The Scarlet Pimpernel

(1934)
Directed by Harold Young
Written by Baroness Orczy
Starring Leslie Howard, Merle Oberon, Raymond Massey, Nigel Bruce,
IMDB Entry

I’ve written before about how much I enjoyed the writing of Baroness Orczy, but that has been a strictly literary admiration until now. It was inevitable that her best-know literary creation would be made into a film. Several silent films were made, but the first sound version was made in 1934 as The Scarlet Pimpernel.

The story was well known.* The Scarlet Pimpernel was the first character to use a secret identity, and he was a major influence on Bob Kane and Bill Finger when they created Batman. He helped victims of the French Revolution to safety in England along with the a group of twenty other English aristocrats who work with him.

He’s revealed to the audience to be Sir Percy Blakeley (Leslie Howard), a silly fop whose biggest interest is lame jokes and making sure other people tie their cravats properly. He is despised by his wife  Lady Marguerite Blakeley (Merle Oberon), who fantasizes about the Scarlet Pimpernel.** Meanwhile, the sinister French ambassador Chauvelin (Raymond Massey), plots to discover who the Pimpernel really is, and blackmails Marguerite to be his spy. Blakeley reveals he has a love/hate relationships with his wife after he hears she betrayed someone to the guillotine.

The movie is extremely faithful to the book. This isn’t surprising, since the Baroness wrote the script. The opening scene of the novel – one of the cleverest bits of derring do in literature – is portrayed almost intact, as is the scene where Chavelin first tries to trap the Pimpernel in a drawing room. The ending seems to have changed a bit – in the book, Lady Blakeley plays a bigger role – but is still first-class adventure.

Leslie Howard was an excellent choice for Blakeley,*** switching easily from heroic to foppish as needed.  Merle Oberon portrays Marguerite perfectly, bringing out her vulnerability and also her intelligence and ultimate bravery. The story is as much a love story as an adventure, and the relationship between Blakeley and his wife is well played.  Raymond Massey is fine as the sinister and manipulative Chavelin.

Nigel Bruce – best known as Doctor Watson  to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes – was something of a surprise. He looked a little different when he was younger; it was only his voice that gave him away.

The movie was a success and gives a surprisingly good example of how a great book could become a great movie.

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* Warner Brothers even parodied it in a Daffy Duck cartoon. But the parody set it long before the French revolution.
**Early Bruce Wayne was clearly modeled on Blakeley, and the Superman-Lois Lane-Clark Kent love triangle also has its source with the Pimpernel.
***Charles Laughton was considered for the role, but the fans seriously objected for the rotund and ugly Laughton playing the romantic swashbuckler.

Mildred Clingerman (author)

(1918-1997)
ISFDB Biography
(A version of this originally appeared in Tangentonline.com)

Science fiction started out as a male abode; the names of early SF writers shows this clearly. While there were women writing in the genre from early on, the numbers were swamped by male names. Over time, this changed.

Mildred Clingerman started publishing in 1952 with “Minister Without Portfolio,” in Fantasy and Science Fiction and appeared there three times that year alone. She quickly became a regular contributor to F&SF and was often chosen to appear in their years Best of … anthology. She was clearly one of the top women writing SF in the era.

Quite a few of her works were anthologized. Not counting single-author anthologies, it looks like 14 of her 19 stories were collected in books.  That’s an amazing percentage.

So how do the stories hold up? Actually fairly well. Some of the social conventions are dated -- the women generally don't work outside the home -- and the stories stick to the assumptions of their time. But the characters are richly drawn, even in the lightest of tales, and the stories run the gamut from science fiction to fantasy to horror. It's a different, quieter voice of science fiction, subtly played and strong on character instead of plot. In many ways they’re a precursor to modern SF.

Particularly memorable stories were the subtle but horrifying "The Gay Deceiver," the ironic "Letters from Laura," and the combination of the two in "Stickney and the Critic."

It's easy to see why the stories were so well received at the time. And how she was an important voice in SF short fiction.

Archy and Mehitabel (literature)

(1916-1922+)
By Don Marquis

“‘the question is whether the stuff is
literature or not.’’ – Archy

Last week, I wrote about the great George Herriman and Krazy Kat and as I looked over his career, I was reminded of one of his side projects, something that equaled his inventiveness and love of words:  Don Marquis’s Archy and Mehitabel.

Marquis was a newspaperman and columnist for the New York Sun. Back then, columnists weren’t strictly political; their job was to fill the column with entertaining observations and comments One day, in a fit of whimsy, he wrote a bit of a poem

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into a body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook on life.

According Marquis, he had left a sheet of paper in his typewriter before leaving for the day and Archy* the cockroach, who climbed on the typewriter and banged his head onto the keys to painstakingly write out the letter.

And thus a bard was born. Archy wrote (in all lower case and without punctuation) on whatever seized his fancy. Some where philosophical; others humorous, and others charmingly absurd. He would sometimes talk about Mehitabel the cat, who thought herself the reincarnation of Queen Cleopatra** and whose motto was “toujours gai.”  Marquis would let his imagination run wild.

Archy was a hit.  And why not, with verses like these:

coarse jocosity
captures the crowd
shakespeare and i are
often low-browed

Or

and the spirit of
a camel
in the midnight gloom
can be so very
cheerless
as it wanders
round the room

Of course, most of the poems are free verse and all of them are a delightful mix of philosophy and entertainment. Marquis wrote in a very direct style that isn’t dated at all.

The poems were popular from the start. Marquis ran them every few days in his column and in 1927, selected ones were put into a collection, Archy and Mehitabel. Herriman added illustrations to some of the poems.*** There have been various editions of the collections through the years, and even attempts at plays and musicals.  None of these achieved any sort of success.

The musical is an interesting case in point. It started as a concept album, with music by George Kleinsinger and lyrics by Joe Darion.**** It was expanded to a stage version with Darion wrote the book with newcomer Mel Brooks and named Shinbone Alley.  Eartha Kitt played Mehitabel and Eddie Bracken was Archy, and it featured an integrated cast, possibly the first on Broadway. Alas, all the talent and good intentions was for nothing; the play only ran 49 performances. There was an animated version made in 1970 with the voices of Bracken and Carol Channing that didn’t fare any better.

This is not surprising. Archy has no overarching story, and the attempt to add one diminished the charm of the original.

But the books are still around. And the answer to Archy’s question is clear:  they are definitely literature.  And still delightful.

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*Archy insisted his name be capitalized outside of his own writing.

