As I’ve said elsewhere, we’re gonna be covering the ’60s in this year-long tribute to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction this month. Picking stories to review for July proved a challenge, but in a good way. Over its 75-year history F&SF has gone through several editors, which is normal, but the ’60s were almost certainly the most tumultuous time in the magazine’s history, for a few reasons. At the beginning of the decade Robert P. Mills was editor, and for the few years he edited F&SF Mills was very capable, arguably even on par with Anthony Boucher; but Mills was an agent and publisher first, and editing wasn’t something he wanted to do as a career. So the torch was passed to Avram Davidson, which sounds like an odd choice with hindsight, but it probably made perfect sense at the time. Davidson was a well-respected writer out of the “new” generation; he was more literary than most of his contemporaries, but he was also… quirkier. For practical reasons more than anything Davidson’s editorship could not last, and so the torch was passed once again, this time to Joseph W. Ferman, with his son Edward assisting him. Joseph lasted about a year before passing the torch to Ed; and this time, by the beginning of 1966, the torch would stay in place, as Ed Ferman would remain editor for the next 25 years. By the last ’60s F&SF had found a new and comfortable niche.

The rapid changing of editors also coincided with a rapid changing of material and reader expectations at this time. The ’60s were the decade of a lot of things: the Vietnam War escalating, racial and socio-economic strife reaching a breaking point, the assassinating of left-leaning public figures, the coming of the hippies. More innocuously it saw the birth of the New Wave, which was spearheaded in the UK by Michael Moorcock and a small army of forward-thinking British writers (although, if it makes you feel better, quite a few important contributors to the New Wave were American), reinventing New Worlds to make it a boundary-pushing powerhouse of a magazine. The US scene was a bit slow to catch up. John W. Campbell and Frederik Pohl lamented the New Wave, but the rascally movement would eventually find a sympathizing magazine in the US with F&SF. Understandably the fiction published in F&SF during this time was a good deal more eclectic than what happened in the ’50s, so it also makes sense the lineup of authors for this month would be a bit eccentric. We have a few of the usual suspects, but we also have… Lin Carter? And Russell Kirk…? We have a New Waver with Brian Aldiss, although the story chosen is decidedly anticipatory of the New Wave rather than part of it. For the most part we have science fiction here, with some horror thrown in; this was not a great time for fantasy in F&SF. Still, I think it’s at least an interesting roster.

Let’s see what’s on our plate.

For the short stories:

1. “The Oldest Soldier” by Fritz Leiber. From the May 1960 issue. He’s baaaaack. Honestly it’s been too long—in fact it’s been exactly a year since we last covered Leiber. Of course in the interim I’ve not refrained from writing about him on a different outlet or two, and can you blame me? This time we have an entry in his Change War series, being one of the first examples of a time war in SF.
2. “Hothouse” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the February 1961 issue. Aldiss has a career that goes shockingly far back for someone who died fairly recently, having debuted in the ’50s and almost overnight becoming a force to be reckoned with. Hothouse is usually considered a novel, but as a series of linked stories it won Aldiss a Hugo. This first entry in the “series” is a much-needed reread for me.
3. “Subcommittee” by Zenna Henderson. From the July 1962 issue. There were quite a few female authors active in the early days of F&SF (more so than other SFF magazines), and one of the most prolific contributors was Henderson. Her fiction often involves families and the experiences of children, and she’s most known for her stories of “The People.” This story, however, is totally standalone.
4. “The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’” by Miriam Allen deFord. From the April 1963 issue. DeFord has one of the most curious careers of any old-timey SF writer, and in 1963 she was almost certainly the oldest living contributor to F&SF, being in her seventies. Prior to taking up genre writing she wrote for socialist and feminist publications, as well as conducting research for Charles Fort.
5. “Cynosure” by Kit Reed. From the June 1964 issue. Starting in the ’50s and remaining active until her death in 2017 (she lived to be 85), Reed’s work is often quirky, humorous, satirical, but also at times brutal. Her science was never hard, and her disposition makes one think of Shirley Jackson. Both are vicious when it comes to domestic portraits. In other words, Reed was perfect for F&SF.
6. “Uncollected Works” by Lin Carter. From the March 1965 issue. Acclaimed, if also controversial, as an editor, and pretty notorious as a writer, Carter is probably most responsible for reviving interest in pre-Tolkien fantasy in the ’60s and ’70s. He’d been active as a fan since the ’40s, but “Uncollected Works” was his first solo professional story, and it garnered him a Nebula nomination.
7. “Balgrummo’s Hell” by Russell Kirk. From the July 1967 issue. Kirk, at least when he was alive, was known more as a conservative political philosopher, and indeed Christianity is integral to both his fiction and non-fiction. But he was also a surprisingly accomplished writer of supernatural horror, and despite being very much an outsider he did sometimes appear in the pages of F&SF.
8. “They Are Not Robbed” by Richard McKenna. From the January 1968 issue. McKenna gained mainstream recognition with his one novel, The Sand Pebbles, but it seems he used science fiction as a training ground, such that he appeared semi-regularly in the magazines—both before and after his death. McKenna died in 1964, but he apparently had a small trove of stories waiting to be published.
9. “The Movie People” by Robert Bloch. From the October 1969 issue. Bloch is most known for writing Psycho, but his career started much earlier and much more embedded in the Lovecraftian tradition—indeed he and Lovecraft were correspondents when Bloch was a teenager. On top of writing bestsellers Bloch wrote for film and TV, even penning a few (horror-themed) Star Trek episodes.

Won’t you read with me?