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Category: Vintage Treasures

Galaxy, October 1968: A Retro-Review

Galaxy, October 1968: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy October 1968-small Galaxy October 1968-back-small

An issue of Galaxy from fairly late in Fred Pohl’s tenure. There’s one fairly notable story here, and a couple more good ones, but to me the most interesting feature was Algis Budrys’ book review column.

But let’s begin at the beginning. The cover is by Douglas Chaffee. Interiors are by Jack Gaughan, Joe Wehrle, Jr., Dan Adkins, Virgil Finlay, Larry S. Todd illustrating his own piece (not surprising, as Todd, then just 20, became fairly well-known later for his comics work), and two artists whose full names I didn’t know: Brand and Safrani. Buddy Lortie identified them for me: Brand was Roger Brand, a fan artist who became a pro, and did comics work as well; and Safrani was Shehbaz Safrani, who seems to still do fine art. I should note that the magazine was very thick in this era — 196 pages (including covers). My copy has staples: I don’t know offhand if that was normal.

The features include Willy Ley’s long-running science column, “For Your Information,” discussing Explorer-1. Fred Pohl contributes an editorial, discussing the upcoming Presidential election (the one in which Nixon beat Humphrey and Wallace), and speculating about computerized voting from one’s home (even on laws, declaration of war, etc. — i.e. direct democracy). There is a Bio feature, Galaxy’s Stars, giving tidbits about a few of the authors. One piece, “The Warbots,” by Larry S. Todd, is designated a “Non-Fact Article,” and it discusses the history of tanks, basically, far into the future.

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Keith West on the Ballantine Best of Series and Why We Need it More Than Ever

Keith West on the Ballantine Best of Series and Why We Need it More Than Ever

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The Best of Leigh Brackett 1977-smll

Over at Adventures Fantastic, the distinguished Keith West visits a topic near and dear to our hearts: the Ballantine Best of series, perhaps the most important line of paperback collections the genre has ever seen. The 21 volumes of the Ballantine Best of series introduced thousands of readers to the best short fiction by the greatest SF and fantasy writers of the 20th Century — and more than a few writers who have now been forgotten. Here’s Keith:

I’ve already written about how the Leigh Brackett volume I bought through the [Science Fiction Book Club] was a game changer for me. The authors I first encountered through the SFBC editions were Pohl (the first I bought through the club), Kornbluth, Hamilton, Brown, del Rey, Campbell, plus Brackett, but the one that really blew my mind was Kuttner. His was the second Best of I bought through the club. Something about Kuttner’s wit and cynicism, plus his imagination captured me and has never really let me go…

So why did I say we need the Ballantine series more than ever? Because of the way it captured the literary history of the field. There’s no one today who writes like Cordwainer Smith. Or Stanley G. Weinbaum. Or Eric Frank Russell. These writers were the trail blazers and pioneers of the genre, folks for whom an entertaining story wasn’t just a good thing. It was how they made a living.

James McGlothlin has been reviewing the series for us, one book at a time. Our previous coverage includes the following 16 volumes (listed in order of publication).

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Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement

Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement

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Astounding Science Fiction April 1953-smallOnce upon a time, there was a strand of science fiction called hard science fiction, dedicated to the exploration of scientific puzzles and more-or-less accurate studies of the physical sciences. The roots of this strand would seem to lie in the technology-focused stories of Jules Verne. Sometimes there’s an adventure involved (Larry Niven’s Ringworld), sometimes not so much (Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg). Whatever the type of story, in hard sf it was the science that occupied center stage. One of the foremost practioners of this style of science fiction was Hal Clement (1922-2002).

Hard science fiction still exists, obviously. Cixin Liu, Vernor Vinge, and Greg Bear are all writing science-heavy stories. Now, though, there’s less of the puzzle-solving variety, and a greater emphasis on exploring the effects of science on people and society. Larry Niven won a Hugo for the story “Neutron Star,” which hinges on its hero understanding how tides work. I’d be curious if anyone’s written a story like that in the last ten or twenty years. In his overview of The Best of Hal Clement, John O’Neill examined the possible causes for the decline in popularity of hard sf.

