson (Mercury Press)

From ISFDB (supplemented by the FictionMags Index):
Two issues, less than a year apart rather than (as is my usual practice in such things) as close to on the stands simultaneously as is practical. But these happened to be two issues which were in a convenient stack, and rather good ones of either magazine, the most consistently published US fantasy/sf magazines in the 1950s-70s, and at many times the best, even when not the only (which wasn't too uncommon, either). 

 The two best stories in their respective issues (so far) are the familiar ones to me (from Leiber's collections and anthology appearance for the Johnson),  Fritz Leiber's "The Casket Demon" in Fantastic and S. S. Johnson's "The House by the Crab Apple Tree" in F&SF.  The Leiber is a sly bit of humorous horror, involving a generational curse afflicting a Prussian family whose current representative among the living is a hardbitten Hollywood sexpot, and the ways the eponymous demon can be...incompletely...foiled (also notable is how the very distinctive illustrator Lee Brown Coye chose to represent the determined actress). The Johnson is as brutal a post-apocalyptic tale as you can possibly want...recently discussed on F&SF's forum as a rather obvious anticipation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (not that that novel doesn't have dozens of literary fathers, and not a few at least as good), it's an example of the kind of controversial story editor Avram Davidson would seek out and publish even more often than most of his fellow F&SF editors over the decades. (Allen Kim Lang's "Thaw and Serve," which anticipates rather more intelligently and viscerally "Demolition Man" the film, is another which comes to mind, and Ray Nelson's work likewise pushed some envelope seams.) Johnson, 24 when the story was published (and a sports reporter for the Hartford Courant at 14, apparently), took his doctorate in English and had an academic career, submitting a short story collection and apparently a novel as his theses but never publishing them, and instead collaborating on a technical writing text as apparently his only other published work (that we've seen, so far). Johnson's rather prodigious nature is echoed by Robert Rohrer, who has a decent, notional fantasy, itself post-apocalyptic, in the earlier issue, involving the changing nature of the holy and unholy supernatural world after the nuclear culling of so much of the human population. Rohrer published a double-handful of short stories in sf and fantasy magazines between the ages of 15 and 18, and then abruptly ceased in 1965...one hopes it wasn't the result of, say, military experiences that left him unwilling or unable to continue. 
back cover of the Fantastic; not Lee Brown
Coye's image of the Hollywood actress in the
story, though of an earlier curse victim

 What helped distinguish the two magazines under these editors in the early '60s was their mutual openness to odd approaches, literary adventurousness, and generally furthering the expansion of the palette in newsstand sf and fantasy that had begun in earnest in the better magazines of the 1950s, and would be a little (but not Too much) more pronounced in the British magazines New Worlds and Impulse. To one degree or another such challenging work would continue to appear in Fantastic (and its stablemate Amazing) and F&SF, and also was making itself felt in the magazines Frederik Pohl was editing from the latest '50s onward through the '60s, at first as a shadow assistant to the ailing H. L. Gold, Galaxy, If, and eventually Worlds of Tomorrow and International Science Fiction. Writer/editor Michael Moorcock criticized Davidson for publishing too much jocular and slight fiction, and there was some of that, but never enough to undermine to seriousness of F&SF as a magazine; Cele Goldsmith (later to marry and sign herself Cele Lalli and later in her career as Cele Goldsmith Lalli) also could be drawn to notional stories at times to a fault, but she could also fill her magazines with stories as beautifully written as the Leiber, the two good stories in this issue by Roger Zelazny (one published as by "Harrison Denmark," his pseudonym which impishly pointed toward Harry Harrison, then resident in Denmark, as the man behind the name) and the David Bunch "Moderan" story, a series of heavily symbolic sf Bunch would contribute to throughout his career. Another decent joke story in her issue is the first published fiction by Piers Anthony, "Possible to Rue," involving a very odd sort of comeuppance to a parental fib or two. (Goldsmith Lalli was the first or practically the first to publish as professional fiction writers Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas Disch, Keith Laumer, Sonya Dorman, Ted White and Kate Wilhelm, along with Anthony and a number of others...Ben Bova's first work in sf magazines was a series of essays in her Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction). 
includes "The Casket Demon"

