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Worlds Without End Blog

A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction on WWEnd! Posted at 4:03 PM by Dave Post

Dave Post

In our quest to bring you the best books in genre fiction we continue to add new awards and lists to WWEnd. When we decide it’s time for a new one we start looking at the holes in our coverage on the site and we try to find a ready list to fill those gaps. But it can’t be just any ‘ol list. We want to find the best possible list from a reputable source that the genre community recognizes as knowledgeable and authentic.

In this case we wanted to add a black authors list to WWEnd, and given what’s going on in our world with the Black Lives Matter movement, we wanted it to be a really great list. That’s when we discovered Nisi Shawl’s excellent list: A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction. Reputable, knowledgeable, and authentic? Check, check, and check. We reached out to Nisi and after a lovely Zoom chat we received permission to add the list to WWEnd!

If you are not familiar with it, A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction is “an annotated list of 40+ black science fiction works that are important to your understanding of its history.” Nisi writes that some of these works could be construed as fantasy rather than science fiction because “…it’s sometimes difficult to understand the history of black science fiction without reference to the history of black fantasy.”

Blake; or, The Huts of America The Comet Kindred Bloodchild The River Where Blood Is Born The Intuitionist Mindscape Pym

In addition to the list, which originally appeared in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination #233, Nisi has written articles about most of the books. Since then, the articles have appeared in the Tor.com blog, and she is slowly adding them to the Carl Brandon Society blog. We have linked to those articles from the individual book pages on WWEnd so you can read about their significance to the ever-growing black science fiction canon.

Our many and profound thanks to Nisi Shawl for graciously allowing us to reproduce the list here. We hope you enjoy the books and will help us share this important resource with the community at large.

 

New version 5 of Classics of Science Fiction Posted at 8:00 AM by James Wallace Harris

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We are now rolling out version 5 of the Classics of Science Fiction list. Since 1987 how the lists were generated has changed with each new version. Version 5 is driven by a database and programs that allow us to add new citation sources on the fly. Hopefully, that means we won’t have to write new versions of the list generator in the future. But it does mean the list will automatically change when we add new data.

We have never claimed our lists of “classic science fiction” are the absolute best of all science fiction to read. Our goal has been to track how science fiction stories are remembered over time. Most stories are quickly forgotten. A few get remembered for years, and sometimes decades. Rare works are still read a century later. Collectively, we remember some stories, but that doesn’t mean that individuals don’t find stories that resonate overwhelmingly with their own unique reading tastes that don’t get recognition statistically.

In version 5 of the Classics of Science Fiction and Classics of Science Fiction Short Stories, almost everything is a hyperlink, and each column can be resorted by clicking on the heading label. There is also a build your own list where visitors can create custom lists. Titles and authors are linked to ISFDB.org, and from there you can follow links to other resources.

At the top of each list is the option to show the citations or turn them off. The citations are in order by year. If you study these lists and citations, you’ll see how stories are remembered and forgotten. If you are old enough, this might spur wistful memories.

We control the size of the generated lists by specifying the number of citations. For our classics lists we use 12 for books, and 8 for stories. These produce lists of around 100 titles, a size that seems to capture the most remembered stories. Stories we like to think of as classics. If you want fewer stories up the citation requirements, if you want more, lower them.

A fun thing to do with the custom list builder is to search for the most popular science fiction for the decade of your teen years. That tends to be everyone’s golden age of science fiction.

Our new URL is https://csfquery.com.

 

Subscribe to SF Magazines – Become a Patron of an Art Posted at 8:00 AM by James Wallace Harris

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How do you make money on a product given away for free? That’s a problem all websites face, but I’m particularly worried about those that publish science fiction short stories. Let’s say you pay 10-cents a word to writers and offer 100,000 words of quality fiction to your readers each month. That’s $10,000 of overhead just for stories. Advertising won’t cover that. And even generous Patreon donors will tire quickly. What’s a publisher to do? Neil Clarke over at Clarkesworld brought this conundrum up on Twitter the other day and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

I love reading science fiction short stories and would hate to see their publishers go out of business. Traditionally, short science fiction was distributed in printed magazines supported by subscriptions. After the internet websites began publishing short SF for free, which competed with the magazines. Their success has steadily grown as more and more awards are given to stories that are first published on the web, as well as seeing a greater percentage of these stories anthologized in the best-of-the-year volumes. It’s now a disadvantage to be published in print.

Magazines have declining revenues while websites struggle for any revenue. This can’t go on. A new monetizing model needs to be discovered.

Free-to-read stories help authors find fans and win awards, but at what cost? Making a profit from selling fiction has always been hard, but it is impossible when the price is free. If I was writing a science fiction story, I wouldn’t picture this in the future. Nor would I predict internet publishing failing and print publishing reviving.

Subscribing to the digital editions of the SF/F magazines seems to be the main hope at the moment. But too many readers still expect SF stories for free. A suggestion was made in the twitter thread that online publishers retain part of their content for exclusive eBook editions, but Clarke replied he doesn’t want to penalize those writers by hiding their stories. What’s needed is for readers to buy subscriptions and let all the stories be published on the net for free. A Zen koan. If a story is published on the net, readers who love it share it with friends. Being free helps a story find readers. But, can publishers find enough paying subscribers to support all the freeloaders?

