Every once in a while I look on the Internet for news of my blog. This isn't really vanity--or not mostly vanity--I just want to see what's going on out there. I don't have any connections to people in weird fiction or science fiction except for the members of our weird fiction book club. I don't know anything about current trends, developments, or controversies. I don't subscribe to any magazines and don't go looking for new fiction. The main reason I ordered Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue, is that it was advertised as the 100th anniversary issue. Now here it is two years later and I'm still writing about the thing.
But other people are, too.
In my most recent Internet search, I came upon an essay called "Pulp Fiction Scholar Savages Jonathan Mayberry's [sic] Weird Tales Fantasy Magazine Revival," by Richard Merritt on the website Fandom Pulse, and dated November 26, 2024. As it turns out, I'm the "pulp fiction scholar" of the title. I guess I don't mind being called a scholar. But I like John Keel's disclaimer: "Not an expert on anything." I don't have an advanced degree. I don't work in academia. I have never had anything published in a scholarly journal. I have never been a speaker or presenter at a conference. I'm not a publisher or editor. I don't know what that makes me. Maybe scholar is it.
So today I would like to write about Mr. Merritt's essay.
I'll start by saying that one of the first courtesies you can extend to another person is to get his name right. Jonathan Maberry, current editor of Weird Tales, seems to have failed in that with one of his contributors, Nicole Sixx, whose name is apparently not Nicola, as it is spelled in his table of contents. But then Mr. Merritt misspelled Mr. Maberry's last name in the very title of his essay, and then mixes correct and incorrect spellings in its main body. Does anybody work with a proofreader or editor these days?
Mr. Merritt's essay starts off well enough when he suggests that the current Weird Tales is a skinsuit. It's hard not to see things that way. Weird Tales looks like Weird Tales and has some of its trappings, but it's mostly an imitation. More accurately, I think, it's a type of exploitation. A lot of people have glommed onto something that they never created and could never have created because they're too small, all for their own purposes and their own gain. It's actually pretty cynical when you think about it. The egregious failure of the current Weird Tales to meet its business obligations is more cynical still. I'll go beyond the word skinsuit: the current Weird Tales is a scam.
I don't have Mr. Merritt's full essay. It's behind a paywall. (My blog is free. Things about my blog you have to pay for.) My friend Nate was kind enough to get it for me, but my version is cut off. I have this clause from Mr. Merritt, though: "Even legacy magazines from the heyday of the pulp era aren't safe from crusaders injecting their tired politics into them [. . .]." If he's referring to Weird Tales #367, I will say that at least Mr. Maberry and his contributors did not inject politics into their magazine (or at least I didn't detect any politics in my reading of it). We can be thankful for that. There is a political issue on the fringes of the magazine, though. I covered that last year. The editor and his authors wisely avoided these otherwise poisonous topics, poisonous and fatal to fiction-writing and the pleasures of reading.
Richard Merritt went through some of what I wrote about the magazine. "Overall," he concluded, "the revival is a mess." Those are his words. Although I wouldn't call it a mess, I would also not praise it very highly, either. Most of it is readable. Some of it is fair to good. None of it is very good or excellent. As I wrote before, probably nothing in here will ever be anthologized, which is far less than you can say about the original Weird Tales and its contemporaries in science fiction. I guess we like to mine the material and culture from the past while putting ourselves above the people who created it. This is presentism in one of its worst forms. Read on . . .
Near the end of his essay, Mr. Merritt showed something that Jonathan Maberry posted on Twitter/X in 2019. Mr. Maberry wrote: "My goal is to find exceptional stories from writers of all kinds. None of the racism, sexism, and homophobia that was once associated with this title." So the goal is not to seek out good and promising writers, regardless of their identitarian qualities, to guide and advise them in their work, or to publish good, enjoyable, memorable, and well-written stories. No, the goal is evidently something else, something less. The focus isn't on what's good but what's bad about the past. And the goal is negative rather than positive. Any adult should know (Jonathan Maberry is sixty-six years old) that negative goals don't work. You have to be for something, not against something else. Anyway, maybe that's where the reference to politics in the first paragraph of Mr. Merritt's essay comes from.
Richard Merritt also quoted from the magazine Cirsova, which wrote, I believe also on Twitter/X: "the guy who's behind the most recent woke relaunch of Weird Tales slapped the Weird Tales logo on his own book and called [it] 'The first Weird tales novel'." I don't know who wrote that and when. In addition to not having any connections to anybody, I don't use X or any other social media. In any case, that quote seems to be from someone called #stolenvalor. That's another fitting phrase, if I'm reading the reference the right way. Mr. Maberry has no claim at all to the label "the first Weird Tales novel." I think what he means actually is that his novel is the first Weird Tales-branded novel. And as we have seen, branding, the use of brandnames, product placement, and the advertising of Weird Tales merchandise seem to be the main activities in the writing and publication of Weird Tales #367. Good writing isn't it.
Skinsuit . . . scam . . . stolen valor. All seem to be accurate in reference to the current Weird Tales. I will say to the current editor and publisher: Let us have our magazine back. At the beginning, in the November issue of 1924, the new editor, Farnsworth Wright declared:
Weird Tales belongs to you, the readers, and we will be guided by your wishes.
Let us have our magazine back.
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Thank you to Nate for a copy of Richard Merritt's essay.
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley
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