 F&SF certainly takes the lead in contrasting the non-fiction features between the two issues; in the Fantastic, the Norman Lobsenz "editorial" is a bit meatier than his usual facile essay, though mostly in being about some of the more interesting advances in information and space technology newly arrived or on the horizon, rather than in being all that deep; the letter column is pleasant enough, and the (also often shallow) book reviewer S. E. Cotts has a rather good assessment of two horror anthologies, one mediocre, from Norman Bates-inspiration and enterprising film fan Calvin Thomas Beck and a brilliant one edited by soon-tragic, brilliant fiction and script writer (and former F&SF film columnist) Charles Beaumont (Jeff Segal has reviewed the latter here...and probably would review the latter if it was to hand). However, the Erle Stanley Gardner "introduction" letter to his reprinted story is a nice touch, and Fantastic, unlike F&SF, does feature illustration for most of its text items. The F&SF editorial, the often long headnotes to the stories, and the bulk of the book reviews are by editor Davidson, default choice for my favorite writer of any kind, when one must be named (one review is by the then just beginning to become notorious fan, and husband of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Walter Breen, whose review of a Jung text somewhat creepily touches on children as sexual archetypes). The magazine had two science columns in the early '60s, with Isaac Asimov's long-running essay series joined for several years by Theodore L. Thomas's two-page essays on a monthly basis, and this issue has one of the occasional letter columns F&SF would run (rather more infrequently since Davidson's years), featuring a number of mildly famous figures in fannish and eventually professional circles, and an essay, one of a short series Davidson would offer, of examinations of sf and fantasy fandom, this one by Wilson Tucker (next month's by Robert Bloch, the third by Terry Carr),  from a time when fandom and geek culture had not yet multiplied to take up significant amounts of space in the world.

 Both issues are filled with notable writers, even if Johnson would publish so regrettably little, and Rohrer fall silent; the other example of a writer with few other credits in fantastic fiction, at least, is the Australian (Mr.) Kit Denton, whose possibly only published short story is also in the F&SF. P. M. Hubbard (a Davidson favorite) and Erle Stanley Gardner, with a "classic" reprint from Argosy All-Story Weekly (part of a series in Goldsmith's magazines), are among those better remembered for their crime fiction--Goldsmith presumably offered the classics in part to help the budget woes at her magazines, which were allowed a base rate of pay of 1c/word for their fiction and other content during her years at Ziff-Davis; the reprints would get big names into the issues and presumably could be purchased at bargain reprint rates, to allow her, as she did, to offer a higher pay rate to such favorites of hers as Fritz Leiber (F&SF has also never been the best-paying magazine in the fantastic-fiction field, though currently it's on par with most of its fellow-travelers). F&SF's Ron Goulart (his first professional publication a decade+ previous F&SF reprint of some sfnal humor from the UC Berkeley campus magazine Pelican) was just starting to get serious about his often satirical crime fiction along with his established career in fantastic fiction, and would soon become almost as much a speculative fiction/crime fiction "amphibian" as Davidson himself; his story here seems at first Just Another Comic Inferno story, but it does have a bit of Kafkaesque intensity that the more generic examples usually lacked. Evelyn E. Smith, Dean McLaughlin and Laurence Janifer (with a clever-enough joke-story) had all established themselves as at least capable talents in the fields, and while Doris Pitkin Buck was better known for her light verse in the magazine, her fiction contribution wasn't too much more unusual than Harry Harrison's amusing poem about time travel paradoxes. I still need to read the long cover story by Philip Jose Farmer (himself a writer not averse to challenging fiction at times) in the Fantastic and several of the shorts in the F&SF, but I'm glad I did dip into these for this week's column...which will be filled out soon!
the UK hardcover featuring the Johnson

 For more of this week's fiction (and some nf) you should know about, please see Patti Abbott's blog; next week I'll be hosting the links, barring the flood.
Richard Powers cover for the middling anthology from the editor/publisher
of Castle of Frankenstein, and Robert Bloch's model, in part, for
Norman Bates, in the novel Psycho...from Ballantine's early '60s horror series...


















































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Saturday, April 2, 2016

Magazine issue review: SCIENCE FICTION STORIES, May 1959

from the FictionMags list, 6 January 2004:

(THE ORIGINAL) SCIENCE FICTION STORIES, May 1959, V. 10 #2. 10 
issues/year (monthly without April or June issues), digest. 132pp 
including covers; 35c ($3/yr). Robert A. W. Lowndes, editor; 
published by Columbia Publications.