There are two kinds of readers — casual ones who read short stories rarely, and dedicated ones who cherish short science fiction as a distinct art form. Subscribers will be the patrons of this art. The question is: Are there enough patrons out there to support SF magazines? Could original anthologies completely replace the periodicals? I hope short science fiction doesn’t become like the world of classical music where local symphonies must constantly beg for money from a dwindling patron base. There are really two problems here: declining readership and declining subscriptions.

Rocket Stack Rank regularly reviews 11 SF/F magazines, as well as a significant number of anthologies and other publishers of short SF. There are even more SF/F magazines out there that they don’t cover, just look at WWEnd’s list of over 60+ magazines that cover the SF/F/H genres. Magazines come and go, and whether or not they get to stay depends on making money. For example, Amazing Stories is publishing again. Steve Davidson is doing everything he can to resurrect that legendary title that’s gone out of business many times.

Magazines and websites need income to stay in existence, but finding a revenue stream in an era where everyone expects everything online for free is a big burden. I’m not sure the market can support 11+ magazines. I expect a big shake-out in the near future. Would more magazines be profitable if there was less competition?

I subscribe to 4 magazines (Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed) because I get them for $2.99 a month each through Amazon. I do it this way because it’s so damn convenient. I can read these magazines on my phone or tablet. I can unsubscribe at any time so there’s no real commitment. I consider the $12 I spend each month as my way of supporting short science fiction. Most people think of patrons of the arts as rich folks who give thousands to their favorite orchestra or museum. $12 a month is my way of being a penny-ante patron of an obscure art form.

I would also subscribe to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction if it offered a $2.99 a month subscription. I’d subscribe to other magazines if they offered $1.99 or $2.99 subs through Amazon. Some magazines offer individual issues for sale at Amazon, like Interzone for $4.99 each, and I’ll buy those when Rocket Stack Rank rates one of their stories highly.

For folks who don’t like Amazon, eBook editions of these magazines are available elsewhere.

It doesn’t bother me that two of the magazines I subscribe to offer their stories for free online. It’s easier to read them on my phone, but I like that the stories are there for free. When I find an outstanding tale, I enjoy telling my friends or blog about them, and having that link means there’s a greater chance of folks giving the story a try. I also want internet browsing to always be free.

The science fiction magazines will need several thousand subscribers to keep them going. Is this the ultimate solution to the problem? Can each genre magazine find at least 10,000 patrons? The other day Apple launched AppleNews+ which provides 300+ magazines for $10 a month. If it succeeds it might draw tens of millions of subscribers.

Unfortunately, none of those 300+ magazines are fiction magazines. The reason why I love subscribing to Spotify is it provides for all my music needs in one source. What if AppleNews+ provided for all my periodical needs? I have no idea if these 300 magazines will make money from AppleNews+ but they are still offering their print, web, and eBook editions too. Maybe the solution is having multiple revenue streams.

Can the new Netflix model for magazines work? Would hundreds of magazines sharing a tiny bit from millions of subscribers pay better than thousands of subscribers paying larger chunks of change?

AppleNews+ offers several categories of magazines (Business + Finance, Cars, Entertainment, Food, Health, etc.). Wouldn’t it be interesting if they included a category for Literature? They could offer various genre magazines, literary journals, poetry magazines, and maybe even Writer’s Digest, The Writer, and Poets & Writers. That way all the would-be writers of the world would want to subscribe.

Over the last decade, I’ve tried Zinio, Texture, and other e-magazine services. I subscribed to Texture for a couple of years and then canceled. I went back to paper magazines. I didn’t feel I was using Texture enough. I thought if I had magazines lying around the house again I’d do more reading. But I haven’t. I signed up for AppleNews+ because, at $10 a month, it’s far cheaper, and I won’t have those piles of magazines around the house making me feel guilty. It’s a cheap enough way to have magazines when I do want them.

I’ve come to realize that I have to pay if I want certain things in this world to exist, even if I don’t use them.

I subscribe to four SF magazines that I seldom read. I read when I can, or when I see a story recommended, or when a friend tells me about a story. I subscribe because I want them to exist. I subscribe because I want a place for new SF writers to get published. I subscribe because one day if I can ever get back into writing fiction I’ll have a place to submit my stories.

We have to realize that free content on the internet isn’t free. We’ve got to come up with revenue systems that work. I think the internet needs to remain free, so we can always have instant access to content, but we need to find ways to pay publishers who present free content on the web.

The rising costs of printing and postage are making publishing the old way impractical. I love printed magazines. Last year I subscribed to Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF because I thought I wanted to collect them again. But they all ruined that desire by putting mailing labels on their beautiful covers. If they had shipped their magazines in protective wrappers I would still be subscribing to the print editions. I have a nostalgia for that. But I feel the age of printed magazines is nearly over. It’s actually much easier to read AppleNews+ than the paper magazines. Many of the essays I read from AppleNews+ are free to read on the web or through Flipboard, but AppleNews+ formats the content for eye-friendlier reading. That’s also worth $10 a month.

