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Post by andydecker on Aug 2, 2020 13:16:46 GMT
Interesting that Carter promoted those women writers. Yes. But I guess he just was a good businessman and knew what his employers wanted. If you look at the selection of his Year's Best Fantasy Stories which he did for DAW Books at the same time, this is more a showcase for DAW writers than a real Year's Best culled from different sources. If you compare it with the Year's Best Horror by the same publisher, Davis and Page obviously put more effort into this. And Wagner later even more. Unfortunatly I don't have an original of Year's Best Fantasy; it would really be interesting to read his overview of the market in these years. The early 70s were the begining of the Golden Age of Fantasy, which alas tried to forget your typical Sword&Sorcery as fast as it could. |
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Post by helrunar on Aug 2, 2020 16:42:35 GMT
Hi Andreas, I own the DAW Year's Best Fantasy volume 7 for 1981. It was edited by somebody named Arthur W. Saha... cover is a portrait of Elric wielding Stormbringer by one Michael Whelan. I quite like the painting--it has an unusual quality to it. Elric is heavily muscled as this genre of art demands, but somehow, his body is painted with a very fluid sensuality that sets this work apart from Frazetta, Vallejo, et al.
The authors selected are: Zelazny, Card, Paul H. Cook, Susan C. Petrey, Phillip C. Heath, Tanith Lee, Nicholas Yermakov, Gene Wolfe, M. Lucie Chin, Caradoc A. Cador, and Jane Yolen. Caradoc A. Cador (a pseudonym) was one of my teachers--he died on January 1, 2007. This is why I have the book on my shelf. But the story selection is unusual. According to the editor, several of the stories were originally published in 1980 in the Magazine of Fantasy and SF. The introduction mentions the deaths of John Collier and H. Warner Munn, and Ray Bradbury's receipt of a Gandalf Award at the World Fantasy Con here in Boston.
The book also has a nice frontispiece illustration, a drawing by artist H. R. van Dongen. It's pretty funny.
All the best,
Steve
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Post by andydecker on Aug 2, 2020 19:00:27 GMT
Hi Andreas, I own the DAW Year's Best Fantasy volume 7 for 1981. It was edited by somebody named Arthur W. Saha... cover is a portrait of Elric wielding Stormbringer by one Michael Whelan. I quite like the painting--it has an unusual quality to it. Elric is heavily muscled as this genre of art demands, but somehow, his body is painted with a very fluid sensuality that sets this work apart from Frazetta, Vallejo, et al. The authors selected are: Zelazny, Card, Paul H. Cook, Susan C. Petrey, Phillip C. Heath, Tanith Lee, Nicholas Yermakov, Gene Wolfe, M. Lucie Chin, Caradoc A. Cador, and Jane Yolen. Caradoc A. Cador (a pseudonym) was one of my teachers--he died on January 1, 2007. This is why I have the book on my shelf. But the story selection is unusual. According to the editor, several of the stories were originally published in 1980 in the Magazine of Fantasy and SF. The introduction mentions the deaths of John Collier and H. Warner Munn, and Ray Bradbury's receipt of a Gandalf Award at the World Fantasy Con here in Boston. The book also has a nice frontispiece illustration, a drawing by artist H. R. van Dongen. It's pretty funny. All the best, Steve Thanks, Steve. The introduction seems to go into the direction which has become the norm. (If you don't are a certain editor) Information about the market, movies, awards and so on. Saha did this for a few years. Cador published a few stories. I never read one. It makes sense that The Magazine of F&SF was one of the main sources for this anthology, still published today, kind of last man standing. I have the impression that in this time the focus changed from the classic fantasy to ever more urban fantasy. I would have guessed this happened later. |
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Post by cromagnonman on Aug 3, 2020 0:05:06 GMT
Interesting that Carter promoted those women writers. Yes. But I guess he just was a good businessman and knew what his employers wanted. If you look at the selection of his Year's Best Fantasy Stories which he did for DAW Books at the same time, this is more a showcase for DAW writers than a real Year's Best culled from different sources. If you compare it with the Year's Best Horror by the same publisher, Davis and Page obviously put more effort into this. And Wagner later even more. Unfortunatly I don't have an original of Year's Best Fantasy; it would really be interesting to read his overview of the market in these years. The early 70s were the begining of the Golden Age of Fantasy, which alas tried to forget your typical Sword&Sorcery as fast as it could. That is certainly one way of looking at it Andy. But I would argue that Carter was really making a far better fist of compiling the contents of Year's Best Fantasy Stories than he is commonly given credit for. At least on the first three volumes published between 1975 and 1977. The selections show that he was intimate with the small press fanzines of the period which is where practically all the most interesting sword and sorcery then being written was being published. It was Carter who gave first book publication to Charles Saunders and his iconic hero Imaro in Vols 1 & 3 with stories culled from Gene Day's Dark Fantasy [the best fanzine of its type bar none]. He also became something of a patron to Pat McIntosh reprinting her stories from the UK fanzine Anduril (which would have been all but unheard of by a US audience). And I doubt many other editors would have been cognisant of dear old Gardner Fox's stories appearing in Dragon.
