Weird Webs & Sci-Fi Lines

I have been writing about anniversaries and will keep on that track after writing a couple of articles on the side. This one is about some of my recent reading and some ideas that came up as I read. The next one is about Joy Division, Star Wars, Bob Newhart, and Volkswagens, among other things.

Last night (I write on August 25, 2024), I finished reading a book called My Name Is Asya by Kira Michailovskaya. I have the Scholastic edition, translated by Catherine A. Burland, originally published in 1968 and reprinted in 1975. The original Russian edition was published in 1964 as Perevodchissta Intourista. I started reading this book several weeks ago. In between starting it and finishing it, I read a couple of other books. I'll get to those in a second.

My Name Is Asya is not a genre story of any kind. It's actually a true-to-life story about a young woman living in Leningrad and working as an interpreter for a Soviet-era agency called Intourist. As a child, the narrator, Asya, went through the siege of Leningrad. Now she is in her early twenties and just starting out in her career. Asya lives in the same house in which she lived during the siege. (She calls it "the blockade.") Also in the house are her Aunt Musa, who has raised her after the death of her parents, and several others. Asya tells her story, about her household, her friendships, her co-workers, her relationship with her new boyfriend Yuri, and her experiences with different groups of foreigners, including some happy Finns and a difficult French visitor called Madam Brand. Her story is often meandering, seemingly unfocused. It reads like a series of diary entries. Asya is a sensitive and likable heroine, and her prose is often powerful, insightful, and poetic.

I say that Asya tells her story, but it's not a straight story and doesn't have a linear plot. There isn't even a proper ending. You would have a hard time writing a summary of it. This is in fact women's writing in which the protagonist and the reader are immersed in feelings, emotions, colors, atmospheres, and relationships. (1) In that kind of writing, there isn't necessarily any up, down, forward, or back. There are few if any lines or vectors. Instead there are webs and sometimes fogs. In telling her story, Asya mixes the present and past tenses, so some things are happening now, others have already happened, and there doesn't appear to be any distinction between the two. We think of time as moving in a straight line. Maybe sometimes it doesn't. In reading My Name Is Asya, I was reminded of Boston Adventure by Jean Stafford (1944). (2) I don't remember much about that book. I read it a long time ago. One of the reasons that I don't remember much about it is that it doesn't have much of a plot. You might say that it's another immersive kind of story. In both stories, a young woman becomes connected to a sort of matron. I don't know what, if anything, that might mean. At least Asya escapes from hers, or, more accurately, hers goes away.

There is women's writing in genre fiction as well as in straight literature. Thank God for that. What a dreary trek it would be to read only things written by men, especially men seemingly without human experience, emotion, feeling, or relationships. Science fiction is notorious for that kind of thing. Too much science fiction is or was written by scientists, engineers, technologists, and other such kinds of men, who seem to lack humanity or to have truncated emotional lives or personalities. Put another way, you might say that science fiction is men's writing and is written in lines. (3) Weird fiction, on the other hand, has color and emotion, very often extreme emotion. It's very often written in moods and with atmosphere. Lines aren't always necessary. One of the strengths of the Henry Kuttner-C.L. Moore writing team is that he was good with the mechanics of plot, while she provided color and emotion. Although we think of Kuttner as a science fiction author, he got his start as an acolyte of H.P. Lovecraft and an author of weird fiction. And although C.L. Moore wrote science fiction, she is, in my mind, more nearly a weird-fictional author. And note the phrase "the mechanics of plot." Sometimes plots can be too mechanical. Kuttner, I think, was guilty of that sometimes. I would rather have a less-strong plot, as well as good and colorful writing, as in C.L. Moore's "Shambleau" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1933).

These are imperfect ideas: that science fiction is hard and linear, that it is built upon plot, and that--most imperfect of all--it is men's writing. Likewise imperfect: weird fiction is "soft" (or pulpy, like Cthulhu), perhaps non-linear, moody, colored, atmospheric, less reliant on plot, more nearly immersive. Weird fiction in general, Weird Tales in particular, very much appealed to women. Some of the foremost authors in its pages were women. That could hardly be said of science fiction magazines of the pulp era. So why was there that appeal? Why did women write so much weird fiction? And not only so much but so much that was so good? I don't have an answer to that, but I can speculate that it is because weird fiction is atmospheric, full of color, descriptive of the emotional states of its characters, very often non-linear, not always reliant on plot, and sometimes even departing from plot for its effect. Weird fiction is immersive, even oceanic. Sometimes even time is suspended, reversed, made irrelevant. Past is present and present is past--just as in My Name Is Asya. To take this idea even further, maybe to the point of breaking, we might say that weird fiction is sometimes uterine. (4) Better yet, we might say that it is sometimes wombed, from the Gothic--significantly from the Gothic.

Asya still lives in the womb of her childhood, her childhood home. Her story is based in that house and begins and ends there. There is little movement along the way. Although she sometimes travels in lines--with her boyfriend, she takes a train to the south of Russia--she doesn't really travel at all. (Travelers come to her.) Her life is oceanic. She lives in a web, not one made of lines, like those radiating from a railroad or airline hub, but a web in which the strands are inseparable from each other. There isn't really a plot in her story. Unlike her boyfriend Yuri, she isn't going in any particular direction. And she writes of the atmosphere in her city, which she loves, the rain and the white nights and the sun and rain and mist on the river Neva.

Houses figure pretty prominently in weird fiction and its forerunner and associate, the gothic romance. Just think of the cover of every gothic romance from the 1960s and '70s for an image of that house. There are houses in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "William Wilson," both by Edgar Allan Poe. Contrast these almost housebound stories with a science fiction story that moves, like The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, not only moves but moves in lines, whether broken or unbroken by its hero's jaunting. Raiders of the Lost Ark has its weird-fictional elements, but it's strong on plot and moves at breakneck pace along straight lines. You can write a coherent plot summary of it for your book report--if it were a book. Good luck with that if you have chosen My Name Is Asya or Boston Adventure.

