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Vintage Treasures: A Science Fiction Argosy, edited by Damon Knight

Vintage Treasures: A Science Fiction Argosy, edited by Damon Knight

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a-science-fiction-argosy2Damon Knight’s massive anthology A Science Fiction Argosy was published in 1972, when I was eight years old. It’s over 800 pages, packed with 24 novellas and short stories plus two complete novels, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human and The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. It’s one of those big, heavy books I’d often glance at on my bookshelf, thinking “I should really read that. As soon as I finish this game of Solitaire.”

I know Damon Knight mostly as an editor — of the highly acclaimed Orbit series, and dozens of other SF anthologies — but he was also a novelist and short story writer. Late in his career he wrote some exceedingly weird SF novels. Check out the article I published at SF Site in 1997, Jim Seidman’s review of his last novel Humpty Dumpty: An Oval, which centers on a lingerie salesman whose skull is fractured by a stray bullet, and who abruptly finds himself dodging both deadly meteorite storms and the society of dentists that secretly rules the world. Glad Jim read it, as I’m sure he made more sense out of it than I would have.

Damon Knight was also a highly respected critic, famous for his dislike of popular pulp writer A. E. van Vogt (“A pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter”), for founding the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and co-founding both the Milford Writer’s Workshop and the Clarion Writers Workshop. He was a busy guy.

I finally started reading A Science Fiction Argosy this morning (after blowing nearly four decades of dust off it). And you know what? It’s pretty good. I was particularly charmed by Knight’s introduction, which can be nicely encapsulated with its first and last sentences:

Some few years ago, when I was only teen-aged science fiction addict in Hood River, Oregon, I prowled the stacks of the local library… like a pornographer looking for pornography, I ferreted out science fiction… but I never got enough…

This is the kind of big meaty selection I wish someone had given me when I was a teen-aged science fiction addict in Hood River, Oregon.

That may be the most honest intro I’ve ever read, and it explains a good deal about what Knight was trying to accomplish with A Science Fiction Argosy — and indeed, perhaps, his entire life as a critic and highly vocal advocate for science fiction. The first story, John Collier’s “Green Thoughts,” is from 1931, but the anthology quickly leaps forward (skipping nearly the entire pulp era) to 1949 for the second, Isaac Asimov’s talky SF puzzler, “The Red Queen’s Race.” Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore’s “The Cure” is even better, a dark and twisted fantasy of a New York lawyer trying to understand an oddly recurring hallucination of suffocation.

That puts me barely 50 pages in. I’m tempted to stop here and write a review, but Knight the critic would not be impressed. So I’ll reserve final judgment until I turn a lot more pages. In the meantime, consider this un-critical word of advice: find your own copy, and don’t wait as long as I did to crack it open.

Vintage Treasures: George R.R. Martin’s “Nightflyers”

Vintage Treasures: George R.R. Martin’s “Nightflyers”

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analog-april-1980-smallOver the weekend I put away a collection of 80s magazines I purchased a few months ago. In the process I discovered the April 1980 issue of Analog, which I read as a junior in high school in Ottawa, Canada.

There’s a lot to like about this issue, from the gorgeous cover by Paul Lehr — perhaps my favorite SF artist — to a famous short story by one of my all-time favorite SF writers: “Grotto of the Dancing Deer,” by Clifford D. Simak, which won both the 1980 Nebula Award and 1981 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. Even the ads reflect those things I personally found most exciting and fresh about SF and fantasy at the time: a full page ad from TSR for D&D, “The Ultimate in Adventure Games;” an ad for six microgames from Metagaming (the company that introduced me to role playing games), including the classic Ogre; and a subscription form for Ares, the short-lived SF gaming magazine from SPI.

This issue is an intriguing cultural artifact for other reasons. There’s an editorial from Stanley Schmidt in response to the recent kidnapping of 50 Americans at the US embassy in Iran, both a fascinating snapshot of a critical moment in American history, and a typical science fiction response:

What the Iranian crisis really demonstrates, at least as dramatically as any incident so far, is that if we want real freedom, we must produce our own energy… Technologies which can do this are possible, and we should not willingly settle for less. Readers of this magazine are well acquainted with the role space can play, but many people are not — and we need to get the action under way now.

If you read Analog in the 20th Century, you got used to this. Exploring space was pretty much the answer to everything — the energy crisis, the hole in the ozone, foreign policy crises, and crappy network television programming — and the magazine’s self-congratulatory tone clearly told its readership (including 15-year-old readers in Ottawa) that they were smarter and more informed than everyone else, especially on science and technology, topics far more important than cars, sports, and other things kids our age obsessed about. Analog told its readers they were destined for success. The future was ours.

But the real reason this issue is remembered is its cover story, George R.R. Martin’s novella of horror in deep space, the chilling classic “Nightflyers.”

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The Spectre Library Brings Rare Pulp Fantasy Back to Life

The Spectre Library Brings Rare Pulp Fantasy Back to Life

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the-living-deadWhen I originally wrote the title above, it was “The Spectre Library Brings Rare Pulp Fantasy Back to Print.” I had to change it when I realized it wasn’t true. Damn digital books… I have to change the way I speak now.

Let me start over.

The Spectre Library, a small press outfit known primarily for reprinting the works of Victor Rousseau, has produced Kindle versions of all four of Michael Waugh’s rare short novelettes:

The Living Dead
Back From the Dead
Fangs of the Vampire
The Mystery of the Abominable Snowman

All four were originally produced by Cleveland Publishing Co., an Australian publisher, in pamphlet format between 1954 – 55. They are quite short, between 45 and 48 print pages.

The Kindle versions feature the original cover art, and are priced at $9.99 each (click on the image at right for bigger version).

On their website The Spectre Library says they “issue lost, rare works of fiction, with a focus upon publishing jacketed limited edition smythe-sewn hardcovers of Weird, Adventure, Detective, Crime, Oriental and Fantastic Content.” Sounds like an enlightened calling to me.

They also have an excellent gallery of cover art of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Weird & Occult publications — including paperbacks, digests, pamphlets, pulps, and magazines — from Britain, Australia and Canada between 1930-1966. It is curated by Morgan A. Wallace.

Vintage Treasures: Science and Sorcery edited by Garret Ford

Vintage Treasures: Science and Sorcery edited by Garret Ford

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science-and-sorceryA few days ago I mentioned Martin H. Greenberg’s impressive collection of paperback SF and Fantasy, and the three boxes of that collection I carted back from the Windy City Pulp and Paperback Show. Two are now incorporated in my library. I set aside roughly a dozen of the more interesting titles to talk about here, and the first one is Science and Sorcery, an anthology of pulp SF stories from 1978.

It was published by Zebra, a pretty low-budget outfit. So low-budget, in fact, that it doesn’t even have a table of contents.

Who publishes an anthology without a table of contents? That’s pretty edgy. A publisher desperate to save paper, apparently. The whole thing feels slapped together, from the introduction on the back of the title page to the oddly formatted first story, Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain” (page 3).

Fortunately, science fiction fans are a diligent and industrious lot, and I found a complete TOC online (at the book’s Wikipedia page, believe it or not). Here it is:

  • “Scanners Live in Vain”, by Cordwainer Smith
  • “The Little Man on the Subway,” by Isaac Asimov & James MacCreigh
  • “What Goes Up,” by Alfred Coppel
  • “Kleon of the Golden Sun,” by Ed Earl Repp
  • “How High on the Ladder?” by Leo Paige
  • “Footprints,” by Robert E. Gilbert
  • “The Naming of Names,” by Ray Bradbury
  • “The Eyes,” by Henry Hasse
  • “The Scarlet Lunes,” by Stanton A. Coblentz
  • “Demobilization,” by George R. Cowie
  • “Voices from the Cliff,” by John Martin Leahy
  • “The Lost Chord,” by Sam Moskowitz
  • “The Watchers,” by R. H. Deutsch
  • “The Peaceful Martian,” by J. T. Oliver
  • “Escape to Yesterday,” by Arthur J. Burks

A pretty eclectic mix, to be honest. Can’t remember the last time I saw an anthology with fiction by Sam Moskowitz. Or James MacCreigh, Ed Earl Repp, Leo Paige, Robert E. Gilbert, George R. Cowie, John Martin Leahy, R. H. Deutsch, or J. T. Oliver, for that matter. I don’t want to say this anthology primarily consists of nobodies, but it looks like this anthology primarily consists of nobodies.

