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Old Empires and Armored Planets: Rich Horton on The Sun Smasher by Edmond Hamilton and Starhaven by Ivar Jorgenson

Old Empires and Armored Planets: Rich Horton on The Sun Smasher by Edmond Hamilton and Starhaven by Ivar Jorgenson

The Sun Smasher Edmond Hamilton-small Starhaven Ivar Jorgenson-small

Rich Horton has been reading through the Ace Double library over at his blog Strange at Ecbatan. His last few selections have been duds, but I’m optimistic about Edmond Hamilton’s The Sun Smasher and Ivar Jorgenson’s Starhaven, Double #D351, published in 1959. Edmond Hamilton was my favorite pulp SF writer, and “Ivar Jorgenson” was a pen name for none other than Robert Silverberg.  Here’s Rich.

Each of these novels was published earlier in a single issue of a magazine, possibly (especially in the case of the Jorgenson novel) in shorter versions. The Sun Smasher appeared as “Starman Come Home” in the September 1954 Universe Science Fiction, while Starhaven appeared as “Thunder Over Starhaven” in Science Fiction Adventures for October 1957. (I suspect the Hamilton novel, which is the shorter of the two at about 30,000 words, probably is the same version as appeared in the magazine, but the “Jorgenson” story, some 40,000 words long or more, is expanded, as Silverberg discusses below.)

The covers of the magazine editions of these stories are something of a real delight, so I’ve reproduced them here.

I always enjoy Rich’s reviews of classic SF. But when he starts throwing in vintage magazine covers, you know he’s really speaking my language.

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Little Miss Martian

Little Miss Martian

Other Worlds May 1951-small Other Worlds May 1951-back-small

Other Worlds, May 1951. Cover by Hannes Bok

Other Worlds Science Fiction launched in November 1949, part of the boom in f&sf magazines in a postwar world that retroactively realized their worth after real life rockets and atomic bombs made headlines. It was frankly third-tier, half written by Rog Phillips under pseudonyms and half by younger writers striving to make their mark. After a year or two, though, some bigger names like Ray Bradbury, A. E. van Vogt, and Robert Bloch were lured in and a few of the newcomers would develop into stars of equal rank. Even so, fans read it for fun and excitement, not literary quality. Issue after issue sated with a plenitude of humor stories, starting with the Hoka series by young Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson, and robot stories, including ones by Bradbury, van Vogt, and Bloch, and humorous robot stories, many by authors nobody remembers (such as Hodge Winsell, whose two atrocities comprise his entire f&sf oeuvre).

One reason for the increase in quality was hidden from readers. The editor for the first issue was listed as Robert N. Webster, another pseudonym. Knowledgeable fans would have been tipped off by the presence of “The Fall of Lemuria” by Richard S. Shaver, a true screwball who might have believed in his stories about an alien civilization hidden within the Earth. Ray Palmer had pushed circulation at Amazing Stories to the  f&sf magazine peak with Shaver until his bosses grew tired of the slime on their fingers. Sure enough, Robert N. Webster was Ray Palmer and Other Worlds was headed down that same path.

And then the horribly unlucky Palmer, who grew up hunched and dwarfed after a car accident when he was seven, slipped, fell, and became temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. A 21-year-old fan, Bea Mahaffey, who was already on the payroll as Managing Editor, i.e. editor of scutwork, quietly took over, adding Marge Budwig Saunder to replace her hands-on jobs. Today it’s given that the sudden veer away from Shaver and toward solid second-tier status is attributable to Mahaffey.

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My All-Story Story, or, A Tale of Tarzan (Not Triumphant)

My All-Story Story, or, A Tale of Tarzan (Not Triumphant)

all story 1912 10 uk edition modified-small

Those who know me well are aware that I’m not a morning person (to put it mildly). Accordingly, they’d be shocked to learn that not only did I get up on Saturday, November 25th morning at 5:00 a.m., I did so voluntarily and eagerly! As collectors will attest, however, no price – even missing hours of delightful sleep! – is too great to pay in the pursuit of one of your collecting grails. Of course, it’s much more gratifying when the pursuit pays off. Unfortunately for me, it did not. Even so, I’m glad I got up to give it a shot.

