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Amazing Stories, August 1964: A Retro-Review

Amazing Stories, August 1964: A Retro-Review

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Amazing Stories August 1964Here’s another of Cele Goldsmith’s issues of Amazing, though by this time she had married, and was Cele Lalli. Of particular interest this time around is an obscure Ursula K. LeGuin story.  I notice as well a different font for the title – I liked it. Not sure when it changed.

This time the cover is by Richard McKenna. At first I thought it might be the author of the Nebula winning story “The Secret Place” as well as “Casey Agonistes” and the bestselling non-SF novel The Sand Pebbles (for which last I have seen it suggested he did the original cover). This is credited to him in the ISFDB, actually, and it’s creditable if not brilliant, a scene at a restaurant on the Moon, with aliens – vaguely reminiscent, perhaps, of David Hardy.

However, further investigation (with the help of ace bibliographer Phil Stephenson-Payne) reveals several further covers from mid-60s SF magazines, mostly Galaxy and If, credited to R. McKenna. These covers bear some resemblance in style to this cover, and those that are signed are signed RMcK, much as with this painting. The latest of these other covers dates to 1968, while Richard McKenna of The Sand Pebbles died in 1964. So it seems most likely that another Richard McKenna worked as an illustrator for a while in the mid-60s.

The editorial, unsigned this time (other examples I’ve seen were signed by Norman Lobsenz, the Editorial Director) is about continental drift, which was just beginning to gain traction as a believable theory. There is no science article, but Sam Moskowitz contributes an SF Profile on Mort Weisinger, focusing on his early career as an SF fan, fanzine producer, and occasional writer, before giving him a bit more credit for Superman than seems fair to Siegel and Shuster.

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Heroic Fiction Quarterly 15

Heroic Fiction Quarterly 15

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logoOne of an editor’s greatest pleasures is coming upon a fine story, so Adrian Simmons, David Farney, and William Ledbetter must have felt pretty delighted when they came upon the most recent batch of fiction they’ve published in Heroic Fiction Quarterly.

I’m sad to say that I’m more familiar with Heroic Fiction Quarterly e-zine in theory rather than in practice. I’ve heard good things about it for some time and I’ve read a few tales now and then, but it’s been years since I sat down for a visit. I’ve tried two of the stories in the most recent issue, “Dusts of War” by Ben Godby and “Kingdom of Graves” by David Charlton and was tremendously impressed. This is stirring, polished adventure fiction and needs to be seen by more readers. I’m looking forward to finding out what the rest of the issue holds. I’m looking forward to seeing what PREVIOUS issues hold.

Just prior to joining the Black Gate staff, I was managing the Flashing Swords e-zine. I selected and edited the tales for the first six issues. It was a small market with a small budget, and as might be expected, some of what I pulled from the submissions pile were diamonds in the rough, work from promising amateurs. It was sort of a “market with training wheels”: a place where burgeoning writers could hone their craft and start their careers. But a lot of the stories proved very fine indeed, better than such a small market had any right to be, and I can recall my frustration that more attention wasn’t being paid to them, as well as the frustration when the wrong sort of attention was paid — a reviewer tearing apart a first-time writer’s first published story with the same claws that would be used on a veteran writer in a pro market, or a fine writer’s work being dismissed by something as foolish as the old saw “first person stories have no tension because you know the narrator will survive.”

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Kirkus Looks at Astounding Science Fiction

Kirkus Looks at Astounding Science Fiction

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Astounding Science Fiction May 1938Andrew Liptak at Kirkus Reviews has posted a nice retrospective of one of the most influential figures in the history of our genre: John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction and the short-lived Unknown magazine. Here’s a snippet:

In 1938, science fiction would run into another personality who would change science fiction again: When 28-year-old author John Campbell Jr. was hired to edit Astounding Magazine. Campbell’s influence in the magazine market is commonly cited as the beginning of the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction, and represented a major shift away from the conventions of Gernsback’s pulp era…

With the release of the July 1939 issue of Astounding, the gloves came off. The issue’s table of contents contained a number of high quality stories from new and regular Astounding writers: “The Black Destroyer,” the first published story by A.E. van Vogt; “Trends,” Isaac Asimov’s first sale to the publication; “City of the Cosmic Rays,” by Nat Schachner; “Lightship, Ho!,” by Nelson S. Bond; “The Moth,” by Ross Rocklynne; Amelia Reynold’s “When the Half-Gods Go;” and “Greater than Gods,” by C.L. Moore.