**Despite getting equal billing, Mehitabel only appears occasionally.

***Mehitabel was clearly Krazy Kat, and some drawings showed Freddy the rat who was clearly Ignatz

****Later to write lyrics for Man of La Mancha.

Jean Kerr (writer)

(1922-2003)
Wikipedia Entry

Erma Bombeck was America’s most popular newspaper humorist in the 60s and beyond, with a column of life as a suburban mom.  I grew up on Long Island and thus was familiar with her work from the beginning, since it appeared in Newsday in the mid-60s.  But I was never impressed by her because, you see, I had read Jean Kerr.*

Kerr was born Bridget Jean Collins in Scranton, PA and went on to get a master’s degree in Catholic University in Washington, DC, where she met and married a professor, Walter Kerr.  They moved to New Rochelle, NY, where Jean raised six children – and began to write about her experiences as Walter established himself as a drama critic.**

Kerr started out by writing plays, with a couple of Broadway flops in the 40s.  Her marriage to Kerr meant she would make the rounds of Broadway parties, where she gained a reputation for being one of the theater crowd’s funniest people. After contributing sketches to a couple of successful revues, her first full-length success came in 1954 with King of Hearts.  By this time, and she had begun writing humorous essays on life in the suburbs for various magazines.  In 1957, these were gathered together into a single book:  Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. 

The book made her a success outside of New York. It was an immediate best seller and spawned both a hit movie (with Doris Day and David Niven) and a successful TV series.

Kerr continued to write for Broadway.  Her musical, Goldilocks, was a small success, and she ventured into essay territory with The Snake Has All the Lines.***  While not as big a success as Daisies, it still showed she was an incredibly funny writer.

Kerr, though was more interested in Broadway and, in 1961, her play Mary, Mary opened to great success, running over three years and closing as the forth longest-running non-musical play on Broadway.

She had two more collections of essays, Penny Candy and How I Got to Be Perfect, and three more plays: Poor Richard, Finishing Touches, and Lunch Hour.  The last was about a couple whose spouses were having an affair, and who started one of their own to get back.  It starred Gilda Radner post-SNL.****

At that point, Kerr retired.  I don’t know why she choose not to write, but it was a loss to comedy and Broadway.  She died in 2003.

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*This is, of course, massively unfair to Bombeck, but I was in my teens.  The two women were doing different things, and, most notably, Bombeck was writing a column three times a week, while Kerr was content to publish occasional essays, allowing her more time to polish them.  I do sometimes wonder how much influence Kerr had on Bombeck.

**Later to become the most powerful drama critic in New York as chief critic for the New York Times.

***The title comes from a story she told about her son, who was cast as Adam in the church play.  She was complimenting him on getting the part:  “That’s the lead.”  Her son looked glum.  “Yes, but the snake has all the lines.”

****Along with future TV stars Sam (Law and Order) Waterston, David (Sledge Hammer) Rasche, and Max (wasting his talent in ALF) Wright

Out of the Silent Planet (book)

(1938)
By C. S. Lewis
Wikipedia Entry

C. S. Lewis today is known for his epic fantasy Chronicles of Narnia, but before he started with the series, he tried his hand at science fiction, with spectacular success.  Out of the Silent Planet is one of the forgotten classics of the genre.

The first book in his “Space Trilogy,” the story features Elwin Ransom, a philologist who while on a walking tour of the UK, falls in with a mad scientist and is taken to the planet Malacandra – known to humans as Mars.  Thinking he’s to be sacrificed to the scary-looking humanoids, the Sorns, he runs off and falls in with a different race of Malacandrans, the Hrossa.  The Hrossa bring to mind otters and slowly integrate Ransom into their tribe.  But he eventually had to face meeting Oyarsa, the ruler of the world.

The portion with the hrossa is the book’s biggest strength.  There is no universal translator, so the book is one of the few that concentrates on the progress Ransom makes in learning the language, which Lewis did a conscientious job of constructing.  There are three races on Malacandra, the Hrossa, the humanoid Seroni (Sorns), and the Pfifltriggi (I seem to recall they are froglike).  It’s very unusual even today to populate a planet with more than one alien, and Lewis was also one of the first to show a well-thought-out alien society. I also love the fact that he keeps the Pfifltriggi offstage – because there’s no reason to show much of them.*

Lewis does use the novel to introduce Christian theology, of course, but it never cloys.  On the surface, it’s a great SF adventure novel, just like the Narnia books are great fantasy adventures.

Lewis followed his friend J. R. R. Tolkien by making this the basis for a trilogy.  The sequel, Perelandra, was set on Venus as a water world.  The plot, however, is a retelling of Eve being tempted in the Garden of Eden.  Even Lewis thought the plot was secondary to his description of the world and the book is a drop down from the first.  The final book in the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, I found unreadable. 

In any case, the weaknesses of the other two books is one reason why Out of the Silent Planet** is not as well known as it should be.  The books are still available, but they are footnotes compared to the success of Narnia, and very few people alive today are introduced to him through his space trilogy.

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*At the end, Ransom talks about being able to describe life among them, but that since he never went there in the course of his adventures.

**The title refers to Earth, known on Malacandra as Thulcandra, which means “The Silent Planet.”

Arthur Upfield (author)

(1890-1964)
Wikipedia Page

Mystery stories are about gimmicks:  the gimmick that makes the murder stand out, the one that leads the detective to the solution.  And, of course, the detective him- or herself.  And its these gimmicks that create great detectives.  Arthur Upfield used an off-beat detective and a talent for creating great mysteries to create a long career that is underappreciated in the US.

Upfield was English, but moved to Australia as a boy, where he spent most of his life.  After WWI, he worked on various stations in the outback and started writing.  His first novel, The House of Cain, was successful enough, but his second, The Barrakee Mystery, introduced his signature character:  Inspector Napoleon “Bony” Bonaparte.

Bony* had an Aboriginal mother and white father (something that was extremely daring when the book came out in 1929), and leaned heavily on this Aboriginal background.  It wasn’t mystical mumbo jumbo, though, but rather the application of both keen observation and a knowledge of the natural world of the Australian bush.  Bony was sure of his own abilities and proud of never having let a case go unsolved.

The mysteries themselves were also clever and well constructed.  Upfield was always on the lookout for new twists (usually one that related to Australia). 

In one occasion, The Sands of Windee, he even did it too well,  The “Murchison Murders” were committed by an acquaintance of Upfield who used it to dispose of bodies of people he killed.  He didn’t follow the method perfectly, though, and Upfield testified against him at the trial.**

Upfield also wrote some other mysteries,*** but it was Bony who made his reputation.  He completed 29 novels with the character until his death in 1964.  His work is still well known in Australia, of course, and in the UK, but most American mystery fans have never heard of him.  His Bony books can be found, though, and are worth the effort to dig up.

In memory of the Wombat: jan howard finder (March 2, 1939 – February 26, 2013).

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*He insisted everyone use that name.

**He later wrote a nonfiction book about the case.

***The Beach of Atonement, which was next to impossible to find, was recently reprinted.  I designed the cover.

Theodore Sturgeon (author)

(1918-1985)
Wikipedia Entry
Bibliography.

As I may have mentioned before, when I first started reading science fiction, the short story was king.  Authors could make a living writing them* and readers were happy with anthologies and single-author collections.

And one of the kings of the short story was Theodore Sturgeon.  While his name is well known to SF writers, and his stories remain in print in small presses, you’d be hard pressed to find him in mass market works.

Sturgeon was born as Edward Hamilton Waldo, but had his name legally changed to when his mother remarried when he was 11.  He started writing in 1938, and soon established himself as a master storyteller, writing science fiction, fantasy, and horror with equal facility.

