The Mumpsimus

This is my fourth post for the great 2012 Caine Prize blogathon. (See my first post for some details.) With 2 stories remaining for our Caine Prize Blogathon of Wonder, I fell behind. Thus, this post will be about the last two stories, "La Salle de Départ" by Melissa Tandiwe Myambo and "Hunter Emmanuel" by Constance Myburgh . Both are solid stories with their own virtues and are, much to the jurors' credit, utterly different from each other.

If you've ever wanted to encounter one of the primary origins of science fiction as we know it (for better or worse), now is your chance: the wonderful Pulp Magazines Project has put the first six issues (April-December 1926) of Amazing Stories online. If you don't know why Amazing Stories  is important to the history of science fiction, Wikipedia has a fairly good entry on it and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction  also offers an overview . (And if you want to delve deeply into it, check out Mike Ashley and Robert A.W. Lowndes's Gernsback Days , Ashley's Time Machines ,  and Gary Westfahl's The Mechanics of Wonder  and Hugo Gernsback and the Century of Science Fiction . )

This is probably my favorite Astounding cover, the last one that magazine published by Alejandro Canedo , apparently titled "Inappropriate". It's the July 1954 issue. Canedo (or Cañedo ? Same artist?) had put naked men on the cover of Astounding before -- the September 1947 is ... well, it sure puts some of the old gay pulps to shame...

Here are links to PDFs of a couple of old science fiction stories that may be of interest to some folks. (Both, as far as I have been able to tell, did not have their copyrights renewed and so are in the public domain; I'll get rid of the links if I discover otherwise.) "The War of the Sexes"  by Edmond Hamilton was first published in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales  and reprinted once, in the version I have a PDF of, in The Avon Science Fiction Reader , no. 1 , in 1951. It's a terribly silly story, bad in just about every conceivable way, and pretty hilarious because of it. "The Queen Bee" by Randall Garrett was published in the December 1958 issue of Astounding  and has never been reprinted as far as I can tell. It is not even remotely hilarious. I found it, in fact, quite disturbing to read. It is a revolting story, a representation of a sick male fantasy made "necessary" by circumstances. (I suspect Joanna Russ may have had the s...

My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted: "The Hero, Pulped" . It's all about my latest obsession, The Spider . The article that sparked this obsession, "The Spider: America's Prophetic Epic of Terrorism" by Stuart Hopen, appears in the latest ( Spring 2008 ) issue of Rain Taxi , but unfortunately it's not available online. (You could use this as your excuse to subscribe to RT and get a year's worth of great interviews, articles, and reviews of books you aren't likely to hear about elsewhere...) The column has some links to various sites of information about The Spider , but if you're curious about where to procure some of the stories, the best source I know is The Vintage Library , which sells books (including all 8 Carrol & Graf editions for $20 ), pulp replicas, and electronic editions. A year ago, Baen Books published The Spider: Robot Titans of Gotham , which reprints a few Spider stories, parts of which can be read on...

Richard Lupoff , from a review of Science Fiction of the Thirties (ed. Damon Knight) and The Fantastic Pulps (ed. Peter Haining) in Algol , Summer 1976: Anybody who has followed this column for a number of years must be aware that I have a great fondness for the old pulp (and even pre-pulp) stuff. Yet I despise most of the contemporary would-be heirs and imitators of the pulp writers, and among moderns strongly prefer the serious and even experimental authors. ... Those old pulp writers, Doc Smith, David Keller, Edmond Hamilton, Murray Leinster, Seabury Quinn, Lovecraft, Otto Binder, Jack Williamson, and all the rest of that crowd -- were writing the best they knew how! Their ideas might seem elementary, their technique primitive, to us . But to themselves and their contemporaries, the ideas were fresh and startling, the technique the most advanced they were capable of (and very likely the most sophisticated their readers were capable of assimilating). And that's exactly the ...

Through a bit of luck, I was able to get a copy of the November 1926 issue of Amazing Stories (vol. 1, no. 8) for an affordable price (because it's not in very good condition). I've wanted to see a complete issue of one of the early, Hugo Gernsback -edited Amazings for ages -- yes, aside from the material they reprinted from Wells and Verne and Poe, most of the fiction they published was atrociously bad and even occasionally illiterate, but Amazing as an idea and institution was an important step in differentiating science fiction from other types of writing. The editorial by Gernsback in this issue has separated from the binding, so here, for your amusement, is a scan of it (click on the image for a full-size view):

At The Valve, John Holbo just posted this cover from the June 1953 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries : Yes, indeed -- Ayn Rand and Franz Kafka in one pulp magazine together! But it's better than that. Here's the entire table of contents: Worms of the Earth by Robert E. Howard Pendulum by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse Bernie Goes to Hell by Arthur Dekker Savage Find the Happy Children by Benjamin Ferris The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka Haunted Hostel by Emma L'Hommedieu Frost Dirge (Aztec) by Louis M. Hobbs Anthem by Ayn Rand Yes, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Ayn Rand, and Franz Kafka all in one issue! (All reprints -- I would love to know what went through Mary Gnaedinger's mind as she put it together...) As noted at The Valve, this was the final issue of FFM , "after which the magazine evidently died of confusion." This is apparently a particularly rare issue -- the least expensive copy I could find on the internet is going for $61, and it...