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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: The 1973 Forry Award: C. L. Moore

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: The 1973 Forry Award: C. L. Moore

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Astounding Science Fiction Judgment Night August 1943-small

Astounding Science Fiction August 1943,
containing “Judgment Night” by C.L. Moore

The Los Angeles Science Fiction Society (LASFS) began presenting the Forry Award in 1966 for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction. The first award went to Ray Bradbury, who, besides his towering achievements in SF, was a prominent member of LASFS. Over the years, the list of Forry Award winners is a curious mix of the obvious (Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Fritz Leiber, Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, A. E. Van Vogt, Ursula K. Le Guin, Lois McMaster Bujold, etc.), with those whose accomplishments are not as writers but still seem significant (Mike Glyer, Chuck Jones, Fred Patten, Ray Harryhausen), and with those whose importance I have probably unforgivably missed (Charles Lee Jackson II, Len Moffat, John de Chancie.)

The 2002 award went to the award’s namesake, Forrest J. Ackerman. Here I will confess a personal bias… If awards like the Campbell and the Tiptree are going to have their names changed, can the Forry Award retain its name for long? Some of my bias is undoubtedly unfair: I think Ackerman’s taste in science fiction was appalling. But that’s just “taste”, and surely he can be forgiven that, and his enthusiasm for the type of SF he loved was no doubt real. But his ethics as an agent, for one, were distressing. But much more seriously, there are credible accusations of sexual harassment and abuse of women fans, and indeed very young women, at least as young as 13. I can’t but feel icky about the worship some express towards him, and while I’m opposed to changing the name of the Tiptree Award, and ambivalent about changing the names of the Campbell Awards, it seems to me that the Forry Award (justified as it may be by Ackerman’s strong association with LASFS) is right out.

But that doesn’t mean the Forry Award winners (Ackerman himself excepted) should be thrown out with the bathwater. And the 1973 winner, C. L. Moore, qualifies as one of the “obviously worthy” winners.

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Explorers, Mathematicians, and Airwalkers: November/December Print SF Magazines

Explorers, Mathematicians, and Airwalkers: November/December Print SF Magazines

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Analog Science Ficion and Fact November December 2019-small Asimov's Science Ficion November December 2019-small The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction November December 2019-small

Covers by Tuomas Korpi, Donato Giancola, and Bob Eggleton

The end-of-year crop of print magazines contains some very promising fiction from Michael Swanwick, James Morrow, James Patrick Kelly, Benjamin Rosenbaum, M. Rickert, Jerry Oltion, Mark W. Tiedemann, Jay O’Connell, Allen M. Steele, R. Garcia y Robertson, Harry Turtledove, James Gunn, and many others — including Black Gate‘s new short fiction reviewer, James Van Pelt. But I think my favorite piece this month was Sheila Williams’ editorial, “A Sadder and Wiser Woman,” in which she addresses the loss of two women, Janet Jeppson Asimov and Carol Emshwiller, who had long been associated with Asimov’s Science Fiction. Here she reminisces about her friendship with Emshwiller.

I was a high-school student when I first encountered Carol Emshwiller’s fiction in the pages of Dangerous Visions. I had to reread “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” a couple of times before I had the slightest idea of what was going one. I became friends with Carol after I moved to New York City, and in 1991 she convinced my husband and I to accompany her on a walking tour of England’s Lake District….

Carol was bemused to “break in” to Asimov’s in January 2006. Her first story for us was “World of No Return.” Over the next seven years we published twelve of her inventive and often disturbing tales. One short story, “The Lovely Ugly” (August 2010), tied for first place in our annual Readers’ Award Poll. The last tale, “Riding Red Ted and Breathing Fire,” appeared in our April/May 2012 issue. Some of my other favorites included “Master of the Road to Nowhere” (March 2008) and “The Bird Painter in Time of War” (February 2009). I was sorry that she stopped writing, because I would love to have published a dozen more. Carol was born on April 12, 1921, and died on February 2.

Here’s the editorial issue summaries for Analog, and Asimov’s, and the complete Tables of Contents for all three.

