Friday, October 31, 2014

A Forgotten Digest

Alien Quakes, Space Birds, and Door-to-Door Salesmen in Space: The Art of The Original Science Fiction Stories

9 comments:

Rick Robinson said...

Terrific artwork there.

mybillcrider said...

I love those old covers. I have copies of all of those.

Todd Mason said...

John doesn't know about Charles Hornig or FUTURE (whether or not combined with SCIENCE FICTION) and generally seems pretty content to not know that some of the work Robert W. Lowndes published (before he joined the Anglican Church and took on the A.) was some of the best and most daring work of its time, because the other magazines didn't dare or choose for one reason or another to run the likes of "Common Time" by James Blish or "The Liberation of Earth" by "William Tenn"...there's at least one issue of SF written entirely by Futurians, often in combos.

mybillcrider said...

I liked this magazine a lot when I was a kid. I didn't know who the pen names concealed. I didn't even know they were pen names, except for Calvin M. Knox. I don't know how I learned that one.

Todd Mason said...

And then there's the "discovery" and encouragement of Carol Emshwiller, Ed Hoch, R. A. Lafferty, and later at Health Knowledge, of F. Paul Wilson and some King guy. And the like.

Todd Mason said...

Lowndes was always pretty open about pseuds in the letter column of the magazine. For all the complaints about lack of access to these magazines, I got my first SF of similar vintage from Gerry De La Ree in a grab-bag for a very reasonable amount of money...probably paid about $1 or so for mine, maybe less, albeit out of 1978 ditch-digging dollars...

mybillcrider said...

I remember reading Carol Emshwiller's first story, but I don't recall knowing that she was the model for many of Emsh's covers.

Todd Mason said...

As was he, himself. That first grab-bag had an Emsh SF cover for a Knox story, with a scrawnified Carol E nearly nude, but the version of CE (and EE) that stoked a mediated crush on her was for a Goldsmith AMAZING in the same batch, for a Brunner serial. She's clothed, but there's a closeup on her striking face in that version, and it looks less altered than in the SF issue's cover image.

Todd Mason said...

OK, John did eventually learn of Charles Hornig, but still doesn't seem to have caught on that Lowndes was editing SCIENCE FICTION for at least one issue in the 1930s, and that FUTURE, despite some issues of both being available for brief periods, was essentially the same magazine under a different title. Gaa.