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Otto Binder on John W. Campbell

Otto Binder on John W. Campbell

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John W Campbell-small

John W. Campbell (photo by Astounding cover artist Hubert Rogers)

Back to Otto Binder letters today. This one, from Binder to his friend, Jack Darrow, dated May 23, 1937, was written just before Binder was cut loose from Otis Adelbert Kline’s literary agency, which happened on June 1 of that year. As a result of his job upheaval, Binder spent some time, unsuccessfully, trying to land a gig as an editor (and a few years later interviewed with Ziff-Davis re: the Amazing Stories opening before it was given to Ray Palmer).

The letter is primarily of interest due to its discussion of John W. Campbell, a few months before Campbell would become editor of Astounding. It’s a shame that no more detailed record of the story telling game played at Binder’s house between him, Dr. John Clark, Frank Belknap Long, Campbell and Campbell’s wife exists; it would have been fascinating to sit in on this! Binder is clearly a fan of Campbell’s fiction (later on, when he found it difficult to sell to him at Astounding, he was not nearly as much a fan of his editing).

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Jack Binder and the Early Chicago SF Fan Club

Jack Binder and the Early Chicago SF Fan Club

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Back in the mid-1930’s, one of the most active science fiction fan clubs was the Chicago Science Fiction Club, which had among its members such fans as Jack Darrow (among fandom’s most prolific writers of letters of comment to the SF pulps), Earl and Otto Binder (the Eando Binder writing team), Jack Binder (their brother, an artist), Walter Dennis and Paul McDermott (both of who had started the Science Correspondence Club in 1929 and later published The Comet, edited by Ray Palmer and arguably the first SF fanzine), William Dellenback, Allen Kline (brother of author Otis Adelbert Kline) and Howard Funk. The Chicago Club had formed as the Chicago Chapter of the Science Fiction League, the nationwide fan organization created and promoted by Wonder Stories. The Chicago Chapter’s activities were prominent in the pages of Wonder Stories, and in Sam Moskowitz’ words, it was “the outstanding chapter of the time.”

From November 1935 to the Spring of 1937, the Club published a fanzine called The 14 Leaflet. The Spring 1937 issue is available online as a pdf in the fanzine section of fanac.org. The copy that’s online, however, is missing the first interior page of the issue. Following the cover (by William Dellenback; I acquired his original preliminary for it back in 2001 when I bought material from Jack Darrow’s estate) but before page 1, many copies of the issue had another page inserted, which contained 19 very small photos (all taken by Dellenback) of various club members. The photos were all glued to a plain sheet of white paper, with numbers identifying them, with the code, revealing the identities of the folks in the photos, on page 2. However, the copy scanned online was apparently missing this photo page. On page 11 of the issue, the editors noted that 50 copies were being printed with the photo page (most going to the members) and 25 copies were being printed without the photo page.

I’ve looked for the Spring 1937 issue of The 14 Leaflet for many years, but had not had any success finding it. I wanted to see those photos!

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Unknown, April 1941: A Retro-Review

Unknown, April 1941: A Retro-Review

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Unknown April 1941-smallWhile World War II continued to escalate, the April 1941 issue of Unknown was published. It’s easy to imagine the desire to escape through Unknown’s fantasy fiction during such times of uncertainty.

“The Castle of Iron” by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt — A trio of psychologists use magic to transport between worlds. Harold Shea and Vaclav Polacek join their friend Reed “Doc” Chalmers, who summons them to an iron castle owned by a leading magician named Atlantes. Atlantes promises to help Doc save the life of a young woman he’s in love with, but there never seems to be any progress. Doc suspects he’s being perpetually lured so that Atlantes has an ally against the threat of opposing knights.

When Atlantes’ nephew, Roger, leaves the castle, Atlantes fears betrayal and sends Harold and Vaclav out to search for the young man. But searching the land among enemy knights isn’t a simple matter.

De Camp and Pratt wrote five stories around the main cast of characters, known today as the Compleat Enchanter series. “The Castle of Iron” is the third in the series, and the previous two appeared in other issues of Unknown — “The Roaring Trumpet” in May, 1940, and “The Mathematics of Magic” in August, 1940. The final two stories were later published in Beyond Fantasy Magazine and Fantasy Magazine. “The Castle of Iron” was expanded into a novel in 1950.

The novella (yes, I know it’s listed in the Table of Contents as a novel) is a pretty quick read. Having no familiarity with the characters previously, I didn’t have much difficulty in jumping into the series; there was enough background information without turning things into info dumps or “as you know, Bob” statements. While I’m curious about the series as a whole, I probably won’t rush out to find it. Not that it’s a bad story, but it did feel somewhat slow at points, and I wasn’t completely drawn into the characters. I wonder if I’d feel differently if I’d started with the first story and worked my way up to this one.