Cover features two interior illustrations by Ed Emshwiller and what 
looks like a spot illo of a rocket, uncredited. Cover is in three 
colors, white, purple, and yellow. Readers are asked within if they 
like this new (and presumably economical) sort of cover.

6 * Robert Silverberg * There's No Place Like Space * ss (illus. 
Wallace Wood)(cover has it with exclamation point; title on text, in 
contents and in running heads do not)
24 * Basil Wells * Utility Girl * ss (illus. Ed Emshwiller)
42 * Kate Wilhelm * Android, Kill for Me! * ss (illus. Ed Emshwiller)
49 * Kit Reed * Here, Kitty Kitty * ss
57 * A. L. Caramine * Weapon Master * ss
63 * (Silverberg as) Calvin M. Knox * Readin' and Writhin' * book reviews:
Algis Budrys MAN OF EARTH (Ballantine)
Donald Wollheim, ed MEN ON THE MOON/Murray Leinster CITY ON 
THE MOON (Ace)
C. L. Moore DOOMSDAY MORNING (Doubleday)
Lester del Rey ROBOTS AND CHANGELINGS (Ballantine)
Wilmar H. Shiras CHILDREN OF THE ATOM (Avon)
Leo Margulies, ed. THREE TIMES INFINITY (Fawcett Gold Medal)
69 * Ward Moore and Robert Bradford * CADUCEUS WILD, Conclusion of 
Four Parts * sr (illus. Uncredited, probably reprinted from earlier 
issue)
117 * R. A. W. Lowndes and others * The Last Word and the Reckoning 
* combined editorial, reader poll, and letter column, including 
letters from:
118 * F. M. Busby
119 * Murray King
121 * Alma Hill
124 * J. Martin Graetsz

The three-color cover, with three small illustrations not 
reproducing all that well under those circumstances, probably didn't 
help sales; clearly one gets the sense that Lowndes was being 
instructed not only to economize but to WW Scott-up his magazines, 
at this point..."Eight Crewmen and One UTILITY GIRL," the cover 
teases, and one doubts that "Android, Kill for Me!" was KW's first 
choice of title. (I'll also remind the assembled of James Blish's 
little poke at the magazine's title, labelling SFS as if it was a 
neighborhood bar...not just McGinty's, but the Original McGinty's.)

"There's No Place Like Space" (which sounds like it should be the 
label on an early acetate by the Sun Ra Arkestra) is a smooth, minor 
effort with a reasonably deft handling of the breast-fetish would-be 
eroticism of its story of the colony-planet technician forced by 
those darn bureaucrats into taking a vacation in NYC. Much as Knox 
will later in the issue (justly) complain about MAN OF EARTH, this 
could pretty easily be rewritten to describe the wearying effect of 
NYC's crowding and groupthink in the 1950s as much as the 2650s 
(when $7500--whose dollars not quite specified--is a fine wage), and 
how much more fine a house in Woodstock is. Wood's illustrations 
are very recognizably Woodish, and cartoonishly handsome for it (one 
may make obvious puns); the erotism of this late issue of the 
magazine definitely suggests to me the influence of both MANHUNT and 
VENTURE, going beyond even the somewhat more submerged yearning of 
BEYOND and the other '50s magazines.

"Utility Girl" (Irish ballad, or neo-retro recording by the Roches, 
this one) betrays rather more debilitatingly hidebound thought, or 
lack of it ("It was too bad [Utility Girl] Ellson was a woman. A man 
could be groomed to take [first mate] Alpergen's place. [...] But a 
woman--no!"). However, I like the phrase, "the needle gun was 
sewing" a lot. Wells, to judge by his ISFDb entries, contributed 
most often in the '40s to PLANET and in the '60s to Pohl's magazines 
(and to IF when not the Lowndes magazines in the '50s), and as late 
as the early '90s to SPACE AND TIME. Emsh's illo is appropriately frantic, if not quite representative.

"Bored Faculty Wife with Android" (as might've been Wilhelm's 
working title for this near-vignette) is an early example of KW 
turning women's-magazine-fiction tropes to her own purposes, if only 
just so; a biter-bit plot out of every other contemporaneous episode 
of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS and every issue of either MANHUNT or AHMM, to say nothing of the lesser CF magazines then, and some 
nicely turned phrases...and the creepy fun of the lustful robot, 
made slightly more suburban (and telegraphed by Emsh's utterly 
appropriate illustration, well-rendered and the Kind Men Like). A 
bit of genuine melancholy seeps through in that the protag is a 
writer caught in a loveless marriage, I gather not a completely 
alien situation to the author at the time.