About a week ago, I learned that an auction house in England would be auctioning off a copy of the October 1912 issue of The All-Story, which features Edgar Rice Burroughs’ complete novel, Tarzan of the Apes. All other things being equal in terms of condition, that issue is the most valuable of all the pulp magazines (the nicest copy I’m aware of having sold at auction, in fine condition, sold over a decade ago for nearly $60,000). This auction house clearly had no idea of its value, as their pre-sale estimate was between 20 and 40 pounds! A decent copy of this pulp has been my number one pulp grail for decades, and I hoped that this one would slip through the collecting cracks on its way to me. The auction house only had one photo of it online, and I couldn’t obtain any other photos of it, so condition was a bit of a guess, which complicated bidding. The front cover had some overall wear, but generally looked decent, but I had no clue on the condition of the spine, back cover or paper. See the photo above.

What made this particularly interesting was that it was the British edition of The All-Story, rather than the American edition. For a period of time in the teens (and I think going back a little earlier than that), The All-Story was also published in Britain, with the same cover date as the American edition. The covers noted that the price was Six Pence, rather than Ten Cents, and I believe the ads were different, but the fiction content was the same. I assume that the British edition was published at least a few days later than the American edition (the October 1912 American edition actually went on sale on September 10, 1912), but I don’t know how much of a delay there was. My guess is that it was later than the American edition, so technically this was not the first printing of the story, unlike the American.

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December Short Story Roundup

December Short Story Roundup

CaptureDecember’s here, so it’s time for another roundup. When the luminous Mrs. V. asked me about what I was reading this week, it turned into a conversation about short stories, then and now. At some point I said something along the lines of short stories have always been hit-and-miss, with most stories being satisfying, some terrific, and even a big name doesn’t always knock it out of the park. In fact, anyone might hit a home run, so a magazine like Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, featuring unknown and lesser-known writers, is just as likely to contain excellent stories as any of Lin Carter’s anthologies. That’s why I persist in reviewing new short stories each month. There’s a chance each and every month that I’ll discover a story that measures up to the best of the past, and will be worthy of a place in some future anthology of great swords & sorcery tales.

That’s the sort of anticipation I have when I open up a new issue of HFQ each quarter. Adrian Simmons, David Farney, William Ledbetter, James Frederick William Rowe, and Barbara Barrett are the names on the masthead, and swords & sorcery fans should thank each one of them for consistently putting out the best new S&S and with far less attention than they deserve. I won’t say any of the latest volume, #34, is among the greats bound to last, but all three are very good. Can you really ask for more than that?

Crazy Snake and the Demons of Ometepe,” by Eric Atkisson, brings to an end the multi-author tale begun last issue where alternate universes were at risk of domination by the Destroyer, a terrible trans-dimensional power. In “Between Sea and Flame” by Evan Dicken, Tenochtitlan fell to evil priests from the sea (not to Cortes) and the warrior Hummingbird found herself forced to back the lesser evil in order to save the word. Raphael Ordonez’s wandering ex-conquistador, Francisco Carvajal y Lopez, had to fight the Destroyer as well in “I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.”

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Exploring the Subterranean

Exploring the Subterranean

Subterranean Magazine back issues-small

I founded Black Gate in 2000, and we published the first issue at the World Fantasy Convention in Corpus Christi, Texas in October of that year. We produced the print magazine for 11 years (the last issue, #15, was published in May 2011), and during that decade-plus I was keenly observant of other print magazines, especially new ones. A handful of new zines popped up during that period, but I think my favorite was William Schafer’s Subterranean magazine, which produced eight print issues between 2005-2011 before transitioning online.

I only managed to come across a handful of issues during the print era, but that’s okay. I keep an eye out for back issues at conventions, and occasionally snag one or two (as I did with Subterranean #2 at the 2015 Windy City Pulp & Paper convention). They’re hard to come by, but they’re generally not expensive. I have an eBay saved search that alerts me when new lots are listed, and a few months ago I got a ping about the set of three issues above.

Subterranean #4 – 2006
Subterranean #6 – January 2007
Subterranean #8 – October 2011 — the last print issue

They were in pristine, unread condition, and offered for $16 total. I was the only bidder, and took the whole set home for less than the original cover price. It’s lonely being an obsessive magazine collector, but sometimes it has its benefits.

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Vintage Treasures: The American Fantasy Tradition edited by Brian M. Thomsen

Vintage Treasures: The American Fantasy Tradition edited by Brian M. Thomsen

The American Fantasy Tradition Brian M Thomsen-small

Brian Thomsen’s first anthology was Halflings, Hobbits, Warrows & Weefolk: A Collection of Tales of Heroes Short in Stature, a 1991 Questar paperback co-edited with Baird Searles. He followed that with more than a dozen more over the next 20 years — including The Reel Stuff (1998), Oceans of Magic (2001), and Masters of Fantasy (2004) — most co-edited with Martin H. Greenberg. He was the Senior Editor of SF and Fantasy at Warner Books and then Director of Books and Periodicals at TSR, where he wrote several Forgotten Realms novels, including Once Around the Realms (1995) and The Mage in the Iron Mask (1996).