So in between starting and finishing My Name Is Asya, I read Up in the Air by Walter Kirn (2001) and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 by John Godey (Morton Freedgood) (1973). Both authors are of course men. Both stories are linear, literally so in that Mr. Kirn's book is--on the surface, no pun or irony intended--about flying on airlines, while Godey's book is set mostly in a subway train, which runs, of course, on a line and in a line. There is even a map at the beginning of the book that shows the line on which the Pelham train runs. This line is tipped with an arrow, and so takes the form of a vector. The equivalent in Walter Kirn's book is the narrator's itinerary, which is also linear, through time more than through space. One thing necessarily happens after another, although there is more to the story than that. Both stories also depend upon conveyances, that is, upon hard machines, also upon hard-technological processes. If Up in the Air had been written in 1960 about air travel in 2001, it would have been a science fiction story. That's how much technology plays a part in the story, as well as in our lives. In contrast, in her story, Kira Michailovskaya writes of webs of feeling and relationships. Her heroine Asya's trade is language and words. (To tell your name--"My name is Asya"--is one of the first exercises in a foreign language class.) We're not sure of when exactly the story takes place except that Asya remembers the blockade. In proximate terms, My Name Is Asya takes place in a never-never-land of time and a bound city. The blockade may have been lifted, but Asya essentially stays put.

It's not so simple as all of this, however, at least as far as Up in the Air goes. There are feelings and emotional and psychological states and relationships in that story. And if I'm not giving too much away, there is at the end a return homeward. Asya's story is about home and family, friendships and relationships. Again, it's based in the home and begins and ends at home. Up in the Air is based out of airports, hotels, restaurants, and casinos--one after another, in a line, by an itinerary. An airport hub and its radiating lines and connecting flights might look like a web, but you can travel only on one line at a time. But even while he's traveling, the narrator Ryan is thinking of home, family, and relationships, all of the best and most meaningful of which are with women. Asya's deepest and most lasting relationships are mostly with women, too. The building at the airport is called a terminal. It's the end of the line. In Up in the Air, there is an ending. In My Name Is Asya, there really isn't one. The narrator ends her account not long after breaking up with Yuri. You have a feeling at the end that her tomorrow will be like her today, and her many yesterdays.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is more plot-driven and less interested in home or relationships. Again, it's based mostly in a subway train, also in various buildings that are not home. These milieux are mostly masculine, and the only notable women characters are related to home and relationships: the mayor's wife in their home; the radical girlfriend in the apartment that she opens up to her hippy-cop boyfriend; and the prostitute who, though her relationships are commodified, is still hoping to make it to her wealthy john's ménage in time to earn her day's pay. In her story, Asya's boyfriend is the radical ideologue. In Godey's story, it is the woman who plays that role. By the way, Asya's boyfriend is an engineer: he lacks human feeling and an ability to love. In a pulp-era science fiction story, he would be the hero and maybe even the author of the story. That's unfortunate. It would be nice to have had more humanity in the early days of science fiction. A second by-the-way: there is of course a plot in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, but the plot outside the story involves a plot from the inside carried out by the four hostage-takers. So, a double plot. One definition of plot here is meta, the other not. Like Ryan in Up in the Air, the hijackers have an itinerary: things have to go exactly as planned and by a set time schedule if they are to succeed. (5) Even the numbers of the title are in sequence. Maybe the four were hoping their hijacking of a subway train would be as simple as 1 2 3. As for the men, the leader is a man with no real feelings, or none that he cares to examine. Their plot breaks down when their relationships break down and emotion intrudes.

Asya travels on a train, too. She does that first with some Finnish tourists, then with her boyfriend. In other words, she leaves the womb or web of her home to travel on a line. But it is for the sake of developing her relationship with Yuri that she goes to the south of Russia. Unfortunately, it doesn't turn out well, as we know by the end it could not have done, for Yuri doesn't care about people. He doesn't see people as individuals, only as a faceless mass or a collective. Asya really doesn't mean anything to him, and he, like so many men, is of course a fool. And like every Marxist, socialist, materialist, or progressive in human history, he is also a fool.

As I have thought about lines versus webs, or of plot versus mood, color, and atmosphere, I have remembered a conversation I had with a friend who is a comic book artist. He knew Bernie Wrightson and has a similar approach in his work. Contrast the late Mr. Wrightson with Alex Toth, who distilled his drawings to essences, using few lines to show what he meant to show. Neither approach is better than the other. Both can be good. If mood is an element of storytelling, then Bernie Wrightson told stories, through mood, by drawing myriads of lines. And if conciseness and the movement forward of a plot are also elements of storytelling, then the use of a minimum number lines--line as essence--is simply a different way. These are not perfect parallels, but if there is a weird-fictional style in comic book art, Bernie Wrightson was, I think, one of its supreme practitioners. Alex Toth, on the other hand, worked a lot in animation, a more technology-dependent field (and one that forced him, I'm sure, to reduce the number of lines he drew), more specifically on science-fictional titles such as Space Ghost, The Herculoids, and Super Friends. Again, not perfect, but: in Bernie Wrightson's art, lines are maximized and used to create mood, while in Alex Toth's art, lines are minimized and used for delineation and to advance the plot, or for the sake of storytelling and continuity.

My Name Is Asya was published in the Soviet Union, of course during an era of communist and totalitarian domination of people's lives. I'm surprised that it made it to print, even if its suggestions of anti-communist--in other words human--sentiments are muted. But then it was written by a woman, and women can sometimes do things that men are not permitted to do. I have some quotes and insights from the book:

• Asya's boyfriend Yuri is working on an engineering concept, prefabricated boxes for building homes. His interest is not in the people but in the problem. In any case, he figuratively wants to put people into boxes, like mass-produced commodities into mass-market packaging. (Is Madam Brand called brand as a poke at westerners?) Asya has her career activities, too, but Yuri doesn't care about any of that. He doesn't see any importance in what she does. "The boxes are progressing," Asya writes, "slowly but always forward." We recognize that call--"Forward!"--as the cry of the radical, the socialist, and the progressive, whether he be a Nazi, a Bolshevik, or a twenty-first century Democrat in America. (p. 111)

• Aunt Musa warns Asya against Yuri:

     "You keep harping on the same subject: Yuri says and Yuri says. I don't like that Yuri of yours. I am afraid of him."