Clement published his first story, “Proof,” in 1942, while still an astronomy student at Harvard. After the Second World War (during which he flew 35 bombing missions as a B-24 pilot and co-pilot) he taught astronomy and chemistry at Milton Academy for many years. His first novel, Needle (1950), the story of a symbiotic space detective, was written in response to William Campbell’s claim that a true sci-fi mystery couldn’t be written. His third novel, and today’s subject, Mission of Gravity (1954), is an exemplar of hard science fiction at its diamond-hardest.

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The Digest Enthusiast #5 Now Available

The Digest Enthusiast #5 Now Available

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The Digest Enthusiast January 2017-small The Digest Enthusiast January 2017-back-small

Unplug the phone and cancel my Netflix subscription. The Digest Enthusiast #5 is finally in the house.

Okay, maybe it seems strange to some of you that there’s a magazine out there devoted to collectors of vintage digest magazines. (But it can’t have escaped you that a healthy percentage of Black Gate‘s contributors are obsessive digest magazine collectors, right? Right?) Though I think the thing that might really surprise you is just how fascinating this magazine is to anyone with an interest in 20th Century genre fiction.

Last issue my favorite feature was Steve Carper’s affectionate and detailed look at The Galaxy Science Fiction Novels, and so this time I turned with high anticipation to his 20-page survey of Ellery Queen Selects, a line of 10 novels and collections published between 1947-1950, including work by Dashiell Hammett, John Dickson Carr, O. Henry, and others. And I was not disappointed — it’s a lively behind-the-scenes look at an interesting chunk of literary history. But the article that really grabbed my attention was Peter Enfantino’s insightful issue-by-issue examination of Robert A.W. Lowndes’ Magazine of Horror, one of the most collectible pulp horror periodicals of the 20th Century.

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Reading for the End of the World

Reading for the End of the World

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The Dead Zone-small The Dead Zone-back-small

Back in 1977, near the high water mark of an earlier age of apocalyptic expectations, Elvis Costello crooned a song about “Waiting for the End of the World.” It seemed to make sense in that era of turmoil and unrest at home and abroad, but the American landscape of the last year or so makes the turbulent 70’s seem like an age of cool, good humored rationality. (It wasn’t — trust me.)

I, along with Little Orphan Annie and MacBeth, still expect the sun to come up tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, but even so, it does indeed feel as if we have arrived at the end of something, and business as usual just won’t do anymore; adjustments are called for in many aspects of our lives, including (of course!) reading. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary literary measures. Therefore… to the barricades — uh, bookstores!

In the spirit of the incipient panic, withered expectations, and rampant paranoia that seem to dominate our current national life, I offer twelve books to get you through the next four years (however long they may actually last): a reading list for the New Normal.

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Space Viking by H. Beam Piper

Space Viking by H. Beam Piper

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Analog November 1962 Space Viking-smallOver the past three-and-a-half years, I’ve written thirty-eight short story roundups (covering about 200 short stories) and one-hundred book reviews for Black Gate. The vast majority of what I’ve read has been swords & sorcery. As much as I love the stuff, I’m getting a little tired and I need to take a break. Not from reviewing, mind you, but S&S. A major point of reviewing was to get myself to read more, and I want to keep that up, but I need some variety.

With the encouragement of our esteemed editor, John O’Neill, I’m going to start by focusing on the science fiction books I devoured in my younger days, as well as some classics I missed the first time around (I just started Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity). Books by C.J. Cherryh, Gordon Dickson, and Poul Anderson are among the first I’m thinking about reviewing. I hope we all have fun with this, and I’m looking forward to reading everybody’s own recollections about these works. So come along, and let’s get started with one of the foremost novels of the well-loved SF writer, H. Beam Piper: Space Viking (1963).

H. Beam Piper (1904-64) didn’t publish his first story until 1947. Until his death at his own hand, he published nearly thirty more stories and ten novels. Most were science fiction, but he also wrote several mysteries, and was a member of the Mystery Writers of America.

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Interstellar Empires, Alien Warrior-Priests, and a Rebel Runner: R.M. Meluch’s Jerusalem Fire

Interstellar Empires, Alien Warrior-Priests, and a Rebel Runner: R.M. Meluch’s Jerusalem Fire

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Jerusalem Fire-small Jerusalem Fire-back-small

I’ve been trying to pay attention to mass market paperbacks lately (since it’s easy for new releases to slip past you if you’re not paying attention.) In my last trip to the bookstore I found R.M. Meluch’s Jerusalem Fire tucked between Jack McDevitt and China Miéville on the shelves, and it had me at “A planet out of myth.” Religion, space empires, and rebel captains — always a good mix in my book.

Meluch is the author of the ongoing Tour of the Merrimack military space opera series, and this seemed like a promising new direction for her. Except it’s not a new direction at all… turns out Jerusalem Fire is her second novel, originally published in paperback by Signet in 1985. It’s been reprinted several times since.

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4,976 Pages of Asimov’s Science Fiction (and a Cat)

4,976 Pages of Asimov’s Science Fiction (and a Cat)

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When cats read science fiction

When Cats Read Science Fiction

Okay, my cat doesn’t really read science fiction. But she does wander over to see what’s going on when I’m photographing eBay purchases. She even knocked over part of my collection as I was prepping a piece on Robert E. Howard a while back (yeah, that’s her white paw on the far right). Cats. They don’t care.

But if Jazz did read science fiction, I’d tell her the early 90s was probably my favorite era of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. Not because the fiction was necessarily better — although there was some really great stuff! — but because it was before I started producing publications of my own, and thus it was the last time I had enough free time to read the magazine even semi-regularly. I have a (complete?) run of the magazine from 1977, but most of my copies are in storage. So when I saw the set above (minus the cat) for sale on eBay, I put in a low bid, and won the entire lot for around ten bucks. Most of them are in terrific shape, and only a few have mailing labels, so overall I’m thrilled with the purchase. (Although the February 1994 issue now has a pair of cat prints on the cover.)

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Future Treasures: The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin, Volume One by Seabury Quinn

Future Treasures: The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin, Volume One by Seabury Quinn

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The Horror on the Links The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin Volume One-smallToday Weird Tales is chiefly remembered as the magazine that launched the careers of the great pulp fantasy writers of the 20th Century. But as most fans of the Grand old Lady of the pulps know, the most popular Weird Tales author wasn’t Robert E. Howard, or H.P. Lovecraft, but Seabury Quinn, someone whom is almost completely forgotten today. Quinn’s supernatural detective Jules De Grandin — a top-seller in the 20s and 30s, appearing in over ninety stories and a single novel between 1925 and 1951 — has been out of print for decades. Night Shade rectifies that injustice with the first volume of The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin, arriving in hardcover next week.

Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.

Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales’s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries — and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!) — captivated readers for nearly three decades.

Collected for the first time in trade editions, The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, edited by George Vanderburgh, presents all ninety-three published works featuring the supernatural detective. Presented in chronological order over five volumes, this is the definitive collection of an iconic pulp hero.

The first volume, The Horror on the Links, includes all of the Jules de Grandin stories from “The Horror on the Links” (1925) to “The Chapel of Mystic Horror” (1928), as well as an introduction by Robert Weinberg.

The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin, Volume One will be published by Night Shade Books on April 4, 2017. It is 512 pages, priced at $34.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital edition. Not sure who did the cover, but I’m working on it.

Assassins, Mad Robots, and an Alien Hunt: Rich Horton on The Man With Nine Lives and A Touch of Infinity by Harlan Ellison

Assassins, Mad Robots, and an Alien Hunt: Rich Horton on The Man With Nine Lives and A Touch of Infinity by Harlan Ellison

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The-Man-With-Nine-Lives-small A Touch of Infinity-small

Back in the early days of the print version of Black Gate, our first Managing Editor, Dave Truesdale, wanted to bring in some big names to the magazine. So I paid a fortune to get a big novella from Michael Moorcock in our first issue, and I got a phone call from Harlan Ellison, whom Dave had contacted to commission a story.

We were paying six cents a word for fiction at the time, but Dave had coached me that Harlan expected to get paid more than that. “His rate is 13 cents a word,” Dave told me.

I was trying to launch a nationally-distributed magazine with my own money (and money I’d begged from friends and family), and paying that kind of money was not in my meager budget. But I grit my teeth and told Dave to go ahead and make the offer. I’d make up the difference with cuts elsewhere, I figured. Harlan agreed, and we were in business.

It’s a long way between an agreement and a completed story, however. Shortly after we made Harlan the offer, he sold a story to Hemispheres, the inflight magazine of United Airlines. They paid Harlan more than 13 cents a word — a lot more. When Harlan called it was to tell me, in considerable detail, just how much he’d been paid for that story.

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