Admittedly he did succumb to laziness on the last three volumes where he developed a reliance on stories commissioned for other anthologies or which hadn't previously seen print, practices which always seemed a bit of a cheat to me. One could argue that the small press and fanzine culture wasn't quite as strong from 1978 onwards as it had been earlier. But there was more than enough quality material still to be found there. Much better than his own stuff for sure which, for some inexplicable reason, he always seemed to conclude merited inclusion in Year's Best ["The Gem in the Tower", I ask you] .
In general though I think he did a pretty good job on the series. Although I could have done without quite so many stories culled from Ted White's deadly dull Fantastic. That mag really should have been the standard bearer for sword and sorcery in the 1970s. It was perfectly placed to plunder the fanzines for personnel like Saunders, and David Madison and Wayne Hooks who were producing brilliant stuff. But White was so blinkered and short sighted in his outlook that he preferred to fill up the issues instead with third choice cast offs from his mates like Barry Malzberg. What a tragedy it was that Carter himself wasn't given the job of editing Fantastic. He would have done a far superior job. And as an added benefit he wouldn't have been left with so much time to write quite so many bloody awful novels. |
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Post by andydecker on Aug 3, 2020 8:19:08 GMT
Interesting points, Cro. When I checked the later volumes by Saha, I discovered that he often used material from magazines like F&SF, Twilight Zone Magazine, even Omni. Ten years earlier Carter surely had fewer options. I am not well versed in the magazine scene of the 70s, but I guess that even F&SF wouldn't touch traditional S&S with a stick. I also don't know much about the fanzine scene and didn't realize there was so much fiction involved.
Thanks for mentioning Saunders and Fantastic. I read so much of this stuff, even some of the more obscure or downright bottom of the barrel like Fox, books like Mike Resnick's Burroughs pastiche Goddess of Ganymede and Asa Drake's Hel Trilogie are still waiting on the shelves, but Saunders I missed somehow. I knew of him, as he is mentioned so often, but never got one of the novels.
Also I never took a deeper look at Fantastic. If you read essays or non-fiction about the field - which IMHO tend to be a bit too enthusiastic like Greenland's The Entropy Exhibition -, there is a lot about Campbell and Goldsmith and so on, but Fantastic seem to be not much more as a footnote. (Or I read the wrong essays, always a possibility.) Guess I have to spend an evening or two looking at line-ups and covers.
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Post by cromagnonman on Aug 3, 2020 12:42:49 GMT
The fanzine culture of the 1970s and early 80s is a subject of special interest to me, Andy. I must have three or four boxloads of material that I've accumulated over the years. A lot of it is pretty hard to come by now being so cheaply produced and narrowly circulated. But it remains a real gold mine of interesting fiction, the vast majority of which has never seen the light of day since. Point of fact I've often toyed with the idea of putting together my own retrospective anthology made up entirely of material culled from the zines of the period. The problem comes from finding the necessary people to obtain their consent. Most seem to have vanished into the ether - if they're even still alive. Sobering to think that the brash young tyros of the time are now - like Saunders - pensioners in their 70s.
[Public Service Announcement: WAYNE HOOKS, IF YOU'RE STILL OUT THERE SOMEPLACE, GET IN CONTACT VIA THIS BOARD. I'D LOVE TO TALK TO YOU!: Public Service Announcement ends]
You're quite right in pointing out the paucity of professional outlets that Carter had access to when compiling the later Year's Best volumes. He admitted as much himself in the introductions to vols 5 & 6 where he bemoaned the loss of Ted White's Fantastic, calling it "the only fiction magazine in America devoted to fantastic fiction". And you're right also that MoF&SF wouldn't have touched traditional s&s with a bargepole. He still found the odd nugget to pilfer there though. Tanith Lee's "Red As Blood" first ran in MoF&SF.
But as I say there were still the fanzines to have recourse to. If only he'd been a bit more diligent and methodical he could have salvaged all manner of material from them. I can't be too harsh on him though seeing as how many of these things were fly-by-night operations that barely mustered four issues or so and most even less. And they relied exclusively on word of mouth to get noticed or on plugs in other fanzines. There was an admirable cameraderie in evidence in the culture. So its understandable if a lot of the titles passed Carter by.
Even so, there were a handful of longer lasting titles that Carter could and should have made use of. Gene Day's Dark Fantasy of course, but also the Clingan brothers' Diversifier, Paul Ganley's Weirdbook and the grand-daddy of all fanzines, Gordon Linzner's Space & Time. None of these last three titles were represented at all.
Naturally a lot of the stuff these titles ran was rough and ready in nature, but they often compensated with enthusiasm and imagination whatever they lacked in polish. Carter could have performed an important service in helping these young authors hone their craft.
I can't speak with much authority on Charles Saunders' more recent material as I haven't read much of it. But his 70s stuff is fanzine stuff of the best quality. If you're interested he's recently published his own collection of work from that period called NYUMBANI TALES. I highly recommend it.