Sturgeon is best known today for Sturgeon’s Law:  90% of everything is crap.  But very little of his output fits in that category.  He had a fantastic and free imagination and a way of creating vivid  and quirky characters.

The cliché is that he wrote about love, and that’s true in many ways, but he was not writing romance.  He was interested in it in all variations.  “The World Well Lost” from 1953 is one of the earliest stories to treat homosexuality sympathetically.  “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let Your Sister Marry One,” in the original Dangerous Visions makes a case for a form of sexuality that is still taboo today.** “When You Care, When You Love” shows to what extent someone will go to help someone they love.  “Not an Affair” is about a seduction for a purpose.  The latter two stories have ending twists that make them unforgettable.  “A Saucer of Lonliness” – made into an episode of The New Twilight Zone is a charming love story.

But Sturgeon was no softy.  His short story “It,”*** written in 1940, is one of the best horror stories ever written, because the monster in it is not evil and thus predictable, but amoral and capable of anything at all.  “Killdozer” – later made into a TV movie – is a straight adventure story.  “Mr. Costello, Hero” is a scathing denunciation of McCarthyism; the final image condemns all people who take power by playing on fear.

In a different vein, there were dramatic stories like “The Man who Lost the Sea” (again with a powerful ending) and “Slow Sculpture.”

As for humor, Sturgeon actually had a story in The National Lampoon and while “Pruzy’s Pot” may not be his best work, it’s certainly a great idea for a humor story that fit right in with the Lampoon’s sensibility.  “Two Percent Inspiration” is a fun story, with a great triple twist at the end. 

Sturgeon’s best known works were for TV.  He wrote two Star Trek episodes, both memorable.  “Shore Leave” has people enjoying themselves on what turns out to be an amusement park planet.  His other, “Amok  Time,” wrote the bible for Vulcan sexuality.

As far as novels are concerned, his More than Human is considered a classic, telling the story of the evolution of a gestalt human being, the next step in evolution.****  But his other novels were few and far between.  He ended up writing only six under his own name, plus some novelizations.  One of these is my favorite.  His book The Player on the Other Side is sometimes cited as Ellery Queen’s best novel, but Sturgeon wrote it under Queen’s direction.

Sturgeon didn’t really need to write novels, though.  His stories were sold and constantly anthologized, bringing in a regular income.  He also had dozens of collections, more than just about any other author this side of Asimov.*****

The list of memorable Sturgeon stories is long, though he won very few awards – only the International Fantasy Award, and a Hugo and Nebula for “Slow Sculpture.”  Much of this was timing; a lot of his best work was written before the awards were set up.

Sturgeon died in 1985.  His last novel, Godbody, was published the next year but because SF readers prefer novels (and long ones) to anthologies, it’s hard to stumble upon his work.  A ten-volume edition of his complete stories is available, but it’s not likely something you’ll see in your local bookstore. 

But his contribution to the genre is immense.  There’s even a Theodore Sturgeon Award for best SF short story given each year, though it’s relatively unknown.  Sturgeon’s personal motto:  “Ask the next question” (represented by a Q with an arrow through it) is also well known in SF circles.

Seek out his stories.  No one was better at firing the imagination.

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*The one cent a word that you could get at a top market works out to almost 9 cents a word nowadays, more than any major science fiction market nowadays.  There were also many more decently paying magazines, and, if you wrote a series of short stories, you could repackage them into a book.  Plus there were short story reprint anthologies.

**And will probably remain so.  But Sturgeon raises questions about our assumptions.

***I’m certain that Stephen King knew of it when he reused the title.  The monster in the story was the precursor of other plant-based monsters like The Heap, Man Thing, and Swamp Thing.

****Like many SF novels of the time, it’s a fix-up of three shorter works.  This allowed him to sell the book twice – to the magazine that published the original.

*****Including one titled Caviar, probably the cleverest title for a science fiction collection ever.  Think about it.

Gardner F. Fox (comics)

(1911-1986)

The names of the creators of most long-running comics are well known.  Jerry Siegel and Jerome Schuster created Superman; Bob Kane created Batman; Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created most of the Marvel superheroes.  But one of the greatest of comic creators, a man whose output ran into thousands of comics, is often overlooked.  That man is Gardner F. Fox.

Fox grew up in Brooklyn and went to college to get a law degree.  However, during the Depression, he realized he needed to supplement his income, so he began writing, hooking up with DC Comics and writing stories almost from the beginning of comic books.  He quickly became a top writer for DC, since he wrote well and met deadlines.  His first assignments was on the long-forgotten Speed Saunders, but he very quickly started writing for Batman, where he reached comic book immortality in his first story, where he created the utility belt. 

At about the same time, he created his first well-known characters, the Sandman.  This isn't the same one Neil Gaiman made famous, though Gaiman did include references to the original, but it was successful enough.

He came into his own in 1940, when he developed the Flash. The idea of a fast-running superhero caught people's imagination* and the Flash became one of the stalwarts of the Golden Age of comics.  He followed that up with creating another of the great names of DC comics:  Hawkman.  Other characters followed, including Dr. Fate and Starman (co-creator of both).

These read like a roll call of all the great characters of the 40s, but soon Fox topped them all by the simple expedient of showing them all together. Taking a group of characters from All-American Comics,** Fox put them all together and created the Justice Society of America. He wrote most of the JSA stories, and made it into one of the great name of the Golden Age.

But the Golden Age ended and the comics began to suffer.  Fox switched from superhero strips to western and science fiction comics and managed to keep working during the hiatus after Seduction of the Innocent.

But Fox wasn't through with superheros.  In the mid-50s, when editor Julius Schwartz decided that the time was right for more superhero comics, one of the first people he contacted was Fox, who helped with the revamp of the Flash, Hawkman, and the Atom and eventually, wrote the new version of the Justice Society, the Justice League.  He also came up with the Earth-1 and Earth-2 concept, which allowed the heroes from the Silver Age (Earth-1) to interact with the heroes of the Golden Age (Earth-2) to meet and interact. 

Fox's interest in science fiction also continued, and he wrote many of DC's SF titles, eventually creating their best-know SF heron, Adam Strange, in 1958.  In the 60s, he went back to writing Batman again, taking two obscure Golden Age villains -- the Riddler and the Scarecrow -- an turning them into important members of the Batman's rogue's gallery.

Fox left DC in 1968 over a dispute about benefits, and did a little bit of comic book work, but primarily wrote SF novels full time.***

Over the years, Fox wrote an estimated 4000 comic book stories**** and he was revered in the field.  So much so that when they created a new Green Lantern, he was named Guy Gardner in his honor.

Fox worked regularly up until his death in 1985.  His work is a bit dated, and even silly today, but that's due to a change in critical opinion, not because they weren't good stories in their time.  Probably no one else wrote more comic books.

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*Even though the original story was awful by any measurement, other than the concept of the character.

**A part of DC, which in that time was split between All-American and National Periodicals Publications.  Eventually the two merged into National Periodicals, which became DC, the letters coming from their oldest title, Detective Comics.

