Weird Tales at Ninety & Ninety-Five

Ann VanderMeer became editor of Weird Tales with its issue of November/December 2007.  She remained at that post until the Winter issue of 2012, collecting awards along the way. She announced her resignation on August 20, 2012, which would have been H.P. Lovecraft's 122nd birthday had he been treated for many years with large volumes of cool air. This was all part of a controversy that took place so long ago that its has probably been forgotten by everyone except for perhaps its most aggrieved parties.

Marvin Kaye took over after that. The first issue under his editorship came along in Fall 2012. This was the "Cthulhu Returns" issue. The theme would have gone against Jeff VanderMeer's desire to move past Lovecraft. For those who don't know, Jeff VanderMeer is the husband of Ann VanderMeer. On September 1, 2012, as the Weird Tales controversy proceeded, he posted on the Internet an essay entitled "Moving Past Lovecraft." You can read it on the website Weird Fiction Review, here. I have written before on Mr. VanderMeer's essay. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

The workings of Weird Tales during and after the controversy remained a mystery for most of us. For a long time there wasn't any content on the Weird Tales website. There were also long delays between issues. In 2012, there were only two issues published. In 2013 and 2014, there was only one issue per year. Each was a themed issue. The theme in Summer 2013 was fairy tales. In Spring 2014, it was the undead. At some point, Marvin Kaye had announced a sword-and-sorcery issue. Alas, that issue was not to appear until late 2022, by which time Jonathan Maberry had taken over as editor. Marvin Kaye died more than a year before that, on May 13, 2021. I think we can say that we still feel the loss.

Once again there was a break in the year-to-year record of publication of Weird Tales. The lone issue of 2014 was the last of a run that had begun in 1998. I'm not sure what the difficulty was. Again, we were not allowed to know what was going on behind the scenes. If the publisher and editor had asked me to do it, I would have put out an issue every year during those missing years of 2015 to 2018, even if it was basically just an ashcan edition. In my opinion, Weird Tales has gone on for so long and is so significant in our popular culture--at least in a subset of our popular culture--that it has become a kind of common property. I think the legal holders of that property have a responsibility to readers and fans. If they're not up to it, they should pass it on to someone who will take care. And while it's in their care, they should not abuse Weird Tales. I would say there has been some abuse in recent years.

Anyway, Weird Tales was not in print in 2018 when it could have observed its own ninety-fifth anniversary. However, it was in print five years before, in 2013, for its ninetieth.

The Summer 2013 issue of Weird Tales was Volume 67, Number 1, whole issue number 361. Again, the theme was fairy tales. The cover art is by Jeff Wong. Marvin Kaye was the editor. The front cover doesn't mention the anniversary but the back cover does. "Celebrating 90 Years of Weird!" it reads. And there are tentacles. There is dreck on the title page, which calls Margaret Brundage the "artistic godmother of goth fetishism." Whatever. You can read the same kind of dreck on the current Weird Tales website. All of it has been written by supposed professional writers and editors. I think some of them should go back to school.

In "The Eyrie," which used to be a letters column, Marvin Kaye mentioned the ninetieth anniversary, but he resolved to publish new stories rather than reprint old ones. I think we have to give the late Mr. Kaye credit for an abundance of content in the fairy tales issue. There is even a gag cartoon by Marc Bilgrey. Was that the first in the pages of Weird Tales? I can't say. And then comes an essay, "Ninety Years of Weird Tales," written by Darrell Schweitzer. Mr. Schweitzer's essay is only two pages long but it covers a lot of ground. I'll quote just one sentence, which is in regards to the classic Weird Tales main title logo, designed, incidentally, by J. Allen St. John: "To ever discard it would be unthinkable folly." And yet that's what happened under the previous editors,  Stephen H. Segal and Ann VanderMeer, who replaced it with a logo that should be buried deep in the ground and never resurrected.

Immediately following Darrell Schweitzer's essay is an interview with J. David Spurlock, conducted by Lynne Jamneck on his co-authorship of The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage--Queen of Pulp Pin-Up Art (2013). I think recognition of Margaret Brundage is fitting. The ninetieth-anniversary issue was a good place for it. I think the subtitle of Mr. Spurlock's book is inaccurate, but nobody asked my opinion. Margaret Brundage created most of her covers in the 1930s. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the term pin-up in reference to pictures of women pinned on walls is from about 1940 at its earliest. Has anyone ever seen a contemporaneous photograph of a Brundage cover pinned to a wall? Probably not. Anyway, I think people put into their stuff whatever they think is likely to make it sell, thus the Cthulhu Returns issue, the Undead Issue, the Margaret Brundage bat-woman ripoff cover of No. 363, the Sword and Sorcery issue, the Cosmic Horror issue, and, as Yul Brynner would say, et cetera, et cetera.

And now we're finally to the 100th-anniversary of Weird Tales, finally observed in 2023.

Weird Tales, October 1933, cover art by Margaret Brundage. The real thing, accept no substitutes, although to be fair to the cover artist on Issue #363, she was probably instructed by the editor or art director to draw what people call "an homage." I know we're looking at some of Bat-Woman's other features here, but have you noticed how long her fingers are?

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales at Eighty-Five

By 2003, Weird Tales seems to have become aware of its own history. In every five-year period since then there has been an observance of an anniversary, except in 2018 when the magazine wasn't in print. And now I find that there's a word for a five-year period. It's called a quinquennial.

From the sixty-fifth anniversary issue of Spring 1988 until the spring of 2007, Darrell Schweitzer served as editor or co-editor of Weird Tales. Sometimes John Gregory Betancourt and George H. Scithers were involved, too. The last issue for their crew was dated February-March 2007. That was also the last issue for a while with the classic Weird Tales main title logo.

With the April-May issue of 2007, Stephen H. Segal took over as editor. With him came a new main title design and a new aesthetic in terms of the design, illustration, themes, mood, and general look of the cover. I think that was a tipoff that things had changed with the formerly unique magazine.

In March 2008, Weird Tales published its eighty-fifth anniversary issue. The cover feature is "The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years," written by numerous authors. There is also an introductory essay by the new editor, Ann VanderMeer, called "Onward to the Next 85 Years." She had taken over as editor with the November-December issue of 2007, so Mr. Segal was not the editor for very many issues after all.

There are also closing essays in the eighty-fifth-anniversary issue. These are "Old Weird," by Stephen H. Segal, and "New Weird," by an unnamed author. In another essay, representing the "old weird" I guess, is an essay on H.P. Lovecraft by Kenneth Hite. And I guess China Miéville, in an interview with Jeff VanderMeer, represented what people back in the old days called "the new weird." The interview is entitled "China Miéville: Capitalizing Weird." I think the title is supposed to be ironic considering that Mr. Miéville is a Marxist, or plays at being a Marxist, depending on how you look at it.

The cover art (below) is by Newel Anderson.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales at Eighty

Weird Tales turned eighty years old in March 2003 and there was a magazine in print to observe that anniversary. Darrell Schweitzer and George H. Scithers were the editors. The cover artist was Les Edwards. His cover art is a version of a previously published paperback book cover for Crypt of the Sorcerer by Ian Livingstone (2002). Below the main title logo on the cover is a starburst design enclosing the words:

80th

Anniversary

Issue

And the subtitle "The Unique Magazine" made a reappearance. Inside is a reprint yet again of Anthony M. Rud's story "Ooze," which was the cover story in March 1923. That was part of series in Weird Tales called "The Classic Horrors," which had begun in 1991 and would go on until 2006. I don't know whether there is any other anniversary-related content.

Original text  copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

More Strength, More Joy

I wanted to be done with this topic, but there is always more of everything, at the door and waiting to come in.

Today (Sept. 10, 2024), I read an article about Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), that notorious, mid-century, whacked-out, Freudian-Marxist, crackpot pseudoscientist and chaser after flying saucers. (1) I'll tell you, there aren't enough adjectives and epithets to describe this guy. Anyway, I came across a quote from him that leads to another quote that leads back to the topic of Strength Through Joy from the other day. I say "the other day" in the Midwestern sense, meaning any day between yesterday and several weeks ago.

Here is Reich on joy and strength:

This future order cannot and will not be other than, as Lenin put it, a full love-life yielding joy and strength. Little as we can say about the details of such a life, it is nevertheless certain that in the Communist society the sexual needs of human beings will once more come into their own. . . . Evidence that socialism alone can bring about sexual liberation is on our side. (2) [Boldface added; ellipses in Mr. Panero's original article. See the note below for the source.]

Ah, so Strength Through Joy came from Lenin. But where from Lenin? Well, here from Lenin:

"Besides, emancipation of love is neither a novel nor a communistic idea. You will recall that it was advanced in fine literature around the middle of the past century as 'emancipation of the heart'. In bourgeois practice it materialized into emancipation of the flesh. It was preached with greater talent than now, though I cannot judge how it was practiced. Not that I want my criticism to breed asceticism. That is farthest from my thoughts. Communism should not bring asceticism, but joy and strength, stemming, among other things, from a consummate love life. Whereas today, in my opinion, the obtaining plethora of sex life yields neither joy nor strength. On the contrary, it impairs them. This is bad, very bad, indeed, in the epoch of revolution.

     "Young people are particularly in need of joy and strength. Healthy sports, such as gymnastics, swimming, hiking, physical exercises of every description and a wide range of intellectual interests is what they need, as well as learning, study and research, and as far as possible collectively. This will be far more useful to young people than endless lectures and discussions on sex problems and the so-called living by one's nature. Mens sana in corpore sana. Be neither monk nor Don Juan, but not anything in between either, like a German Philistine." [Boldface added.]

That long quote is from "Lenin on the Women's Question," an interview conducted in 1920 by Clara Zetkin (1857-1933), a German Marxist and feminist. You can easily find it on the Internet.

Lenin was of course a socialist, but he was of the international variety. Nazis were socialists, too, but of the opposing national variety. These people couldn't stand each other. And yet the Nazis seem to have gone to Lenin for his concept of strength through joy, at least when it came to "[h]ealthy sports, such as gymnastics, swimming, hiking, physical exercises of every description." Activities like these were of course part the program under the Nazi organization Kraft durch Freude, or KdF, established in 1933, thirteen years after Lenin gave his interview.

It seems to have been Reich and men like him, particularly of the Frankfurt School, who departed from Lenin's proscription against what he considered the bourgeois "emancipation of the flesh" and a "plethora of sex life." (3) In Lenin's analysis, these things impair rather than yield joy and strength. On top of that, they're "bad, very bad" for the Marxist revolution. Imagine: Lenin seems to have come out in favor of conventional and committed love-relationships between men and women, all the better, I guess, to keep the revolution going. The revolution, after all, was the thing.

Reich, a Marxist to be sure but a Freudian as well, went the other way. He and his followers, even unto today, would seem to be the Philistines in Lenin's formulation, although I'm not sure I understand the reference exactly. (Maybe it was to Rousseau, a Swiss, or to Goethe, a German, but I just can't say. See the note below.) In any case, it looks like Lenin has been kicked into the dustbin of history. After all, it is critical theory and other ideas of the Frankfurt School and the New Left--all pretty heavy on sex and what people call gender--that have taken over the minds of people in academia and the Western élite. In contrast, who today calls himself a Marxist-Leninist? Poor Lenin. He must be turning over on his bier.

* * *

By the way, Reich's followers included Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, a sure indication that even very intelligent people can be extremely stupid. As for the literature and cinema of science fiction and fantasy, Reichian ideas--rather, his gadgets--are in Barbarella (1968) and Sleeper (1973), as well as in the video of Kate Bush's song "Cloudbusting" (1985). One of those gadgets, the orgone accumulator, makes me think of L. Ron Hubbard's E-meter, a different kind of gadget that he swiped from Volney G. Mathison (1897-1965). Both are pseudoscientific instruments that would have found an easy place in the science fiction of their day. They may very well have been inspired by science fiction, just as flying saucers were. (Like Hubbard, Reich believed that aliens from outer space have come to Earth.) So the path seems to start in science fiction before moving into the real world, after which it goes back into science fiction. The problem is that people forget where it all started. They lose the origin story and see the beginnings of these things in the real world rather than in the imagined worlds of science fiction.

By the way, both Wilhelm Reich and L. Ron Hubbard were influenced by Freudian psychology, which you could also call a pseudoscience if you want.

Connections between real-world pseudosciences and the imaginary worlds of science fiction continue. For example: Reich's Maine estate, called Orgonon, recalls the Valley of the Pines, run by Joseph A. Sadony (1877-1960) close to the shores of Lake Michigan. In attendance there for many years was Meredith Beyers (1899-1996), who, like Volney Mathison, was a teller of weird tales.

Another example: science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard had his own real-world hideout. Sometimes it was on board a ship at sea. Towards the end of his life, Hubbard, depraved as always but then in extreme decay, retreated to a secluded ranch in California. Instead of being like Captain Nemo on his Mysterious Island, Hubbard put his ocean-going days behind him and died in his bed, in a motor home, his hair and nails grown long the way people used to say happened with corpses. Lenin died in bed, too. His corpse has remained static in the one hundred years since his death. Happy death anniversary, V.I. We don't miss you.

* * *

These men and men like them were and are like Bond villains or pulp-fiction or comic-book supervillains who live in great wealth in their secret lairs, secluded estates, hidden valleys, expensive vessels, and other hideouts peopled with anonymous but extremely loyal henchmen who, as it happens, always die in droves when the hero shows up. Unlike fictional villains, however, the real-world pseudoscientist, theorist, and experimenter usually lives with only few attendants, their numbers often dwindling as the years go by, and he often dies alone, in poverty and misery and maybe even suffering from insanity. This is what happens, I guess, when you separate yourself from nature, fact, truth, and reality, also from yourself and other people.

Marxists and Nazis of course have their own pseudosciences and their pseudoscientific processes and gadgets. Marxism is itself, in its whole, a pseudoscience, i.e., the pseudoscience of what Marxists calls History. And what else are the Marxist Workers' Paradise and the Nazi Thousand-Year Reich (a different Reich from Wilhelm) than just larger versions of those insular and closed-off places where Reich, Sadony, Hubbard, and men like them played with their pet theories and carried out their abstruse researches and pointless experiments? In contrast, Captain Nemo was only a fictional character. He was harmless. In contrast, too, Edgar Rice Burroughs was only a real-world author. All of his theorizing and experimentation happened only on paper. He was harmless, too. But maybe we can say that his Tarzana was the secular equivalent of those hidden and isolated places of pseudoscience and separation, a kind of Disneyland not open to the general public.

Marxism and the "science" of History, Nazism and the "science" of race, orgone energy, cloudbusting, Dianetics, Scientology, flying saucers, contact with aliens--including sexual contact with aliens--ancient aliens, alien abductions, alien invasions and infiltrations--on and on these ideas go. Some are mostly harmless. All are, at least in part, pseudoscientific. Among them are ideas, Marxism and Nazism being the chief examples, that are dangerous in the extreme, to the point of being lethal to countless millions of human beings. What does it say about us that we keep coming up with these things? That they keep coming back even though we chase them away over and over again? What does it say about us that we keep falling for them? Believing in them as keys to our understanding, of ourselves, our history, and the world in which we live? Believing them to be keys to making our lives better and happier? What do all of these things say about us?

Notes
(1) The article is "Marx of the Libido" by James Panero on the website of City Journal, Summer 2024, accessed by clicking here.
(2) From his essay "Politicizing the Sexual Problem of Youth" in Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929–1934 (1972).
(3) I'm interested in the origins of the supposed bourgeois idea of the "emancipation of the heart." I found this phrase in an online abstract of a paper about the German authoress Marie Louise von François (1817-1893). I also found it in reference to both Rousseau and Goethe. I can't say whether I'm on the right track, though. Maybe if we could find a handsome prince to kiss the sleeping Lenin in his glass coffin, he would wake up and tell us what he meant.

Speaking of the Swiss and glass coffins, an American woman killed herself in Switzerland using a suicide coffin. This happened on September 23, 2024. See what I mean when I say that there are always more things waiting to come in the door? Anyway, last night (Sept. 24, 2024) I read "Welcome to the Monkey House" by Kurt Vonnegut (1968). The story involves suicide parlors where people voluntarily go to their deaths. How prescient. There are also suicide chambers (pun possibly intended, given the author's surname) in "The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers (1895) and in the film Soylent Green (1973), based on the 1966 novel by Harry Harrison. These ways of killing ourselves originated in science fiction. Now they have come into the real world. Is it possible for them to go back into science fiction again? Or is it too late for that?

Wilhelm Reich and son Peter, by the artist MacNeill, from High Times #9, May 1976. Note the flying saucers and the Vernian rocketship. Note also the two orbs as in Robert W. Chambers' illustration for his own King in Yellow (1895).

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales in Its Sixties & Seventies

I have been writing about anniversaries of Weird Tales and observances of those anniversaries within the pages of the magazine, as well as in other publications. Here is a list of my articles about Weird Tales in its sixties and seventies:

• "Weird Tales: Years without Anniversaries" (Sept. 14, 2024) is about the years 1978, during which there weren't any issues published, and 1983, in which Lin Carter's fourth Weird Tales paperback came out. I don't have a copy of that book, and so I wasn't able to say whether there was any anniversary content in its pages. Nineteen eighty-three was the sixtieth-anniversary year of Weird Tales.

• Luckily, Phil Stephenson-Payne, who conducts the website The FictionMags Index, does have a copy of that book. He provided us with an excerpt from Lin Carter's essay from Weird Tales #4 (1983). I transcribed that text into an article called "Weird Tales at Sixty" (Sept. 15, 2024).

• On September 17, 2024, I posted an article called "More of Weird Tales at Sixty." That article is about Robert Weinberg's program book for the World Fantasy Convention, held in Chicago in October 1983. The late Mr. Weinberg's book is overtly an anniversary issue and has a lot of anniversary-related content.

