2024 read #93: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Winter-Spring 1950 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Winter-Spring 1950 issue (1:2)

Edited by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1950

Read from August 10 to August 11

Rating: 1 out of 5

So, I had this plan to read an issue of F&SF from each decade of its existence, double back when I got to the 2020s, and do it again going the other way. I only made it as far as the 1960s before losing what little focus I had. Instead, today we’re hopping back to the 1950s for this, the second-ever issue of the magazine.

It would take me so many years to read through every single issue of F&SF, especially since I would need to buy hundreds more issues (some of them at collector’s prices) to make it happen. As much as I’ve thought about it, I probably won’t attempt it. But I might try to read through every issue I have access to, which happily includes its first full decade, thanks to online archives.

I don’t have high hopes for this issue. I’m choosing to read it because of the Ray Bradbury and Margaret St. Clair pieces, and also because the Coleridge reprint technically lets me add another item to my 1800s decade tag.

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“The Gnurrs Come From the Voodvork Out” by R. Bretnor. The vast majority of 1950s humor hasn’t aged well. I’ve also never been impressed with any of Bretnor’s efforts. The  editorial blurb above this story hyperventilates: “[A]ny mention of gnurrs tends to reduce both editors to a quivering state of helplessness which has been authoritatively diagnosed as hysteria bretnorica.” What exactly is so hysterical, you ask? We have a kook inventor named Papa Schimmelhorn, a hidebound military officer who still yearns for cavalry, a WAC secretary who’s miffed by the lack of sexual harassment from her commander, and the gnurrs, who swarm out of the wainscoting to eat everyone’s clothes. It reads like something finely tuned to the sensibilities of midcentury 10 year old boys — maybe like old Bugs Bunny cartoons, but not funny. F

“The Return of the Gods” by Robert M. Coates (1948). This reprint, a tale of Greek gods (and various associated creatures) appearing to unsuspecting WWII veterans throughout the Northeast, originally appeared in The New Yorker. The prose has an oddly antique cadence, with news-magazine “the facts of the case” narration. The story itself feels like a throwback, as well, hearkening back to the Pan fad of the 1890s through 1930s. Yet it also has a whisper of the midcentury apocalypse genre within it, perhaps the earliest such expression of atomic anxiety I’ve encountered. I didn’t dislike it, aside from a sprinkling of the typical “women love sexual harassment, actually” bullshit. C-?

“Every Work Into Judgment” by Kris Neville. Dull, bible-thumping drivel that’s thoroughly impressed with itself, this one is a would-be philosophical ramble about a building on a future college campus. The building slowly gains sentience and telekinesis, and gets religion. Neville’s prose strains to attain poetry and meaning, but only gets in its own way. Maybe F+

A Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem, “Time, Real and Imaginary” (1803), has been inserted to fill half a page. First ever poem in F&SF! It might also be my first exposure to Romantic poetry, at least for the purposes of this blog. I liked it, but probably wouldn’t want an entire book of it.

“A Rope for Lucifer” by Walt Sheldon. An early example of a fantasy western, unsurprisingly freighted with racist caricature. If you’re like me, you probably imagined some bronco-busting variation on “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” but no: our epistolary narrator is the one named Lucifer, and the tale centers on how he received a sacred rope from mysterious India. The story never develops any degree of pizazz. D?

“The Last Generation?” by Miriam Allen deFord (1946). Another postwar atomic anxiety tale, originally published in Collier’s, pre-dating Coates’ effort by two years (though it employs the same news-magazine format). This time a testing accident in New Mexico renders all mammals sterile, all over the globe. The outcomes deFord lays out are equal parts creative and hopelessly optimistic; universal infertility leads to world peace and cooperation, for example, while the world’s rich men are happy to have their now uninheritable wealth taxed for the greater good. However, even within a global utopia, deFord couldn’t resist casting the usual white writer’s aspersions on China, India, and Africa. Maybe D+

