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Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1951: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1951: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy February 1951The February, 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction is groundbreaking. The first story is a novella by Ray Bradbury titled “The Fireman.”

My heart skipped a beat when I saw this, and I quickly discovered that Bradbury later expanded this tale into the classic novel Fahrenheit 451.

In “The Fireman,” Mr. Montag works as a fireman – not one who douses flames, but one who starts them in order to destroy books. Books, after all, are upsetting and challenge the brain-numbing entertainment of the day. People who are well-read might unbalance a society of non-thinkers.

I read Fahrenheit 451 in school, and I didn’t understand all of the warnings Bradbury issues throughout the novel. When I read “The Fireman,” there were parts that really concerned me as I considered our own society. Replace references to “television” with “Internet” or “Facebook,” and suddenly Bradbury’s dystopia doesn’t seem so distant anymore. This is a story I wish everyone would read – and think about while reading it. It really is quite chilling.

“…And it comes out here” by Lester del Rey – A man travels back in time to prepare his younger self for an expedition. The mission is to retrieve a device from the future and claim it as his own invention.

I love the second-person narrative of this tale, and I equally enjoyed the way that everything circuitously ties together. It was interesting how del Rey used the protagonist both as a character and as a narrator, and because time travel was involved, these were essentially two different people.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering — yes, this is the same man who started Del Rey Books.

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Paul Di Filippo on “A” is for Android and Other Tales: Masters of Science Fiction Vol. #8

Paul Di Filippo on “A” is for Android and Other Tales: Masters of Science Fiction Vol. #8

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Milton Lesser A is for AndroidOver at Locus Online, Paul Di Filippo has a look at the latest Masters of Science Fiction reprint from Armchair Fiction, this one focused on Milton Lesser, author of Slaves to the Metal Horde and The Thing from Underneath.

If you do not know the enchantingly retro line of SF/F/H books published by Armchair Fiction… then I offer you now an eye-popping introduction. Visit his site and marvel at the vast range of vintage fiction, long out of print, lovingly repackaged with period artwork. Names as seminal as those of Fritz Leiber, Clifford Simak and Edmond Hamilton consort with the bylines of lesser craftsmen… The Armchair Fiction catalogue opens an essential window onto a vital and overlooked and still enjoyable portion of our history.

The latest entry in their “Masters of Science Fiction” series is awarded to Milton Lesser, who bears a name the majority of modern fans will probably be unfamiliar with. Lesser was one of those working-stiff writers back in the day who turned out intelligent, yet perhaps sometimes over facile, goods to suit whatever market was looking for material and paying a decent word rate… Truly the work of a Master? Did it exhibit a genuine affinity for the mode, a sense of wonder, some unique ideation? Does it seem hokey and clunky today, or do its narrative virtues still engage and reward?

We last looked at Armchair Fiction — via Paul W. Fairman’s The Girl Who Loved Death and Murray Leinster’s Planet of Dread — last January.

Curiously, this book is listed under the variant title “A” as in Android at Amazon.com and other places. I haven’t seen a copy myself, so I can’t confirm which title is correct.

“A” is for Android (or maybe “A” as in Android) was published January 30 by Armchair Fiction. It is 320 pages in trade paperback, priced at $16.95. There is no digital edition. See more details at the Armchair Fiction site here, and you can read Paul’s complete review here.

Forrest J. Ackerman and the Days of the Do-It-Yourself Anthology

Forrest J. Ackerman and the Days of the Do-It-Yourself Anthology

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Forrest J Ackerman Starlog 1978-2When I was 14 years old, I stumbled on an article in Starlog magazine titled “The World’s Greatest Science Fiction Fan.”

It was about Forrest J. Ackerman, of course: writer, literary agent, and editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland. But Forry’s greatest claim to fame was his legendary science fiction collection, housed in the Ackermansion in Los Angeles.

The article was accompanied by some mind-blowing photos. Forry standing before one of his greatest prides: his complete collection of Weird Tales. Forry posing with the original model used in George Pal’s War of the Worlds. Forry shaking hands with the Maschinenmensch from Metropolis. [Click on the image at left or below for bigger versions.]