Subsequent issues of Astounding featured a regular stable of authors who have become household names: Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard and Isaac Asimov, amongst many others. The magazine had changed the landscape…

The complete article is here. Thanks to John DeNardo at SF Signal for the tip.

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More Bad News for ‘Zines: Reader’s Digest Files For Bankruptcy

More Bad News for ‘Zines: Reader’s Digest Files For Bankruptcy

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READERS-DIGEST March 2013Reader’s Digest, the most widely-purchased magazine in the world, has filed for bankruptcy protection for a second time.

Reader’s Digest was founded in 1922; it is currently published in more than 70 countries, with 49 editions in 21 languages. Not long ago, it had a worldwide circulation of over 10 million copies per month, making it the largest paid circulation magazine on the planet.

The magazine emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, selling off assets to lower its debt — including cooking website Allrecipes.com (sold for $180 million) and sister magazine Every Day With Rachael Ray (for $4.3 million). Its paid circulation fell to 5.5 million at the end of 2012, making it the fifth-biggest consumer magazine by circulation in the U.S., behind two publications from the AARP, Game Informer Magazine, and Better Homes and Gardens.

The magazine filed for Chapter 11 protection in an attempt to cut debt; it is hoping to convert about $465 million of debt into equity held by its creditors. Reader’s Digest has about $1.1 billion in assets and slightly under $1.2 billion in debt, and has arranged roughly $105 million to keep it afloat during bankruptcy proceedings.

The news follows a lengthy obituary list for magazines in 2012, including the 80-year old Newsweek, which published its last print issue in December, music magazine Spin, Nintendo Power, Whole Living, American Artist, and many others. Fantasy fans lost the print version of the excellent New York Review of Science Fiction in 2012, which converted to digital format last spring.

Amazing Stories, January 1963: A Retro-Review

Amazing Stories, January 1963: A Retro-Review

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amazing stories January 1963This issue was published almost exactly 50 years ago. This was well into Cele Goldsmith’s tenure. Goldsmith is regarded now as one of the great magazine editors in our field’s history, for what she did with Amazing and Fantastic from December 1958 through June 1965.

I immediately noticed the subtitle: “Fact and Science Fiction.” This appeared with the October 1960 issue and lasted through Goldsmith’s tenure (she was Cele Lalli by the end). 1960 was also the year Astounding Science Fiction became (starting with the February issue) Analog Science Fact and Fiction. Amazing may have been following Analog’s lead, or both may have been reacting to the Space Race, and the increased U.S. emphasis on science education.

Goldsmith/Lalli left the magazine when Ziff-Davis, her employers, sold it – she stayed on with Ziff-Davis and became a very successful editor with Modern Bride.

The cover is by Lloyd Birmingham, an unfamiliar name to me. I didn’t like it very much. As John Boston puts it: “an attempt at pompous pageantry that just looks silly.” It illustrates the lead story, “Cerebrum,” by Albert Teichner.

Interiors are by Birmingham, Leo Morey, George Schelling, and the great Virgil Finlay. There are a couple of inhouse ads, a Classified section, and two full page ads, one for the Rosicruans, and one for the 1963 Stereo/Hi-Fi Directory.

The Fact content is represented by Ben Bova’s article, “Progress Report: Life Forms in Meteorites,” the subject of which seems clear enough, though the article actually discusses the discovery of chemicals possibly related to life in meteorites, as well as where meteorites come from.