I’d love if AppleNews+ included fiction magazines. Or if all the fiction magazine publishers allied together and created a monthly subscription service like AppleNews+. I’d be willing to pay another $10 a month for it.

JWH

 

 

 

Do You Want to Be a Science Fiction Writer? Posted at 11:42 AM by James Wallace Harris

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This is an important time of year for would-be science fiction writers. The big three SF writing workshops, Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey are taking applications for their 6-week workshops this summer. Application deadlines are March 1, March 1, and April 1. These workshops require a serious commitment of time and money, but you get to work with professional writers and editors. You’ll need roughly $5000 to cover tuition and expenses not counting travel costs. The real commitment is finding six weeks free from work. Acceptance is based on a story you submit with your application. James Gunn offers a shorter 2-week Speculative Fiction Writing Workshop June 9-12, for those who have less vacation time.

Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey are for people committed to becoming writers. Many modern science fiction writers got their start at these workshops. Each year, around fifty students attend these workshops. Many of them go on to sell stories. A few of them go on to sell novels. Wikipedia even lists alumni for Clarion and Clarion West.

These workshops are based on submitting stories and having them critiqued by fellow students. You’re expected to write a story a week. There are countless general fiction writing workshops, MFA programs, creative writing courses that use the same techniques to get feedback on your work. Then there’s Critters Workshop, an online critiquing system for those agoraphobic writers who never want to leave home.

If you’re a new writer, critiques by other would-be writers are the marketing research you want the most. Don’t expect your first few dozen stories to be worth reading. Jamie Todd Rubin’s experience is more typical. And I’ve read memoirs by writers who claimed it took writing two hundred short stories before they started selling professionally.

Our genre often feels far more open to new writers than other genres. Several sites for science fiction writers such as Duotrope, Ralan, SFWA (you don’t need to be a member to read their market reports), Locus Magazine, Writer’s Digest, Critters Black Hole, will help you find magazine publishers that are open to new submissions.

One way I keep up with the event horizon of the latest science fiction is to subscribe to digital SF magazines at Amazon. For $12 a month I get the latest issues of Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed automatically sent to my iPad. I wished that F&SF still offered a monthly Kindle subscription. I do miss the wonderful paper editions, but mailing labels ruining beautiful cover art was just too painful, so I’ve gone digital. There’s more free science fiction being published on the web today than any immortal could read, so if you’re too cheap to support the markets you want to sell to, at least read their stories online as market research. If you want to know your real competition, just buy any of the annual best-of-the-year anthologies.

Astounding History Posted at 2:07 PM by James Wallace Harris

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I’ve always thought interest in science fiction’s history was extremely tiny, but when Alec Nevala-Lee’s new book, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction got reviewed in The Wall Street Journal and Nature I had to revise that thought. Who knew? Earlier this year Paul Giamatti and Stephen Colbert discussed Golden Age science fiction on The Tonight Show. That blew me away. Just how many old Baby Boomers know about Astounding Science-Fiction?

Astounding under slight title variations was published from 1930 to 1960 when it became Analog Science Fact & Fiction The science fiction boom that began in the 1950’s coincided with the Baby Boom generation. It was kickstarted with hardback and paperback reprints from 1930’s and 1940’s Astounding. It’s glory days, often called The Golden Age of Science Fiction was from 1939-1950 when its editor John W. Campbell reshaped the genre with new writers like Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt, L. Ron Hubbard, and many others.

All my life I’ve been reading about the legendary issues of Astounding Science-Fiction. I even collected them for a while in the 1970’s but I gave that up when I realized it would become an obsession. Last year I bought the complete run of Astounding scanned to digital images sold on DVDs at eBay. The same digital scans are available free on the net if you look around. For the past several years I’ve been seeing cover images and interior art shared all over the web. Evidently, those scanned copies are being read again by a fair number of people. It’s wonderful to have this digital library of Astounding because whenever I read a reference to a story, editorial, or letter to the editor, I can quickly call it up.

What I’d love to know is just how many fans of Astounding are there today? Evidently, enough to make Alec Nevala-Lee’s book a minor hit. His book is not the first history of Astounding, and maybe not the last, but it seems to have arrived at a significant time. The book has gotten lots of advance reviews, it’s available in hardback, Kindle, and audio, and it’s getting great word of mouth. I really want to know how many people buy it. That number should be a census of my people.

Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee is probably the most significant book about science fiction history since The World Beyond the Hill by Alexei and Cory Panshin. That book won a Hugo, and I expect this one will too.

 

Reading the Pulps: Robert F. Young Posted at 11:37 AM by James Wallace Harris

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I can’t remember ever seeing a book by Robert F. Young at a bookstore, new or used. My library has nothing by him. Young published over a 150 SF/F short stories from 1953-1987, and just five novels few fans have ever heard about. If you search for “Robert F. Young” at ABEBooks.com most of the returns are used magazines. Worlds Without End lists three collections and three novels, just about all of Young’s published work — not much to show for a lifetime of writing. Amazon offers just three short story collections still in print, and one of them is a 55 cent ebook of out-of-copyright stories.

In other words, Robert F. Young is a forgotten writer. He was never famous, but I was always delighted to buy an SF mag with one of his stories. I remembered his name. He seldom got the cover story, but I’d say he often got his name on the cover. Young’s stories were easy to read, gentle, sentimental, romantic, and usually involved fun science fictional ideas. His tales were never great, but always entertaining. He appeared in a huge variety of magazines, including Playboy, Saturday Evening Post, but mostly in science fiction digests. Towards the end of his life, his literary home seemed to be The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

The cliché for writers is their work will make them immortal. That’s not true, of course. Sure, a handful of writers have written things we’ve remembered for hundreds of years or even thousands, but nothing lasts forever. I wish Robert F. Young’s stories would last a little while longer. I hope reading this makes you give him a chance.

I wish I knew more about Young. He was born in 1915 and died in 1986. He served in the Pacific during WWII. The most fascinating thing Wikipedia says about him is “Only near the end of his life did the science fiction community learn he had been a janitor in the Buffalo public school system.” That intrigued me. Was his whole writing career done while working as a school janitor? Did the kids know their janitor wrote science fiction? The Science Fiction Encyclopedia doesn’t offer much more about his personal life. Was he married? Did he have kids? Was he an active fan that attended conventions? Did he contribute to fanzines? I can only find one grainy photo of him. If you know more, post a comment below.

The interesting thing about Young is how readers remember him. Every now and then I’ll meet readers who loved the science fiction digests growing up like I did, and sometimes the Robert F. Young name comes up. Always fondly. I doubt Robert F. Young was anybody’s favorite writer, but quite often I’ve talked to people who said they always read his stories when one appeared in the table of contents.

I envy Young. I always wanted to be a science fiction writer. Of course, I always fantasized about writing famous novels, but now, I just wish I had some short stories published. At least one story that was as good as RFY’s best. I think it’s kind of special that his stories linger on and wished before I die I could hide away a story in a magazine too. We don’t know much about Robert F. Young, but his stories leave a mysterious marker that he was once here.

The pulp and digest magazines published thousands of writers that never achieved book fame. They live on in the hearts of fans, who are mostly old now. I belong to a number of groups that remember the pulps, and I’m always surprised by how different fans fondly remember authors I can’t recall ever hearing about before.

I wonder how many Baby Boomer SF fans remember Robert F. Young? If you do, post a comment. If you’re interested in giving Young a try, his first collection from 1965, The Worlds of Robert F. Young was reprinted in 2017. I bought this recently, hoping the Avram Davidson introduction would have provided more biographical information – it didn’t.

 

Reading the Pulps: Time Travel Posted at 3:35 PM by James Wallace Harris

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I came across a wonderful website the other day, The Big List of Time Travel Adventures created by Michael Main. What Michael has done is gathered as many time travel stories as he could find and organized them by the year they appeared. The header of his site allows visitors to pick a year and see what time travel stories were published that year. Each entry has a graphic, usually the cover of the pulp magazine in which the story appeared, a short synopsis, and a quote. Michael also awards Master Traveler citations to writers and Eloi gold, silver, and bronze medals to stories.

I especially love Michael’s “ALL YEARS” page that produces one long list of time travel stories beginning with “Memoirs of the Twentieth Century” from 1733 and ending with all the time travel stories from 2017. Michael is working a new version of his site that will be database driven and allow users to input stories. And it will catch up with stories from 2018.

I wish there were other sites devoted to other sub-genres of science fiction. Wikipedia does have some pages that do that. Here’s their page for Time Travel in Fiction. It’s excellent, but not as fun as Michael’s pages,

And here’s Wikipedia’s page for Artificial Intelligence in Fiction. That’s the topic I would work on if I created such an SF sub-genre site. It breaks the topic down into different subjects, which is great, but I’d rather see things listed by year. I love following the evolution of an idea as it develops over time. I’ve also wanted to mind map a sub-genre.

I stumbled onto The Big List of Time Travel Adventures when I was researching “Barrier” by Anthony Boucher. I discovered “Barrier” when I was reading The Great SF Stories 4 (1942) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. “Barrier” first appeared in the September 1942 issues of Astounding Science-Fiction.

Boucher is evidently the first person to ask, “Where are all the time travelers” in the same way the question “Where are all the space travelers” was asked when wondering why we’re apparently alone in the universe. If time travel is possible shouldn’t we have time traveling visitors?

“Barrier” from 1942 is a complicated time travel story that reminds me of “By His Bootstraps” by Robert A. Heinlein from 1941. I have to wonder if Boucher read Heinlein’s story and thought he could top it.

Brent is a time traveler visiting the year 2473. First, he has trouble with the language. Boucher imagines in the future incorrect speech can get you killed. The’s reason behind that absurdity that makes sense. Brent has landed in a time period that believes it’s a utopia. Because this society thinks it’s a perfect society it also assumes that changes are a threat. Their fear of altering their ways extends to fearing time travelers. So they erect barriers to block time travelers from both the past and the future. Unfortunately, Brent got in before the barrier was complete, and can’t get out. And, it turns out, he isn’t the only time traveler trapped inside the barrier. Because this story was written in 1942, this future repressive society has Nazi ancestry.