The Reed story is cute, almost too cute, and not as redeemed as are 
most of her later humorous stories by what could be called 
Bradburyan detail (and usually less romantic than RB), and it posits 
that no one was getting their cats fixed in 1959. True, that? Fun 
enough.

A. L. Caramine...I knew I'd come across that by-line before, and 
ISFDb reinformed me that it was on a guest editorial in one of Barry's issues of FANTASTIC, which leads me to suspect [incorrectly, as it turned out] that this one is also Robert Silverberg  sorry if no, Mr. S.  A twist ending hard not to see coming, although a point for giving the swindler a slightly more amusingly corrupt reason than usual, even if also a point or two off for his relentless "g"-dropping from gerunds and the utter foolishness of his marks.

I have not yet read the synopsis and conclusion of the serial, 

though it seems to be in the GALAXY tradition, this time with MDs in 
charge of society and just waiting to fall on their own scalpels.  
Apparently, this one may not've gotten a US book publication, at 
least, till a 1978 Pinnacle paperback, so clearly this was not a 
robust moneymaker for Moore nor Bradford; I don't know if the latter 
has done anything else notable in sf or otherwise. Since I like 
Moore, I'll probably read it soonish, and may seek out the Pinnacle edition [or the Armchair reprint pictured above] and hope it isn't too bad a job of republishing.

The most interesting assertion, to me, in Knox's reviews is Silverberg's 
crediting FURY primarily to C. L. Moore. Was there some confusion at that time that has since been resolved toward crediting it mostly or entirely to Kuttner? [Silverberg soon told me he doesn't know why he was so certain of this, though he still suspects Fury was mostly Moore's work.] I idly wonder if Margulies actually edited THREE TIMES INFINITY (since it's comprised of Brackett and Bradbury's "Lorelai of the Red Mist," Sturgeon's "The Golden Helix," and Heinlein's "Destination Moon," it presumably wouldn't take anyone too long to assemble), and am pleased to be pointed toward our much-missed-here Frank Robinson's "The Reluctant Heroes" as the best story in the Wollheim antho. I also wonder how the various reviewers (including Damon Knight) felt about that "Readin' and Writhin'" column-title, and if Silverberg might now be the most frequent column-holder in sf-magazines, with however many of these he did, "The Spectroscope" book reviews in AMAZING in the '60s, the 
"Opinion" columns in AMAZING and ASIMOV'S later, "The Observatory" in 
the last AMAZING inpulpation so far, and possibly others I'm overlooking ...not that Damon Knight wasn't pretty widely-dispersed in this regard, as well...

The ads are a reasonably insane bunch; aside from unsurprising house 
ads for DOUBLE ACTION MYSTERY AND DETECTIVE STORIES (the one led off by Wilhelm's "Murderer's Apprentice" and detailed in the FM Index), and FUTURE SCIENCE FICTION, there are the usual pulp-holdover RUPTURED? ads, offers of "spot-reducing" anti-flab handheld vibrators, BOYS! GIRLS! SPECIAL OFFER TO ZOOM YOUR POPULARITY! through the wonders of personalized stationery, with a menu of suggested self-inflicted nicknames you, too, could have included on your letterhead..."Spook" or "Goldbrick Harry" for boys, "Hep Cat" or "Slick Chick" for the XX chromosome crowd, hoo doggie. Also, an offer for unisex hooded sweatshirts emblazoned "U. S. Drinking Team" just to remind us College Humor was already very much with us by 1959. John Boston's much-beloved "You Traveled Through Time for FORBIDDEN LOVE..." SFBC ad would actually be an improvement, on balance...but perhaps not if it nudged the ILLUSTRATED SEX FACTS ad out. For a magazine printed by the reasonably-rated folk in Holyoke, there's unusually dark ink on the relatively large-charactered, uncrowded pages. I wonder how Lowndes might've done with a budget...but, we can wonder this about 
so many editors, eh?