***One of his novels, Escape Across the Cosmos was actually plagiarized twice and published as Titans of the Universe and Star Chase by different authors.

****The Grand Comics Database lists well over 3000, and there were probably more, since he was often uncredited. 

John Brunner (author)

(1934-1995)
Wikipedia Entry

In the late 70s, I was growing tired of science fiction.  I had been devouring it since I saw The Space Explorers  when I was seven.  I would occasionally get away from it for a few months, usually during the school year when I didn't have time for non-school books, but always come back in the summer to read anything I could get my hands on.* But I was feeling that the genre was getting stale, with too much of it things I had seen before.  The ideas and sense of wonder were gone.

Then I happened upon The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, and my faith in the genre was restored.

Brunner was an incredibly prolific SF novelist, with well over 100 books to his credit.**  He was born in the UK and published his first novel at age 17, and began to crank out books until he could begin writing full time in 1958.  His earlier works were competent space opera -- good reads and nothing more.  But by the mid-60s, he started adding far more depth of characterization and more intriguing ideas into his novels.***

The turning point was The Whole Man, about a telepathic individual who has to deal with his new power and about how the world looks at him.  It showed a new depth of characterization, and gave Brunner his first Hugo nomination.

By 1970, John Brunner was on the list of the top SF writers.  He reached stardom in the field in 1968 with his classic Stand on Zanzibar, a novel about an overpopulated world that uses a complex structure to not only tell the main story, but to give details about the world by small sections that illuminated particular aspects.****  It won a Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Brunner continued with his complex futures and narrative drive on other of his major works, like The Jagged Orbit and The Sheep Look Up. 

The Shockwave Rider in 1975 was his last classic novel (though he continued with several very good ones).  It probably impressed me because it was cyberpunk before cyberpunk was invented, the story about a man caught up in a fight against an oppressive US government and surviving because of his computer skills.  The technology is dated (he uses touchtone landline phones), but it was far advanced for the time, and like nothing I had ever read.  Brunner even coined the term "computer worm" for the novel.

I am also a fan of his Total Eclipse, about an attempt to discover why an alien race went extinct, and which has some rather frightening implications for the human race.  In addition, his lighter The Infinitive of Go was a great concept and story using the idea of the transporter that doesn't work quite the way it does in Star Trek.

Brunner died in 1995, suffering a heart attack while attending the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow.  It was a sad loss to the field and to the cause of imagination.

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*I'm perversely proud that, when I took the New York State English Regents (a statewide exam for high school students), I answered one question by using Jack Vance's Emphyrio, which had been serialized but not yet published as a book.  I knew the teachers wouldn't have read the book, but I could always show them a copy if they called me on it.

**Asimov's of course, reached nearly 500 books, but Brunner had far more novels.  Asimov also padded his total by being the editor of a book, where his main contribution was writing an introduction and lending his name.  Brunner tended to repacking his books under different titles, but I'm pretty sure he's still ahead of Asimov.

***In a way, his career path paralleled Robert Silverberg, who had the reputation of being something of a hack in his early days.  At a certain point, Silverberg decided he had made enough on hackwork to live comfortably, and announced he would write more serious sf novels.  Some people in the field thought it a joke, but he quickly became a multiple award winner for some great short stories and novels like "Passengers" and Dying Inside.

****He took the technique from John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy. For those who think that science fiction is about prediction, he predicted that Earth would have a population of 7 billion by 2010 -- only a year off from the actual date.

Harvard Lampoon Life Magazine Parody (book)

(1968)
Written by the staff of the Harvard Lampoon, Henry Beard and Doug Kenney, editors.

Doug Kenney may have been the most influential comic mind of the latter half of the 20th century.  He was the mind behind Bored of the Rings, the first editor of the National Lampoon,* and screenwriter of Animal House.  There is also a direct connection between the Lampoon and Saturday Night Life.  And Kenney got his first national exposure as editor of  the Harvard Lampoon Life Magazine Parody.

The Harvard Lampoon had a long history of doing parodies of popular magazines.  It was a regular fundraiser of theirs:  they'd do a parody issue and sell enough copies around Boston and the northeast to make some money.    In this case, they were able to get the issue out to a much wider audience.**

The magazine matched Life accurately, but that was the easy part.  The articles were straight ahead silliness, many based upon the idea that the world is going to end.  There are profiles of intellectuals (philosopher Eric Mouth and poet Harry Umbridge), fashion made out of food (including a "sleeveless bacon blouse" and a salami skirt made out of genoa and bologna***), a recipe for thermonuclear turkey, kids playing war a little too realistically, the adventure and excitement of cows and sheep, and columns paralleling the columnists in the actual magazine.****

The magazine sold decently, making some money for the Harvard Lampoon, and perhaps gave some impetus for the founding of the National Lampoon.  The original is hard to find, probably because it was basically meant to be recycled.  But it's still one of the funniest parodies around, and historically important as a springboard for most of what was successful in American humor.

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*A subject for another day.  Henry Beard was no slouch, either.

**I picked it up in my home town on eastern Long Island.  It made me want to apply to Harvard to work on the Lampoon.  Alas, Harvard turned me down.

*** I have no evidence that Lada Gaga has ever seen an issue, but it make you wonder.

****Life Magazine enjoyed the parody enough to take out several full-page ads in it. There were multiple advertisers, and a modern reader might wonder if they were parodies themselves, but all the ads were genuine.

The Day of the Triffids (book)

By John Wyndham
(1951)
Wikipedia link

Sometimes when you read a book, the thought crosses your mind that it would make the perfect movie.  And anyone reading The Day of the Triffids would agree*.  It is, in many ways, the perfect monster movie, and it remains a classic of science fiction horror.

Triffids was written by John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, though with a name that unwieldy, you can understand why he shortened it to John Wyndham.  He was born in a small village in the UK, the son of a barrister. He went through various careers in the 1920s and 1930s, selling an occasional science fiction short story to US magazines.  After World War II, he returned to writing and, in 1951, he produced his best-known work, The Day of the Triffids.

The book, like many of his, deals with a disaster.  Bill Masen wakes up after an eye injury that caused him to be bandaged up for several days, and all around the hospital is eerily quiet.  He removes his bandages -- they were due to come off anyway -- and soon learns that everyone seems to have gone blind.  There had been a magnificent display of meteors the night before, but everyone who watched it cannot see any more.

And, worse, there are the triffids.  They a (possibly) genetically engineered carnivorous plant that can walk and has a whiplike poisonous stinger that it uses to kill its prey.  They are useful, though:  cut off the stinger and they can be raised for their high-quality oil.  When the book begins, the triffids are well-established**.  Some have their stingers docked (though they grow back), but many do not.  Without sight, humans have no advantage over them.  And the triffids are on the march.

The book is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece as Masen has to avoid the triffids, find others who can see, rescue some who can't, and help develop a community and a plan to fight back.  There are many chilling moments, like when a sighted little girl describing how she saw her brother being stalked by a triffid, but can do nothing because one would attack her once she made a sound.  There are scenes of triffids herding people like food animals, and blind humans turning sighted ones into slaves to keep them alive.