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The Rise of the Short Story: The New York Times on the New Era of Short Fiction

The Rise of the Short Story: The New York Times on the New Era of Short Fiction

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The New York Times logoInteresting post on the success of short stories in the digital marketplace at today’s New York Times:

The Internet may be disrupting much of the book industry, but for short-story writers it has been a good thing. Story collections, an often underappreciated literary cousin of novels, are experiencing a resurgence, driven by a proliferation of digital options that offer not only new creative opportunities but exposure and revenue as well.

Already, 2013 has yielded an unusually rich crop of short-story collections, including George Saunders’s Tenth of December, which arrived in January with a media splash normally reserved for Hollywood movies and moved quickly onto the best-seller lists…

“It is the culmination of a trend we have seen building for five years,” said Cal Morgan, the editorial director of Harper Perennial Originals, who until last year ran a blog called Fifty-Two Stories, devoted to short fiction. “The Internet has made people a lot more open to reading story forms that are different from the novel, and you see a generation of writers very engaged in experimentation.”

The article was written by Leslie Kaufman; the complete text is here.

Amazing Stuff Where There’s a Will

Amazing Stuff Where There’s a Will

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Amazing Stories August 2012Here’s some Amazing news. Just think what the Golden Agers who wrote for this magazine back in the 1940s might wonder about an online pulp magazine?

Actually, one of them, Ray Bradbury, considered the Internet a “waste of time.” I guess his problem was he never spent any time on the Internet.

We don’t have any of Shakespeare’s plays that he wrote in his actual hand, but we do have the plays as transcribed by members of his acting troupe. These days, it wouldn’t be profitable to have an Amazing Stories magazine if it weren’t for the Internet. Even Uncle Ray would be down with that, wouldn’t you think?

Apex Magazine 49Speaking of the Bard and online magazines, I had two “minor” fields of study for my English M.A. (if you must know, or care, the major field was Rhetoric), which were science fiction and Shakespeare.

When I say that, some people think there’s a discipline called “Science Fiction and Shakespeare” and maybe there should be, as certainly the Elizabethan fantasist has inspired many a modern one.

Case in point is the latest edition of Apex Magazine, which is a Shakespeare-themed issue featuring the work of Kate Elliott, Kat Howard, Sarah Monette, Merrie Haskell and Patricia Wrede.

Did Entertainment Weekly Reveal that Benedict Cumberbatch is Playing Khan?

Did Entertainment Weekly Reveal that Benedict Cumberbatch is Playing Khan?

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Entertainment Weekly Star TrekIn a sharp-eyed bit of investigative reporting, Tor.com has reproduced screenshots from the Entertainment Weekly Back Issues store that name the villain in the upcoming J.J. Abrams film Star Trek Into Darkness as Khan.

As we reported back in December, speculation has been rampant around just whom Benedict Cumberbatch will be playing in the new film. IMDB originally listed his character as Gary Mitchell, the Enterprise officer who becomes an all-powerful psychic loonie in one of the show’s earliest and best episodes, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Rumors that he was playing Khan, the genetically-engineered supervillain originally portrayed by Ricardo Montalban in the episode “Space Seed” and the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, eventually led the otherwise tight-lipped Cumberbatch to deny it.

As shown by Tor.com however, screen captures for the February 15 cover-dated issue of Entertainment Weekly allow you to select one of two covers, the “Spock & Kirk” cover, or the “Kirk & Khan” version.

EW hastily deleted the notations, and the latest version of the page gives no such identifiers.

In its current cast list, IMBD now lists Cumberbatch as playing “Khan (rumored),” and Alice Eve as playing Dr. Carol Marcus, Kirk’s ex-flame and baby mama from Star Trek II.

The latest Super Bowl TV trailer for the film has been posted on YouTube. Star Trek Into Darkness is directed by J. J. Abrams, and is set for release on May 17, 2013. As we reported in January, Abrams was also selected as the director for the next Star Wars film.

Meanwhile, there’s no truth to the rumor floating in fan circles that J.J. Abrams will also be tapped as the new pope.

Rue Morgue Magazine’s 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See

Rue Morgue Magazine’s 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See

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Rue morgues magazine's 200 alternative horror filmsI had a clever title in mind for this post, something about a book you need to see, but the name of the book was so long nothing else would fit. Rue Morgue Magazine’s 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See. See what I mean? Damn near had to start a new paragraph just to say it again.

200 Flicks (which we’ll be calling it going forward) is a marvelous little treasure I found on the B&N magazine rack while digging around for the latest issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I’m vaguely aware of Rue Morgue magazine (and should probably be moreso, granted), but that wasn’t what caught my eye. No, it was the title, and the fact that this perfect bound “magazine” is an impressive 162 pages.

I flipped through it, and was sold instantly. This is the kind of invaluable reference work I’ll be drawing on for years. It’s packed to the brim with text, with plenty of color stills and crisp reproductions of 200 movie posters and DVD covers. The heart of the book is the carefully-selected collection of well written and informative reviews of overlooked horror films.

A quick check showed many of my favorites are here, including a guilty pleasure or two: Session 9, Let the Right One In, Psycho II, Something Wicked This Way Comes — and plenty more that I’m not familiar with. And isn’t the joy of discovery the true reason you lay your money down for this kind of thing?

The entries are organized alpahbetically, but it’s really something you browse rather than read cover-to-cover. It has numerous lists: 10 Made for TV Terrors You Need to See, 10 Foreign Zombie Films You Need to See, plus lists covering vampire flicks, foreign zombie movies, family fright fests, gore films, slashers, and many more. There are also interviews with directors and film personalities like Guillermo del Toro, Tobe Hooper, Roger Corman, Fred Dekker, Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon, and others.

The book is so inexpensive (a criminally low $9.99, or $4.99 for the digital version) and so packed with content that the only way it can possibly be a money-making venture is if it’s primarily recycled material from Rue Morgue magazine. Which is fine by me — if the magazine is a fraction as interesting and entertaining, I’ll be getting a subscription.

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Vintage Treasures: Creatures From Beyond, edited by Terry Carr

Vintage Treasures: Creatures From Beyond, edited by Terry Carr

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Creatures from Beyond-smallIt shouldn’t be a surprise that I didn’t discover science fiction and fantasy through novels — not really. I discovered it by reading short stories in Junior High, and especially the enticing anthologies on display every week in the library at St. Francis School in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I didn’t really know what science fiction was; but if it had monsters on the cover, I was all over it.

The first anthology I can recall reading was Creatures From Beyond, a marvelous monster-fest if ever there was one. When I tracked it down again decades later, I was delighted to discover the editor was none other than Terry Carr, the legendary editor whose Best Science Fiction of the Year and Fantasy Annual paperbacks I read avidly all through high school — and who pulled William Gibson’s Neuromancer out of the slush pile at Ace Books.

I think the reason I still remember it so well after all these years is that, unlike most of the collections I checked out of the library, it wasn’t a kid’s book. It’s a genuine SF anthology, with short stories from Henry Kuttner, Clifford D. Simak & Carl Jacobi, Theodore Sturgeon, Donald A. Wollheim, Brian W. Aldiss, Robert Silverberg, and other top-flight authors.

Carr reasoned — correctly — that there was no better source for action-filled monster tales than pulp science fiction magazines and he mined them heavily to generate Creatures From Beyond. The fiction is drawn from Amazing Stories, Astonishing, Unknown, Other Worlds, Comet, Thrilling Wonder, Future, and a smattering of anthologies.

Of course, the other reason I remember it is Eric Frank Russell’s brilliant novelette “Dear Devil,” the tale of a handful of children who survive a nuclear apocalypse on Earth… and the curious (and hideous) explorer from Mars who helps put them back on track towards a new and better civilization. Rejected by all the major SF magazines of the time, it landed at Ray Palmer’s fledgling Other Worlds, where it almost single-handedly put the magazine on the map — and instantly made a name for the young editor who pulled it from the slush, 26-year-old Bea Mahaffey, who’d been thrust the reins of the magazine when Palmer was incapacitated in an accident.

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