Last week seemed like my week for time travel stories. Because “Barrier” was so complicated I wanted to read what others thought about it and jumped on Google. That’s how I discovered The Big List of Time Travel Adventures. While clicking around on that site I saw this cover:

Could you resist reading “When Time Was New” after seeing a guy climb inside the head of a triceratops? I couldn’t. It was a fun story and I mentioned it to my discussion group for The Great SF Stories about how I always liked reading Robert F. Young stories back in the day. The group asked, why isn’t Young remembered today, so I looked up his bio on Wikipedia. Two things caught my eye. One, he had been a school janitor and wrote over 200 science fiction stories, and second, his most popular story was “The Dandelion Girl” first published in the April 1, 1961 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. That’s quite an accomplishment for a science fiction writer.

I wish I had that issue of The Saturday Evening Post to see how “The Dandelion Girl” was presented and illustrated. Also, I would have been curious how mundane readers reacted to a romantic time travel story.

“The Dandelion Girl” is a lovely tale about a man from our time meeting a young girl from the future. “When Time Was New” is about a man from our time meeting a young girl 79 million years ago while observing dinosaurs. There is a symmetry between these two stories. Young was in his forties at the time and I have to assume he was feeling old and daydreaming a lot about young women.

“When Time Was New” had a wonderful complication. Carpenter, the main character travels back in time 79 million years and discovers two kids in a tree. That’s a pretty cool start for a story. He assumes they have time traveled too. But they haven’t. They are from that time Mars. They were kidnapped and their kidnappers were hiding out on Earth. This is rather unbelievable, but the story is still fun. I immediately wonder if Young is going to suggest that people of Earth are long ago immigrants from Mars.

I can’t say too much about these three stories without ruining their plots. But I was intrigued by how each used time traveling for its plot. I was also entertained by jumping around in time to research each story. Boucher was using time travel to comment on his current politics by imagining a future society, Young was using time travel to for adventure and romance. H. G. Wells used his famous time story to explore human and astronomical evolution. Heinlein wrote several time travel stories just to push the envelope on plotting stories. And course, most writers use time travel to get modern people into historical periods. The possibilities are endless, or are they?

If you read enough time travel stories you sense the limitations of the sub-genre. I’m confident that actual time travel is impossible. But that’s also one of the fun components of the theme, how traveling in time would cause endless problems. One thing I’ve learned from reading time travel stories is they need precise limitations or they ruin the plot of their story.

It’s fun for me to see how a science fictional concept evolves over time, which explains why I admired Michael’s site so much. Be sure to check it out. Go use his time machine, set a destination year, and then read the time travel stories from that year.

 

 

 

Reading the Pulps 11: Where to Find Them Posted at 12:19 PM by James Wallace Harris

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Few people still read the pulps. There are collectors, like those who gather at PulpFest, that buy, collect, and read the actual magazines from the past. But they are not many anymore. Pulps were printed on cheap paper that wasn’t acid-free, so decades later they’re doing a slow burn into oblivion. Generally, their pages are brown, brittle, and have a distinctive smell. Many of them have become too fragile to read, with pages so dry that fragments snap off.

There is little reason for the average reader to read an original pulp magazine because most of their best stories have been long reprinted in books, audiobooks, and ebooks. Many bookworms don’t even know they’ve been reading pulp fiction their entire life. But if you love a particular genre, and want to explore its roots, I highly recommend reading digital copies of the original pulps. The illustrations, editorials, letters to the editor, non-fiction columns, and ads all take you back to another time. Just look at how space suits were imagined in this 1940 illustration from the June issue of Astonishing Stories.

There are many places on the web to find copies of pulps to read. For example, the issue of Astounding Stories that contained the illustration above can be found at the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is a non-profit library that preserves popular culture digitized for the web. The Internet Archive is also known for its WayBackMachine that archives old websites.

For each issue of a pulp magazine the Internet Archive preserves, it provides a variety of reading formats, including Kindle, ePub, PDF, full-text, Abbyy OCR, and the one I prefer, CBR reader (RAR/CBR/CBZ files). These are single file collections of images that can be viewed with a comic book reader (CBR) program. The advantage of CBR is each page is a high-resolution image.

The Pulp Magazine Archive at the Internet Archive also allows visitors to read the pulps on screen with a web viewer. This is great for casual reading. But if you want to sit in your easy chair and use your iPad to travel back to the first half of the 20th century, then downloading a preferred file-type is better. I just save an issue to Dropbox and open it with Chunky, my iOS CBR reader.

I don’t regularly read pulp magazines. I mainly read specific old issues for research about the history of science fiction. I doubt the Internet Archive will become a major source of free reading. Pulps are fun to sample like finding an old 1938 issue of Life Magazine at a flea market and taking it home for an afternoon of contemplating the past.

There are many places on the web to learn about pulp magazine history. Just search Google for “Pulp Magazines.” Most fans of these old magazines are bookworms in their last third of life who remember what they loved to read from their first third. I expect as they die off, interest in pulps will fade, and these old scanned issues will only be of interest to scholars.