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Thank You, Martin H. Greenberg (and Doug Ellis)

Thank You, Martin H. Greenberg (and Doug Ellis)

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martin-h-greenberg-paperback-lot-small

That’s a pic of one of the boxes I unloaded in my library this morning. It contained 103 paperbacks from the vast collection of the great Martin H. Greenberg, one of the most prolific and talented anthologists our field has ever seen (click for a more legible version). Greenberg died almost exactly a year ago, on June 25, 2011. He left behind some 2,500 anthologies and other books he created — including over 120 co-edited with his friend Isaac Asimov — and his company Tekno Books, a book packager which produced nearly 150 books a year. I wrote about six of them just last week in my article TSR’s Amazing Science Fiction Anthologies.

He also left behind a massive collection in his home in Green Bay, which was purchased by Chicago collectors Doug Ellis and Bob Weinberg. They’ve been gradually selling the high value stuff — autographed vintage hardcovers, things like that. Doug runs the Windy City Pulp and Paper show every year, and he brought some of it to the show.

I’m usually a pretty social guy. Put me in a room with fellow collectors and I’ll happily spend my hours chatting. But as I passed Doug’s booth, I saw countless boxes of what looked like beautiful, unread vintage paperbacks stacked in neat rows, all priced at a buck. I started to browse, then select a few books, and finally obsessively dig through every single box, much to the annoyance of the always patient Jason Waltz and my other companions.

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New Treasures: The Fantasy Fan

New Treasures: The Fantasy Fan

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the-fantasy-fanLast month, I got a great e-mail from Black Gate blogger Barbara Barrett. In between her entertaining comments on The Avengers, Arthur Machen, and re-discovering comic books, was this fascinating tidbit:

I’ve started reading The Fantasy Fan — a fan’s tribute to Hornig.  It’s a book containing a compilation of all the Fantasy Fan magazines… I’m only on the first zine but I’m amazed how closely the format matches that of Black Gate. Is this a *coincidence*? The first zine was published in September 1933 and it’s chilling because I keep in mind Robert E.Howard was still alive at that point… the breadth and depth of authors, articles and stories are wonderful. It’s definitely a page out of Living History.

Among fantasy collectors The Fantasy Fan is legendary. The world’s first fanzine dedicated to weird fiction, it lasted for 18 issues, from September 1933 to February 1935. Its contributors included some of the most famous names in the genre — H.P Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Bob Tucker, Julius Schwartz, Forry Ackerman, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Eando Binder, and many others — and its young editor Charles Horning so impressed Hugo Gernsback that he hired him to edit Wonder Stories in 1933, at the age of 17. While at Wonder Stories he published Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” and many other famous pulp stories.

Barbara’s reference to a compilation of The Fantasy Fan was so intriguing I had to track down a copy for myself, and it finally arrived last week. Copies of the original fanzine are so rare that I’ve never even seen one, so to hold a facsimile reprint of all 18 issues in my hands was rather breathtaking. The man behind the book is Lance Thingmaker, and here’s what he says in his introduction:

These fragile gems were so unique. They were simple little fanzines, but were filled with stories, articles and comments by history’s most important weird fiction writers and fans. I felt like I was looking back in time… Since they are extremely hard to find, it seemed many others probably never had the chance to check out the world’s first weird fiction zine. I wanted to make it happen.

The end product is a top-notch piece of work. The magazines are presented in facsimile format, with painstaking restoration of the original barely legible pages, hand printed and hand-bound in hardcover by Thingmaker. The book is over 300 pages, including the complete text of H.P. Lovecraft’s famous essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” which was being serialized when the magazine folded. It is limited to 100 copies and sold for $50. Thingmaker’s next project, due to ship later this month, is a facsimile reprint of all four issues of the ultra-rare pulp Marvel Tales.

You can find a detailed breakdown of the contents of The Fantasy Fan here. My thanks again to Barbara for alerting me to this before it sold out!

Vintage Treasures: Poul Anderson’s After Doomsday

Vintage Treasures: Poul Anderson’s After Doomsday

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after-doomsdayI’m putting away all the paperbacks that arrived with my two Philip K. Dick lots, and I stumbled across the fabulous artifact at right.

