Vintage Treasures: Bug-Eyed Monsters, edited by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg
Last week I posted a brief article on Damon Knight’s landmark SF anthology, A Science Fiction Argosy (and I mean that in the literal sense — it’s so large that for years I used it as a visual landmark when scanning my bookshelves.) The first response in the Comments Section was from the esteemed John C. Hocking, who wrote:
Some years back I read the anthology Bug-Eyed Monsters, edited by Bill Pronzini and Barry Malzberg, which leads off with Knight’s story “Stranger Station.”
This story knocked me out of my chair.
It is not a clever punch-line kind of tale, it’s a bravura piece of serious space operatic sf with strong characters, a vivid setting, genuinely alien horror, and a plot that manages to make the outcome of a single character’s dire situation a crux of cosmic importance without pushing the whole tale into wide-eyed melodrama.
The other stories in the collection were worth reading, but Knight’s tale put them deep in the shade.
So naturally I had to dig up my copy of Bug-Eyed Monsters, a 1980 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich trade paperback, to see what all the fuss was about. First thing I noticed was the Ruby Mazur cover. Mazur, who created over 3,000 album covers, was one of the most famous rock ‘n’ roll cover artists of the 70s and 80s. His work here is serviceable but not particularly attractive, with a rather drooly BEM lording it all over a pulpy alien landscape.
But we’re here to talk about “Stranger Station,” not 70s cover art, and Mr. Hocking is right that Damon Knight’s story, which first appeared in 1956 in F&SF, is a fine piece. The editors give it pride of place as first in the anthology, calling it “a virtuoso performance — arguably, one of the two finest BEM stories ever written (the other being, of course, H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.)”
I get more and more e-mails about the sources I use to write about ancient Arabia, and questions about those sources come up more and more frequently every time I turn up on a convention panel. As a result, I took a long post live on my blog today about one of my favorite books, a historical memoir from the 11th century. When I talk about any of my sources in person I can only tell you how good I think it is. One of the benefits about putting my thoughts in writing is that I can provide examples from the text to prove my point.
With directing great superheroes comes great responsibility. I wish director Marc Webb knew this. Or perhaps directing superheroics on screen isn’t something the man is capable of.
Make a list of the ten best horror movies of all time (or the hundred best horror movies of all time) (or the thousand best horror movies of all time) and at least half those titles will be low-budget, independent films. There’s a reason for that.