Brief and spoilertastic notes on fiction I have read
Years ago, I pledged to read at least one story from each issue of the seminal speculative fiction magazine Weird Tales bearing a 1930s cover date. That quest accomplished, I expanded the scope of my eldritch ambitions to encompass the entire century-long history of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual and began chipping away at the 1940s and 1920s. Some progress has been made, but more…
Remember how awesome some of those Lovecraft collabs with Hazel Heald and Zealia Bishop were? Let's try to recapture that magic with three more H. P. Lovecraft collaborations read from the pages of my Corrected Fifth Printing of The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions. Today's stories appear in the "Secondary Revisions" section of The Horror in the Museum ; editor S. T. Joshi describes…
Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories from 1920s issues of Weird Tales , the widely beloved pioneering speculative fiction magazine. Today we are going to tackle four WT stories from the era by an author closely associated with WT , H. P. Lovecraft, stories I haven't blogged about yet, though I may have read some of them in the distant past. I will be reading them from my Arkham…
During a period in 1924 and 1925, many stories in Weird Tales bore a heading that tightly integrated title and illustration in a rectangle as here Back in 2020 we read four stories H. P. Lovecraft produced in collaboration with C. M. Eddy, Jr. Today let's read three stories published under Eddy's name in Weird Tales that deal with themes far removed from those we associate with HPL. Read along…
Galen C. Colin has four fiction credits at isfdb, three of them for stories that appeared in Weird Tales in the year 1924. At the Tellers of Weird Tales website , you can find a biographical article on Colin by Terence E. Hanley; Colin was a big player in the world of printing and journalism in his home state of Kansas and author of many Western short stories and novels. As part of our effort to…
Robert Bloch. August Derleth. Henry Kuttner. Ray Bradbury. David H. Keller. Hannes Bok. Edmond Hamilton. These are the names we associate with the McIlwraith era of Weird Tales , and these are names that dominate the 1943 issues of WT I have just finished exploring. As you perhaps know, I have sworn a vow to unnamable powers to read at least one story from every issue of Weird Tales , and have…
After today I will have read at least one story (in fact it looks like I will have read at least three stories) from each of the six issues of Weird Tales with a 1943 cover date. We are making progress in our grand quest to have read something from each issue of Weird Tales , a periodical the life of which spans from 1923 to 2025. And today may be a red letter day, with stories by blockbuster…
It's time for another trip to the dark and dangerous world that is Weird Tales , the essential pulp magazine, edited, from 1940 to 1954, by Dorothy McIlwraith. Today, the September 1943 issue. We've looked into this issue already to admire "Fredric Brown's story "The Geezenstacks" and a Hannes Bok illustration. But it is stories by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and Ralph Milne Farley that bring us…
Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading a 1965 edition of the 1953 collection E Pluribus Unicorn by Theodore Sturgeon, the man who brought you such bizarre utopian visions as "If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" , "The Skills of Xanadu," and "...And Now the News," as well as those wacky tales of alien invasion, "Make Room for Me" and "The Incubi of Parallel X."…
In July, at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle, I bought a copy of the 1965 paperback edition of the 1953 Theodore Sturgeon collection E Pluribus Unicorn because of the Richard Powers cover. Today let's read three stories from the book, stories from the early 1950s--I have chosen stories specifically because they did not debut in Weird Tales , because I am going to read Sturgeon's WT stories as…
It seems some ne'er-do-well hacked into my X account and put up some posts that break the X rules and so my X account has been suspended. Many of my blog posts here include links to my X posts, and I have no idea if those links will send you to my photos of SF books and sculptures at art museums or some other less savory or even unsafe content, so I am posting this as a warning and/or apology. I…
After "F" comes "G." Back on July 9, we read three stories published in 1959 by authors whose names begin with "F," stories that Judith Merril, renowned anthologist, had recommended. On the same list of Honorable Mentions in the back of Merril's critically acclaimed The Year's Best S-F: Fifth Annual Edition we find six stories by author's whose names begin with "G." We're reading four of these,…