If you would like to buy pulp magazines to see what they were physically like, I suggest using eBay and searching for bargain lots. Individual issues of can run into money because of specific collector value, whereas some sellers will bunch together several odd issues and sell them at a bargain. However, what you really want is one with a beautiful cover in top condition. Some people even frame these as decorative art objects.

Reading the Pulps 10: “In Hiding” by Wilmar H. Shiras Posted at 8:08 AM by James Wallace Harris

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“In Hiding” originally appeared in the November 1948 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. You can find this story in these books, which include:

Warning: This column contains mild spoilers

I just finished listening to the new audiobook edition of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 2B. “In Hiding” turned out to be my favorite story in the collection. I don’t think I’ve read it before, although it feels vaguely familiar. And I had no memory of ever encountering the author, Wilmar H. Shiras, before. It turns out Wilmar was a woman, making her only the third woman writer in the first three volumes of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

“In Hiding” is a quiet story about a boy who is so smart that he has to hide his intelligence from other kids and grown-ups. I thought it a remarkable story, and so did the readers of Astounding Science-Fiction back in November 1948. “In Hiding” scored first place in “The Analytical Laboratory,” with an average score of 1.54, meaning most readers put it at the top of their list. That doesn’t happen often. John W. Campbell, the editor had this to say:

Wilmar H. Shiras sent in her first science fiction story, “In Hiding.” I liked it and bought it at once. Evidently, I was not alone in liking it: it has made an exceptional showing in the Lab here—the sort of showing, in fact, that Bob Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, and Lewis Padgett made with their first yarns. I have reason to believe we’ve found a new front-rank author. Incidentally, there’s a sequel to “In Hiding” coming up in the March issue.

Shiras wrote two more stories for Campbell, “Opening Doors” (March 1949) and “New Foundations” (March 1950). In 1953 Shiras came out with Children of the Atom from Gnome Press by including the three Astounding stories and writing two more to create a collection. Although this book has been reprinted many times over the years, it’s not well-known, and Wilmar H. Shiras only wrote a handful of other stories, including three for Ted White’s Fantastic in the early 1970s. It’s a shame that Campbell was wrong about her, and she didn’t become a major science fiction writer. Wikipedia has damn little about Shiras. She got married at 18, had two boys and three girls. Children of the Atom is the main reason she is remembered, and only by a few old fans.

I found “In Hiding” to be a philosophically insightful science fiction story because of how Shiras dealt with the human mutant theme. There are some who claim (without documentation) that Children of the Atom inspired Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to create X-men comics. After the atomic bomb in 1945, radiation was used for all kinds of miracle mutations in comics, pulps, books, television shows, and movies. Radiation caused insects to grow as big as dinosaurs and for people to develop superpowers. Shiras took a quieter approach. Parents working at an atomic plant conceived mutant children with very high IQs. Normal looking, but very smart. I found that much more appealing than silly stories of oddities with superpowers.

I don’t know why, but science fiction has a long history of imagining Humans 2.0, and they invariably give our replacements telepathy and other psychic powers. I just don’t see that happening. Psi-powers are obviously borrowed from stories of gods, angels, and other magical beings in myths. Isn’t prayer telepathy with God? Don’t angels and demons teleport? Aren’t god-like beings always using telekinesis to act powerfully? I find it psychologically lame that SF writers assume evolution will lead to such talents. Superpowers appeal to the child in us. We want reality to be magical — it’s not.

Shiras takes a different approach, one I feel is more adult. Radiation can cause mutations. Sadly, most would be unwanted physical changes. But, Shiras suggests just a bump in smarts. Not god-like super-knowledge, but children smarter than average. In her stories, it’s implied the orphan children of the atomic plant workers have IQs greater than 150. They are orphans because the plant blows up.

“In Hiding” is about Tim, a boy a school psychologist discovers is a lot smarter than his B average grades imply. Over time the psychologist gains the confidence of the boy and learns Tim pretends to be a normal kid because he discovered at a very early age that other people, young or old, resents intelligence greater than theirs. Tim hides. He is raised by his grandparents who expect him to be well-behaved and quiet, and when he is, allows Tim to have privacy and a workshop in an old barn. By using the mail, and pseudonyms, Tim creates secret personalities that pursue various hobbies, conducts science experiments, breeds cats, completes college correspondence courses, sells stories to magazines, and writes articles for journals.

Science fiction has speculated about Homo superior or superior aliens since the 19th century. Almost always they imagine big heads and ESP. I think evolution is obviously working towards increased intelligence and self-awareness. I believe AI machines will be the next rung on the evolutionary ladder, but I also assume it is possible humans could undergo mutations that will lead to a new and improved biological species. But what is better? Marvel Comics mutants appeal to the child in us. What improvements would rational adults hope for? What new species of humans would have better adaptations for our current reality?

I’d say a species that is smart enough to live in cooperation with nature, one that doesn’t cause endless wars, mass extinctions, and poisons the ecosystem. Science fiction and comic books can’t seem to conceive of that. If Wilmar H. Shiras had continued with her series, she might have. Science fiction shines at imagining dystopias but fails at speculating about utopias. Billions plan to go to heaven, but the most complete description of heaven in The Bible sounds like hell to me.

It’s sadly ironic, but Wilmar H. Shiras has been in hiding all these years.

 

 

Reading the Pulps 9: “Co-Operate—Or Else!” by A. E. van Vogt Posted at 9:13 AM by James Wallace Harris

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“Co-Operate—Or Else!” originally appeared in the April 1942 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. You can find this story in these anthologies, which include:

  • The Great SF Stories 4 (1942) edited by Asimov & Greenberg
  • Futures Past: The Best Short Fiction of A. E. van Vogt
  • The War Against the Rull by A. E. van Vogt (fix-up novel)

Warning: This column contains minor spoilers

 

“Co-Operate—Or Else!” begins with a bang and keeps exploding with action. Readers feel like they’ve been thrown into a climax of an adventure novel as Professor Jamieson hangs from an anti-gravity disc high above a jungle planet. (Think high tech parachute.) We learn later in the story that his spaceship has been destroyed by one violent alien creature, an ezwal, and Jamieson is the sole survivor from a crew of over hundred humans. The ezwal, a giant six-legged creature stands on top of the anti-gravity disc trying to kill Jamieson as they float towards the surface of a deadly planet. Later on another race of aliens, the Rull, try to kill both of them, thus the title. This is a terrific start to a science fiction adventure.

Every time I read a science fiction story about aliens I wonder if the author will present a new view of aliens. I’ve been consuming science fiction for sixty years and it’s been a long time since I encountered anything different. Have SF writers imagined all the possibilities? One of my retirement projects is reading all the great short stories in the science fiction genre. I’m systematically going through the annual best-of-the-year anthologies starting in 1939 as well as reading the outstanding retrospective anthologies that preserve the most distinctive science fiction stories from the last four hundred years.

I’ve been keeping a mental list of alien archetypes. It’s starting to feel like that list will be finite because of the constant reuse of the same old forms. In the next decade, I’ll be reading a couple thousand stories which should give me a good statistical example to see if I’m right.

In counting types of imagined aliens, I’m wondering if it should be a list of discrete examples or a list of spectrums. Should alien invaders be subcategorized into various kinds of invading beings or just a spectrum from ultimate nightmares to ultimate BAFFs? Should we create a database of alien taxonomies or just use a spectrum from completely incomprehensible to just like us? We could divide alien relationships into enemies, allies, traders, friends, rulers, subjects, equals, etc., or give a numerical score of 0 for no communication possible to 10 for aliens with whom we develop a telepathic symbiotic relationship.

Science fiction writers have a hard time portraying aliens without using human attributes. “The Martian Odyssey” was such an astounding story in 1934 because Stanley Weinbaum described aliens by their bizarre behaviors. Concurrent with Weinbaum in the 1930s Olaf Stapledon in Star Maker, presented most kinds of aliens we’d see in science fiction for decades to come.

Science fiction writers work hard to imagine what a first contact will reveal. Have they pre-imagined all the possibilities? I sometimes wonder if they have, but I’m going to assume when we actually encounter aliens they will be everything we never imagined. Of course, they might be a black swan, and we’ll hit our heads like a V-8 commercial and say, “That’s so obvious, why didn’t we ever think of that?”

Everyone knows we have mental receptors for recognizing characteristics of sexual attraction in other humans. What if we also have receptors for archetypes in fiction? And even specific ones for science fiction? And what if those archetypes are finite because of hardwired neural limitations?

I’m going to use “Co-Operate—Ore Else!” because it triggered several archetypes as I read. I’m learning from old science fiction why we psychologically respond to science fiction. I’m sure how we imagine aliens in science fiction is directly related to how we pre-imagined people from other cultures. Science fiction often connects deeply with our xenophobia. The trouble is science fiction writers need to imagine beings that aren’t like us, and that’s very hard to do. Look how long we’ve taken to recognize intelligence in other Earthly animals.

Great science fiction lies between the gosh-wow thrill of a Buck Rogers serial and the hard precise mathematically reality of the latest NASA probe. “Co-Operate–Or Else!” reminds me of so many science fiction stories that came later. Picture Captain Kirk in an Enemy Mine conflict on a Deathworld planet.

Back in the 1940s A. E. van Vogt was a superstar of science fiction pulp writers. Many claim The Golden Age of Science Fiction began in July 1939 with his story “The Black Destroyer.” And anyone who has read that story is reminded of the film Alien because of the monster who sneaks onto the ship. Plus, the captain and crew will remind them of Forbidden Planet and Star Trek. Back in 1966 when Star Trek premiered, I thought it original because I had only been reading science fiction for four years. But in the fifty plus years since, I keep discovering how it riffed off Golden Age science fiction. When I read even older science fiction, I discovered the Golden Age writers weren’t original either.

Science fiction writers keep repeating certain concepts while using the same writing techniques. Both the concepts and the techniques can be considered archetypes that go way back into our collective consciousness. Because science fiction works off our past, it has a very difficult time imagining beings we’ve never encountered.

