Edited by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas
128 pages
Published 1949
Read from January 28 to January 29
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
It’s the 75th anniversary year for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Despite recent troubles and controversies, it’s still my favorite fiction magazine. Under the editorship of Sheree Renée Thomas, F&SF has been the best it’s ever been, consistently brilliant and innovative.
I’d hoped to continue reading each new issue when it comes out, as I did for most of 2023. To my knowledge, though, the January / February 2024 issue still hasn’t gone to press, which suggests concerning developments on the business and publishing end of the magazine. Fingers crossed it’s able to weather the current problems and endure into whatever future we face.
Thanks once again to online archives, I was able to read this: the very first issue of what would become our beloved F&SF. Founded purely as a fantasy magazine, this, like many periodicals of its era, padded its pages with reprints, and at least one story penned pseudonymously by an editor. Also, horror was lumped in with fantasy in this era; much of this issue is horror or horror-adjacent.
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“Bells on His Toes” by Cleve Cartmill. Fairly standard humorous 1940s urban fantasy number. A cop checks up on Dr. Swaam, a would-be guru, to make sure he isn’t defrauding people, and discovers that the good doctor’s “believe it and make it real” self-actualization works a bit too well. The story is unremarkable. It’s fine. C-
“Thurnley Abbey” by Perceval Landon (1907). Even in 1907 this would have been a touch old fashioned. Our framing device narrator goes through the trouble of familiarizing us with his Continental routine before introducing our actual narrator, Colvin, a stranger on the train who begs to sleep in the first narrator’s cabin so he doesn’t have to sleep alone. To explain why, Colvin slogs through an implausibly detailed and rigidly chronological account of a cadaverous night he spent at his friend’s manor house. The skeletal being that Colvin encounters is depicted vividly, but the tale peters out and then just… ends, feeling half finished. What there is of it feels like a C
“Private — Keep Out!” by Philip MacDonald. This existential horror piece reads more hokey than horrific nowadays, but it’s an interesting variation on the classic forbidden knowledge trope, one grounded in the quotidian routines of Hollywood. As a reader, I think my expectations for a story are higher, thanks to the depth and imagination of modern day fantasy; I kept expecting “Keep Out!” to have something more, a deeper element, an unexpected twist that would feel like a revelation, perhaps a Siren Queen-esque connection to Hollywood myth. But no, once you figure it out, that’s pretty much all there is to it. C
“The Lost Room” by Fitz-James O’Brien (1858). This one is little more than a mood piece. It goes like this: Our narrator looks around his lodging room on a sweltering evening and recalls all the objects in it, with a paragraph or two of how each came into his possession. When his cigar burns down, he flings it out the window, and he decides he’ll go sit in the garden where it’s cooler. He proceeds to describe the vast and gloomy house around his room, then the cypress-grown garden. There he meets a strange little man in the dark, who tells him his fellow lodgers are enchanters, ghouls, and cannibals, before disappearing. Our narrator rushes back to his room and finds everything changed into a bacchanalian chamber, and all his familiar belongings transformed into exotica. Six lascivious strangers lounge around a table laden with delicacies; he must gamble with them for the use of his room. The story is slightly less boring than it sounds — O’Brien sustains a note of doomed melancholy that is moderately engrossing — but inevitably, there’s more than a little bit of Orientalism in the decadence of the transformed room. (There’s plenty of anti-Black racism, too.) It’s hard to rate a story so far removed from my own contemporary standards of storytelling, but the racism does it in. Maybe F+
“The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast” by Theodore Sturgeon. This one is a thoroughly 1940s science fantasy, of the sort that tosses in terms and names like gwik and Hvov before admitting that none of it matters. It’s supposed to be cheeky, playing with the expectations of early sci-fi worldbuilding, but it feels clumsy and lazy nowadays. (Like, you know you can just write your horny fable in an interesting way instead, right?) Anyway, a hurkle is a blue, six-legged alien kitten. One blunders its adorable way into a teleporter and shows up on Earth, which it finds as alien as we would find Lihrt. The first man to see it sprays it with DDT. If I’m parsing the ending correctly, the hurkle then gives birth to 200 female kittens, which in turn breed with humans and end up pacifying Earth (or at least male humans) with their happy sexual purrs. A weird horny twist condensed in vague, can’t-offend-the-censors language — how very 1940s. Maybe D+?
“Review Copy” by H. H. Holmes. The ever helpful ISFDB (Internet Science-Fiction Database) informs me that this was written by editor Anthony Boucher, which makes it odder that he chose a prolific real life serial killer for his supernatural murder-mystery pen name. (A cynical ploy for name recognition, presumably.) Here we find a vengeful writer, his book killed by a bad review, enlisting the services of a Black Magic user to kill the reviewer. The weapon? A book sent for review to the newspaper office. The story never rises above its banal “writers vs reviewers, am I right?” underpinnings. D
“Men of Iron” by Guy Endore (1940). A fable of automation and redundancy that’s still all too relevant in our current era of capitalist bullshit. (I typed out a whole rant about “AI” and the coordinated tech bro attack on labor, but we all know about it and it wasn’t necessary to include in this review.) The continued applicability is this story’s main point of interest; “Men” is forgettable, aside from its ending, in which (spoilers!) the newly automated machine lathe places a tarpaulin over its former operator and goes home to his wife. D+
“A Bride for the Devil” by Stuart Palmer. This one opens with several paragraphs describing the “full breasts” and “ample femininity” of its doomed heroine, with her youth treatments and multiple divorces and knack for spending the money of whichever husband is current. It would be a feat for any story to recover from such a beginning, and “Bride” doesn’t make the effort. Rote “occultists getting more than they bargained for” fluff, built on an unshakable foundation of misogyny. F
“Rooum” by Oliver Onions (1910). In much the way that “Bride” was built on misogyny, “Rooum” is built on racism, its opening paragraphs belaboring the fact that there was something not quite white about the titular character. Rooum’s tale of an invisible “Runner” catching up with him and running through him, the supernatural osmosis more painful each time, was interesting in a strange and half-formed way, but that wasn’t enough to redeem this story. F
“Perseus Had a Helmet” by Richard Sale (1938). Homicide procedural meets a touch of Greek legend. That makes this pulpy number sound way more interesting than it actually is. An office dweeb named Perseus loves an office dame named Ruby, but she’s playing him off the office Bluto, who beats Perseus up to keep him off her. Perseus subsequently acquires a helmet that, as in his namesake’s mythology, gives him powers of invisibility. He immediately launches into a life of crime, culminating in offing his rival. Clearly, “weenie becomes a tyrant when he gets a little taste of power” was a popular pulp trope; I was reminded of “The Weakling” in the February 1961 Analog. Maybe D-?
“In the Days of Our Fathers” by Winona McClintic. Imagine having your first published story printed in the first issue of what would become F&SF. Obviously no one knew what this little magazine would become, or how long it would last, or what masterpieces would appear in its pages. But in retrospect, it seems like quite an achievement. The story is a pretty standard midcentury affair: a child in the heavily regularized and perfected far future sneaks into the attic and, after reading a book penned by her uncle, discovers the “unsane atavism” called poetry, stirring feelings long since smoothed out of society. Unremarkable overall, but McClintic’s writing had actual character to it, which makes it a standout here. C+
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And that’s it for the first issue of what would become F&SF! Somewhat disappointing, though unsurprising. Still, it’s better than many issues I’ve read from the 1980s and ’90s.
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