The triffids themselves are great monsters.  They communicate among themselves, and their ability to move, as well as their poisoned stingers make the memorable and terrifying.  But many of the worst monsters in the book are human beings who try to take advantage of the situation. In a broken down society, the most ruthless prevail if people aren't careful

You'd think that this would make a great monster movie.  A movie was made, but it's terrible.  The problems were many, but the biggest mistake was coming up with a magic solution to kill all the triffids; in the book, it's not magic, but hard work, and there's a long way to go.  In addition, the darkness of the broken down society is shunted to the far background in place of standard "fight the menace" scenes that have very little excitement.  There have also been two better-received TV miniseries, though they are not well known in the US.

Wyndham continued in this vein for most of his writing career,  His next novel, The Kraken Wakes,*** is nearly as good. In it, there's an alien invasion that no one realizes -- because it takes part in the deepest parts of the ocean.  And the aliens start to make over Earth so it's all deep ocean.

There's also his The Midwich Cuckoos, where all the women in a village all become pregnant one day, only to give birth to silver-eyed children who develop psychic powers.  The book was filmed as Village of the Damned, and is a minor classic of 50s horror.

But Wyndham's most terrifying creating never gained widespread popularity in popular culture.  It's too bad, since there's clearly a space for a great horror film from the book.

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*Another one was Gregory Macdonld's Fletch, a book whose cover listed the first few paragraphs of the novel, with the assumption that you'd read that and be hook.  And you were.  It was a tight little mystery thriller.  Hollywood made it into a soggy comedy with Chevy Chase as his most self-indulgent. 

**Masin's eye injury was caused by a few drops of triffid venom, an irony that is noted.

***Retitled in the US to the far less imaginative Out of the Deeps.

Atlanta Nights

(2005)
By Travis Tea
Wikipedia Page
Free Download (pdf)
Lulu Press Version
Travis Tea Website
Atlanta Nights may be the worst novel ever written.  That was deliberate. It was a sting to prove that PublishAmerica -- who claimed to be a legitimate book publisher -- was actually a vanity press that would accept anything. 
Over thirty science fiction authors* wrote chapters in one crazy weekend, with only the skimpiest of outlines, with the goal to write as badly as possible.  No one knew what anyone else had written.  Characters changed hair color, description, and even race and even sex from chapter to chapter.  Cliffhangers in one chapter were never resolved.  A character wakes up in the middle of the book and realizes everything was a dream.  Another character is dead, then alive again. The sun sets in the East.  There are penguins in the Sahara.  There were two chapter 12s.  Chapters 4 and 17 were identical.  There was no chapter 21.  Chapter 34 was randomly generated by a computer.
Editor Teresa Neilsen Hayden put it best:

"The world is full of bad books written by amateurs. But why settle for the merely regrettable? Atlanta Nights is a bad book written by experts."

Then the whole mess was sent off the PublishAmerica, who wrote about their high standards and how science fiction writers couldn't write well enough to be accepted by them.
They accepted it.
Of course, word got out immediately.  PublishAmerica then suddenly withdrew their acceptance, saying they discovered one chapter (Chapter 34) was gibberish.  Which means they didn't even read it through**.
The story became an Internet sensation when it was announced in early 2005.  It led to all sorts of jokes and strangeness. 

• The manuscript was made available for free, but there were also paperback copies at Lulu.com (all proceeds go to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Emergency Medical Fund).  The author is listed as "Travis Tea."***
• The book was blurbed by some well-known authors, in on the joke, often in terms that were hilariously ambiguous.
  • "Atlanta Nights is sure to please the reader who enjoys this sort of thing" -- Raymond F. Feist
  • "I stayed upright reading it." -- Jane Yolen
  • "Don't fail to miss it if you can!" -- Jerry Pournelle
• The book is being taught in creative writing classes as a guide of what not to do.
• A special, ugly-purple-cover hardback edition was produced as a fundraiser, signed by most of the authors, and auctioned off as a fundraiser.
• Science fiction conventions have had Atlanta Nights midnight readings, the goal -- like with readings of the legendary Eye of Argon -- is to get to the end of a chapter without cracking up.
• It has its own page on TV Tropes, listing a few of the many cliche types used.
• "Manwithoutabody" has posted an overly dramatic reading of all the chapters on Youtube.  Here's the chapter I wrote:

And now, the crowning achievement:  The book has been optioned for a film.  Rachel Saltzman, an independent filmmaker, is working on a combination of documentary/dramatization of the 21st century's worst published novel.
Of course, film options are gambles; there a good chance that there will be no film.  Saltzman is using a page on Kickstarter.com to raise a budget.  If you want to be part of film history, think about making a pledge.
It will be worth it for the Penguins.
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* I was one of them.
** To be fair, very few people have managed to read it all.
***Say it out loud.  Some of the writers involved included Alan Steele (who had to get completely drunk to be able to write his chapter), Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm, James D. Macdonald, Adam-Troy Castro, Kevin O'Donnell, and many others (see Wikipedia article).

Alice and Jerry Books

c1941-c1961
Alice and Jerry were my best friends.  They taught me to read.
Back in the 50s, when I was first going to school, it wasn't considered proper for students to start reading actual books.  It was the day of the basal reader, and by far the best-known reader was the Dick and Jane series from the publisher Scott, Foresman.  But there were others, and my school chose Alice and Jerry, from Row, Peterson and Company.
That wasn't the name of the individual books.  As I researched this article, I realized that I had forgotten the individual titles.  I had long since called them Alice and Jerry.
Like Dick and Jane, Alice and Jerry were brother and sister, along with their dog, Jip.*  I do remember the immortal words:

"See Jip.  See Jip jump."

What impressed me about the books at the time was that they were interconnected. Of course the early ones were just a series of stories about the two,** but as things advanced, the connections were less obvious.  Toward the end, you'd be reading all year about some pioneers on the prairie, and discover that they were Alice and Jerry's great grandparents.
The books were usually written by Mabel O'Donnell, with art by Florence  and Margaret Hoopes. Obviously, they weren't great literature or art, but there was something about the first day of school when you'd find the new books there like familiar friends.
The series was discontinued in the early 60s, as the reading instruction switched away from basal readers,*** and Row, Peterson joined Harper Brothers to become Harper and Row and now HarperCollins. Alice and Jerry seem to have been overlooked while Dick and Jane became a catchword. 
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* Even in first grade, I thought that "Jip" was a stupid name for a dog.  Addendum 11/6/13:  For those wondering why the dog had that name, it turns out that there was a dog in Dicken's David Copperfield named "Jip" -- short for "Gypsy."
**Typical American kids, if you assume all Americans were white and middle class.  Since I was, it seemed reasonable at the time.
***There was an uproar about US reading levels, centered around Rudolf Flesch's book Why Johnny Can't Read from 1955.  Flesch blamed the readers -- and their "see and say" method of instructions -- as being inferior to teaching phonics. Like all educational theories, the truth lies in between:  some children do better with phonics, and some do better with "see and say" (and some do better with some other method). 

Groff Conklin (science fiction)

(1904-1968)
Wikipedia
Bud Webster's Index to Groff Conklin anthologies (click on the image to purchase)

At first, science fiction stories were ephemeral.  They appeared for a month in a pulp magazine, then were never seen again.  Until the 50s,  novels were few and far between, and were often "fix-ups" -- a group of previously published short stories set in the same universe (e.g., The Foundation Trilogy, The Martian Chronicles).  It's quite possible these works and authors would have just been forgotten if it weren't for Groff Conklin.

Conklin was not an author nor was he a magazine editor.  He was an anthologist.  From 1949 until his death in 1968, he gathered together the best of the magazine SF stories into over 40 anthologies that helped define the genre.

This was essential. I started reading SF in the early 60s, and didn't know about the pulps.  By that time, only a few were being published* and I didn't know what to look for at the newstands, especially since the era of pulp fiction had ended.  But I did haunt the bookstores and my school library, and the name Groff Conklin was everywhere.  You really couldn't look at a bookshelf without seeing a collection with his name on it.

Conklin knew the great stories.  He was fond of authors like Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Damon Knight, William Tenn, Arthur C. Clarke, Cordwainer Smith, and all the greats of the genre.  His books were the way to get a grounding in science fiction.

My favorite of his anthologies was something called Science Fiction Oddities, which includes such gems as Alan Arkin's "People Soup,"** Isaac Asmov's "What is This Thing Called Love?,"*** R.A. Lafferty's amazing "What Was the Name of That Town?," Charles Harness's "The Chessplayers," Fritz Lieber's Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee," and several others.  All were off-beat stories that went into areas that few dared go and brought more smiles of pleasure than any other collection I have read.

Conklin continued to collect and publish anthologies until his death.  He was purely a labor of love:  the economics of such a book are pretty dismal even in the best of times.  He paid the authors low rates (not a big problem, since they had already been paid for the original publication), and didn't have a lot left over for him.  I doubt the books were his main source of income.

Of course, not only is Conklin forgotten, but the reprint SF anthology has gone the way of the passenger pigeon.  People far prefer novels these days, and if they want a reprint anthology, it'll be from a single author they've discovered through books.  That's too bad.  The real advantage of a reprint anthology was that it had great stories by authors you never saw before.  If someone impressed you, you could look for more of his work.  Now, with the exception of some anthologies edited by Martin H. Greenberg, it's much harder to have that sort of smorgasbord of authors to sample.****  But, alas, it's far too late to change that trend. 

Conklin's anthologies are long out of print, and are unlikely to be reprinted due to issues of getting the rights.*****  It's a loss to the field, especially since the stories may be forgotten.

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* Fantasy and Science Fiction, Analog, Amazing, Fantastic and one or two others.

**Made into a short film that was Adam Arkin's film debut.

***Asimov's preferred title, though I like the original one:  "Playboy and the Slime God."

****Martin H. Greenberg has stepped into Conklin's footsteps, with original and reprint anthologies.  He often works with other authors -- a big name to make the selection of stories, and, for reprints, someone to find stories for the anthologies (Charles G. Waugh had a self-made index of SF stories by theme and did a lot of the digging up of obscure works.  Greenberg actually just handled the business end in all these, getting the rights and selling the concept.

****It would take a Herculean effort to track down the authors and their estates.  The only one that seems to be available is one he co-edited with Isaac Asimov, which is around because of Asimov's name. 

Ellery Queen (author)

(1905-1971) & (1905-1982)

He was probably the most influential and popular of all American detective story writers and editors in the 1930s until the 1970s, yet, Ellery Queen seems to be only live on in the name of one magazine, where many of its readers may not even have read any of his work.

"Ellery Queen" was the pen name of two cousins, Manfred Lee and Frederick Dannay, who started writing together in the late 1920s.  Their first novel, The Roman Hat Mystery, introduced a new star to the lineup of detective sleuths:  Ellery Queen.

It was a cute conceit* as were several others.  Queen the writer was a strong advocate of the "fair" detective story -- where all the evidence is laid before the reader so that you had a chance at guessing the solution.  Queen took it even further by stopping the narrative for a "Challenge to the Reader," where he would say that you now had all the facts you needed to solve the crime and would dare you to guess.  These gimmicks helped make the Ellery Queen novels stand out from the many being published at the time.

The early novels -- all of which were titled "The <nationality> <noun> Mystery"** -- used this gimmick to great effect and worked because the solutions were all difficult to guess, but clear once Queen explained it all.

That the big thing they had going for them, since the character of Queen was not well defined.  He was introduced as a sort of a upper class snob, son of Police Inspector Richard Queen, who wore a pince nez and quoted Latin aphorisms without bothering to translate.***  He is more mannerisms than a character, and probably would not have lasted long once the gimmick got tired.

Lee and Dannay realized that.  Their tenth novel, Halfway House, dropped the nationality in the title (even though the introduction shows they could easily have stuck with it) and had the final "Challenge to the Reader."  The title not only fit the mystery, but it also signified that the book would be a "halfway house" into a different form of mystery. 

The later books made Ellery more human, the mysteries more than just puzzles.  Lee and Dannay set a group of books in Hollywood, but were more successful with several more in the fictional small town of Wrightsville, which he joked had more murders per capita than any other town in the US. 

Toward the end, Lee and Danny hired other writers like Theodore Sturgeon and Avram Davidson to flesh out their outlines. My favorite Queen mystery, The Player on the Other Side, was actually written by Sturgeon, and the Davidson title, And on the Eighth Day, is memorable in its portrayal of real-life evil and how it can come up even when we think it's defeated.

In addition to the novels, Queen wrote many short stories, often based upon a "dying clue" -- something the victim did in his last moments that identified the killer, but which is not clear until Ellery Queen shows up.

But Queen was more than a writer; he was an editor (or rather, Dannay was).  In 1941, he founded Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as a place to showcase mystery fiction, and it quickly became the top magazine in the field, and is still being published today.  Queen's anthology, 101 Years' Entertainment, was essential reading to familiarize readers with the best of the genre (no Sherlock Holmes, though -- but that's because it was easy to find Holmes stories, but difficult to find detectives like the Old Man in the Corner, Arsene Lupin, Dr. Thorndyke, Father Brown, Philip Trent, Professor Poggioli, or Ruth Kelstern.****

Lee died in 1971, and Dannay continued his editorship.  There were few Ellery Queen stories now and they were strictly puzzles.*****  The partnership seemed to work with Dannay coming up with the plots and puzzles and Lee fleshing out the characterization, so the stories after Lee's death were puzzle stories.  Danney died in 1982.

So why is Queen not remembered today?  Of course, there is the change of taste in mysteries; Queen was too old-fashioned to work in a Raymond Chandler mystery universe.  In addition, the Ellery Queen stories never had the type of popular success that someone like Agatha Christie did when translated to other media.  There were several movies, but none were major hits and the last US film was back in 1942.  In the mid-70s, there was a TV series starring Jim Hutton (and run as a period piece, with Hutton stopping the story to give the "Challenge to the Reader" each show) that ran for one season, but to mediocre ratings.