Fantastic Action Adventure might be the first archetype we’re dealing with in this van Vogt story. I doubt Homer was the first to use it or George Lucas the last, yet elements of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Star Wars have striking similarities. Joseph Campbell has covered that thoroughly. Heroic conflict in strange lands with fantastic creatures can’t be claimed by science fiction but they are part of its evolutionary development.

Also common to all fiction is the Cliffhanger-Escape technique. Van Vogt throws his characters into a series of traps that promise certain death only to have them escape. The new Lost in Space often featured two or three cliffhangers with escapes in each episode. Combining fast action with repeated escapes was the standard plot structure of most pulp fiction stories. So, what archetypes of storytelling are unique to science fiction?

Two that van Vogt uses in this story effectively is the Not Like Us Alien and the Ultimate Threat Alien. The ezwal are an intelligent race of beings that don’t use technology. The unnamed telepathic ezwal in this story wants to kill humans for invading their planet, treating his species like food animals, and not recognizing their form of intelligence. The Rull are a species of intelligent being that use technology and travel from galaxy to galaxy destroying all intelligent species. They also eat humans which makes them our ultimate enemy. Cannibalism has always been the pinnacle of horror for describing human enemies. The ezwal are like us getting to talk to an octopus about why we eat them. Van Vogt creates the Rull by imagining a top-level predator who would eat us.

We learn later in the story that Professor Jamieson was bringing the ezwal to Earth to prove their species were intelligent so the federation of over 4,800 worlds with indigenous intelligent species would change their policy on Carson’s Planet, the homeworld of the ezwal. Just before the story began the ezwal escaped aboard ship and killed every human except Jamieson and destroyed the spaceship. “Co-Operate—Or Else!” is about Jamieson’s struggle to convince the ezwal to change his mind about humans. He also wants to convince the ezwal to combine forces, first to survive the deadly planet, and later to fight the Rull. He tells the ezwall his species must join their federation to war against the Rull or else all the species in our galaxy will be destroyed. The ezwal wants to ally his race with the Rull to destroy the humans, and Jamieson struggles to convince the ezwal the Rull have no allies. How many times have we seen this plot?

Nostalgia is an archetype used by all types of fiction. “Co-Operate—Or Else!” doesn’t use it directly, except that I imagine 1942 SF readers were reminded of Edgar Rice Burroughs planetary adventures, or earlier science fiction classics like “A Martian Odyssey.” It’s funny, but much of modern film/TV science fiction is strongly nostalgia driven. Fans can’t let go of Star Trek, Star Wars, or even Lost in Space. I suppose rebooting classic science fiction TV shows only reinforces my theory that there’s a limited number of science fictional archetypes that appeal to us.

If you analyze all the science fiction books, movies and television shows about alien contact, we could sort them into a set of categories. War of the Worlds is not the first alien invasion story, but probably the one most people think defined the archetype. It also illustrates xenophobic science fiction. Tweel in “The Martian Odyssey” is probably how most older SF  readers remember the E.T. category of a good alien. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers defines the ultimate threat alien to many readers. These are aliens we can kill without ethical consequences. That is until Orson Scott Card refined the category with Ender’s Game/Speaker for the Dead/Xenocide. The ezwal reminds me of the one-with-nature aliens in Avatar.

“Co-Operate—Or Else!” suggests another archetype – nonhuman intelligence. In most science fiction stories aliens are pretty much like us. Few authors work to convey truly alien aliens who perceive reality much differently from humans. The ezwal claims humans use of technology is a crutch. The ezwal are like dolphins, being intelligent without building things. The ezwal tells Jamieson that technology made them blind to their superior mental abilities. The ezwal use telepathy to survive and evolve. Does that make them superior aliens? Quite often in science fiction, we define superior beings by their ability to use psychic powers. But isn’t that the same thing we did with gods and God? We have a very limited ability to imagine beings more advanced than us.

I just finished the new 10-part Lost in Space on Netflix. The aliens in this show are intelligent robots. Are they evil beings out to exterminate humans, or are there reasons their violence against us could be ethical? Because fiction often wants pure enemies to destroy without moral qualms, science fiction often invents Borg, Bezerkers, Bugs, or Buggers to kill without empathy. But isn’t this like video games seeking kill thrills?

Van Vogt covers a lot of ground in “Co-Operate—Or Else!” Jamieson wants humans and ezwal to coexist. But he also claims there will be aliens who want to exterminate all other intelligent beings and they should be made extinct. Is that the true spectrum of how we imagine aliens — from those we should kill, to those we should befriend? In Roadside Picnic, Russian SF writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky imagined aliens we couldn’t comprehend. who were neither a threat nor potential friend, because we were completely inconsequential to them.

“Co-Operate—Or Else!” is a fairly early SF story. As I continue to read through the years of science fiction I expect to find a variety of aliens, yet I worry I won’t find anything I haven’t encountered before. I feel challenged to seek authors who can escape the event horizon of our collective imaginations. But is that possible? I plan to keep a spreadsheet of  SF archetypes, and maybe that will eventually describe the scope of science fiction.

 

 

JWH