Black Gate

Back in June, I wrote a short blog entry about one of my favorite Ace Doubles, Tales of Outer Space and Adventures in the Far Future. I took the excuse to talk about one of the field’s true renaissance men, Donald A. Wollheim, who edited both books and launched several of the most enduring SF and fantasy publishing imprints in history.

Wollheim doesn’t get much credit for his amazing accomplishments these days. Which is why I was pleased to see Andrew Liptak at Kirkus dedicate his latest column to Wollheim and one of his greatest creations: the Ace Double. These compact and beautiful treasures occupy a very special place in my library. Here’s a snippet:

In 1952, editor Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Books introduced a format that would prove to be immensely popular, and cemented science-fiction literature’s role in bookstores afterwards…

Ace’s Double Novels were a distinctive part of the science-fiction community throughout the two decades in which they were published. The line helped to launch the novel careers of a number of authors, from Philip K. Dick to Ursula K. Le Guin to Samuel R. Delany, in addition to a number of other popular authors in the field, such as A.E. van Vogt, Margaret St. Clair and Leigh Brackett… the books were an innovative entry in a brand-new publishing world, one that found both considerable staying power and a platform for publishing a high volume of science fiction. The huge number of stories published allowed for something great to happen: Talented authors with interesting stories to tell broke into the field, allowing for their own voices to shape the genre as they continued to find success.

Read the complete article here. We last reported on Liptak when he looked at Astounding Science Fiction in February.

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And so we come to Fritz Leiber, in our continuing exploration of Lester del Rey’s Classic Library of Science Fiction series.

The Best of Fritz Leiber, published in 1974, was the second in the line, following The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum. Unlike Weinbaum and many of the authors who would follow him, Leiber was well known — even a star — to contemporary SF readers in 1974, thanks chiefly to his popular Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books.

Which brings us conveniently to the book’s first problem. Those stories were being published by Ace Books, who had five volumes of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in print by 1970, and the Classic Library of Science Fiction line was owned by Ballantine, which meant The Best of Fritz Leiber couldn’t include any of them. This is sort of like assembling a Best of Robert E. Howard collection that ignores Conan (which Del Rey books did in 2007, with considerable success, now that I think about it.)

Poul Anderson acknowledges this painful lack in his introduction, taking a moment to badmouth sword & sorcery while he’s at it:

It’s too bad that we have no tale of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser here. Not only did that charming pair of rogues… launch the author’s career, they are still going strong, to the joy of everyone who appreciates a rattling good fantasy adventure. But by no means are these stories conventional “sword and sorcery.” The world of Nehwon is made real in wondrously imagined detail… Here Leiber in his way — like the late J.R.R. Tolkien in his, and not vastly different — has done, and is doing, for the heroic fantasy what Robert Louis Stevenson did for the pirate yarn: by originality and sheer writing genius, he revived an ossified genre and started it off on a fresh path.

I could likewise wish that this book held a sample or two of Leiber’s horror stories. In my opinion, which Fritz modestly does not share, Lovecraft and Poe himself never dealt out comparable chills.

In other words, Leiber’s stories (and Tolkien’s) are good, so they can’t really be sword and sorcery… despite the fact that Fritz Leiber is often credited with coining the phrase “sword & sorcery” to describe his most popular work. Poul Anderson. What a doofus.

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This is the fifth volume in Lester Del Rey’s Classics of Science Fiction line I’ve discussed here (starting with The Best of Murray Leinster, The Best of Robert Bloch, The Best of Henry Kuttner, and The Best of C M Kornbluth.) I believe it may also have been the first, since it has the earliest publication date of the titles we’ve examined so far — April 1974 — and also because the cover design for the first printing (see below) was slightly different and a little rougher.

And also because, if you’re going to launch a series dedicated to the very best science fiction and fantasy writers of the century, it makes sense to start with Stanley G. Weinbaum.