The article appeared in the 1978 issue of Starlog, and it had a pretty profound effect on me. After I read it, I knew what my life’s work would be: to build a science fiction collection that could stand with pride alongside Forrest J. Ackerman’s.

These are the things that only a 14-year-old can dream.

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Vintage Treasures: The Amazing Space Race

Vintage Treasures: The Amazing Space Race

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Amazing Stories January 1969A few weeks back, I purchased a lot of 27 Amazing Stories digests from the mid-60s and early 70s in great condition, for $35 (including shipping) — or about a buck an issue.

This was simultaneously delightful and dismaying. Delightful, of course, to get a fine set of SF magazines for not much more than they cost on the newsstand 45 years ago; dismaying to find that pristine vintage copies of one of the most important SF magazines command such little interest in the market.

Seriously, this doesn’t bode well for the thousands of SF magazines I’ve been gradually accumulating in my basement for the last 35 years. I  consider them treasures, but it seems the number of people who share my interest is shrinking every year. I just hope they don’t all end up getting recycled when I shuffle off this mortal coil.

Well, all collectors can really do is delight in those treasures we find, and share our enthusiasm with those around us. To that end, here I am, talking about a handful of issues of Amazing Stories, starting with the January 1969 issue, at left.

The late sixties was a bumpy time for the Granddaddy of Science Fiction magazines. Perhaps its finest editor, the talented Cele Goldsmith, left when the magazine was sold to Sol Cohen’s Ultimate Publishing Company in March 1965. At the time, Ultimate was simultaneously publishing Great Science Fiction, Science Fiction Classics, and other profitable reprint magazines — profitable chiefly because they didn’t pay for any of the reprints. Cohen wanted to pursue a similar strategy with Amazing.

Cohen hired Joseph Wrzos to edit both Amazing and Fantastic magazines, and indeed for several years Amazing offered almost exclusively reprints — although Wrzos reportedly did get Cohen to cough up funds for one new piece of fiction per issue. Wrzos left in 1967, and Harry Harrison was briefly editor from September 1967 to February 1968, when the talented Barry Malzberg stepped into his shoes.

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Vintage Treasures: Robert E. Howard’s Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors

Vintage Treasures: Robert E. Howard’s Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors

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Robert E Howard Cthulhu The Mythos and Kindred HorrorsOn April 27, I wrote a Vintage Treasures article about Robert E. Howard’s The People of the Black Circle, one of the first fantasy books I ever owned.

The Comments section quickly became a discussion of REH collecting, with readers swapping photos of their favorite Howard books. Joe H. shared a LibrayThing catalog of his Howard collection, noting the hardest title to find had been Cthluhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors. “It took me years to track down a copy,” he said.

Well, that’s exactly the kind of thing that perks up a collector’s ears. Intrigued,  I went on a quest to find my own copy of Cthluhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors, a collection of Robert E. Howard’s Cthulhu stories.

I finally succeeded this week, after a two-week search. I settled in with my new copy today. First thing I noticed is that the cover, by Stephen Hickman, depicts a treasured artifact from my own collection: the Hickman-designed Cthulhu statute by Bowen Designs — a prized collectible these days. Now that it’s worth something, maybe my wife will let me bring it up out of the basement.

The other thing I noticed is that this is a sizable collection: 250 pages. While I knew Howard had made some minor contributions to Lovecraft’s famous milieu before his death, I had no idea he’d written so many stories that could be categorized as part of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Perhaps editor David Drake has been fairly liberal with his selections. I note that “Pigeons from Hell” is included, and that’s only peripherally a Cthulhu story — but it’s a damn good tale, so I’m not complaining.

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Get a Random SF or Fantasy Book Cover from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Get a Random SF or Fantasy Book Cover from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

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Into the Slave NebulaOh, Internet. Will you ever cease to come up with new ways for me to waste time?

So the latest thing I’ve been doing is hitting the Lucky Dip button in the Picture Gallery section of the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. It generates a random book cover from their massive archives:

So far, I’ve seen a few hundred vintage hardcovers and paperbacks, from a 1951 Lord Dunsany hardcover I never knew existed (The Last Revolution) to Samuel R. Delaney’s 1977 collection of critical essays on science fiction (The Jewel-Hinged Jaw); from John Brunner’s 1968 Lancer paperback Into the Slave Nebula to the 1954 Gnome Press edition of C. L. Moore’s Northwest of Earth. And many hundreds in between.

It’s a fascinating kaleidoscope (I can’t really call it a tour) of our genre — and a great launching point to ignite your interest. I ended up reading about UK author M. John Harrison after seeing the cover to his 1975 Panther paperback collection The Machine in Shaft Ten and Other Stories. Plus, doing about a dozen Google searches on the words “Slave Nebula.”

Of course, there’s a powerful search function as well, in case you want to leap directly to a specific book or author. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the new online incarnation and third edition of the classic reference book edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, indexes some 54,000 individual titles, with 113,500 internal hyperlinks and over 4,000,000 words. It builds massively on the text of the (already massive) 1995 CD-ROM edition, and is produced in collaboration with British SF publisher Gollancz and the SF Gateway. And it is, as the introduction points out, still a work in progress.

The only thing that’s missing? The back button. I tried to scroll back to some of the earlier samples, but no dice. Looks like the Lucky Dip is powered by a Javascript app of some kind that doesn’t allow you to page back through prior selections — so if you see something interesting, be sure to write it down!

Vintage Treasures: The Girl With the Hungry Eyes by Fritz Leiber

Vintage Treasures: The Girl With the Hungry Eyes by Fritz Leiber

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The Girl With the Hungry EyesSometimes it seems that every time a new sword & sorcery novel appears, a publicist automatically slaps “comparable to Fritz Leiber!” on the cover.

I’ll tell you why: it works. When Karen Burnham at SF Signal noted that Tim Pratt’s latest Pathfinder novel Liar’s Blade had done “an excellent job of capturing the spirit” of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, I bought it immediately. A fantasy novel with the charm and style of Fritz Leiber’s great adventures? Where’s my credit card.

I think publicists must get tired of comparing new sword & sorcery to Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard. I know it’s annoying to their fans, and I don’t think it does a genuine service to most new writers — not in the long term, anyway.

And frankly, all the focus on Fritz Leiber as the poster child for exemplary S&S overlooks his success in a broad range of genres: science fiction, mystery, dark fantasy, supernatural horror, plays, and even a 1966 Tarzan novel. Ask anyone who’s read his 1965 Hugo Award-winning novel The Wanderer, about a rogue planet that drifts close to Earth — or his brilliant short story “A Pail of Air,” a post-apocalyptic tale of a family fighting to survive on a world grown so cold that oxygen has condensed out of the air, and the strange things they discover when the world has gone completely still — and you’ll find that Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser tales, as important as they are to the Sword & Sorcery canon, stand as only a small sample of a stellar writing career that spanned over 50 years.

As a paperback collector, it’s hard to pick my favorite Fritz Leiber book. I love Michael Whelan’s cover for Swords and Ice Magic (1977), and of course The Big Time (1961), Gather, Darkness! (1975), and the creepy Our Lady of Darkness (1977). But I think it would have to be a collection, possibly The Mind Spider and Other Stories (1961), Ship of Shadows (1979), or The Ghost Light (1984).

But I might just cheat and make it the 1949 Avon paperback The Girl With the Hungry Eyes.

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Vintage Treasures: An Earth Man on Venus by Ralph Milne Farley

Vintage Treasures: An Earth Man on Venus by Ralph Milne Farley

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An Earth Man on VenusRalph Milne Farley was a pen name for Roger Sherman Hoar, a state senator and assistant Attorney General for the state of Massachusetts. Why a state senator wouldn’t proudly lay claim to a novel featuring a man and woman in underwear on the cover is beyond me, but some people just humbly shy away from fame, I guess.

Or maybe it’s the antennae growing out of her head. It’s hard to be sure.

Whatever the case, An Earthman on Venus was originally published (as The Radio Man) in that grand old lady of the pulps, Argosy, in 1924. It was immediately popular, and reprinted many times, starting in Famous Fantastic Mysteries (1939) and then in hardcover from Fantasy Publishing in 1948.