Without a presence in other media, the novels lost their appeal, especially the earlier ones that were based on gimmicks and sometimes clues that are now badly dated.****** 

But the books are still fun to read as puzzles and as detective stories.  And Queen's work as an editor and anthologist have cast a long shadow on the field.

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*Though why they did it is a mystery.  The stories were written in the third person, and Ellery Queen the detective was clearly not Ellery Queen the author.  But it did make thing memorable, and maybe that was the point.

** The Roman Hat Mystery, The French Powder Mystery, The Dutch Show Mystery, etc.

***In the first book, he is said to be retired, married, and living in Italy after the events of the mystery, but that bit of background vanished away.

****It might be easier now, with the Gutenberg Project.

*****It is generally thought that Dannay wrote the plots and puzzles, while Lee handled the characterizations.  With Lee gone, the stories were all plots and dying clues.

******The resolution to one book, for instance, is based on the assumption that no man would appear in public without a tie.

Baroness Orczy (author)

(1865-1947)
Wikipedia Page

European nobles are not known for their contributions to the arts. Oh, there's Lord Byron, of course, but other than that, it's hard to think of anyone who was successful in the arts, where their bloodlines and money does them no good. But Baroness Emmuska Orczy managed to become an extremely popular writer in the early years of the 20th century.

Orczy was the daughter of a Hungarian baron who moved to London when she was twelve to escape a revolution in his home country. In the late 1890s, she began to write as a way to bring in money, and, after a few fits and starts, ended up establishing herself as a writer of mysteries and adventure stories.

She made her name as a writer of swashbucklers, starting with The Scarlet Pimpernel.  Though the name is pretty much forgotten except as a joke,* it was a major success when the character first appeared in short stories and finally a play in 1903.  The stories were set during the days of the French Revolution as the Pimpernel**, one of the first characters to have a secret identity, fought to rescue nobles from the madness of the Terror.  The Pimpernel was really a precursor to superheroes like Batman and the Shadow, and both better-known heroes had similarities to him.

It is interesting that Orczy, who was uprooted by revolution as a noblewoman, chose as a hero a man who fought against revolutionaries to save noblemen.

But the Pimpernel wasn't Orczy's only literary creations.  She also wrote a series of mystery stories featuring the Old Man in the Corner.

The Old Man -- his real name unrevealed -- was one of the first armchair detectives.  He sits in the ABC Tea Shop and engages reporter Polly Burton*** in conversations discussing the mysteries of the day, all the while fidgeting with a piece of string.  The Old Man does get around -- to visit the scenes of the crime or to watch the trial -- but each story has him staying entirely in his chair.  Like he does with the knots in his string, he unravels mysteries, and finds the solution.  But he never arrests anyone, and often the murderer remains free.  The stories are first class mysteries.

Orczy also had another series about the adventures of Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, the police's only woman detective, who manages to solve crimes by using a woman's eye to see what men have missed. 

With these and other series, Orczy was one of the most popular writers of the early 20th century.  Alas, her stories slowly lost favor and the type of swashbuckling adventure of the Scarlet Pimpernel is out of date****

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* Looney Tunes parodied it in their classic cartoon, The Scarlet Pumpernickel.

**One of the first characters to have a secret identity -- Sir Percy Blakeney

***Whose function is to put forth questions to challenge the Old Man, only to have them shot down.

****Except when they use lightsabers.

Harry Golden (author)

(1902-1981)

Harry Golden led an unusual life.  Born in the Ukrane, he ended up in New York City at the age of three and grew up on the Lower East Side.  He became a stockbroker, but lost his job in the 1929 crash and was convicted of wire fraud, for which he spent five years in prison.  Once released, he moved to North Carolina where he got a job writing for the Charlotte Observer and in 1944 began to put out a bimonthly newsletter called The Carolina Israelite.

If Golden were writing today, The Carolina Israelite would be done as a blog.  It was Golden writing about topics of interest to him and finding an audience for his writings. He started writing nonfiction books on Jewish history to help make ends meet, and in 1958, republished the best of the magazine in a book Only in America. The book was a major best seller and Golden followed it up with For Two Cents Plain.

The essays in the book, like much of Golden's writings, fell into three categories.  He wrote on general issues for Jewish Americans of the time, with a unique viewpoint as a Jew in one of the least Jewish areas of the country.  He was also a staunch supporter of racial equality and wrote eloquently against the segregated South. But the most popular essays were when he reminisced about his boyhood in New York before World War I.

The stories were a wonderful look into a different time.  Some of the incidents stick in my mind, like the ritual of buying a boy his first suit.  I especially liked the little scam where the kids would get a flavored seltzer (three cents) for the price of a plain (two cents) -- they'd order plain seltzer then, after paying two cents at precisely the right time, they'd tell the soda jerk to "float" a little flavoring on the drink.  It had to be done right, so that the drink had been poured and the soda jerk had no option but to give a little squirt of flavored syrup to the drink.

Other essays I loved was his analysis of the character of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, where he shows how Shakespeare subtly undercut the antisemitism in the play.

Golden continued to write.  He stopped publishing The Carolina Israelite in 1968, by which time he had established himself well enough to write books full time.  In 1974, Richard Nixon pardoned him for his embezzlement rap.  His books still remain in print, and are a wonderful look at both the Lower East Side in New York and of life in the early days of the civil rights movement.

Blind Voices (book)

 by Tom Reamy
(1978)

Tom Reamy could have been one of the great writers in the science fiction genre.  The only thing that stopped him was his heart.

Reamy grew up in Texas, and by the 1950s had become one of the big names in science fiction fandom.  You have to understand that a fan back then didn't just mean you read everything and had favorite books.  It also meant you were involved in writing SF 'zines* and running conventions.  He organized the first SF convention in the state and worked on Worldcon bid committees.

But he also was interested in writing.  He helped set up the Turkey City Writers Workshop,** one of the most successful writing groups in the genre.

Finally, in the early 70s, Reamy decided he was ready to break in as an author.  And did he break in.  One of his first stories, "Twilla," was nominated for a Hugo Award. The next year, his story "San Diego Lightfoot Sue" also got a nomination, and won the Nebula Award.  In 1976, he won the John F. Campbell Award for best new writer. 

Obviously, he looked like he had a great future.  But, on November 4, 1977, Reamy was found dead of a heart attack.  He had been working on a story when he died.

There was one last treat for his fans, though.  Reamy had completed a novel, Blind Voices. It was published the next year.

 Blind Voices is set in Kansas in the 1920s.  Haverstock's Traveling Curiosus and Wondershow comes into town, promising more than just the usual circus performers.  Three young women -- Francine, Rose, and Evelyn -- are attracted to the show and its denizens -- a centaur, and man who's only a foot tall, and Angel, the Boy Who Can Fly.

It is a story of wonders, with a subtext of sexual awakening in a time when sex was still a taboo subject.