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Post by helrunar on Aug 3, 2020 13:57:10 GMT
Richard and Andreas--
I am enjoying this discussion immensely! I know nothing of British F/SF and beyond zine culture of the 70s (or 80s) and I love hearing about the titles and the authors.
Richard, I think a book the tales would be a fabulous read, especially if you included a couple of essays on your research into the zines and the communities that gave birth to them.
cheers, Steve
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Post by cromagnonman on Aug 3, 2020 15:04:24 GMT
Thanks Steve.
It would be an awful lot of work but I do think such a book would be a worthwhile venture. It would be an education I'm sure to interview the survivors of the culture and record their opinions - as well as their stories - for posterity. There is certainly a narrative there, one of admirable naivety and gung-ho enthusiasm on the one hand and tragedy on the other. Each strand no better personified than in the tragic figure of David Madison, who had the germ of genius in his work but blew his brains out in an Arlington railway yard.
I would envisage it as a tribute to Gene Day who, in many ways, was the lynchpin of the entire culture. Not just through his own publication Dark Fantasy - which as well as Saunders also gave starts to Charles De Lint and Dave Sim - but by his support for so many others. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the fanzines I've got that don't have a contribution of some sort from Day. More often than not a fantastic illustration, contributed purely out of a love for the culture even when he knew it was destined for a badly xeroxed zine stapled together on the kitchen table. The guy was amazing and the entire culture lost its impetus when he died so prematurely in the early 80s.
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Post by andydecker on Aug 3, 2020 18:31:07 GMT
I don't had access to American fanzines, but have to confess that I never was interested much in them. Nowadays they are indeed a part of the past which has sunk into obscurity, if it is remembered at all. The fanzine culture of SF is one of a kind, neither crime fiction nor western fiction - or woman's fiction - had something like this. In this I think such a book would be great.
I never even knew that Gene Day did a fanzine like that. Only knew his fantastic artwork for Marvel, one of the highlights of Master of Kung Fu. His brother(s)(?) also were artists, I gathered, have a few short stories done by them. I have to confess that I always envisaged Day as a young guy who suddenly was there and maybe would have a great career if he didn't die of a heart attack. At the time there were some ominous stories about the circumstances of his illness.
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Post by dem on Aug 3, 2020 19:18:48 GMT
The fanzine culture of the 1970s and early 80s is a subject of special interest to me, Andy. I must have three or four boxloads of material that I've accumulated over the years. A lot of it is pretty hard to come by now being so cheaply produced and narrowly circulated. But it remains a real gold mine of interesting fiction, the vast majority of which has never seen the light of day since. Point of fact I've often toyed with the idea of putting together my own retrospective anthology made up entirely of material culled from the zines of the period. The problem comes from finding the necessary people to obtain their consent. Most seem to have vanished into the ether - if they're even still alive. Sobering to think that the brash young tyros of the time are now - like Saunders - pensioners in their 70s. Different genre/ sub-genre, but there were some vague plans for a 'best of ..' the vampire 'zines selection. They came to nothing after hitting the same wall - within a year or two of this or that fly-by-night publication vanishing from the scene, it was the devil's own job hunting down contributors, and, of course, in many instances, the person in question had had enough grief the first time around, they'd no wish to see their articles/ stories exhumed. I can, and do, fully sympathise. The football 'zines ( oh no! not football! Bear with me) were brilliant at this kind of thing. Case in point, Mike Ticher's Best of Foul. Martin Lacey's El Tel Was a Space Alien, and Phil Shaw's Whose Game is it Anyway. I guess they timed it right, striking during the peak years of [terrace] fanzine culture. Six years into When Saturday Comes' existence, Mike Ticher also compiled the earliest, lo-fi hard-to-get issues into a single facsimile volume, recycling the whole as The First XI (Lennard Queen Anne Press 1992). Would love if, say, the British Fantasy Society had done the same with early issues of Dark Horizon. |
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Post by helrunar on Aug 4, 2020 1:18:32 GMT
I would love to see scans of covers and/or specimen pages of some of those zines. Just putting it out there.
There were some very cool US horror film fandom zines in the early to mid 70s. I stopped being able to follow any of it around '76 because I started college and other interests took up all available space in my life (and some space that wasn't really available at all, but such is mortal existence). I don't know anything about the fiction oriented fantasy zines but I'm sure there were some interesting ones over there. Unless you were somebody like Lin Carter or, for that matter, Michel/Mike Parry with special connections, it was pretty difficult I think to get zines from across the wine-dark sea. I mean people did it because they had ingenuity and gumption... In the zine to which I contributed for a short period of a couple of years, Gore Creatures, the editor ran reviews of zines published in the UK, France, and Germany... maybe one or two from Switzerland as well. There was this one guy who was a Harvard grad student and he seemed to have spent some time in Turkey because occasionally he'd review Turkish horror films. He claimed some of them were really good.
All a lot of blather but I do love and adore this thread. I wish we could re-name it though...
cheers, Steve
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Post by helrunar on Aug 7, 2020 19:34:51 GMT
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 8, 2023 17:02:25 GMT
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