After Doomsday was published by Ballantine Books in 1962, two years before I was born. It was originally serialized in Galaxy magazine (as The Day after Doomsday) between December 1961 and February 1962.

What truly makes it fabulous isn’t just the great cover art by Ralph Brillhart, with a bug-eyed alien stumbling on some guy surveying a road during his evening constitutional. No no no. It’s this wonderful description on the back cover:

CARL DONNAN was a space engineer — a man of action who did his job well and didn’t think much beyond that — but now his home planet was destroyed and he found himself with two burning ambitions:

– FIND the beings who blew up the Earth.

– SEARCH the galaxies until they located another Starship with female humans aboard.

BOTH PROJECTS were vital to the survival of the human race — and both were monumental tasks.

THIS was the time when the galaxies discovered how grim and purposeful a handful of homo sapiens could be.

A starship with “female humans” aboard. I think the first task for this guy Carl should be to look up “female humans,” find out they’re called “women,” and then put an ad on Craig’s List. The survival of the species is on your shoulders, dude. Time to put down that survey equipment and pick up a clean shirt. And maybe some mouthwash.

There’s a lengthy plot synopsis of After Doomsday here. Don’t expect it to be as entertaining as that back cover copy, though.

Selling Philip K. Dick

Selling Philip K. Dick

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the-simulacra-philip-k-dickAlmost exactly a year ago this weekend I was in downtown Chicago, selling books and Black Gate magazines at the Printer’s Row book fair. It was hot and I got sunstroke, and I had to cancel dinner plans with the charming and beautiful Patty Templeton. Stupid, stupid sunstroke.

But I learned something fascinating. Well, two fascinating things. The second was that no one wants print fiction magazines anymore. I can’t tell you how many people picked up copies of Black Gate 15, dazzled by the look and heft of the thing, asking “What is this?” The moment they learned it was a magazine, they put it down and wandered over to the booth selling travel books.

But the first fascinating thing I learned is that vintage Philip K. Dick paperbacks sell at almost any price.

I learned this mostly by accident. I had a few hundred recently-acquired vintage paperbacks bagged up, but didn’t have time to price them. The night before the show they were spread out in stacks on our bed, all with cheerful blank price stickers, and Alice was threatening to sleep on the couch.

So I just priced them at random. Most I listed at 2 – 3 bucks, occasionally as high as 10. When I got to the more valuable stuff, like the Philip K. Dick , I wrote “$35” on most of ’em, even the stuff I’d only paid a buck or two for. I figured I’d do my homework and re-price everything that didn’t sell later.

Instead, I sold all the Philip K. Dick in less than two days.

Obviously, this was an unusual test case. For one thing, this wasn’t an SF convention and my buyers generally weren’t science fiction readers. They were book collectors who knew just enough about Philip K. Dick to know he’s in demand. There was a lot of impulse buying, and hardened rare book collectors are maybe less reluctant to fork over $30 – $40 on impulse than a typical SF reader.

Still, it was very educational. Dick was one of the only authors browsing customers frequently asked about (the others were Samuel R. Delaney and Ursula K. LeGuin), and if I could put a book in their hands, it was a short step to a sale. It didn’t hurt that many of his paperbacks look terrific, like the Emsh cover on the 1964 Ace edition of The Simulacra, above.

I don’t sell much anymore, but I do have two tables reserved for Chicon 7, the World Science Fiction convention coming up this Labor Day here in Chicago. In preparation, I’ve been accumulating as many Philip K. Dick titles — and other vintage SF paperbacks — as I can find. eBay is one fertile hunting ground, especially if you’re willing to buy larger lots. Last week I purchased lots containing The Simulacra and Dr. Bloodmoney (plus 10 other mixed SF paperbacks) for $6.05 each. I’m pretty sure I can re-sell the Dick titles alone for a lot more than that.

Just how much more remains to be seen. I’ll let you know after Chicon.

Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild”

Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild”

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isaac-asimovs-science-fiction-magazine-june-1984I’m still putting away boxes of stuff that’s piled up in my library. Today it’s a collection of science fiction magazines I purchased from Craig Sandford, a guy I met on eBay, a few months ago. Craig kept his magazines in great condition. I had most of them already (don’t tell Alice), but Craig offered me a sweet deal. And realistically, I won’t be content until my basement is so stuffed with games and magazines it’s impossible to move. So this is progress.