The story immediately drew comparisons to Ray Bradbury and and Charles G. Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao for its lyricism and setting.  Critics agreed it showed all the signs of a major talent, even if some things were a bit rough.*** It was nominated for both a Nebula and a Hugo, losing both to Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake.

Of course, despite his success, there would be no more Tom Reamy stories.  His short stories were collected in San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories in 1979.****

With his slim output, Reamy is easy to miss.  But Blind Voices is a book that shouldn't be overlooked.

_______________________________________________

*In those days, created on a mimeograph or hectograph and mailed out to others.  Reamy got two Hugo nominations for his fanzine Trumpet.

**Which, years later, created the Turkey City Lexicon, a must for anyone seriously interested in writing SF.

***It seems to me that Reamy's death prevented some minor edits, notably not fixing the fact that one of the character's fates is left unresolved.

****One final story was sold to Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions (before that became a punchline) and is still unpublished.

Beat the Queen/Porko von Popbutton (book)

(December 23, 1968)
by William Pene Du Bois
Story at Sports Illustrated.com
Back in the 1960s, Sports Illustrated was struggling.* The market for a sports only magazine, especially a glossy one with photos, was small.  So it did many different things to try to attract readers:  articles on non-mainstream sports and some odd features.  And once, they even published a children's book.  Beat the Queen was one of their few forays into fiction of any kind,** but it was a great one.
Beat the Queen is the story of Patrick O'Sullivan Pinkerton.  Pat was fat.  Extremely fat (in the first paragraph, his bed falls through the floor of his house).  His parents send him off to the President Coolidge School for Boys, where he is separated from his beloved food. 
The school is a sports-mad institution, and that sport is hockey. His roommate is the irrepressible Jim "One-Point-Two-Five" Finger***, goalie for the team.  Jim dubs Pat "Porko von Popbutton," and takes a liking to him, having him help with practice and teaching him about their archrivalry with Queen Mary School, the reason why there are big signs all over campus saying "BEAT THE QUEEN."
And then Pat discovers an interesting fact:  He's almost the same size as a hockey goal.  So he decides to don the pads and become a goalie.
I think you can probably guess how this ends up.****  But the story is charming.  Pat is perfectly happy with himself; he may be fat, but he likes it that way.  He wants to keep eating, even though everyone wants to stop him, because it's something he truly likes to do. Du Bois makes it clear that all the sympathy is for him, and not for those who are trying to help him.
Jim is also the type of friend that many people would love to have. He may tease Pat, but it's never malicious, and ultimately it's clear that he does like his roommate.
William Pene Du Bois was an author and illustrator, winner of Newberry Medal (Children's literature's highest honor) in 1948 for The 100 Balloons and gaining Caldecott Honors (for being a runner up for top children's illustrators) twice.
The story was published soon afterwards as a book, with the title changed to Porko von Popbutton. If anyone was looking for it due to the Sports Illustrated article, they may have missed it, but Du Bois was well established enough at that time so it probably was successful.
Alas, despite the delights of the tale, it's out of print.  I would guess that, with childhood obesity a serious problem, the subject matter is a bit touchy these days, and children's literature likes to avoid controversial positions.
But if you have a little time, read the story at the Sports Illustrated website. It's something people of all ages can enjoy.
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*It ran at a loss from its founding in 1954 until about 1968
**About a month earlier, they published a tongue-in-cheek article about how the New York Jets would win the Super Bowl. It was meant to be a joke, but, oddly enough, predicted that the Jets beat Oakland (who had to face a division playoff because they were tied for first) and Baltimore.  Those opponents were exactly how things worked out.
***The nickname is his goals against average. 
****The problem with stories about sporting events is that there are only two outcomes at the event.  You can usually assume the underdogs will win, mostly because it's hard to write an ending where they lose that feels satisfying. In any case, Pat does end up tending goal in the big game.
*****One of the highest honors for a children's book author.

Stanley G. Weinbaum (author)

(1902-1935)
Wikipedia

When I was growing up and reading science fiction magazines and anthologies in the late 1960s, I was delighted to realize that most of the authors I enjoyed were still alive and writing, so I could look forward to reading more of their work.  There were only four whose stories I loved, but who had died -- Henry Kuttner, Cyril Kornbluth, Cordwainer Smith* -- and Stanley G. Weinbaum.

Like Smith, Weinbaum burst on the scene with a single story.  Bur whereas Smith's "Scanners Live In Vain" appeared in an obscure and soon-to-fail magazine, seen only by a small audience, Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" appeared in Wonder Stories, at the time one of the major magazines in the field.  And it was one of the most influential stories in the field.

You see, Stanley G. Weinbaum invented the alien.

Oh, there were aliens in science fiction previously:  Martians, Venerians,** etc.  The problem was that they were just human beings in funny suits***.   This was even true in the case of top writers like H.G. Wells, whose Martians were just British colonial soldiers with better weapons.

"A Martian Odyssey" is the story of Dick Jarvis, a member of the first Earth expedition to Mars, who crashes his exploration rocket 800 miles from the base camp.  He decides to walk back, and meets up with a creature he names Tweel.

Tweel is a memorable, a birdlike creature who Dick rescues from being eaten by a Martian predator.  He leaps long distances, landing on his beak, and is clearly intelligent, even if he only can pick up about a dozen human words and is amused by the idea that two different objects could both be called "rock."  Yet he manages to communicate some very sophisticated concepts. 

But Tweel isn't the only novel alien in the story.  There were the pyramid makers, a very odd form of silicon-based life.  There were predators, and the barrel creatures, who are building tunnels underground.

All these aliens have their own motives and habits, often very different from human ones.  Jarvis's journey is one of the most remarkable ones in science fiction, even today.

Weinbaum was far from a one-story author; he wrote a series of stories set in the same universe as "A Martian Odyssey," and fairly scientifically accurate for their time.  There was also "The Adaptive Ultimate," a story about a woman who after undergoing a medical experiment, is able to adapt herself into becoming whatever she needs to be, and nearly takes over the world.****

But though Weinbaum leapt to the head of the science fiction writers of his day, it didn't last for long.  Eighteen months after the publication of "A Martian Odyssey," he was dead of lung cancer.

Weinbaum's legacy remains throughout printed science fiction.***** The goal throughout the genre is to create memorable aliens who aren't motivated in the same way humans are.  Nearly all writers in the field have read "A Martian Odyssey" (in 1970, the Science Fiction Writers of America voted it the second greatest short story in the field), but many SF fans have never encountered it.  Luckily, it seems to have fallen in the public domain, so it can be found at The Gutenberg Project.

Read it.  It's as amazing today as it was in 1936.

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*Actually, Smith died in 1966, about when I started reading, but had stories in the pipeline for a few more years, so I did get to read new stories by him.

**A much more elegant construction than "Venusians."

***This reached the height of absurdity when you had squid creatures lusting after human women.  While human perversity has no bounds, it's a bit absurd to think they'd think they were the slightest bit attractive.

****I'm sure feminists would have a field day analyzing this one.

*****TV and movies are another thing.  Aliens in media are either evil, godlike, or metaphors. The idea that they might be different and unknowable just doesn't exist.