Deyv said, “This is all very well, but how does it concern me? I won’t live nearly as long as a tharakorm , and these gateways terrify me. They are not guaranteed entrances to places where the Earth won’t die—for an unimaginably long time yet. Anyway, what is life to me without my own soul egg and my tribe, the people I know and love?....No, I’m not going one step further on this crazy quest of…
What now? What did the forces want her to do next? Leave the house, try to get away in the darkness? No. The murderer was out there, watching, waiting; he would see her if she tried to leave, and she couldn't outrun a man through the snow. Hide? No. There wasn't anywhere to hide that she wouldn't be found. 1981 paperback edition A year or so ago, I guess, I spent four dollars on a 1979 Playboy…
We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are exploring 1959 speculative fiction, and we've got a map to guide us, a map drawn by that Trotskyist cheerleader of the New Wave, Judith Merril. The map comes from the back of Merril's fifth Year's Best anthology, where lies a long list, alphabetically organized, of Honorable Mentions. Of course, I am not making every stop on the map; today, as we travel through…
As chronicled in my most recent overly long blogpost , I downloaded a scan of the 600th issue of Amazing Stories , published in the year 2000. Today let's read the Harlan Ellison story included in the issue, and two other stories from the Y2K period by SF's bad boy. As I write this, the below links will get you to scans of publications including today's stories, but no guarantees--the high seas of…
Usually here at MPorcius Fiction Log we read old stories, but today we're mixing things up and reading some recent speculative fiction. Last week I was in the District (you might know it as The Swamp) and took a look at the clearance carts at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle. Among the books available was a copy of the 800-page anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual…
We recently read a story from the October 1956 issue of Infinity by Harlan Ellison, and I noticed that advertised on the cover of the issue is a story by Damon Knight I have not read. So let's read it! And two other stories Knight published in the same period. We've already read a bunch of stories by Knight printed in 1956; "The Country of the Kind," "Stranger Station," "The Beach Where Time…
Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories from my paperback copy ( signed by the author! ) of Alone Against Tomorrow by Harlan Ellison. Three stories today from the "man of passion," as Cecil Smith of Los Angeles Times likes to call him, "Try a Dull Knife," "In Lonely Lands," and "Eyes of Dust." Sounds life-affirming, eh? To read the exact same versions I am reading of these stories, try…
In my last blog post I mentioned that I own a signed paperback copy of Harlan Ellison's Alone Against Tomorrow . Over ten years ago, at a Half Price Books location in Iowa or Ohio, I paid just two dollars for the volume, a 1979 Fifth Printing. Let's look at the contents page and figure out which stories I haven't read yet and then read three of them. And don't fret, I will wash the Ovaltine off my…
We're still doing this, looking at the list of Honorable Mentions at the back of Judith Merril's 1960 Year's Best SF anthology and reading selected stories from it. Last time was "D"s, today is "E"s. Only two stories today, because Merril only has three "E" recommendations, and one is Harlan Ellison's "The Abnormals," which we read in 2024 under its later title "The Discarded" in my signed…
The lake of the Horibs lies at a considerable distance from the eastern end of the mountains of the Thipdars, perhaps five hundred miles, and where there is no time and distances are measured by food and sleep it makes little difference whether places are separated by five miles or five hundred. The time has come to read the thirteenth Tarzan book and the fourth Pellucidar book, Tarzan at the…
Let's read three early 1930s stories by that titan (or as we might start saying after today, Anakim) of the weird, Clark Ashton Smith, the California-based poet, short-story craftsman, sculptor and painter. Today's stories debuted in Hugo Gernsback's magazine of prophetic fiction, Wonder Stories , so these might be more like science fiction stories than actual weird tales, but we'll see to what…
Welcome back to MPorcius Fiction Log and to another 1943 issue of Weird Tales. Big names today, including two of the biggest, plus one of H. P. Lovecraft's closest associates and Robert E. Howard's literary agent. Within this July '43 issue of D. McIlwraith's magazine we also find a decent new illustration from Hannes Bok of a very skinny guy and a bunch of nice Boris Dolgov illos of monsters…
The last time we mined stories from the Honorable Mentions list at the back end of Judith Merril's Year's Best SF: Fifth Annual Edition , we read stories by four people whose names began with "C" and with whose work I was not very familiar. Today we've got some Merril-approved "D"s and two of them are pretty famous writers whose work I have read, Avram Davidson and Gordon Dickson , while two of…