I have been spending the last three months on research – that essentially means taking apart scans of Pulps so that I can aggregate the works of authors into definitive collections. There is something satisfying, terrifying, and ultimately, sad about a complete works of an old Pulpster.
Let’s take Jerome Bixyby for instance. That’s forty-three separate story texts. You can read them all and then…. There’s curiosity and anticipation at first but in the end a weird finality to it. Unless a lost work is discovered, that’s all folks! Bixby started off as a magazine sub-editor but in the end wrote at least one classic, “It’s a Good Life” that was filmed by Rod Serling with Billy Mumy back in November 1961. One more piece of the gigantic puzzle that is SF/F/H. And thank goodness, it’s so massive a canon. Imagine if you could read it all and then what? You’d be weeping like Alexander, with no more worlds to conquer.
This, of course, will never happen again. The time when a fan could “read it all” ended around 1940 with the explosion of magazines. Before that, there was Amazing Stories, Astounding, the Gernsback magazines and Weird Tales. Think of how much speculative fiction has been written since 1940!
Take heart, dear fan, Sturgeon’s Law saves us from desiring any such thing, because 90% of everything (including SF/F/H) is crud. (That’s hopefully what this blog does, help you find that 10% that isn’t.)
Which is a very long way of saying, I’ve been wading through a lot of crud. The Ray Palmer Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures certainly seem to suffer from Ted’s axiom. But even still, even though many of the stories aren’t great, there are still interesting bits of history. Like David Wright O’Brien, the nephew of Farnsworth Wright, who wrote a Jules de Grandin parody, wrote under six pseudonyms for Palmer, but died in the army in 1944. The final Edgar Rice Burroughs tales, the ERB pastiches by Palmer, under his elaborate personae of J. W. Pelkie. The Robert Bloch Lefty Feep stories, the Manly Wade Wellman Hok the Mighty stories, the Adam Link stories of Eando Binder, the Shaver Mystery tales of Richard S. Shaver and many, many more. So even if it’s crud, and much of it is, there’s always something to catch the fan’s eye.
There is a bit of a caveat for the fan looking for a lost gem or SF moment. Just because it’s new to you doesn’t mean it is to everyone. I’m a child of the 1960s. Feuds and tempests from teapots that occurred before 1975 probably escaped my attention. A good example of this was the piece I wrote called “Tarzan Never Dies”. Ray Palmer’s attempt to co-opt the Edgar Rice Burroughs franchises of Tarzan and John Carter failed in 1955. This was exciting news to me. Of course, someone at Erbzine (the best online source of Burroughsiana) had written about it years ago. Sigh.
Researching can make you feel that it is pointless to try and encapsulate SF/F/H, but that is not really our goal here at all. I don’t want to sum up the last 100+ years of Science Fiction. We aren’t an encyclopedia. I think the closest thing that this blog aspires to is the old annuals that Brown Watson and G. G. Swan sold. It’s a hodge-podge of different, fascinating stuff that collectively captures the excitement of a particular (some general) topic. We aren’t going for authority (we’ll leave that to others) but joy. In a way that The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction can not arouse the blood of the true SF/F/H fan, I wish to do that. So get your tin-foil hats, your Buck Rogers blasters, your almost complete collection of Micronaut figures ready because more posts are on the way.
If you haven’t guessed it, this was supposed to the editorial for Dark Worlds Quarterly #5. Oh well…