This isn’t the first time we’ve covered Weinbaum’s career. The distinguished Ryan Harvey wrote a terrific retrospective three years ago, where he said, in part:

In a way, Weinbaum was science fiction’s equivalent of Robert E. Howard: a hugely talented author who died too young. But Weinbaum’s run was even shorter than Howard’s — a mere year and a half, with twelve stories published during that time. Posthumous work followed, but considering the immense talent that Weinbaum shows in his fiction — starting with his first story! — it is frustrating how little of this gold strike ever got to the surface for readers to mine.

We’re hardly the first fans to champion Weinbaum’s pulp science fiction. H.P. Lovecraft praised him highly, calling him ingenious, and stating that he stood miles above the other pulp SF writers in his ability to create genuinely alien worlds, especially in comparison to Edgar Rice Burroughs and his “inane” stories of “egg-laying Princesses.” And series editor Lester del Rey, in the June 1974 issue of IF magazine, said:

Weinbaum, more than any other writer, helped to take our field out of the doldrums of the early thirties and into the beginnings of modern science fiction.

Pretty heavy claims. So exactly who was this writer who won such adoration and devotion, even decades after his death?

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Cyril M. Kornbluth was one of the best science fiction writers of the 1950s. Like Stanley Weinbaum and Robert E. Howard, he died in his early thirties, leaving behind a handful of stories that would gradually make him famous.

Kornbluth was an early member of The Futurians, the legendary group of young science fiction fans that included Donald A. Wollheim, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Robert A. W. Lowndes — and Mary Byers, who eventually became his wife.

Kornbluth might be virtually unknown today if not for the efforts of Pohl, his friend and collaborator, who became one of the most acclaimed editors and novelists of the 20th Century — and is still alive today. Kornbluth wrote nine novels, including six in collaboration with Pohl: The Space Merchants, Search the Sky, Gladiator at Law, Presidential Year, Wolfbane, and Not This August.

He also produced some of the most famous science fiction stories ever written, including “The Little Black Bag” and “The Marching Morons.”

On March 21, 1958, Kornbluth had arranged to meet with Robert P. Mills, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. An overnight storm had dumped snow in his driveway, and he had to shovel it out first. Running late, he was racing to make the train when he suffered a heart attack. He died on the train platform at the age of 34.

He left behind a body of brilliant work that included 57 short stories published between 1939 and 1958. In 1976, Pohl selected the 19 best for Lester Del Rey’s The Best of… series, collected as The Best of C M Kornbluth.

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I’ve gotten used to introducing these vintage Best Of collections — as I did recently with The Best of Robert Bloch and The Best of Murray Leinster — assuming that most readers have no idea who the authors are.

There’s been a surge of interest in Henry Kuttner lately, however, and he’s been in the news half a dozen times this year at Black Gate alone. The most recent was just last week, when we listed him as one of the luminaries covered by Bud Webster’s Past Masters.

But before that, Connor Gormley wrote a Fantasy Face-Off featuring Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis vs. Robert E Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian, I discussed The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner and looked at his Weird Tales classic “The Graveyard Rats.” And we announced the lucky winners of the giveaway copies of Thunder in the Void, the deluxe collection of Kuttner’s Space Opera tales from Haffner Press.

It’s not just us with a recent Kuttner obsession. In just the last few years, there’s been a re-discovery of this brilliant pulp author. Haffner also published the detailed retrospective Detour to Otherness, a collection of tales co-written with his wife, C.L. Moore, and a generous volume of his weird menace tales, Terror in the House: The Early Kuttner, Volume One. He’s been a favorite over at Paizo’s Planet Stories imprint as well, and they’ve brought his classics The Dark World, Elak of Atlantis, and Robots Have No Tails back into print in handsome new editions.

Centipede Press and the Science Fiction Book Club produced a massive 915-page retrospective of Moore and Kuttner’s collaborative work in 2006, Two Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C.L.Moore.

And his 1943 short story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (co-written with Moore) was made into the feature-length film The Last Mimzy by New Line Cinema in 2007.

Seriously, that’s not bad for someone who died over 50 years ago.

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