As I slid each magazine into a protective plastic bag, daydreaming of the future age when SF digests from the 1980s are near-priceless cultural artifacts (not far off now), I came across the June 1984 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, with Wayne Barlowe’s brilliant and chilling cover for Octavia E. Butler’s story “Bloodchild.”

“Bloodchild” is a stunning work of short fiction. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novelette, and was the title story of her slim 1995 collection, Bloodchild and Other Stories. Although I had magazines and boxes scattered all over the floor, I curled up in my big green chair to re-read it.

Butler has described “Bloodchild” as a tale of male pregnancy, which is apt even if it isn’t very descriptive. The young Gan lives with his family on a Preserve on an alien world, where humans are protected from the dominant species — the huge, powerful and intelligent insect-like Tlic, who lay their eggs in humans and nearly wiped them out when the first human settlers arrived. Gan’s father gave birth to three alien broods before he died, including the noble T’Gatoi, a female Tlic who’s become one of humanity’s strongest protectors. But now it’s time for T’Gatoi to lay her own eggs, and she has chosen Gan as her mate. When Gan witnesses the violent and bloody birth of a clutch of grubs, he realizes for the first time exactly what he’s being groomed for. He’s unsure he can go through with it, but to refuse now will have dangerous ramifications for his family. “I knew birth was bloody and painful, no matter what,” he reasons. And how does T’Gatoi see her mate? Is he just a pet? Or is it possible she feels… something like love?

Barlowe captures the innocence and horror of “Bloochild” perfectly in his cover, which depicts a new-born alien grub leaving a trail of blood as it emerges from the adolescent boy Gan, who watches with a calculating look. Click on the image above for a bigger version.

This is why I love science fiction and fantasy magazines. They’re not just slender collections of stories. They are a refined meeting of fact, art, and fiction, and when that meeting turns into a wild night of necking in the back seat, as it does here, it’s worth telling your friends about. You’re my friends, so I’m telling you. (And as we’ve discussed, kindly don’t mention this to Alice).

I don’t know any place where you can read “Bloodchild” online, but you can get a copy of the June 84 issue of Asimov’s online for only a couple of bucks. Just buy it soon, before the inevitable day 80s SF magazines become priceless. Why not hoard them in your basement, like me? You’ll thank me later.

Vintage Treasures: TSR’s Amazing Science Fiction Anthologies

Vintage Treasures: TSR’s Amazing Science Fiction Anthologies

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amazing-the-wonder-yearsD&D publisher TSR generally gets a bad rap for their brief venture into science fiction in the 1980s. Much of their D&D related fiction — especially the Weis and Hickman DragonLance novels, which launched their entire publishing line — is still remembered fondly today. But does anybody remember Martin Caidin’s Buck Rogers novel, or Martin H. Greenberg’s Starfall anthology?

Nope.

Which is a shame. At one point — riding high on the success of the DragonLance books — TSR claimed it was the largest publisher of SF and fantasy titles in the nation, and it sure looked that way whenever I walked into a bookstore. There were literally racks of the stuff: DragonLance books, Forgotten Realms books, Dark Sun novels, Birthright novels, SpellJammer novels, Greyhawk books, Ravenloft novels, Planescape novels… and on and on and on.

If you were a serious genre reader in the late 80s, you gradually trained your eyes to ignore it all as you scanned the shelves for anything new and original.

What many of us never knew — because they were hidden alongside all their gaming fiction — was that TSR published dozens of new and original SF and fantasy novels, unconnected to any of their gaming fiction, including bestselling author Sharyn McCrumb’s famous science fiction pastiche Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987), Paul B. Thompson and Tonya C. Cook’s Red Sands (1988), Ardath Mayhar and Ron Fortier’s Monkey Station (1989), Robin Wayne Bailey’s Nightwatch (1990), and many others.

They also discovered several major authors, publishing Nancy Varian Berberick’s first novel The Jewels of Elvish (1989), Nick Pollotta’s first novel Illegal Aliens (written with Phil Foglio, 1989), and first novels from L. Dean James, Chrys Cymri, K.B. Bogen, and others.

But my favorite books published by TSR during this period weren’t novels at all. They were five anthologies collecting stories from the pulp days of Amazing Stories, edited by Martin H. Greenberg.
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