• In "World Tales (1985)" (Sept. 19, 2024), I wrote about the program book of the World Fantasy Convention held in Tucson, Arizona, in October-November 1985. Created by Donald D. Markstein, that book was made to look like an issue of Weird Tales from the 1940s, but it isn't an anniversary issue. For the sake of completeness, I have included it in my blog. Before you reach the end of this article, you will see another publication included for the sake of completeness.

• "Weird Tales at Sixty-Five" (Sept. 21, 2024) is about the Spring 1988 issue of Weird Tales, the first issue after a hiatus. That publication, too, was overtly an anniversary issue, as indicated on its front and back covers. I don't have a copy of it (yet), but Mike Harwood was kind enough to send images of an introductory essay, written by "The Editors," and published as an entry of "The Eyrie." That essay is four pages long. Maybe I'll post it on this blog, but not yet. Anyway, the Editors made a really noteworthy distinction when they wrote: "We intend to resurrect the magazine, not to exhume it." They weren't interested in what they called "necrophilia" regarding long-dead authors and their works. As in seemingly every other anniversary essay, they made a list of authors. Fortunately, their list makes up a small percentage of their overall word count. I take that to be something less than mere filler. On the back cover, as well as in "The Eyrie," they gave some space to both H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Despite objections beginning perhaps with Robert Bloch and more recently from Jeff VanderMeer, editors and publishers of weird fiction know on which side their bread is buttered. I feel certain they will continue to publish stories of the Cthulhu Mythos and of heroic fantasy. Witness the issues of Weird Tales published in 2022-2023. Thank you, Mr. Harwood for your contribution.

• "Weird Tales at Seventy & Seventy-Five" (Sept. 23, 2024) is about two issues, those of Spring 1993 (70 years) and Summer 1998 (75 years). Phil Stephenson-Payne has let us know that he didn't find any mention of an anniversary in the former but that there is mention of the seventy-fifth anniversary in the latter. Thank you, Mr. Stephenson-Payne.

There was a break in the publication of Weird Tales from Spring 1994 to Summer 1998. During that time, there was a magazine called Worlds of Fantasy & Horror that was basically Weird Tales but without the title. Weird Tales came back with the Summer 1998 issue, mentioned above. So again, an anniversary issue came at the end of a break in publication. I guess we can call that a pattern. Thanks to Mike Harwood for pointing this out.

Mike Harwood has also let us know that Satellite TV Europe published a magazine called Weird Tales, complete with the classic main title logo, in March 1997, just in time for the seventy-fourth anniversary of the magazine. The name of the cover artist is unknown. According to Mr. Harwood, there isn't any fiction in that magazine, only non-fiction about movies and TV shows. Below is the image of the cover that Mr. Harwood sent to me. Thanks again to Mike Harwood.

Corrected on September 26, 2024.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales at Seventy & Seventy-Five

Weird Tales turned seventy in the spring of 1993. Fortunately there was still a magazine in print. Darrell Schweitzer was the editor of whole issue number 306. The cover artist was Nicholas Jainschigg. There isn't any mention of an anniversary on the cover, and I don't know whether there is any anniversary content inside. But Weird Tales had reached threescore and ten years, which is what is allotted us. There were two more issues (Summer 1993 and Spring 1994), then Weird Tales came to an end again.

* * *

The magazine that never dies came back in its Summer issue of 1998. Darrell Schweitzer and George H. Scithers were the editors. Jason Van Hollander was the cover artist. But again, there isn't anything on the cover about an anniversary, and I don't know whether there was anything inside.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales at Sixty-Five

Weird Tales was in print from March 1923 to September 1954, for a total of 279 issues and thirty-one and a half years. That was the longest year-to-year run in the history of the magazine. The third longest run began with the Spring issue of 1988. That issue was whole number 290. By volume and number, it was Volume 50, Number 1. John Gregory Betancourt, Darrell Schweitzer, and George H. Scithers were the editors. The publisher was Terminus. The cover art was by George Barr.

Spring 1988 coincided with the sixty-fifth anniversary of Weird Tales, and the editors knew it. At the top of the front cover is a blurb:

Sixty-Fifth Anniversary Issue!

On the back cover is some copy that begins:

65 Years of Terror!

Below that:

Weird Tales first brought you the

adventures of Conan the Barbarian and tales of

the Cthulhu Mythos.

I don't have this issue of Weird Tales, so I don't know what anniversary-related content there might be inside. But an observance of an anniversary is a nice way to begin your new-old magazine.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley