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.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination July 1966

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination July 1966 (1966)
Here we are with another one of these, and mostly reprints this time for some reason, excepting Chad Oliver's Just Like a Man, which is relatively readable and set on a planet so indistinguishable from Earth as to actually have lions. The point is anthropological, focusing on the absolutely fascinating means by which Oliver's alien lemurs failed to evolve into anything resembling humanity. My use of the term absolutely fascinating in the previous sentence may contain trace elements of sarcasm.

David V. Reed first enquired as to Where is Roger Davis? back in 1938, the answer apparently revealing that those swastika toting hordes about to sweep across Europe may have been aided by Martians. It's one of those first person account tales impersonating  private correspondence which opens with I know you're not going to believe this, but the other night as I charged my trusty meerschaum with a goodly plug of tobacco… To be fair, that sentence doesn't appear in the story because I just made it up, but somehow it feels as though it did. Also, the Martian invasion force comprises just three of them, which is probably understandable when you're trying to make a kid's show on the cheap, but—oh never mind.

Simak's The Trouble with Ants is one of those short stories which was eventually included in City, which is approximately a novel; and I know it won a million awards and that it's Simak and I generally love Simak without exception or reservation, but I've always found City a little overrated with its cast of talking dog and their robot pals just a little too silly to work. This one is about how the talking dogs and their robot pals realise that you have to be careful with ants, otherwise they develop technology. I sort of wonder if Cliff was experiencing trouble with his heating that month, because City suggests the influence of certain powerful fumes. I'm told it can get a bit nippy at times up there in Wisconsin.

Almost Human by Tarleton Fiske, who was actually Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, tells of an innocent robot corrupted by the kind of toughs commonly portrayed by James Cagney and who end each statement with a quasi-interrogatory see, see. It's readable, if nothing life-changing, see.

Theodore Sturgeon's The Way Home is short and pleasant but didn't make much sense - or maybe I mean didn't seem to have a point - but never mind because the last two pretty much justify the entrance fee. Henry Kuttner's Satan Sends Flowers is one of those tales where someone has an actual conversation with the devil and is very satisfying; leaving just Isaac Asimov's Satisfaction Guaranteed, which apparently I've read before although I don't remember it. It's one of his Susan Calvin things, but herself is thankfully only a secondary character. Being written by Asimov in 1951, we probably shouldn't be too surprised to meet a housewife who just wants to keep her home clean and her man happy, which I'm sure will have gone down a storm with the usual Goodreads wankers. I sometimes find this sort of thing a bit painful, and true enough, when Asimov falls on his arse, he falls hard; but here the focus on the actual thrust of the story - yet more robot stuff - is of such elegant precision that blaming Asimov for a) the fifties and b) having been born as someone other than Andrea Dworkin seems both unfair and a bit of a waste of time, tantamount to whining about Silas Marner seeming dated.

I'm still not sure why Fantastic went tits up. I guess maybe there were just too many of these things and not enough readers coughing up to a monthly timetable.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1965

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1965 (1965)
This one is dated to the month of my birth, beyond which I don't have anything interesting to add regarding these unrelated facts aside from makes you think, dunnit?

Fritz Leiber's Stardock is one of his Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser tales, a series I've given a wide berth up until now because I didn't like the sound of it. Leiber writes like a dream when he's writing something interesting - expressive and arguably unique in the history of this sort of literature; but Stardock is unfortunately more or less what I expected it to be, namely the adventures of bearded men who point at distant objects and exclaim behold! The bearded men in this case are engaged in mountain climbing in search of the inevitable treasure, and they both get to knob sexy faerie ladies, and it's sixty looong pages which I read in a single sitting because I knew I'd end up skipping the rest if I took a break. It's probably great if you like that sort of thing and I don't, but it's nice to know my instincts regarding whether I'm going to like something or not seem reasonably on point.

Thankfully, it's mostly uphill for the rest of the trip. Simak's You'll Never Go Home Again is characteristically nourishing; and Sally is one of those tales in which Asimov did something other than invite us to figure out the puzzle, so that's jolly nice; and this issue's vintage reprint was David H. Keller's The Worm from 1929 - then much younger than this magazine is now - which isn't anything mind blowing but does a job.

Frank R. Paul's cover illustrates The Man from Mars, his one page speculative essay on Martian biology. It's preposterous but charming and, dating from 1939, somewhat refutes the claim - which I read somewhere or other and have probably repeated - of Simak being the first writer to depict alien intelligence as something other than inevitably hostile.

The finest of the selection is Theodore Sturgeon's The Dark Room featuring a cast of mostly vodka-Martini guzzling fifties men and which is as such absurdly dated but works in spite of itself, and because Sturgeon's prose has a uniquely jazzy energy which crackles off the page.