Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1966

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1966 (1966)
Having done my homework on this occasion, I've discovered that Cohen's time as editor of Fantastic was characterised by most of the stories in each issue being reprints, these presumably being cheaper than new material. Five of the seven in this issue are reprints, from what I can tell, and it's not looking great.

I actually plucked this one from the shelf upon seeing Murray Leinster's name on the cover, and while The Psionic Mousetrap isn't necessarily anything amazing, it isn't entirely lacking redeeming qualities. Similarly reprinted is August Derleth's Carousel. Derleth's contribution to the field as editor and publisher shouldn't be underestimated, and when the stars are aligned in a certain configuration, he's even been known to spin a decent yarn, but Carousel is unfortunately not one of them. It's not terrible, but you can pretty much tell how it's going to end before you're half way through the first paragraph. Swinging back to 1932, David H. Keller's No More Tomorrows doesn't make a whole lot of sense but is at least short, so most of your time is spent waiting for him to explain the guy with a massive head and just one eye, which he doesn't; and You Can't See Me! by William F. Temple is harmless, fairly stupid but not without a certain screwy charm.

A regrettably sizeable chunk of this issue is occupied by Eando Binder's The Little People dating from 1940. Eando Binder was a literary gestalt of brothers Earl Andrew and Otto Binder. They had a big hit with Adam Link, a robot character starring in a series of short stories, but whatever magic they may have pseudonymously wrought in issues of Amazing and others is not immediately obvious from The Little People. The Little People is forty leaden pages of science discovering real fairies on the grounds of Charles Fort having proven their existence beyond any doubt whatsoever because of all those myths and legends 'n' stuff blah blah evolution blah blah blah Eohippus was a tiny horse meaning that blah blah blah. It might be less annoying were it not written like Enid Blyton for adults, or at least Enid Blyton for older girls and boys, but mostly boys - although I read one of her Wishing Chair books a couple of years back as an experiment and Enid can be impressively weird in places, whereas this is just squaresville from beginning to end. Recidivist fairies, for example, are punished by reduction to what the Binder lads term woman-status, meaning their duties are limited to cooking and cleaning for a year. Even the illustrator apparently couldn't be arsed to read the thing all the way through, cladding his fairies in tiny versions of human clothes, contradicting the revelation of their captor, the evil scientist Dr. Scott, denying them such traditional fairy clobber.

Never mind.

Of the new material, there's Rocket to Gehenna by Doris Piserchia which I didn't read because it's one of those stories told as an exchange of correspondence, and I can't be doing with that shit. The other one is Roger Zelazny's For a Breath I Tarry - although it actually turns out to have first appeared in New Worlds six months earlier. Anyway, it's more of what I suppose must be Zelazny's customary science-fiction as pseudo-Buddhist parable, as was Lord of Light, but being significantly shorter is more easily digested and is actually pretty great. In fact, it's probably the best thing I've read of his which wasn't an attempt to make sense of Philip K. Dick.

So it's not a great average for this issue, but I guess a few decent efforts mostly cancel out the duds, although I still say The Little People was a barrel scraped too close to the grain.