     "Why is that?"

     "He looks like a lynx. His eyes are shifty."

     I laugh.

     "Go ahead, laugh. Only, be careful with your Yuri."

     "What do you mean by 'careful'? Why?'

     "I did not want to talk to you about it, I felt that you would figure it out for yourself. Now that I have begun I'll tell you. I think that nothing is sacred to him."

      "Of course, he doesn't believe in God."

     "I am not speaking of God. What I mean is, there is no kindness in him, no soul. And if there is no soul, there is nothing sacred."

     "Sacred, soul--these are all strange concepts, Aunt Musa. Something that doesn't exist. In any case they are not material things. And Yuri is a man of the future, a rationalist. All our future life will be built on reason. What is reasonable cannot be bad. In the future, all these concepts--sacred, soul--will die and never return. There will only be the 'reasonable' and the 'unreasonable'." [. . .] (pp. 136-137) 

(I wrote that My Name Is Asya is not a genre work, but in talking about the future--the future of human society--Asya in reference to Yuri has broached the exact subject matter of science fiction. Yuri is a materialist, a rationalist, in other words, one type of science-fictional or pseudo-scientific hero. [I'm looking at you, Karl Marx.] That makes him also one type of weird-fictional villain or antagonist, as we have seen. Very often, the hard-nosed materialist or science-minded person is also a psychopath. Although he isn't obviously a psychopath, Yuri is essentially lacking in a soul and he doesn't have any soul-to-soul connection with Asya. Asya in love doesn't see any of this and repeats Yuri's convictions. Older, wiser Aunt Musa does see it, though. Before the end of the book, Asya will see it, too.)

• How often have we read in weird fiction that "no words can describe the thing that I saw" or something to that effect. It's a kind of writerly laziness. Just try, Mr. Author. Please just try. In My Name Is Asya, the author deftly handled this problem. Weird-fiction authors take note as Asya first encounters Madam Brand: 

     I shall not attempt to describe the woman, although there are words in our dictionary especially created for such women: "enchanting," "captivating," "magic" and so on. If one should select the strongest words and arrange them in harmonious order, give them pure sound, then someone resembling her might result. (p. 170)

• Asya talks to her friend Valya who is upset. Asya assumes that she is in love. Valya goes on a rant in response:

      "How do you know that? How do all of you know it all? What makes you all so clever? You are not people, you are computers--know all, and have an answer for everything. But life is not a formula and there are things that don't fit with your ideas. Things which don't even have a name in your language. You imagine and you know everything and that you have names and prescriptions already prepared for every occasion." (p. 194)

(I have commented a lot on this blog, but I wonder if others have, too, on the very strong and obvious connections among socialism and progressivism, scientism, and science fiction which are--with the frequent exception of science fiction--inhuman or anti-human. Aunt Musa sees it, so does Valya, though neither sees it in regards to science fiction, even if Marxism is a pseudo-scientific idea, in other words, a kind of science-fictional idea.)

• Unlike Ryan in Up in the Air, Asya doesn't fly in planes. She comes to a parting of ways with Yuri. "I feel rotten because we are different people," she writes. "I am a pedestrian and Yuri travels in planes." (p. 247) Asya realizes that her diploma is not rubbish and that Yuri's boxes are not important to her life. And so they part. (pp.246-247)

• Finally, Asya begins to move past Yuri. She paraphrases his thoughts: "I myself reject this drivel about individual people. There are no individuals, there is only the nation and the well-being and progress of the nation." She continues:

     We all live under the same sun, but Yuri seems to have turned to the sun only one side of himself. The other has dried up, ceased to exist--the side which makes people, people. We are not threatened with the danger of being turned into animals, but we are threatened with the danger of being turned into machines. (pp. 260-261)

Those words were written six decades ago. They were prescient, just as true then as now. Transforming ourselves or allowing ourselves to be transformed into machines is a science-fictional concept, but it exists in science fiction only because it exists in real life. What we should want instead is to be human, like Asya and her family and friends. Human is infinitely better than machine, soul infinitely better than material, love infinitely better than process, family and friendship infinitely better than mass-living and collectivism. We're in a battle this year in America--as in every year the world over--and the lines are sharply drawn. (One case out of many where sharp and clear lines are better than fogs, mists, webs, and obscurities.) Let's be like Asya and choose human-soul-love-family-friendship over the alternatives.

Notes

(1) As a Scholastic book, it was meant for girls. And here is a difference between then and now: My Name Is Asya is not a children's novel, and yet it was packaged and sold to children with the expectation that they were up to the task of reading, understanding, and appreciating it.

(2) Jean Stafford was the daughter of a Western pulp writer named John Richard Stafford (1874-1966), aka Jack Wonder. He may have been the same man who wrote as J.R. Stafford. See The FictionMags Index for these names and their credits.

(3) I don't like the term "sci-fi," but I have used it in my title for the sake of assonance.

(4) Uterine is an inartful word to be sure, weakened in our language and for our purposes by its Latinate origin and its association with medicine. In the original, uterus also refers to "matrix," and that meaning works much better here, a matrix being something like a web.

(5) Up in the Air by Walter Kirn was published in 2001, but it must have been during the first three-quarters of the year, and I'll tell you why. Strangely, the dates of Ryan M. Bingham's itinerary, laid out in the front of the book, are inclusive of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. If the story had taken place that year, Ryan would never have reached his goal of one million frequent flier miles, and he would have been stuck in an airport somewhere in the West as his career came to an end. By the way, Walter Kirn is sometimes on TV. It's nice to see a novelist on television. It reminds me of the days when novelists, historians, philosophers, artists, and others were on TV pretty often and the United States was still a cultured country.