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Silas P. Cornu’s Dry Calculator

Silas P. Cornu’s Dry Calculator

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Henry A. Hering Adventures and Fantasy 1930 cover

Digging through the vast, deep landscape of popular culture is very much like being a working paleontologist. Fragments of bones are everywhere, both on the surface and accessible through spadework. Unbroken samples are rare finds, interesting enough in and of themselves but truly valuable only if put into context.

Also as in paleontology, trying to create a proper history grows exponentially more difficult every time a new site is opened. The older metaphor of an evolutionary tree of life that leads to a single branch labeled Homo is now obsolete; modern practitioners see more of a bush with a tangle of branches whose origins are obscure.

The origin of science fictional ideas matches this entropic march toward disorder. Fans of SF once proudly hailed the writers in the field for coming up with fantastic ideas, notions, gadgets, and futures that could be boasted about to their snobbish mundane friends. Years of historical research into the subject make me wonder sometimes if any sf writer ever had a truly original idea.

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: “The Sonic Flowerfall of Primes,” by Andrew Joron

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: “The Sonic Flowerfall of Primes,” by Andrew Joron

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Cover by Fiona Preston
Cover by Fiona Preston

The Rhysling Awards, named for Robert A. Heinlein’s poet from “The Green Hills of Earth,” were established by the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 1978. Both the association and the award were founded by Suzette Haden Elgin. Each year, awards are given for Short Form poetry and Long Form poetry. The first award for Long Form poetry was won by Gene Wolfe for “The Computer Iterates the Greater Trumps.” In 1980 Andrew Joron won the award for “The Sonic Flowerfall of Primes,” first published in New Worlds #216, September 1979, edited by Charles Platt.

Poetry often does not lend itself to literal interpretation, and Andrew Joron’s “The Sonic Flowerfall of Primes” is an excellent demonstration of that. Even just trying to understand the poem’s title in a literal or concrete manner is setting the reader up for failure since the words, when taken together, seem to lack any cohesion or coherence.

In fact, Joron seems to revel in the ambiguity of the title and the poem itself, which is narrated by unidentified beings which might be aliens, possibly some form of fauna, or an artificial intelligence, although the narrator does seem to identify variations of gender.  The poem, which has numerous stanzas, begins by painting a picture, vague though it may be, of the world in which it takes place.  This is followed by lyrical language which incorporates imagery of music as two lovers meet, again, ambiguous as to their identities.

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Rich Horton on Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl, and L. Sprague de Camp

Rich Horton on Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl, and L. Sprague de Camp

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Worlds of If May 1963-small Turn Left at Thursday-small The Continent Makers-small

Cover art by John Pederson, Jr., Richard Powers, and Bob Pepper

I know a lot of writers, and one of the reasons I hang out on Facebook is to find out what the heck they’re all up to. For example, this morning Rich Horton left this brief but intriguing update:

For the third day in a row, I have posted a Birthday Review compendium of reviews of older short fiction from an SFWA Grand Master. In this case, it’s for L. Sprague de Camp.

I checked out his blog Strange at Ecbatan, and sure enough, Rich has had a busy week. It started Monday:

Here’s my first Birthday Review is a while. (I’ve used up most of the birthdays!) This is a pretty significant one — Poul Anderson. He’d have been 96 today. This is a collection of reviews of magazine fiction (with one very late anthology story), including two serializations of a couple of his lesser known novels. And most of the stories here are not that well known either.

In a lengthy post, Rich reviewed 16 Anderson pieces from Super Science Stories, Worlds Beyond, Planet Stories, Space Science Fiction, Science Fiction Adventures, Cosmos, Galaxy, and many more. Here’s his thoughts on Anderson’s cover story for the May 1963 issue of Worlds of If (above left).

“Turning Point” is a neat little story. Kind of Cargo Cult in reverse. Humans come to an isolated alien planet, where the people apparently live primitive lives. But it turns out they are incredible geniuses, who simply never had the spur to develop technology. Once they see human tech, all bets are off.

Read Rich’s complete tribute to Poul Anderson here. Next up was the centenary of Frederik Pohl’s birth, which Rich celebrated with another lengthy review survey yesterday.

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Galaxy Science Fiction, September 1954: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, September 1954: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction September 1954-small

Art by Ed Emshwiller

I find the cover of the September, 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction a bit risque for Ed Emshwiller (a piece titled “Robots Repaired While U Wait”). Editor H. L. Gold produced a magazine that you wouldn’t have to hide from people, unlike other fiction offerings that had much more salacious artwork (please don’t attach any to this article, John). But you may have to keep this issue face-down around coworkers and family.

“The Man Who Was Six” by F. L. Wallace — Dan Merrol doesn’t know who he is anymore. Ostensibly, he’s Dan Merrol, but his body is unrecognizable, even to himself. After a horrific accident, doctors used an amalgamation of human donors to heal Dan’s broken body. With legs of different lengths, arms of varying bulk, and multi-colored hair, Dan’s become a laughable caricature of humanity. But it’s not just his body; his damaged brain was also rebuilt using slivers of other brains, giving him memories of lives he never lived. He wants to return to a normal life as a pilot and try to resume his marriage, if his wife could possibly still love the creature he’s become.

I like how Wallace examines Dan’s predicament. The initial confusion, the stages of grief in dealing with who and what he’s become. It maintains a somber tone but allows for lighter moments.

“A Start in Life” by Arthur Sellings — Em and Jay are robots raising two unrelated six-year-old children (a boy and a girl). Their world is confined, and there are no other humans to interact with. The children begin asking more questions about their world, and Em is hesitant to share anything new. The truth will come out eventually, but is this the right time, she wonders?

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Terror, Existential Dread, and Surprised Laughter: A Review of Spectral Realms #11

Terror, Existential Dread, and Surprised Laughter: A Review of Spectral Realms #11

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Spectral Realms 11-small

Cover by Daniel V. Sauer

Spectral Realms magazine is a square-bound journal of weird poetry, reviews, and articles launched in 2014 and published twice yearly by S. T. Joshi — the field’s foremost scholar, writer, advocate, and critic.  If ever there was a man who should need no introduction, Mr. Joshi is he — 300+ books to date and counting. An avowed rationalist, rapier-witted satirist (in the savage tradition of Bierce, Twain, and Mencken), and sometime crafter of his own macabre tales, S. T. Joshi bestrides the entirety of weird fiction like a colossus. His error-corrected drafts of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Arthur Machen, George Sterling, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, et. al. — produced through an exhaustive and meticulous examination of extant hand-written copy, typescripts, and published versions — serve as the final word on these respective writers’ original aesthetic intentions and lasting literary legacy. To those who know, the words “texts by S. T. Joshi” prominently displayed on a book’s cover assure the discriminating reader that he or she is perusing an author’s truest, error-corrected, “best” published version of any given work.

So it is no small matter when a man of S. T. Joshi’s stature and first-rate scholarship decides to launch a new journal dedicated to the poetic expression and criticism of the weird.

Hippocampus Press announced the inaugural issue of Spectral Realms to the reading public thusly. (I quote the passage in its entirety, as it cannot be improved upon — no better introduction and summarizing mission statement can be crafted):

The spectral realms that thou canst see
With eyes veil’d from the world and me.
—- “To a Dreamer,” H. P. Lovecraft

The last few decades have seen a remarkable efflorescence of weird poetry, to such a degree that we can authentically state that a renaissance of the genre is underway. Hippocampus Press has always been committed to this most rarefied mode of expression, and now Spectral Realms, published in Summer and Winter, leads the way.

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Stories That Work: “It Never Snows in Snowtown” by Rebecca Zahabi, and “Dust” by Edward Ashton

Stories That Work: “It Never Snows in Snowtown” by Rebecca Zahabi, and “Dust” by Edward Ashton

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The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction November December 2019-small Curious Fictions Dust-small

F&SF cover art by Bob Eggleton

Ray Bradbury caused the ruckus first with The Martian Chronicles, but I also blame Eric Frank Russell’s Men, Martians and Machines, and Anthony Boucher’s A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. Before those three books, I only read novels — short ones to be sure — like Tom Swift and Tom Corbett and anything that the Weekly Reader Book Club featured in their regular catalogs. After reading Bradbury, Russell and Boucher, short stories hooked me. They drew me so powerfully that when I grew older I believed that maybe I could write some, and for the last thirty-five years, that’s what I’ve been doing.

Here’s the thing, though, the mood, energy and time to write exactly overlaps reading time, so I found that I read much less as an adult than I did when I was younger. Also, my tastes have narrowed. Where I used to read indiscriminately, uncritically, I now am a picky reader. Time seems short, and I hate to waste it on middle-of-the-road writing.

So when I find an outstanding short stories, I point them out. Reading time is precious!

F&SF offered a truly disturbing piece by Rebecca Zahabi in the Nov/Dec 2019 issue. “It Never Snows in Snowtown” starts like a Christmas card as the unnamed narrator decides to find out more of her city’s cultural heritage. Zahabi’s artful language creates a compelling portrait. Snowflakes catch in a child’s clothes “like sugar icing sprinkled on this human cupcake,” and on the city’s lake, “couples danced together, twirling around each other like birds trying to tell their love in flight.”

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray on The Spider

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray on The Spider

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Murray_SpiderdoomLegionEDITED“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

You know, of course, that Will Murray carried on the adventure tales of the Doc Savage – because you read about it here!  Will is also carrying on the adventures of another legendary pulp figure – The Shadow.  So, he’s making another guest post here in the series. Read on for: Secret Origins of the Spider.

I have to confess that writing The Spider is a completely different experience for me than writing the Wild Adventures of Doc Savage, Tarzan, John Carter, or any of the other classic pulp heroes I’ve been privileged to bring back to life in new novels.

With these other pulp heroes, it’s largely a matter of concocting a logical plot and having the heroes go through their customary pieces, although I seem to have quickly become an accidental king of crossovers since I’ve managed to convince the various license holders to permit me to have a few of them collide, such as Doc Savage and The Shadow, Tarzan of the Apes and King Kong. Most recently, the Spider encountered both Jimmy Christopher of Operator #5 magazine fame and G-8, but without his Battle Aces in my first Spider novel, The Doom Legion. So some of their customary paces are not so customary.

When I acquired a license to the Spider a few years ago, I asked the late Joel Frieman of Argosy Communications about a mystery that had vexed me for a long time. Namely, why did Canadian novelist R.T.M. Scott write only the first two Spider novels, and then give way to Norvell W. Page, who worked under the house name of Grant Stockbridge?

Joel knew Popular Publications founder Harry Steeger and got the answer from him.

Watching the phenomenal sales growth of Street & Smith’s Shadow Magazine, he naturally itched to produce something in that emerging category. But Steeger didn’t want to get sued. So he conferred with his attorney and asked, essentially, how do we do something like The Shadow and not risk an expensive lawsuit?

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Steve Scott on John D. MacDonald’s ‘Park Falkner’

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Steve Scott on John D. MacDonald’s ‘Park Falkner’

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MacDonald_BreatheNoMoreEDITED“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Steve Scott runs The Trap of Solid Gold. It’s not just a blog dedicated to my favorite author. It’s THE blog dedicated to the late, great John D. MacDonald. It is absolutely the best place on the web to read about JDM. Period. I was going to do a post on an early, quickly aborted attempt by MacDonald to write a series character – if two stories qualifies as a series. Then I remembered, I had read a post by Steve on one of those stories. Turns out, he’d covered both of them. And his essays were FAR better than anything I could have come up with. So, I got permission from Steve to combine them and run a long post as part of A (Black) Gat in the Hand. Woohoo! Read on about the not-a-private eye, Park Falkner

Story One – “Breathe No More My Lovely”

Long before Travis McGee was even a random thought in the mind of author John D MacDonald, before he had established himself as a first-rate writer of crime fiction, before he had even a full year of life as a published author, MacDonald began experimenting with a “series” character. In two early Doc Savage submissions, “Private War” in December 1946 and “Eight Dozen Agents” in January 1947, he created a hero he called Benton Walters. Having never read either of these stories, I don’t know if Walters was a private eye, a secret agent or a super hero.

According to Ed Hirshberg, he was a “war veteran… working at a humdrum civilian job somewhere in the northeastern United States…” who was disillusioned with his “unexciting” postwar job. Sounds like a great idea for a series. I do know that MacDonald quickly dropped the idea, writing to Babette Rosmond (the editor of Doc Savage):

“Honest to God — I’m never going to start another series. They are limiting and I hate them.”

Sixteen years later Travis McGee was attempting to have a quiet evening a home while Chookie McCall was dancing up a storm in the lounge of The Busted Flush.

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