The version of interest to us is the 1950 Avon paperback, pictured at left. Primarily because it’s a prime early example of underwear chic, but also because it was the first true mass market edition.

Legendary editor Donald A. Wollheim — who would later found DAW Books — was at the helm at Avon at the time, and he had an eye for pulp fiction that would play well in paperback. While he was at Avon, he made A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, and C. S. Lewis’s Silent Planet space trilogy available in mass market for the first time, bringing those authors — and many others — a wide audience.

The Radio Man isn’t particularly well-remembered today, but it’s an important part of the history of our genre nonetheless. Not just because of it has giant ants and antenna girls on the cover… well, mostly that. But it was also one of the first sword-and-planet adventures, and it was successful enough to spawn no less than seven sequels over the next three decades, starting with The Radio Beasts (1925) and including The Radio Planet (1926), The Radio Flyers (1929), The Radio Menace (1930), The Radio Gun-Runners (1930), The Radio War (1932) and The Radio Minds of Mars (1955).

Now I don’t know about you, but I thought the sequel was invented with The Godfather, Part II. Evidence that fantasy writers were doing that kind of thing half a century before Francis Ford Coppola thought of it fills me with pride. And a powerful compulsion to buy blue lingerie for Alice, but let’s not get in to that.

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Vintage Treasures: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard

Vintage Treasures: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard

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people-of-the-black-circleI may have more books by Robert E. Howard in my collection than any other writer.

I’m not certain, as I haven’t counted, and if you allow anthologies then he’ll be beaten out handily by folks like Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. But the venerable Mr. Howard occupies more than two shelves in my library, which is astounding for someone who died at the age of thirty.

I came to Howard early. The first story I read by REH was “Pigeons from Hell,” which Charles Saunders mentioned in a speech he gave to the Ottawa Science Fiction Society in 1981, the year his groundbreaking Imaro was released. “Horror doesn’t usually scare me,” he told us. “‘Pigeons From Hell’ scared me.”

I think the second REH tale I read was the Solomon Kane tale “Skulls in the Stars,” which I enjoyed even more. (I wrote about the two Bantam Solomon Kane collections, Skulls in the Stars and The Hills of the Dead, last year.)

But I wasn’t a Conan fan. Most of it was prejudice — in those days, all those novels with barbarians on the cover were considered the lowest form of fantasy, and I generally snubbed them. Oddly, I don’t think I even associated Conan with Robert E. Howard.

I surreptitiously tried a Conan book in my early teens, a collection of tales mostly by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, if I remember correctly. Didn’t impress me. That was all I needed to confirm that I was better than this stuff and return to reading books of quality, like Perry Rhodan and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.

All that began to change with The People of the Black Circle, a Christmas gift from my brother Michael.

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Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1951: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1951: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction January 1951-smallGalaxy Science Fiction’s fourth issue was published for January, 1951.  Now with 50% more illustrations, Galaxy was rolling along, ready to offer the best fiction on the market.

“Tyrann” by Isaac Asimov – This is the first part of a three-part serial of Asimov’s novel.  It was later reprinted under the title: The Stars, Like Dust.  Biron Farrill is a young nobleman visiting Earth when someone tries to kill him with a radiation bomb.  An acquaintance of Biron’s tells him that there’s a plot underway by the Tyranni.  The Tyranni, who control the galaxy by oppressing the various world leaders, killed Biron’s father and are now coming after him.

Biron flees to Rhodia in hopes of finding refuge under their leader, Hinrik V.  The Tyranni track Biron’s movement, allowing him to reach Rhodia in order to test Hinrik’s loyalty.  Soon after his arrival, however, Hinrik’s daughter and cousin confide in Biron that they are not loyal to the Tyranni and that the three of them must find a way to escape the planet without alerting the Tyranni.

I love this story so far.  The characters are great, especially Hinrik’s cousin who shows two personalities – one is a public façade in order to keep his work secretive.  Plus, their ships jump to hyperspace!

Asimov didn’t coin the term hyperspace, but he was one of its early adopters, and the way the jump is described will resonate well with Star Wars fans.  By the way, if FTL (Faster Than Light-speed) travel was good enough for Asimov and Galaxy, why is it shunned by some editors today?

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