“Postpaid to Paradise” by Robert Arthur (1940). I can safely say this is my very first philatelist fantasy. Magic stamps that transport the recipient to El Dorado are a neat conceit. Since this was 1940, alas, the narrator has to emphasize that one of the stamps depicts a teenage girl, before he promptly leers at her. Meh. D-

“The Exiles” by Ray Bradbury (1949). It’s hard to describe this piece without spoiling it, so here are the spoilers: All the canonical literary fantasists of the past (Shakespeare, Poe, Dickens, Baum, Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, etc.), kept alive thanks to those who read their books, have exiled themselves to Mars to escape the relentless pragmatism of science and progress. With the first astronauts approaching Mars, the fantasists use the magic of their creations (the witches of Macbeth, etc.) to kill or frighten them away. But the astronauts have an unexpected weapon: the last copies of their books, banned long ago. It’s a shallow business, and very much in the thrall of the white man canon, but it’s cute. I could see this as a Doctor Who serial. C+

“My Astral Body” by Anthony Hope (1895). The “mystical East” meets Edwardian social comedy in this tale from the 1890s. An unnamed “rajah” teaches a well-to-do Oxford student how to project an astral body. The student promptly sends his astral body to attend church and to get trousers measured for him. All this casual employment gives the astral body big ideas, and soon our Oxford student has regrets. A shrug. D

“Gavagan’s Bar” by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. Actually a pair of stories: “Elephas Frumenti,” which sees bar patrons discuss selectively breeding elephants down to whiskey-drinking house pets, and “The Gift of God,” in which a Christian poet doesn’t know what to do when a miracle happens to her. This pair of flash stories launched the long-running Gavagan’s Bar series, which proved popular for some years in F&SF. I don’t get the appeal. Maybe D?

“World of Arlesia” by Margaret St. Clair. This author is hit or miss, and unfortunately, this one falls in the miss category. The plot — an immersive movie is used to pull people into a Matrix-like work camp — is interesting, and the narration dabbles with second-person, but the pieces don’t quite gel together. D+

“The Volcanic Valve” by W. L. Alden (1897). A supposedly humorous yarn about a scientist who, hoping to perfect a means of controlling volcanoes for profit, inadvertently triggers the explosion of Krakatoa. Full of the horrid racism of contemporary English authors, the entire punchline seems to be “our plan blew up our Chinese workmen.” F

“Not with a Bang” by Damon Knight. A supposedly humorous last-man-on-Earth tale. The “humor” derives from the fact that last woman on Earth is a prim Protestant who can’t wrap her head around the changed circumstances and just give the man some kids already. Gross as fuck. Something worse than F

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Even with low expectations, this issue managed to disappoint me. The last two stories, in particular, were horrendous. I’ve read worse issues from the 1980s, but this one was a marked step down from the dubious charms of the first issue.

2024 read #49: The Wild Irish Girl by Sydney Owenson.

The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale by Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan

Introduction and notes by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

290 pages

Published 1806

Read from April 22 to April 24

Rating: 1 out of 5

I read this for the sole purpose of scrounging up another title for my list of 1800s reads. (Eighteen-oughts, that is — not eighteen hundreds.) That’s a form of historical interest all on its own, naturally, but it isn’t the most satisfying reason to read a book. It certainly didn’t help me stay engaged with the tedious, allusive, grandiloquent style of the era, or help me through the book’s desultory, epistolary structure (I can’t call it plot).

As a document of historical attitudes and advocacy, The Wild Irish Girl is interesting, availing itself of the unsophisticated political philosophy of its day to lay out a nationalist mythology opposed to English colonialism (hence the subtitle). Owenson responds to the 1800 dissolution of the Irish parliament by taking the broad, otherizing stereotypes the English consigned to the Irish people, and turning them into positive attributes. The usual English propaganda of uncouth, uncivilized barbarians across the Irish Sea is recast into a Rousseauean state of “wild,” “natural” grace, suffused with “primeval simplicity and primeval virtue.”