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Friday, April 1, 2016

FFM: SHORT STORY INTERNATIONAL, February 1965 edited by Samuel Tankel; THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. MAGAZINE, February 1966 edited by Cylvia Kleinman

image courtesy James Reasoner, who comments here
Another head-to-head comparison of fiction magazine issues, and perhaps not the first pair one might think of despite the mutual interest in espionage fiction: from the FictionMags list, 29 May 2000:

 SHORT STORY INTERNATIONAL February 1965 (Volume 2, Number 4)

Editorial by Samuel Tankel
"The Wallaby Track" by Les Shymansky (Polish-Australian)
"Toward the Unknown Region" by Pira Kanungsattam (Thai)
"The Quiet Island" by Darrell Bates (English-Gibraltaran)
"Brother Ben" by Norma Fay Hamilton (Jamaican)
"The Dark Forest" by Sergei Maximov (USSR-US; translated by Igor Kozak)
"Death" by Rene Marques (Puerto Rico/US; translated by G. R. Coulthard)
"Olga's Revenge" by Jerome Bahr (US)
"A Vacant Bed" by Solveig Christov (Norwegian; translated by Carolyn 
Gelland)
"All Our Yesterdays" by Beb Vuyk (Indonesian)
"The World Is Too Much With Us" by H. E. Bates (English)
Letters column

Published monthly by Short Story International, Inc (copyrighted by 
Universal Printers, Inc). Editor and Publisher: Samuel Tankel. 
Managing Editor: Francesca van der Ling. Interior illustrations by 
John Groth. Cover photograph by Milt Shapiro (for "The Dark
Forest"). 
50c/issue; $5/year. 160 pp; digest.

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. MAGAZINE February 1966 (Volume 1, Number 1)

Editorial by Leo Margulies
"The Howling Teenagers Affair" by "Robert Hart Davis" (Dennis Lynds)
"Robert Vaughn (Napolean Solo)" by Sigmund Smallman
"The Proposal" by James Holding
"David McCallum (Ilya Kuryakin)" by Peter Oppenheim
"One Gun, One Bullet" by Thomas Calvert McClary
"'But You Don't Know Me!'" by Steve April
"The Peepshow Murder" by John Jakes
"Leo G. Carroll (Mr. Waverly)" by Walter H. Springs
"The Big Cat's Claws" by Tom Curry
"The Cardboard Box" by Carolyn Wynne

Published monthly by Leo Margulies Corp (includes house ads for MSMM 
and SHELL SCOTT MYSTERY MAGAZINE). Editorial Director: Cylvia
Kleinman [Margulies]; Publisher: Leo Margulies. H. N. Alden: Associate
Editor. 
Interior illustrations by Hector Castellon. Cover photographs from 
MGM/Arena Productions. 50c/issue; $6/year. 144 pp; digest.

Now, if [FM list-member] Paul [Di Filippo]'s looking for apples and oranges among fiction magazines, these two would seem to fit the bill. Before I read them, I suspected that they would both have at least a modicum of international intrigue fiction (although the latter-day SSIs I'd read when they were new or newish in the late '70s and early '80s only rarely delved into spy fiction, the cover of this first-incarnation issue, with its two men in vaguely Russian uniforms and woman in Red Cross finery, suggested some sort of Iron Curtain action in "The Dark Forest"). I was mostly wrong.

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. MAGAZINE, while briefly bridging the gap 
between the hero pulps and the endless sequelization of the "media" 
books of the '70s onward (as opposed to the rather brief runs of MFU, 
GET SMART!, and other '60s book-series entries), offers as its only remotely 
espionage-oriented fiction, a remarkably unevenly-written novella, 
attributed to one of the "Davis"es (Bill Pronzini and Talmage Powell 
are apparently among those who've used this house name, also used on 
MFU novels in paperback [James Reasoner notes this one was by Dennis Lynds]); word-count-packing redundancy frames 
occasional acutely-written passages, and Napolean Solo is not 
particularly good-looking on one page, handsome on the next. I 
skimmed it after the first few pages; read this way, it's still a 
pretty shambolic affair. Nice, if overly severe, descriptions of the 
Australian desert; Stan Musial is typo'd into Stan Musical.