He eventually became a Consulting Editor at Tor, where he produced in my opinion the most significant book of his career, and indeed one of the most important fantasy anthologies of the 90s: The American Fantasy Tradition, a massive 600-page hardcover surveying two centuries of American fantasy, containing stories by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Stephen Vincent Benét, Edith Wharton, Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft, Manly Wade Wellman, Charles Beaumont, Henry Kuttner, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Fredric Brown, Ray Bradbury, R. A. Lafferty, Alan Dean Foster, Shirley Jackson, Avram Davidson, Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Gene Wolfe, Karl Edward Wagner, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Bishop, and many others.

The American Fantasy Tradition is one of the finest survey anthologies of Western fantasy ever assembled, and it would serve as a splendid textbook for any introductory course to modern fantasy. It stands with David Hartwell’s The Dark Descent, Gardner Dozois’s Modern Classics of Fantasy, and Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s The Weird as one of the essential texts of the fantasy canon.

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The Late November Fantasy Magazine Rack

The Late November Fantasy Magazine Rack

Albedo-One-Issue-47-Cover-Smaller Back Issue 101-small Lightspeed magazine November 2017-small Meeple Monthly November 2017-small
Apex Magazine November 2017-small Locus magazine November 2017-small Outposts-of-Beyond-18-Tyree-Campbell-small Skelos magazine 3-small

If you’re a magazine fan, November continues to be very, very good to you. The latest crop of magazines include brand new fiction by BG regulars John C. Hocking and John R. Fultz, plus Charlie Jane Anders, Ashok K. Banker, Bruce McAllister, Keith Taylor, Nick Mamatas and Tim Pratt, and many more. Here’s the complete list of magazines that won my attention in late November (links will bring you to magazine websites).

Albedo One — issue 47 is a bumper 88 pages, with stories by Teis Teng, Bruce McAllister, Karla Schmidt, and Michele Piccolino — plus the winners of the International Aeon Award Short Fiction Contest
Back Issue— issue #101 is 84 pages in full color,  featuring an interview with the star of Flash Gordon, Sam J. Jones
Lightspeed — issue #90 has original fiction from Ashok K. Banker, Charlie Jane Anders, Kathleen Kayembe, and Max Wynne
Meeple Monthly — with coverage of the newest board games, featuring Blue Orange Games, Galakta Games, Greenbrier Games, Pandasaurus Games, and Renegade Game Studios
Apex Magazine — with new fiction from S.B. Divya, K.A. Teryna, and “The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft” by Nick Mamatas and Tim Pratt
Locus — interviews with David Marusek and Aliette de Bodard, a column by Cory Doctorow, obituaries and appreciations of Kit Reed, Julian May, and Yoji Kondo, and reviews of books by Victor LaValle, Jane Yolen, Tim Pratt, Sarah Gailey, and many others.
Outposts of Beyond — stories by Karen & Bill Otto, Pedro Iniguez, Vaughan Stanger, and editor Tyree Campbell
Skelos — issue #3 has contributions from two popular Black Gate authors, John C. Hocking and John R. Fultz, plus fiction from Keith Taylor, Chris Gruber, Ed Erdelac, Josh Rountree, and many others

Click any of the thumbnail images above for bigger images. Our early November Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

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Amazing Science Fiction Stories, February 1960: A Retro-Review

Amazing Science Fiction Stories, February 1960: A Retro-Review

Amazing Science Fiction Stories February 1960-smallHere’s a pretty early Cele Goldsmith issue. The names on the TOC reflect that — a lot different than in the 1963-1965 era — only Ben Bova would be familiar from latter days, and he mostly did nonfiction.

The cover is by Edward Valigursky, another contributor who didn’t appear as much later on. (His last cover was for the May 1960 issue.) Interiors are by Leo Summers, Varga, and Virgil Finlay. The editorial, extremely brief, is as ever by Norman Lobsenz, and concerns suspended animation. S. E. Cotts’ book reviews cover Manly Wade Wellman’s The Dark Destroyers, which she enjoyed a great deal more than I did; The Outward Urge, by John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes, a fixup of four stories from Fantastic, which she didn’t like much at all; and John Brunner’s The World Swappers, which she thought quite good.

The lettercol has contributions from Chester F. Milburn, Mike Deckinger, Ronald Felty, Philip A. Harrell, Arthur B. Prag, and Tobey Reed.