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Discovering Robert E Howard: Fred Adams Jr. on Esau Cairn – A Man Outside His Epoch

Discovering Robert E Howard: Fred Adams Jr. on Esau Cairn – A Man Outside His Epoch

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Almuric_Cover1As you can see from the list of prior essays in this series down below, we’ve wandered all over the Robert E. Howard landscape. But we hadn’t touched on Howard’s science fiction. Dr. Fred Adams goes off-planet for us and examines one of Howard’s cult classics, Almuric. Blasting off…

In his novel Almuric, published in Weird Tales in 1939, Robert E. Howard presents a one-shot protagonist named Esau Cairn, a man in many ways typical of Howard’s barbarian warrior-heroes, but who departs from them in that he is more philosophical than most of Howard’s creations, and perhaps in many ways best speaks to Howard’s personality and philosophy.

Much of the discussion of Esau Cairn and of Almuric hinges on what I call the WWCD? Issue: ‘What Would Conan Do?’ in the modern world. That topic has been exhaustively covered by the discussion threads of the Robert E. Howard Society, and several interpretations have been postulated. To me, the importance of Esau Cairn as a character is that he gives voice to Howard’s own frustration at being a man of action trapped in a relatively genteel world.

Howard wrote, in “The Tower of the Elephant,” “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” Cairn bears out that rule when his barbarism rises to the surface and he kills a corrupt politician (perhaps rightfully so) with a single blow to the head.

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Vintage Treasures: Worlds Imagined: 14 Short Science Fiction Novels, Compiled by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg

Vintage Treasures: Worlds Imagined: 14 Short Science Fiction Novels, Compiled by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg

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Worlds Imagined Robert Silverberg-smallI bought a fine anthology of science fiction novellas on eBay last week for 5 cents. With $3.99 shipping, that brought the whole thing to $4.04 — about 28 cents per novella. Pretty sweet deal.

The anthology is Worlds Imagined, published by Avenel in April 1989, and edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg. Excuse me, ‘Compiled by,” not edited by. I guess Silverberg and Greenberg didn’t feel comfortable with the title of editors, for merely selecting the fiction. That’s editorial integrity for you.

One of the things I love about this book is the editors’ (erm, compilers’) impassioned defense of the novella in their intro. I read it years ago, and much of it stayed with me. Here it is, in part.

The short novel — or “novella,” as some prefer to call it — is one of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms. Spanning twenty to thirty thousand words, usually, it allows for more extended development of theme and character than does the short story, without making the elaborate structural demands of the full-length book… Some of the greatest works in modern literature fall into the class of novellas. Consider Mann’s “Death in Venice,” Joyce’s “The Dead,” Melville’s “Billy Budd,” and Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” — or Faulkner’s “The Bear,” Tolstoi’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” Carson McCuller’s “Ballad of the Sad Cafe”…

Since a prime task of the science fiction writer is to create carefully detailed worlds of the imagination, room for invention is a necessity. The short story can give only a single vivid glimpse of the invented world; the full-length novel frequently becomes so enmeshed in the obligations of plot and counterplot that the background recedes to a secondary position. But the short novel, leisurely without being discursive, is ideal for the sort of world-creation that is science fiction’s specialty. and since the days of H.G. Wells and his classic novella “The Time Machine” it has exerted a powerful attraction for science fiction writers.

Preach, brothers!

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Classically Awful or Awfully Classic: A.E. Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A

Classically Awful or Awfully Classic: A.E. Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A

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The World of Null-A-smallAlfred Elton van Vogt (1912-2000) is one of the great names of 20th century science fiction, and not just because the moniker sounds so odd, like it belongs to a mad scientist in a lurid Gernsbackian tale, the kind where “cosmic rays” are used to mutate the sleepy denizens of the city zoo into panicky prehistoric behemoths, which then rampage through the streets, spreading riot and chaos, thus allowing a cabal of sinister foreigners to hijack the metropolis’s secret supply of plutonium in order to build a colossal… sorry. Got a bit carried away there; once you’re in full Pulp Mode it’s hard to disengage. Back to A.E. van Vogt.

Van Vogt was a giant of the golden age of the 40’s, first appearing in John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction with the short story “Black Destroyer” in 1939. In the years that followed, he dominated the pages of the magazine with countless short stories and novels that even today are regarded as classics, among which the best known are Slan, The Empire of the Atom, The Voyage of the Space Beagle, The War Against the Rull, The Book of Ptath, and The Weapon Shops of Isher. (He frequently incorporated his short stories into his full length books; van Vogt was a pioneer of the “fix-up” — a term he coined — in which a novel is cobbled together from earlier, shorter pieces.)

In an era in which many of the SF writers of the 40’s and 50’s (some of major importance) have vanished from the shelves, most of the van Vogt books I’ve mentioned are still in print, and he remains influential — and controversial. (He did a short stint as a cheerleader for L. Ron Hubbard’s dianetics, for instance.) His writing seems to be equal parts sublime and appalling, and any discussion of van Vogt must sooner or later get around to addressing one simple question: can a “classic” be a godawful, incoherent mess?