Many pages are spent enumerating fanciful mythologies meant to link the Irish to Phoenician exiles, the sort of nationalistic bridge between the Classical Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe so beloved by early Moderns, Victorian diffusionists, Thor Heyerdahl, and Twitter’s white nationalists. At one point, even the way women fold their scarves is underlined as a cultural link to Egypt. If you’re researching the history of how folklore gets spun to foment nationalism, this is a book for you.

The story itself isn’t worth a read. Horatio, our viewpoint letter-writer, is a woeful and apathetic wastrel, banished by his aristocrat father to western Ireland to rethink his ways. He’s prejudiced against the Irish people, buying into every negative English stereotype against them. Bored after just a few days, Horatio prowls around his father’s estate, where he learns the tragic history of an Inismore prince whose ancestor was killed and dispossessed by Horatio's own ancestor. Horatio, feeling the first pangs of conscience an Englishman ever felt over the depravity of conquest, decides to attend church and gawk at the prince and his family. Once there, he promptly obsesses over Lady Glorvina, the prince's daughter. He breaks his arm while stalking her, wakes up in her care, assumes a false identity to stay with her, pretends to be an art tutor to get near her, etc. Then he has the gall to get upset that she might be deceiving him. I couldn’t be done with Horatio fast enough.

Here in Turtle Island, we often forget that England’s second colonial venture was perpetrated in Éire. (Their first colonial venture, as even fewer people recall, was against their own lower classes.) It’s a depressing reminder of how vile colonialism has always been that the English literate classes needed to be informed by a half-English author that the Irish were human. The Wild Irish Girl takes that thesis and stretches a book out of it. Horatio lists out an English prejudice on one page, only to be shocked by the kindness and generosity of the Irish on the next. Again and again. For some 250 pages of modern typesetting. And such is the way of colonialist empire that this was considered too radical to publish by several presses at the time.

2023 read #142: Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth.

Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale, Taken from Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires Before the Year 1782 by Maria Edgeworth

90 pages

Published 1800

Read from November 30 to December 1

Rating: 2 out of 5

I read this for one reason: I hadn’t yet read anything from the decade of the 1800s, and this sounded like the least uninteresting book I could find from those years. Plus, it’s short. Maybe someday I’ll take the time to read Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the years 1799–1804, but not today.

Rackrent is, for the most part, a delightfully snarky little satire of English colonialism in Ireland, ironically chronicling four heirs of the Rackrent estate, all of them some flavor of predatory English lord on occupied soil: “the drunken Sir Patrick, the litigious Sir Murtagh, the fighting Sir Kit, and the slovenly Sir Condy….” The satire is in a vein that should be familiar to anyone who’s read Early Modern literature:

However, my lady was very charitable in her own way. She had a charity school for poor children, where they were taught to read and write gratis, and where they were kept well to spinning gratis for my lady in return….

Beneath the slyly ingratiating surface, it’s all deliciously pointed.

Someone in the publishing process, however — quite possibly Maria Edgeworth’s father — took it upon themselves to bootlick tender English feelings in an introduction, insisting that English abuses of Ireland spontaneously ceased sometime around 1782, and that everybody is happy and congenial now and that the Irish simply adore their English overlords:

The Editor hopes his readers will observe that these are “tales of other times”: that the manners depicted in the following pages are not those of the present age: the race of the Rackrents has long since been extinct in Ireland; and… are characters which could no more be met with at present in Ireland, than Squire Western or Parson Trulliber in England. There is a time, when individuals can bear to be rallied for their past follies and absurdities, after they have acquired new habits, and a new consciousness. Nations as well as individuals gradually lose attachment to their identity, and the present generation is amused rather than offended by the ridicule that is thrown upon its ancestors.

Endnotes, also appended by this editor, made every effort to satirize the Irish at large for their “laziness,” their funereal lamentations, their litigiousness, drunkenness, not paying their rent on time, and so on. Unsurprising, given the overwhelming fragility of the colonialist ego, which we can observe for ourselves in our own era.

And, sadly, this editor wasn’t Rackrent’s sole letdown. There’s a plotline in which the wastrel Sir Kit marries Jessica, a Jewish heiress, which detours the narrative into some shitty of-the-era antisemitism.