The rest of the issue's stories are generally-good crime fiction 
straight out of the inventory of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, which probably seemed a little less odd in the contemporaneous SHELL SCOTT MM V1, #1. James Holding's "The Proposal" is not the minor classic that "Second
Talent" is, but a fairly neat insurance-scam story with noirish humor. Thomas 
Calvert McClary's "One Gun, One Bullet" is an excellent "open" crime 
story, in which an upper-level Mafia aide does his damnedest to 
advance himself as paranoia starts to mess over the dons; a Man in a 
Gray Sharkskin Suit. Steve April's story is poorly-constructed but 
engaging enough as it weaves a blackmailing bookkeeper with her 
teenage underprivileged assassin and the butcher at the center of the 
mystery; like several other stories here, it ends immediately with
the arrest of the confessing suspect. John Jakes's "The Peepshow Murders" 
seems like it may have been meant to be a different, longer story, so 
much wordage (at a penny each) is given over to the stupor the 
self-destructive detective-protagonist wallows in, only to too-easily 
shake that about a third of the way in. Tom Curry's is a mediocre 
gimmick-weapon story, but Carolyn Wynne's "The Cardboard Box" reads 
like something that shouldn't've been rejected by HITCHCOCK'S, an 
after-the-worm-turned story that very elegantly lays its cards on the 
table. The three brief actor profiles are most notable for the 
diffidence with which the stars discuss their gigs.

SSI in both incarnations, if this issue is indicative of the first, 
was consistently a source of good fiction, but only occasionally 
excellent or better fiction; a certain NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC-style good 
grey blandness could settle over the magazine at times: "Short
stories bring the world into focus." Although it was also usually good for 
some interesting fantasy (this aspect as much as the international 
good-willism seemed to excite Judith Merril in her writeup for her 
10th YEAR'S BEST annual), as with Les Shymansky's opening story, "The 
Wallaby Track" (reprinted here from Shymansky's collection ESCAPE TO 
THE TROPICS). Aboriginal fantasy in the manner of THE LAST WAVE,
only with less invested in the "white" characters. "Toward the Unknown 
Region" is a kind of personal alternate history rumination, a what-if 
from the point of view of a young man wrestling with guilt for being 
expatriated for his education who learns of the hardships of his 
family back home (reprinted from the New Zealander little magazine 
LANDFALL). "The Quiet Island," the longest story in the issue and
the one reprinted from the least obscure source (an issue of the previous 
year's SATURDAY EVENING POST), was perhaps too-perfect-for-SSI a story 
to pass over--occurring as it does upon a fictional? remote island 
somewhere off the UK? coast populated by peaceful, rulebound but more 
or less anarchist folk of multicultural ancestries, and what they do 
in the face of a volcanic flow that comes to reshape their homeland.  
Darrell Bates is in no hurry with this story, which strategy begins
to pay off after a page or so (I wonder how many SEP readers were so 
patient?). "Brother Ben" (from PUBLIC OPINION, perhaps a Jamaican 
magazine of that name, after appearance in FLAMINGO magazine) is a 
fine dialect tale of love lost to overwhelming religious faith; "The 
Dark Forest" (from Maximov's collection BLUE SILENCE) turns out to be 
a brutal, though justifiably so, WW2 tale of Russian partisans coping 
with the requirements of war vs. humanity. Rene Marques, who would 
have stories in the later issues as well, has a good minor tale of a 
man who overcomes his omniphobic paralysis in the face of political 
repression, perhaps in Puerto Rico but even more likely in one of the 
many even less fortunate Hispanophonic lands of the Americas (from
the SAN JUAN REVIEW). "Olga's Revenge" is the kind of thing Garrison 
Keillor would later make his career of, mildly serious tales of 
everyday lives among the Norwegian-American community leavened with 
homespun wit; reprinted from Bahr's WISCONSIN TALES, it plays a neat 
enough turn on most cuckoldry fiction by having the younger, more 
attractive wife the vain, aggrieved party. Solveig Christov's "A 
Vacant Bed" is perhaps the most impressive of the very short stories 
in this issue, a sort of turning inside-out of "The Dark Forest" in 
which the apparently noble avenger/rescuer is revealed to be a coward 
of the first water (from SCANDINAVIAN-AMERICAN REVIEW). This is 
followed immediately by "All Our Yesterdays": another hospital-based 
story, this one set in Indonesia in ca. 1960, with flashbacks to the 
atrocities of the Japanese occupation, which somewhat eerily presage 
the events in Indonesia simultaneous with this issue's release (from 
THE LITERARY REVIEW for Winter 1961). "The World Is Too Much With Us" 
(from THE GOLDEN ORIOLE, a collection of Bates's work) rounds out the 
issue amiably, a story of a man's wooing away from a chicken as the 
sole object of his affection by a widow. Perhaps not the kind of 
story that would've appeared in the SATEVEPOST.  

 For more of today's books, as opposed to magazine reviews that are millennial, please see Patti Abbott's blog...
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