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: “My Very Dear Beans, Cornbread and Onions” (Valentine’s Day—Robert E. Howard Style)

Discovering Robert E. Howard: “My Very Dear Beans, Cornbread and Onions” (Valentine’s Day—Robert E. Howard Style)

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One Who Walked Alone Novalyne Price Ellis-smallFor those of you who searched for the right way to describe your feelings for that certain special someone on February 14, Robert E. Howard might have been be a good source. After all, he was a wizard with words. And he did have a novel approach when it came to romance. As Bob Howard explains to Novalyne Price Ellis in her book One Who Walked Alone:

[M]en made a terrible mistake when they called their best girls their rose or violet or names like that, because a man ought to call his girl something that was near his heart. What, he asked, was nearer a man’s heart than his stomach? Therefore he considered it to be an indication of his deep felt love and esteem to call me his cherished little bunch of onion tops, and judging from past experience, both of us had a highest regard for onions. (106)

REH expanded this “indication of his deep felt love and esteem” in future letters to include:

“My very dear little Bunch of Radishes” or “My very dear Beans, Cornbread and Onions” or “My dear Sausage and Big, Brown Fluffy Biscuits as well as sliced red beets with butter over them.” (110)

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Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Three – “The Clue of the Pigtail”

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Three – “The Clue of the Pigtail”

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NOTE: The following article was first published on March 28, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 260 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

The_Mystery_of_Dr._Fu-Manchu_cover_1913220px-Mysteriousfumanchu“The Clue of the Pigtail” was the second installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu. It was first published in The Story-Teller in November 1912. It would later comprise Chapters 4-6 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu [US title: The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu] published the following year. Rohmer makes a drastic switch from the weird menace of “The Zayat Kiss” to a more traditional Yellow Peril storyline. The influence of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries is much less pronounced the second time around. This episode and the one that immediately follows it (“Redmoat” which we will examine in greater detail next time) see Rohmer instead delve deeper into the background of his Yellow Peril mystery. This transition is a necessary one to provide Dr. Fu-Manchu with a plausible motive for the weird deaths he was directing against his political enemies in the first story.

Most critics cite the Boxer Uprising of 1900 as the beginning of Yellow Peril fiction. While that inaugural international conflict of the 20th Century certainly did much to incite reader interest, Yellow Peril stories had existed prior to the series of massacres of Western missionaries that would ultimately spell the end of the Manchu Dynasty and be responsible for much of the ideological and socio-political transformation of the globe in the last century. A brief overview of the most prominent Yellow Peril stories prior to Sax Rohmer’s introduction of Dr. Fu-Manchu may prove beneficial.

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The Quest of Frank Schildiner

The Quest of Frank Schildiner

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7a0183d69395cea098c126a7581be8a7franktourbkJean-Claude Carriere is best remembered as the acclaimed screenwriter of Hotel Paradiso (1966), Belle de Jour (1967), The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (1972), The Return Of Martin Guerre (1982), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). Less well known is the fact that he also authored (under the house name of Benoit Becker) six very bloody sequels to Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) in 1957 and 1958 for a French horror-specialty imprint. Carriere’s  books chronicle the exploits of Gouroull, as he christened the Monster, as he moves across Europe from 1875 to 1939.

Gouroull is portrayed very much in the mold of Mary Shelley’s literary original. He is a terrifying amoral creation possessed of superhuman strength and cunning. Truly the only one of his kind, he is a creation who has outlived his creator and knows not love or restraint. Gouroull is the ultimate sociopath. This Frankenstein monster is quite foreign to our pop cultural mindset. Gouroull uses his razor sharp teeth to slash his victims’ throats. He does not breathe. His skin is naturally flame-resistant. Ichor runs in his veins in place of blood. He is a monster like no other.

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Acquiring Michael Whelan’s Cover for The Bane of the Black Sword

Acquiring Michael Whelan’s Cover for The Bane of the Black Sword

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Michael Whelan The Bane of the Black Sword-small Michael Whelan The Bane of the Black Sword DAW-small

I thought I’d move a bit further ahead in time tonight than my usual pulp related posts, though it does have a bit of a pulp connection for me. I was discussing this piece with a friend of mine earlier today, so I figured I’d post it. By Michael Raymond Whelan, this is the cover for The Bane of the Black Sword by Michael Moorcock, featuring the one and only Elric of Melnibone (click the art for bigger versions). Both Deb and I loved the Elric books when we read them as teenagers, in the DAW editions featuring all those great Whelan covers, and when we had the chance to pick this up, we jumped at it.

We bought this in a hotel room many years ago, from our friend Randal Hawkins. He and his wife Donna drove up from the K.C. area with the painting, and we met them at a hotel about half way between there and Chicago to do the deal. It wasn’t the only time we did a deal like that in a hotel room with Randal — we bought other art from him that way as well, over the years, as well as many pulps. Hence the bit of a pulp connection for me. Those were good hotel rooms! Randal passed away much too young, but we have fond memories of visiting with him and Donna in K.C., looking at their great art collection, as well as their place in Las Vegas. And we often think of him when we look at this piece.