The stories are:

Complete Novel

“Transient,” by Ward Moore (35,000 words)

Short Stories

“A Long Way Back,” by Ben Bova (6,000 words)
“Divvy Up,” by Milt Lesser (4,700 words)
“It’s a Good Trick If …,” by Kate Wilhelm (1,900 words)
“A Jar of Jelly Beans,” by Franklin Gregory (4,900 words)

To begin with the short novel. Ward Moore (1903-1978) published five novels, beginning with Greener Than You Think (1947). His most famous novel by far is Bring the Jubilee (1953), a very well-regarded alternate history in which the South wins the Civil War. He is also remembered for his last novel, Joyleg (1962), a collaboration with Avram Davidson, about a Revolutionary War veteran discovered to be still alive in the present time; and for a stunning post-Apocalyptic (or “during the Apocalypse”) story, “Lot,” along with its sequel, “Lot’s Daughter.” As a writer he started late and finished early, with the great bulk of his fiction appearing between 1947 and 1962 (though a few more stories appeared in the ’70s).

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Giving up the Ghost: All Hallows 43

Giving up the Ghost: All Hallows 43

ALL HALLOWS 43-smallWhen I was at the 2016 World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio last year, I accomplished something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: buy the current issue of All Hallows, the acclaimed Canadian journal of spooky fiction. It’s been published since the mid-90s, and was nominated for the International Horror Guild Award in 2003, and the World Fantasy Award in 2004. Back issues are still available at their website, but I wanted to hold a copy in my hot little hands before handing over my shekels for international shipping.

Issue #43 was well worth the wait. Weighing in at 304 pages, it contains new fiction from Frances Hardinge, Rhys Hughes, J.J. Travis, Terry Grimwood, John Alfred Taylor, and many others. There’s also plenty of great articles and reviews. The editors are also the folks behind the highly regarded Ash Tree Press, and much of the material originally published in All Hallows has ended up reprinted in one of their attractive collections. The Ghost Story Society website has a fine description of their magazine:

All Hallows is the twice-yearly journal of The Ghost Story Society. This substantial publication, which is now 300 pages per issue, is edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden.

Each issue of the journal offers a mixture of items dealing with all aspects of the ghost story world. In addition to articles dealing with authors such as M. R. James, E. F. Benson, Amyas Northcote, Eleanor Scott, Elizabeth Jane Howard, H. G. Wells, August Derleth, Robert Aickman, Walter de la Mare, and other practitioners of the genre, there is a substantial review section dealing with new publications in the field; a News and Notes section covering new developments in the genre; a Film News and Notes section; articles about obscure and/or overlooked authors; Haunted Cinema, a regular feature looking at classic supernatural films; ‘Ramsey Campbell, Probably’; and letters and queries from our members.

All Hallows is also the Society’s major forum for new supernatural fiction, with an average of seven stories appearing in each issue. These are all new stories — not reprints of previously used material — by authors such as Simon Clark, A. F. Kidd, Terry Lams… Ellen Datlow, in her Introduction to The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 10, wrote that All Hallows ‘is a must for aficionados of the classic ghost story.’

All Hallows 43 is the Summer 2007 issue, which appears to be the most recent. So while it’s good to get so many questions answered, obtaining this issue opens up a deeper mystery. Namely, is the magazine still being published?

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 239 Now Available

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 239 Now Available

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 239-smallThe latest issue of Scott Andrew’s Beneath Ceaseless Skies has new fiction from Adam-Troy Castro & Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, and Michael Anthony Ashley, plus an Audio Fiction Podcast, and a reprint by Catherynne M. Valente. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

The Mouth of the Oyster,” Adam-Troy Castro & Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Sometimes we treated our anger as a polished jewel, too precious to be set aside. I retained mine for many long seconds before seeing it as a burden and letting it slip, unmourned, into the peace of the fine day. The last of it expressed itself with a grumpy, “For a man who makes eyes, you certainly have much to learn about the blind.”

Woe and Other Remedies,” Michael Anthony Ashley

On rang the bells, and the guests, as if released from fetters, dispersed to take their seats. And here we are, Gama III thought. The table was full, the moment at hand. Anticipation moved as a wild fondle from seat to seat, bowel to bowel, quivers begetting moans and hoarse whispers, emotion stretching jaws with violence.

Audio Fiction Podcast: “The Mouth of the Oyster,” Adam-Troy Castro & Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

And with that I gave up so many things, so many golden sunrises and so many lingering sunsets.

From the Archives: “The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery,” Catherynne M. Valente

For the sake of the beautiful Dogaressa, I took up my father’s battered old pipe and punty.

Read issue 239 online completely free here.

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