A final note: This is nothing against John Godey's book, but there isn't any reason to read it if you can see the movie version from 1974.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Unique Magazine

Weird Tales began in March 1923 as "The Unique Magazine," and for ten years it kept that subtitle. The last issue labeled as "The Unique Magazine" came out in March 1933.

The second issue of Weird Tales, from April 1923, had a red border around the cover illustration. The border turned white, then black, in subsequent issues. By January 1924, the border was gone.

The red border came back in August 1925. There was one blue border and four black borders after that. Otherwise, borders remained red until the February/March or April/May issue of 1931, depending on how you look at it. After that, the main title logo was enclosed in a red box at the top of the cover design, this until May 1933.

So at the ten-year mark, the subtitle "The Unique Magazine" and the red border or box on the cover disappeared. Also in May 1933, a new main title logo, designed by J. Allen St. John, made its debut. It is that logo that we now associate with Weird Tales in all of its forms. After May 1933, the cover designs for the magazine were simpler and cleaner. They had a more modern look instead of an older, Victorian or prewar appearance.

There were two exceptions to all of this. As we have seen, the May issues were the place where Weird Tales usually celebrated its anniversaries. I have found two throwback covers. Both came out during the anniversary month of May. The first was in May 1936. That one had the old subtitle, "The Unique Magazine," and a red border. The second was in May 1937. That one was subtitled "The Unique Magazine," but there wasn't any border at all.

Irving Glassman's letter in the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales appears to have been the last time there was mention of an anniversary during the first run of the magazine, 1923-1954. In September 1953, Weird Tales switched from the old pulp format to being digest-sized. It must have seemed to readers that their favorite magazine was on its last leg. Again and again, it had been reduced, first in the number of pages in each issue, then in the number of issues per year, finally in its dimensions. In September 1954, it disappeared altogether. The last two covers were by Virgil Finlay. Both were reprints. (The last original cover was W.H. Silvey's cover of May 1954.) However, the word "unique" returned for one last showing. On the cover of the last issue of the magazine, September 1954, is a blurb: "Unique Fiction."

Weird Tales, the last issue, September 1954, with cover art by Virgil Finlay. This image had originally appeared on the cover of the August issue of 1939. It has the same basic color scheme--orange and black--as the first issue of the magazine, published exactly thirty-one and a half years before, in March 1923.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Thirtieth Anniversary

In its March issue of 1953, Weird Tales magazine printed a letter from Irving Glassman of Brooklyn, New York, in observance of the thirtieth anniversary of the magazine. Glassman had one other letter in Weird Tales. That one was printed in the May 1952 issue and reprinted in H.P. Lovecraft in "The Eyrie", edited by S.T. Joshi and Marc A. Michaud (1979). Glassman referred to H.P. Lovecraft in his first letter and made an oblique reference to Lovecraft in his second:

The Editor, WEIRD TALES

9 Rockefeller Plaza, New York 20, N. Y.

My calendar informs me that with the next issue WEIRD TALES celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. I would like to be among those who offer their congratulations to the most long-lived of all imaginative magazines.

I, myself, am too young to have read those early issues of The Unique Magazine but I have read many of those stories in later editions of WT as well as in the Arkham House books. I have in my library a copy of The Moon Terror which, I believe, was the first anthology of stories taken exclusively from your magazine. The Moon Terror is something of a rara avis today and I'm quite proud to own that book.

It would be fitting on this occasion to present a list of what I consider to be the ten best stories to have appeared in WT but such a task, I find, is impossible. At least 50 outstanding phantasies come to mind and there are more than that number which are equally good but which have, for the moment, escaped my memory. For every poorly-written tale that is printed in WT (and that only proves that the editor is human, after all) there are at least a dozen readable ones and of that dozen you will find that about half of them are potential classics. This is not merely my opinion; it is shared by all the readers of your Unique Magazine. Please keep up the good work.

Every best wish to you.

Yours by the Doom that came to Sarnath,

Irving Glassman, Brooklyn, N. Y.

There weren't very many Irving Glassmans in public records. Unfortunately, I can't say for sure who he was.

Weird Tales, March 1953, with a cover story "Slime," by Joseph Payne Brennan and cover art by Virgil Finlay. This is one of my favorite covers by Finlay for "The Unique Magazine." I think it's also one of his best. "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud was the cover story for the first issue of Weird Tales in March 1923. "Slime" has some similarities to "Ooze." As I wrote recently, it also has some similarities to "It" by Theodore Sturgeon.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary-Part Three

Seabury Quinn had the second essay in "The Eyrie" in March 1948. His is quite a bit longer than August Derleth's. His, too, includes a list, but Quinn's is longer, and I sense a kindlier inclusivity in it. He even used the word inclusion in his essay, albeit in a different context. Quinn's essay is in the same spirit, I think, as early observances of anniversaries in Weird Tales. That's fitting, I think. And I think his essay is better than that written by Derleth, who preceded him.

Weird Tales, A Retrospect--Quinn

The vast majority of people will tell you, "I don’t like ghost stories," meaning, thereby, "I am afraid of them." A relatively small minority of cultured and imaginative readers either find a sort of masochistic thrill in having the daylights scared out of them or, completely agnostic, still get a lift from reading stories of "ghoulies and ghosties, long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night." It is for this select, sophisticated minority WEIRD TALES is published, and that it has fulfilled its purpose is more than merely adequately proved by the fact that it celebrates its Silver Anniversary this issue.

Until the advent of WEIRD TALES the longest-lived magazine dedicated to the supernatural story was the Black Cat which first saw the light of print October, 1895, and perished in September, 1906, after eleven years of superservice to discerning readers on both sides of the Atlantic. True, it had a temporary recrudescence between December, 1919, and October, 1920, but in that little interval it functioned only as a zombie, without life or spirit.

The publication of WEIRD TALES filled a real want. Thrill-seekers, votaries of the ghost story, people fed up with the boy-meets-girl formula or the adventures of impossible detectives flocked to it as the thirsty flocked to wet-goods emporia at the recision of the Volstead Act, and writers who had turned out one or more good stories of the supernatural and found no market for them sent in their cherished brain-children with a sigh of profound thankfulness.

The list of names which has appeared on WEIRD TALES contents pages reads like a roster of those already great or destined to greatness in this particular genre: H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, E. Hoffman Price, Frank Belknap Long, H.G. Wells, Sax Rohmer, Major George Fielding Elliot, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Carl Jacobi, A.V. Harding, Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Frank Owen, Clark Ashton Smith, Manly Wade Wellman, Henry E. Whitehead [sic], Earl Pierce [sic], Greye LaSpina, Edmund Hamilton [sic], David H. Keller, Malcolm Jameson, Nictzin Dyalhys [sic], Otis Adelbert Kline--this is but a sampling of the galaxy made at random and from memory, to count them all would be like numbering the Milky Way.

One thing, however, WEIRD TALES writers have in common: ability to tell good stories well. It has been said that "WEIRD TALES prints slick-paper fiction wrapped in pulp." However false or true that estimate may be it is an undisputed fact that more WEIRD TALES writers are "tapped” for inclusion in anthologies than those of any other pulp magazine, that many of its regular contributors are also "names" in the slick-paper field, and that a high percentage of them have had one or more successful books published.

In its quarter-century of publication WEIRD TALES has had many imitators, but no real competitors. Some of these degenerated--or evolved, if you prefer that term --into straight science-fiction magazines, some were so patently sex-motivated that the Post Office and/or the censors took them in hand, some misjudged their market and used shock--shock--shock! as their formula and paid small heed to literary composition. All of them are gone, and of a dozen imitative magazines put out ten years ago not one can be found on the newsstands today. WEIRD TALES enters on its second quarter-century as truly the unique magazine as it was when No. 1 of Volume I was offered to a critical public.

SEABURY QUINN.

(Boldface added.)

Seabury Quinn speaks before the Free Lance Writers Association in Washington, D.C., from an article in The Sunday Star Pictorial Magazine, July 27, 1947, page 15. There are men in the group, but I see the women, who remind me of Helen Hokinson's clubwomen. Could there be another teller of weird tales in this photograph? Photograph by Paul Schmick.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary-Part Two

August Derleth wrote the first essay to appear in "The Eyrie" in March 1948. Half of it is a catalogue of names and titles. I'll have more on that in a minute. First, Derleth's essay: 

25th Anniversary Issue --
August Derleth

FOR a quarter of a century WEIRD TALES has given those who delight in the fantastic and macabre the best in the genre, and it has remained the most consistently satisfying outlet of its kind. For all these years authors and readers have looked to this unique magazine as something very special, and, despite a welter of imitators, something very special it has remained. A magazine which has brought to the attention of its public the work of such authors as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, Ray Bradbury, and many another fine writer has justified many times over its sterling reason for being and has earned its right to exist. When I began to read WEIRD TALES with the very first issue, I was thirteen, and I had to work at mowing lawns, chopping wood, and the like to earn the quarter that would buy the magazine. Few purchases have ever given me such lasting satisfaction.

It seems incredible that a quarter of a century has passed, and now, when I look back over those rich years of WEIRD TALES, I can experience again the wonderful delight of discovery and the deep reading satisfaction I knew in such stories as Lovecraft's The Rats in the Walls, The Dunwich Horror, The Music of Erich Zann, The Outsider, and others, [Seabury] Quinn's The Phantom Farmhouse, [H.F.] Arnold's The Night Wire, [Clark Ashton] Smith's A Rendezvous in Averoigne, [Henry S.] Whitehead's Passing of a God, [Arthur J.] Burks' The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee, [Robert E.] Howard's The Black Stone, [C.L.] Moore's Shambleau, [Mary Elizabeth] Counselman's The Three Marked Pennies, [Nictzin] Dyalhis' When the Green Star Waned, [Donald] Wandrei's The Red Brain, [H. Warner] Munn's The Werewolf of Ponkert, [Ray] Bradbury's The Lake, [J. Paul] Suter's Beyond the Door, [Frank] Owen's The Wind That Tramps the World, [Frank Belknap] Long's The Hounds of Tindalos, [Greye] La Spina's Invaders from the Dark, [E. Hoffman] Price's Stranger from Kurdistan, [Carl] Jacobi's Revelations in Black, [A.] Merritt's The Woman of the Wood, [Edmond] Hamilton's Monster-God of Mamurth, [Wilfred Branch] Talman's Two Black Bottles, [Everil] Worrell's The Canal, [John Martin] Leahy's In Amundsen's Tent, [Robert] Bloch's Enoch, and countless other stories space does not permit mentioning.

These first twenty-five years have given us a rich heritage in the strange and wonderful; I have every confidence that the next twenty-five will add increasing stature to WEIRD TALES. 

AUGUST DERLETH.

(Boldface added.)

Alas, Weird Tales had just six and a half years left in its original run. The second twenty-five-year mark would be observed in a second run of just four issues in 1973-1974.

The first name Derleth mentioned in his essay is that of his literary god, H.P. Lovecraft. He couldn't have done anything less. Despite the fact that Quinn and Derleth had more stories in Weird Tales, it is Lovecraft's name that is most closely identified with the magazine. By the way, today, August 20, 2024, would have been Lovecraft's 134th birthday, had he lived as long as some of his characters.

Derleth's second paragraph is mostly just a list. Lists are fine. We all make them. But they're not writing. At best, a list is just filler. At their worst, lists are name-dropping. In his essay "Moving Past Lovecraft," from 2012, author and editor Jeff VanderMeer dropped a lot of names that, truth be told, are not very well known. I guess the rest of us are benighted in comparison because we have different names on our lists, names not to his liking. In the 100th-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, from 2023, the current editor of the magazine, Jonathan Maberry, also dropped names in his essay "Cosmic Horror and Weird Tales Go Hand-in-Tentacle." I sense that to be filler. In any case, lists are, again, not writing. Beyond that, we all have access to names and titles and now even to whole stories in Weird Tales. We can all read them and make lists of our own. Ironically, Mr. VanderMeer's call for us to move past Lovecraft appears to have gone unheeded, as the centennial issue of Weird Tales is subtitled "Cosmic Horror Issue." (According to Wikipedia, "cosmic horror" is a term synonymous with "Lovecraftian horror." Jeff VanderMeer even used the term "cosmic horror" in his essay.) Lovecraft's name is mentioned second in Mr. Maberry's essay, second only to that of Robert W. Chambers. Too bad, Mr. VanderMeer. You tried.

I don't know what, if anything, it meant if you were not included in August Derleth's list from 1948. Maybe he liked you just fine, he just wasn't permitted the space to include you. On the other hand, maybe you were like C. Hall Thompson, who may have been on a completely different kind of list created by Derleth, and whose last story for Weird Tales appeared in the May issue of 1948, just two months after the anniversary issue.

To be concluded . . .

August Derleth, from the Green Bay Press-Gazette, March 31, 1963, page 13.

Revised on the morning of publication.
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary-Part One

In January 1940, Weird Tales began as a bimonthly rather than monthly magazine. There were no more April issues, but March and May remained. So in March 1948, Weird Tales celebrated twenty-five years in print with a commemorative cover by Lee Brown Coye and messages inside from the editor, presumably Dorothy McIlwraith, and its two leading contributors, at least in terms of the number of pieces each had published in the magazine. These were August Derleth and Seabury Quinn.

The introduction, from "The Eyrie," March 1948:

Weird Tales, 25 Years

ON this occasion of WEIRD TALES' twenty-fifth birthday, we'd like to share with you the kind comments of Seabury Quinn and August Derleth, especially sent to us for this anniversary. These two have known and contributed to WEIRD from its earliest days; their many superb stories and always-helpful suggestions through the years have contributed in no small way to the magazine’s success. And when we thank them we mean to thank, too, all the other fine contributors and friends who have helped us do the job that is your WEIRD TALES.

To be continued . . . 

Weird Tales, the 25th-anniversary issue, March 1948, with cover art by Lee Brown Coye. The names on the cover were some of the magazine's heavy hitters.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Sixteenth Anniversary

The May 1939 installment of "The Eyrie" began with these words:

For sixteen years WEIRD TALES has consistently endeavored to give its readers stories that are different from any to be found elsewhere. In addition to the best weird and fantastic stories obtainable, we have sought out and printed other highly imaginative tales, so plausibly told that they seem entirely possible and convincing. That we have succeeded in our purpose of presenting utterly different literary fare is attested by the multitudinous flood of enthusiastic letters from you, the readers, throughout the years this magazine has been published. Such a different story is The Hollow Moon in this issue, the story of a lunar vampire, written by an author [Everil Worrell] whose previous vampire story, The Canal, was acclaimed by no less an authority than the late H. P. Lovecraft himself as one of the greatest vampire tales ever written. The next few months will be particularly rich in such highly original and utterly different tales, notable among them being Giants of the Sky by Frank Belknap Long, Jr., an unusual tale of vast beings in a super-cosmos who made our earth the object of an experiment; King of the World's Edge by H. Warner Munn, an intriguing weird novel of America in King Arthur's Time, with Merlin as one of its principal characters; and Spawn by P. Schuyler Miller, as powerful and strange a tale as it has ever been our good fortune to present to you, our readers.

(Boldface added.) 

Weird Tales, May 1939, with a cover story, "The Hollow Moon," by Everil Worrell and cover art by Harold S. De Lay. Throughout most of 1939, each issue of Weird Tales contained 164 pages. I believe that was as close as it ever came to the very long issues of 1923-1924.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Fifteenth Anniversary

Weird Tales magazine turned fifteen years old in March 1938. In the anniversary installment of "The Eyrie," from May 1938, the editor allowed readers to speak on the occasion:

Fifteenth Anniversary

Richard H. Jamison writes from Valley Park, Missouri: "Congrats on WEIRD's fifteenth anniversary! You really started something with that March 1923 issue, for with that issue the first (and best) of the fantastics was born. There's been a world of improvement in the lusty youngster since he first saw the light of day fifteen years ago.

The first issue had rough edges, no interior illustrations, and many of the stories were pure and simple detective stories. But now we have smooth edges, the best illustrated magazine on the market, and the stories are uniformly good weird tales with quite a number of little masterpieces among them. I noticed a letter in the Eyrie in which the writer asked who had written the most stories for WT. Seabury Quinn has that distinction, having contributed no less than ninety-two stories since his first appeared in October 1923. He has also had two stories reprinted. His closest competitor is August Derleth with sixty-nine stories, no reprints."

The author of that letter would appear to have been an early cataloguer of Weird Tales, its contents, and the authors who wrote for the magazine. Good for him. Seabury Quinn would remain the all-time champion with 145 stories and fourteen articles published in Weird Tales in its original run. And August Derleth would remain in second place. As for Richard H. Jamison, he was presumably the same man who wrote letters to "The Eyrie" as Richard F. Jamison. If that's the case, then he would also have landed on a list of "Who Wrote the Most . . .?", for Jamison had eleven letters in "The Eyrie" from January 1937 to March 1940, and that would have tied him with six others for eighteenth place on the list.

Letters to "The Eyrie," May 1938, continued:

Back in 1923

Arthur Lincoln Brown writes from Dallas: "For a number of years now I have been reluctant to write you this letter, but today it rived its fetters and escaped to you. Back in 1923, when your magazine first made its appearance on the news stands, it was primarily a magazine daring to open the way to the inexhaustible field of weird fiction. I have watched it grow, expand, and improve until now it has reached the acme of weird fiction. In my estimation, it is today at the pinnacle of success. WEIRD TALES is a piece of literary art founded on the genius of its authors--on the co-operation of its readers--on the receptiveness the editor holds for each new suggestion of improvement. Readers of fiction sometimes are fortunate to discover WEIRD TALES early; others must advance, explore and read their way through numerous cheap and pulpy magazines that litter the news stands before they discover WEIRD TALES. By this I mean that some of us have had to graduate to it before we became satisfied; but once we have perused our first copy we are enmeshed within its realm of weird narratives. It has finally reached the summit of weird fiction, and may we keep it always superb in its unequaled uniqueness."

(Boldface added in both letters.)

Unfortunately, I can't say for sure who Richard H. Jamison and Arthur Lincoln Brown were. But at least we have their thoughts from nearly ninety years ago.

Weird Tales, May 1938, with a cover story, "Goetterdaemmerung," by Seabury Quinn and cover art by Margaret Brundage. Note the blurb at the top: "16th Year of Publication." That same blurb appeared on every cover during 1938 from March through December.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Eighth Anniversary

In "The Eyrie" for April/May 1931, the editor wrote:

WEIRD TALES will continue the policy on which its brilliant success has been built since it was first published eight years ago. That is, we will print the best weird fiction in contemporary literature, stories that Edgar Allan Poe and FitzJames O'Brien would delight to read if they were alive today. Both these writers would undoubtedly have been writing for WEIRD TALES if the magazine had been published in their time. In addition to the weird tale proper, we will offer you marvelous weird-scientific tales that forecast the science of the future; tales of other planets, and wars between the worlds; tales of eery surgery; tales of megalomaniacs whose brilliant scientific achievements menace the world with destruction; tales of tremendous dooms sweeping upon our world from the depths of stellar space; tales of the interstellar patrol; astronomical tales that bring to you the most daring prognostications of stellar science.

The bulk of our stories, however, will be tales of utter weirdness, for it is upon these that the splendid reputation of the magazine has been built. Such tales, for instance, as the stories of cosmic horror penned by H. P. Lovecraft, to mention one of the most popular writers in this magazine; the eery adventures of Jules de Grandin, as told in Seabury Quinn's inimitable style; shuddery werewolf stories (you all remember The Werewolf of Ponkert, by H. Warner Munn, do you not?); tales of the unnatural and abnormal; fantastic and bizarre stories such as Frank Owen's unforgettable tale, The Wind That Tramps the World; tales, of vampires and witches; thrilling stories of devil-worship, of which E. Hoffmann Price is a master narrator; occasional ghost stories; tales of strange monsters, such as the ever-to-be-remembered story by Frank Belknap Long, Jr., entitled The Space-Eaters; thrill-tales of mystery and terror; tales of stark horror, but nothing sickening or disgusting.

We could dwell at length on some of the great stories we have published in the past; but we think it better to continue publishing the finest weird fiction in the world today, rather than harp on the past glories of the magazine.

(Boldface added.)

The 1930s had begun, and science fiction magazines were proliferating. I like that Weird Tales gave some space to what the editor called "weird-scientific" stories. Weird science, weird science fiction, or science-fantasy is its own sub-sub-genre, I think. Where else would you put "Shambleau" by C.L. Moore? Many readers liked stories of this type. Some did not. But another one of the things I like about Weird Tales is that it listened to and allowed its readers to speak.

Lovecraft, Owen, and Price received repeat mention after the editorial of two years before, but Frank Owen's story "The Wind That Tramps the World" was the only one mentioned by name in both the sixth- and eighth-anniversary editorials.

Weird Tales, April/May or just May 1931, with a cover story, "The Dust of Death" by Hugh Jeffries and cover art by C.C. Senf in a somewhat different mode from his earlier covers. Note the clever vertical lettering in imitation of the Chinese.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Sixth Anniversary

I didn't find anything on the five-year anniversary of Weird Tales, but here are the beginning paragraphs of the May 1929 installment of "The Eyrie":

IT IS now more than six years since the first copy of WEIRD TALES appeared on the news stands. The magazine was created to fill a very real demand for something radically different, something that would let the fancy escape from the humdrum, everyday life of the world; a magazine whose stories should plumb the depths of occult horror, as Lovecraft has done in so many of his tales; a magazine that should not shrink from the terrible mysteries of madness and wild imagination, but should deal boldly with what Clark Ashton Smith in one of his memorable sonnets calls life's

"dark, malign and monstrous music, spun
In hell, from some delirious Satan's dream."

Here at last was to be a magazine whose readers could not begin a story with the bland assurance that the hero would triumph in the final paragraphs, and all turn out sweetly in the time-honored stereotyped manner, and the heroine be surely rescued.

The magazine, we believe, has lived up to the aims of the founders, and has provided a feast of imaginative literature that has entrenched it thoroughly in the affections of its readers, and assured its continued success as long as we continue to play fair with you by printing superb weird tales such as we have given you in the past--stories that reach out into the depths of space and picture such beings as Donald Wandrei describes in The Red Brain; stories of such cataclysmic horror as H. P. Lovecraft depicts in The Rats in the Walls; stories that sound the abysses of physical suffering as H. Warner Munn does in The Chain; fantastic tales surcharged with beauty and sweetness and light, such as The Wind That Tramps the World, by Frank Owen; epochal masterpieces such as E. Hoffmann Price's sublime little tale of devil-worship, The Stranger From Kurdistan, with its audacious close; superb imaginative master-works of literary craft such as A. Merritt's tale of the revolt of the forest, The Woman of the Wood. It is our aim to continue to give you such marvelous weird tales as these; for it is on these stories, and others like them, that the brilliant success of WEIRD TALES has been built.

(Boldface added.)

These paragraphs are more specific than those of the fourth-anniversary editorial of May 1927. They also seem to me more boosterish. If this had been published in 2024, I might think it was written by artificial intelligence. (The truly human is authentic. AI is inauthentic, and what it writes evokes feelings that are the verbal equivalent of the visual uncanny valley. In other words, AI is creepy. People who write like AI are inauthentic. Their writing, too, evokes uncanny feelings.)

By the way, "The Woman of the Wood," by A. Merritt, was voted by readers the most popular story published in Weird Tales between 1924 and 1940. With an initial "A" and a last name that is a homophone for "merit," I guess Merritt was destined for excellence.

Weird Tales, May 1929, with a cover story, "The Scourge of B'Moth," by Bertram Russell and cover art by C.C. Senf.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Fourth Anniversary

If you're on the hunt for observances of anniversaries in Weird Tales, the place to look is in "The Eyrie," the regular letters column and the place in print where the editor communicated with readers, as well as with authors, who were frequent writers to the magazine. If you look only in the March issues, you might miss something. A better place might be in the May issues of every year, for it was in the May issue that readers had their first chance to comment on the issue from two months before. The editor could then join in and make his own comments.

I have looked in Weird Tales in the March and May issues of 1925 and 1926 and haven't found any mention of anniversaries. "The Eyrie" in the May 1927 issue opens with these words, though: "WEIRD TALES is now four years old." The editorial continues:

When it first appeared on the news stands, many thought it was "just another magazine," but it was soon discovered that WEIRD TALES was a "different" magazine, with a wholesome disregard for the self-imposed editorial limitations of other publications. The fantastic monsters of ancient legend stalked through its pages; werewolves lived again; ghosts and apparitions took on modem trappings; specters wailed in haunted houses; and scientists performed weird experiments in their laboratories. Magazine pages were again opened to the rich literature of the bizarre and fantastic, and with the return of weird fiction to the news stands came the new literature, of which WEIRD TALES is the foremost exponent--the weird-scientific story. The forward leap that science has taken in the last fifty years has stimulated the imaginations of authors, and in the pages of WEIRD TALES the future of the world is rolled back, the void of Space is peopled with flying ships, which can go backward and forward in Time as well as Space; mad scientists strive to destroy the world; tremendous dooms rush in upon the Earth from the sky.

The amazing success of WEIRD TALES has been built upon three types of stories--the weird tale proper; the bizarre and fantastic story; and the weird-scientific story. That these types of stories, which take one away from the humdrum environment of everyday life, are appreciated by the reading public is shown by the steady growth of WEIRD TALES. We shall continue to give you the kind of stories we have given you in the past. And if you like these stories, if you want to aid in building up an even greater success for your magazine, you can do so by calling the attention of your friends to the feast of imaginative reading it contains and letting them share the good things therein.

That's a pretty nice summary of the previous four years in Weird Tales. I read it as almost a progress report, or as a continuation of "Why Weird Tales?" from the first-anniversary number of May/June/July 1924. I think we have to assume that Farnsworth Wright was the author of that anonymous editorial. H.P. Lovecraft gets a lot of well-deserved credit as a theorist of weird fiction, but Wright might be right up there with him. And now we're off in search of anniversaries.

Weird Tales, May 1927, the fourth-anniversary issue, with a cover story, "The Master of Doom" by Donald Edward Keyhoe, later a flying saucer enthusiast, and cover art by C.C. Senf.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Two Uncle Stories

I have read two Uncle stories in the past week. (I write on July 29, 2024.) First was "Green Magic" by Jack Vance, originally in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in June 1963. It contains an insight into human nature, namely, the importance we place upon knowledge and experience over happiness. Second was The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown, a crime novel originally in Mystery Book in April 1946. It was published as a hardbound edition in 1947 and after that in one paperback edition after another. I have the David R. Godine trade paperback edition of 1986. In Jack Vance's story, the uncle is one who was involved in the pursuit of green magic. He's missing at the beginning of the story, and for good reason. It has to do with green magic. In The Fabulous Clipjoint, the uncle is named Ambrose, and he's not missing, even though his name is Ambrose.

Fredric Brown contributed to Weird Tales. Jack Vance did not. Brown put a minor character named Bradbury into his story. I don't know whether he knew Ray Bradbury, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did. Oddly, Brown also put a character named Dutch Reagan into The Fabulous Clipjoint. And I really doubt that he knew Ronald Reagan, who went by the nickname Dutch when he was young. But Brown knew Chicago, the fabulous clipjoint of the title, and portrayed it memorably in his novel. What a great image and a great title: the big city as a fabulous clipjoint. One more thing: for the first time in my life, I have seen the word doniker in print. My mom used that word. I thought it might be a German word that came to her from her German family. As it turns out, doniker is carney slang and comes from an English word. And now I wonder how my mom came to use it.

Anyway, we now have two more Uncle stories to add to the list.

The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown in a Bantam edition, with cover art by Grant. This is the scene that every artist seems to have homed in on, and why not? The story turns on it. It also involves a beautiful woman (she's not a blonde in the story but has black hair instead). More than that, it is in this scene that the protagonist, young, working-class Ed Hunter, rises above the bars, flats, cheap restaurants, and dark alleyways of Chicago into its "tall, narrow buildings [. . .] like fingers reaching towards the sky," into a higher and finer place where it's possible to meet and know and love such a woman. It's a fantasy, of course, but so much of literature is a fantasy after all. Fredric Brown was onto something, then, when he wrote in the very next sentence: "It was like something out of a science-fiction story." (p. 178) He was of course a science fiction author, but who else in a mystery story or in mainstream literature would have made such an observation or admission in 1946 or 1947?

By the way, Fredric Brown was, for the briefest period of his life, a Hoosier in that he attended Hanover College. His story is set not only in Chicago but also in Gary, which is on the opposite end of the state from Hanover. The black-haired woman Claire is from Indianapolis, and so we have two places that figure in the history of Weird Tales magazine, Indianapolis and Chicago. Those same two places figure in another Uncle story, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" by Otis Adelbert Kline.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley