Notes from PulpFest-H.P.L. at 125

Today, August 20, 2015, is the 125th anniversary of the birth of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, author, poet, essayist, editor, publisher, and perhaps the most prolific writer of letters in human history. PulpFest, the annual pulp magazine convention held in Columbus, Ohio, honored Lovecraft at the convention and on the cover of its annual magazine, The Pulpster. Inside is a long article called "Lovecraft's Lasting Legacy," with contributions from Ramsey Campbell, Darrell Schweitzer, S.T. Joshi, Marvin Kaye, Will Murray, and many others. Happy Birthday, Ech-Pi-El! (The photograph is from 1915.)

This week is also the anniversary of the birth and death of Hugo Gernsback, known as "The Father of Science Fiction." Born Hugo Gernsbacher on August 16, 1884, he came from Luxembourg to the United States in 1904 and set himself up in the electronics business. Soon he was on to radio and eventually television. In the 1910s, he began publishing science fiction. (The term did not come into use until 1929.) In 1926, Gernsback published the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. If I have done my research correctly, he also published the second, third, and fourth science fiction magazines, the Wonder titles of 1929-1930. The Hugo Awards, presented by the World Science Fiction Convention, are named in his honor. (Incidentally, the World Fantasy Awards, presented by the World Fantasy Convention, are cast in the image of H.P. Lovecraft.) Hugo Gernsback died on August 19, 1967, at age eighty-three. Happy Birthday, too, to Hugo Gernsback! (The photograph is from 1918.)

Captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Weird Tales Controversy-Part One

Last week, before PulpFest, I was writing about politics and science fiction. My thesis is that politics often intrudes upon science fiction because: a) people who are extremely political make all things--including art, science, and literature--political; and b) science fiction, being progressive in a general sense, too easily lends itself to progressivism in the political sense. The subject of science fiction is the question what if? The temporal setting for that question is usually the future. But in working with the future, the science fiction writer unknowingly intrudes upon a territory carved out by the political progressive exclusively for himself or herself. As a result, the science fiction writer may feel pressure to create in his or her work a future suitable to the political progressive. He or she is not free as the artist must be free. There is pressure to conform, to guard his or her thoughts and words, to compromise his or her own artistic integrity, to engage in tokenism, to be politically correct, and, at the extremes, to create propaganda. To be nonconformist is to risk censorship, boycotts, and opprobrium of the most vicious kind. Physical violence may not yet have occurred in the world of science fiction, but earlier this year, the staff of Charlie Hebdo were murdered by Islamists. Those staff members--artists, writers, and editors--were non-conformists. They stood alone and they died alone. Their spilled blood was yet warm when the politically correct (and others) began defending their attackers and attacking them, the defenseless, with the opinion that they got what was coming to them. It may just be a matter of time before other artists and writers face the same kinds of threats, hazards, and violence. You can ask Salman Rushdie, a writer of science fiction and fantasy, about that.

Now I'm forced to show my hand: The second part of my thesis is that, if the future belongs only to the political progressive, and science fiction, as the literature of the future, is increasingly or inevitably politicized, then only fantasy (including weird fiction) remains for the escapist, the non-political person, the politically non-progressive person, or the person who wants to read within the larger realm of fantasy simply for pleasure. Fantasy (including weird fiction), being about the past, is apolitical (or non-political or anti-political) because the political progressive is not interested in the past. In fact, he or she hates the past. At least I thought all that before reading about the Weird Tales controversy of 2012. Now I'm beginning to see that the world of fantasy can be--and probably will be--politicized as well. I don't know why I would have thought differently, knowing then and now that for politically-minded people, all things are and must be political. To them, even the past can be politicized. Even the past can be made politically correct. And it will be. The past will be scrubbed, expurgated, censored, revised, and bowdlerized to match current requirements, which will, as we know, change moment by moment. In short, the photograph you think you saw never existed, for it disappeared down the memory hole.

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Notes from PulpFest-Who Owns Weird Tales?

Pulp magazines began in 1896, making next year the 120th anniversary of their birth. The anniversary of their death is harder to pin down. Like old soldiers, they just faded away, probably in the 1950s. I read that the last pulp science fiction magazine was published in 1957. Michael Neno tells me that the last pulp of any kind was Ranch Romances, which rode off into the sunset in 1974.

Few titles are left from the pulp era. Analog, which was christened Astounding Stories in 1930, is still in print. So is The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which came into the world in 1949. Both, however, are digest-size and not pulp-size. Amazing Stories is still around but only in digital format. There may be others of that type as well. If Weird Tales were to be issued this year, we might be able to say that it's the last of the magazines from the pulp era still printed at pulp-size, but who knows if it will be published, and if it is, whether it will be pulp-size or magazine-size. Of course the cheap paper, garish covers, muddy interiors, and untrimmed edges are long gone. So, too, is the world in which pulp magazines flourished. Pulp today is more a spirit, a culture, or fiction and art of a certain kind than a physical object you can buy on the newsstand.

Weird Tales made its debut in 1923. The early history of the magazine is a little tricky, and I'll leave that for another day. In 1938, however, Short Stories, Inc., acquired Weird Tales and moved its offices from Chicago to New York. In September 1954, Weird Tales came to an end. My understanding is that editor Leo Margulies acquired the Weird Tales property at about that time (ca. 1954-1955). He may have had plans to revive the magazine, but Sam Moskowitz is supposed to have talked him out of it. Instead, Margulies published a number of paperback anthologies in the 1960s. He also reprinted stories from Weird Tales in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine.

Margulies and Moskowitz revived Weird Tales for four issues in 1973-1974, just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of "The Unique Magazine." Moskowitz the editor relied heavily on reprints of stories from other magazines that had fallen into the public domain. There wasn't much new or even pulp content. Leo Margulies died in December 1975. At about that time (ca. 1974-1975), Robert Weinberg acquired the Weird Tales property and began publishing his own books and periodicals: WT50: A Tribute to Weird Tales in 1974, The Weird Tales Story in 1977, and The Weird Tales Collector from 1977 to 1980. Mr. Weinberg held onto Weird Tales for thirty years or so as I understand it. He finally sold the property to Viacom. In the meantime, the magazine went back into print, as four paperback anthologies in 1980-1983, then in two rare magazine-sized issues in 1984-1985, finally, in varying formats under varying editors and publishers from 1988 to 1994 and 1998 to 2014. We're still waiting for an issue to appear this year.

This weekend at PulpFest, the ownership and editorship of Weird Tales came up again and again. On Friday evening, Philip M. Sherman talked about his uncle Leo Margulies, who owned Weird Tales from circa 1954 to circa 1974. Other people at the show mentioned Robert Weinberg, Darrell Schweitzer, and other authors, editors, and publishers associated with the magazine. I can tell you, there is a lot of confusion on the issue of who owns Weird Tales. Robert Weinberg supposedly owns the copyrights to stories published in the magazine--except that some issues have fallen into the public domain. Viacom I believe owns the Weird Tales trademark if nothing else. (Maybe film or video rights as well.) And now we know that Nth Dimension Media, Inc., is the publisher of Weird Tales magazine. But how? Under a license? Is Weird Tales split into various pieces, each owned by separate persons? The bigger question is this: why don't we know?

The publishers of Weird Tales went through a controversy lately, and we might be tempted to ascribe its absence to that. But one dealer I talked to said that it became impossible to find the magazine when it was recently in print. Another dealer or collector mentioned that Weird Tales had lost its distributor. So maybe the Mystery of the Missing Magazine has more to do with economics and logistics than anything else. None of this is new, of course. All of it is emblematic of Weird Tales throughout its troubled history.

Copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Notes from PulpFest-The Mystery of the Missing Magazine

I came away from PulpFest with a copy of The Pulpster, the official publication of the convention. A colorized photograph of H.P. Lovecraft is on the cover, and inside is an article called "Lovecraft's Lasting Legacy," written by various authors, editors, fans, and critics of Lovecraft and Weird Tales. Marvin Kaye contributed to "Lovecraft's Lasting Legacy" and provides clues to the Mystery of the Missing Magazine, which has not been seen in print in more than a year.

Sometime within the last decade, Mr. Kaye went to work for the Jekyll and Hyde Club in New York City. "I was given the role of Mr. Shroud," he writes, "the head butler and major-domo to Dr. Jekyll." (p. 46) In that role, Marvin Kaye (b. 1938) met fellow actor John Harlacher (b. 1976). Sharing a taste for the macabre, the two became friends. Upon learning that Mr. Kaye had once edited H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror (6 issues, 2004-2009), Mr. Harlacher urged him to acquire the property from John Gregory Betancourt (b. 1963). To Mr. Kaye's surprise, Mr. Betancourt, when contacted, offered him Weird Tales to go with H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror, all for a bargain price. With both magazines in the bag, Marvin Kaye and John Harlacher created Nth Dimension Media, Inc., with Mr. Kaye as editor and Mr. Harlacher as publisher. That transaction took place in 2011. 

I don't know what legal arrangement the two men might have, but in my previous article, I suggested that Marvin Kaye the editor might be subordinate to John Harlacher the publisher. That's not necessarily the case. I also suggested that it was Mr. Kaye's decision to print an excerpt from Save the Pearls: Revealing Eden by Victoria Hoyt (2012) and that John Harlacher objected to that plan (at least after controversy inevitably and predictably ensued). According to Jeff VanderMeer, however, Mr. Harlacher and Mr. Kaye had dinner with his wife, then-editor Ann VanderMeer, in June 2012 (I think), during which they talked about their plans to print an excerpt from Revealing Eden. She advised them against it. That and other disagreements precipitated her resignation. John Harlacher may have tried to put a damper on the controversy, but it was already too late. To read accounts now, he seemed only to have thrown more fuel on the fire with his apologies and explanations.

Part of the problem in trying to reconstruct the sequence of events here is that the website for Weird Tales is no longer in existence except for as a placeholder, as one of my readers pointed out. There are still websites where you can read about the controversy over Revealing Eden, but only from one side, the side of the aggrieved. (1) The best place to start might be on a blog posting called "Weird Tales, Ann VanderMeer, and Utter Stupidity" by Jeff VanderMeer (her husband), dated August 20, 2012, here. Weird Tales itself remains silent.

Ann VanderMeer stayed on as editor for one issue of Weird Tales after its acquisition by Nth Dimension Media. That was the Winter 2012 issue, Volume 66, Number 3, whole issue number 359. Three issues edited by Marvin Kaye followed:

• Cthulhu Returns Issue, with a tribute to Ray Bradbury--Fall 2012 (Vol. 66, No. 4) #360
• Fairy Tales Issue--Summer 2013 (Vol. 67, No. 1) #361
• Undead Issue--Spring 2014 (Vol. 67, No. 2) #362

In this year's issue of The Pulpster, Mr. Kaye states: "[T]he next issue [of Weird Tales] in development is our 'Swords and Sorcery' issue." (p. 46) I don't know when Mr. Kaye wrote those words. I presume it would have been since last year's PulpFest, as decisions about next year's themes are worked out during this year's show. I don't suppose it matters. The controversy over Revealing Eden (though maybe not over Marvin Kaye or his company's actions) has died down. Nth Dimension Media has had more than a year during which to get a new issue in print. There are no doubt scads of sword-and-sorcery stories and art available for publication. And, still, Weird Tales is missing.

In closing his essay, Marvin Kaye writes:

Though [Weird Tales] was closed down several times, it always returns, which is why I called it "the magazine that never dies." It is now in its 92nd year. May it go on until it is at least 200-years-old, and beyond!

I wonder if he sees any irony in those words.

Note

(1) The controversy over Revealing Eden suggests that the current owners of the license to Weird Tales might have reason to remove the content of the website themselves. We simply can't say.

Copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Where Is Weird Tales?

Weird Tales has been called "The Magazine That Never Dies," and in the ninety-two years since it was first published, Weird Tales has lived up to that sobriquet. This week, Weird Tales is being celebrated at PulpFest, the annual pulp magazine convention held in Columbus, Ohio. H.P. Lovecraft, who probably helped keep the magazine afloat, is also being celebrated on the 125th anniversary of his birth. Lovecraft is long gone. But where is Weird Tales?

Weird Tales was last seen in Spring 2014 when Volume 67, Number 2--whole issue number 362--was published. The editor was Marvin Kaye, the man who many years ago nicknamed his recent charge "The Magazine That Never Dies." It's either a coincidence or an irony that the Spring 2014 issue was subtitled "The Undead Issue," for the magazine that never dies appears to have done so after all. But then it has died before and has always come back, in 1924, 1973, 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1998. Although Weird Tales was in print in almost every year from 1988 to 2014, the roster of publishers and editors in that time became bewildering. And now the magazine is lost.

Marvin Kaye succeeded the widely admired Ann VanderMeer as editor of Weird Tales with the Fall 2012 issue. He was at the helm for just three issues, Fall 2012, Summer 2013, and Spring 2014. Somewhere along the line he got himself into some trouble when he announced that Weird Tales would print an excerpt from Save the Pearls Part One: Revealing Eden by Victoria Foyt (2012). Written for young people, Revealing Eden is a dystopian or post-apocalyptic novel of a world ruined by global warming. (1) If she had stopped with global warming, the author (and Marvin Kaye) probably wouldn't have caught any grief. It is, after all, a politically favored idea. Instead, Ms. Foyt proceeded to tell a story in which white people--the "pearls" of the title--are lower in status than are black people, specifically because of their skin color. (Black people are called "coals" in the book.) Ms. Foyt's book was self-published; the weight of the inevitable political charges against her might only have dragged her down. But then Marvin Kaye chained himself to Victoria Foyt's anchor, and he, too, went under when fans, authors, and publisher John Harlacher objected to his plan to reprint Revealing Eden. [Update, Aug. 19, 2015: John Harlacher's objection may only have been an attempt at damage control for a decision that he and Mr. Kaye may have made together. We can't be sure of some of these things because all the content on the Weird Tales website is gone.]

But is that why Weird Tales is missing from the scene? I don't know. If you look at the supposed website of the magazine, which is called Weird Tales but is found at a URL called www.weirdtailors.com (for some unknown reason), you will find only an image of the Undead Issue cover by Danielle Tunstall. (2) The website has been like that for almost a year. A former staff member told me that the original website was wiped out by another former staff member who, unbeknownst to his coworkers, had it stored on his own server. That sounds like a disgruntled former staff member. Whatever the case may be, he was probably well qualified to work for Hillary Clinton after that. No one since has rebuilt the Weird Tales website, and so it shows, appropriately, only the image of a zombie.

Weird Tales in its last four issues (from Winter 2012 to Spring 2014) was published by Nth Dimension Media, Inc., with an address at 105 West 86th Street, Suite 307, New York, NY 10024. The man in charge presumably is or was actor, director, and producer John Harlacher (b. 1976). However, the Weird Tales property itself is owned by Viacom, which acquired it from Robert Weinberg. I can't say for sure, but I presume Nth Dimension Media is or was operating under a license from Viacom, which may have had some plans for it, but nothing seems to have come of any of its plans or anybody else's plans. So as you can see, Weird Tales is still lost or missing.

Or dead.

Or maybe mostly dead, like Westley from The Princess Bride.

But Weird Tales has always returned from the dead, and I would wager it will again. But it won't be in time for PulpFest this weekend, so we'll have to celebrate without it. (3)

Notes

(1) Oddly, Revealing Eden, the first book in the Save the Pearls series, won an Eric Hoffer Award for the Young Adult Category in 2012. So some people liked it and some people hated it. Not having read it, I can't say what merits, if any, the book might have.

(2) The URL:

http://www.weirdtalesmagazine.com

redirects to:

www.weirdtailors.com

(3) As an aside, Weird Tales, in its first incarnation, was in print during every year from 1923 to 1954. In later incarnations, Weird Tales was in print in every year from 1988 to 1994 and from 1998 to 2014. If no issue comes out this year, then the second longest string of publication will be broken and we'll be starting over again at year one.

The most recent--or maybe the last--issue of Weird Tales, No. 362 from Spring 2014. The artist is Danielle Tunstall, a British artist and photographer. Note the ubiquitous zombie. If Weird Tales has died again, here's hoping for a resurrection or maybe a reanimation. Where's Herbert West when you need him?

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

This Week in Columbus: PulpFest

I'm taking time out from my series on politics in science fiction to let you know that the 44th PulpFest is taking place this week in Columbus, Ohio. The convention begins on Thursday afternoon, August 13, 2015, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Columbus and will run until 2 o'clock Sunday afternoon, August 16, 2015. This year, PulpFest will be celebrating the 125th anniversary of the birth of H.P. Lovecraft, as well as the magazine that showcased his work, Weird Tales. This year's guest artist will be Jon Arfstrom, cover artist for the original Weird Tales magazine. If you would like to learn more about PulpFest, click on the following link:

http://www.pulpfest.com/

One of the great questions about Weird Tales is: Why didn't H.P. Lovecraft ever get a cover story? I have a possible answer: His byline was guaranteed to sell magazines, so the magazine didn't need a Lovecraft cover story in order to appeal to its readers. Weak, but a possibility. I have another possible answer: maybe Lovecraft's work didn't lend itself very well to cover art, especially for a magazine that would have been displayed on the newsstand for a general readership vs. for a specialized readership. Weaker still and not really worth considering. In any case, it isn't true that Lovecraft never got a cover story in Weird Tales. In fact he got exactly one--this one--from May 1942. The problem was, you had to live in Canada to pick up a copy. The cover story was "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," rejected by editor Farnsworth Wright in 1933, published in booklet form in 1936, finally published in Weird Tales in January 1942, then reprinted in the Canadian edition of May 1942. This cover dispels any possibility that Lovecraft's stories may not have lent themselves to cover art. The Canadian-American illustrator and cartoonist Edmond Good (1910-1991) was the man behind the cover. He is in a category of one.

Here is Jon Arfstrom's first cover for Weird Tales. It was published in January 1952 when the artist was barely twenty-three years old. Now eighty-six, Mr. Arfstrom is one of the last living contributors to the original Weird Tales. I hope to see him at PulpFest.

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Frankenstein: A Monster of Gothicism and Science

I have been thinking about the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818). It has been called the first science fiction novel, but Frankenstein is also, obviously, a Gothic romance that originated in a contest to write a ghost story. Like the monster itself, Frankenstein is an assembly, part one thing and part another. I haven't been able to reconcile those two parts, but I think I have figured out another problem to do with the origins of science fiction.

In reading about the development of the Gothic romance, I was surprised to learn that it has been interpreted as a reaction to the rationalism of the eighteenth century. That confused me, as I have associated Romanticism--of which Gothicism must be a part--with the liberalism and chaos of the French Revolution. I guess that's where I made my mistake. Likewise, I have associated Neoclassicism with the conservative, rational, and orderly periods of pre-revolutionary Europe, the American Revolution, and the post-revolutionary periods in Europe and America. There are some associations there, but Neoclassicism isn't so easily opposed to Romanticism, while conservatism may not even belong on that list. If you consider the dichotomy of the Dionysian vs. the Apollonian, it gets even more complicated, and maybe the theorizing starts to fall apart.

Anyway, in regards to Frankenstein, I thought: how can a Gothic romance be the first work of science fiction? I may be getting closer to an answer to that question, but it makes sense to me now that the roots of science fiction--and progressivism--are in reason and rationalism. (Maybe also in Neoclassicism or the Apollonian.) If we're working with opposites, then fantasy, weird fiction, and supernatural horror--together the genres of Gothicism, or, alternatively, the genres that look to the past--must be rooted, like conservatism, in the non-rational or anti-rational, the Romantic, the Medieval, and maybe even the Dionysian. (That list doesn't hold together very well, either, but then it's harder to theorize about conservatism, which is by nature anti-theoretical.) The natural form, then, for science fiction would be the novel, whereas the natural form for the Gothic story is the romance.

So Frankenstein seems to me a Romantic work, an inspiration for other Romantic works, and--together with other Gothic romances--a lead-in to the Gothic genres of fantasy, weird fiction, and supernatural horror. As I have said all along, those genres look to the past and by temperament are conservative. Science fiction, on the other hand, being about the future, tends to be progressive in its view and in its aims. By this analysis it is descended from the rationalism of the eighteenth century and--whether we like it or not--from the forces that brought about the French Revolution and eventually the Russian Revolution.

But what if science fiction has a Gothic strain as well? Edgar Allan Poe is supposed to have been the originator of science fiction in America. Peter Viereck considered him conservative in some ways. He was without doubt a Romantic. His stories--full of black cats; old, dark houses; living corpses; and other such trappings--is also without a doubt Gothic. So if the first science fiction novel was actually a Gothic romance, and the originator of science fiction in America was a conservative Romantic, my question remains: how can these things be reconciled? And is there really the divide that we imagine separating the scientific from the Gothic?

Science fiction in its first century and more (1818-1920s) was, like Frankenstein's monster, an assembly, part science and part romance. The nascent genre was even called scientific romance in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Then came the scientific fiction, Scientifiction (1915, 1926), and finally science fiction (1929) of Hugo Gernsback, followed by the hard science fiction of the Golden Age under John W. Campbell, Jr. As it evolved, science fiction developed higher aspirations, to be taken seriously as literature, to be novelistic rather than romantic. That may have been true at no time more than in the 1960s or '70s. Then, in the early '80s, Romanticism I think seems to have revived--like Frankenstein's monster--with the arrival of a new kind of romance, written by a new romancer.

Now, on to William Gibson.

Frankenstein (Halcyon House, 1932) with illustrations by Nino Carbe (1909-1993), later an animator with Walt Disney, Walter Lantz, Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, and DePatie-Freleng.

Frankenstein in a paperback edition from 1953. Evidently there wasn't any novel that could not receive the redhead-with-cleavage treatment from paperback and pulp publishers. 

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley