1970s

What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. XXI

/ Joachim Boaz / 65 Comments
  • A selection of read volumes from my shelves

What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading or planning to read this month? Here’s the March installment of this column.

Recently I came across John Boston and Damien Broderick’s three-volume series examining each and every story and non-fiction article in the pre-Michael Moorcock New Worlds and Science Fantasy/SF Impulse magazines in the UK. John Boston is a valued member of my site’s community — frequently stopping by in the comment sections. I thought for this mini-editorial I’d list a handful of active community members with websites, books, and worthwhile SF-related fanzine articles. I, of course, could be missing a few. Community matters more than you might think. I enjoy the discussion. I enjoy reading reviews that others write — even if it’s on science fiction that might not be within my more narrow focus (the historian in me). I always want to learn and share what’s worth reading and/or historically interesting. Thank you one and all.

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What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. XX

/ Joachim Boaz / 53 Comments
  • A selection of read volumes from my shelves

What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading or planning to read this month? Here’s the January installment of this column (sorry I missed a month).

Before John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971) attempted to raise the “standards and thinking in magazine SF,” David Lasser (1902-1996) attempted his own brief (1929-1933) program to improve science fiction as managing editor of Hugo Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories, Wonder Stories, and Wonder Stories Quarterly. According to Mike Ashley’s The Time Machine: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazine from the Beginning to 1950 (2000), Lasser is a “much neglected revolutionary in science fiction” and through his efforts the genre “started to mature” (66).

Ashley highlights Lasser’s letter of instruction mailed to his regular contributors on the 11th of May, 1931, in which he “exhorted them to bring some realism to their fiction” (72). He also outlawed common tropes like the giant insect story and space opera (73). He emphasized the need to focus on characters that “should really be human” — not everything needs to be a “world-sweeping epic” (73). Stories in this vein, according to Ashley, include Clifford D. Simak’s religiously themed “The Voice in the Void” (1932), P. Schuyler Miller and Walter Dennis’ “The Red Spot on Jupiter” (1931) and “The Duel on the Asteroid” (1974), which featured a grim realism and character development (74).

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What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. XIX

/ Joachim Boaz / 58 Comments
  • A selection of read volumes from my shelves

What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading or planning to read this month? Here’s the December installment of this column.

Lost texts, and the act of reconstructing the fragments, fascinates. The questions pile up. Would the contents reveal a pattern in an author’s work? Intriguing personal details? A startling modus operandi? At the 11th World Science Fiction Convention (Philcon 2), Philadelphia (September 1953), Philip José Farmer gave a speech titled “SF and the Kinsey Report.” Considering Farmer’s recent publication of “The Lovers” (1952), this is not surprising. Alfred Kinsey, the famous sexologist and founder of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction on Indiana University’s campus, published his controversial Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female appeared in 1953. Like many of Farmer’s earliest speeches, he did not keep copies.

Deeply intrigued by what the speech might have contained, Sanstone and I (on Bluesky) managed to piece together a few general responses from fanzines and magazine con reports.

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Short Fiction Reviews: Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959) and James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972)

/ Joachim Boaz / 4 Comments

The following reviews are the 31st and 32nd installments of my series searching for “SF short stories that are critical in some capacity of space agencies, astronauts, and the culture which produced them.” Some stories I’ll review in this series might not fit. And that is okay. I relish the act of literary archaeology.

Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959) reframes the triumphant astronaut’s return home as the ultimate horror.

James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972) imagines the hallucinogenic journey of a post-human explorer severed from the experience of physical pain.

As always, feel free to join the conversation.

Previously: Clifford D. Simak’s “Founding Father” (1957)

Up Next: E. C. Tubb’s “Without Bugles” (1952), “Home is the Hero” (1952), and “Pistol Point” (1953)

A brief note before we dive into the greater morass of things: This series grew from my relentless fascination with the science fiction of Barry N. Malzberg (1939-2024), who passed away last month. Malzberg wrote countless incisive visions that reworked America’s cultic obsession with the ultra-masculine astronaut and his adoring crowds. As I am chronically unable to write a topical post in the moment, I direct you towards “Friend of the Site” Rich Horton’s obituary in Black Gate. If you are new to his fiction, I proffer my reviews of Revelations (1972), Beyond Apollo (1972), The Men Inside (1973), and The Gamesman (1975). The former two are relevant to this series.

  • Ed Emshwiller’s cover for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Robert P. Mills (January 1959)

4.5/5 (Very Good)

Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Robert P. Mills (January 1959). You can read it online here.

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Updates: Recent Science Fiction Purchases No. CCCXL (Philip José Farmer, L. Sprague de Camp, George Alec Effinger, and an Anthology of SF by Women)

/ Joachim Boaz / 26 Comments

A selection of SF volumes acquired over winter break!

Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?

1. Flesh, Philip José Farmer (1960)

  • Gerald McConnell’s cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “Spaceman by DAY… MONSTER by night!

Peter Stagg was caught in the vilest trap ever devised–his own lust-driven body! For FLESH is the pulse-stirring story of a space explorer’s return from the strangest voyage man had ever made–to the strangest world the universe had ever seen–his own Earth!

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Exploration Log 7: Interview with Jordan S. Carroll, author of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024)

/ Joachim Boaz / 22 Comments
  • Graphic created by my father

Over the last few years, I have attempted to incorporate a smattering of the vast range of spectacular scholarship on science fiction into my reviews and highlight works with my Exploration Log series that speak to me.1 Today I have an interview with Jordan S. Carroll about his brand-new book, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024). In the book, he examines the ways the alt-right uses classic science fiction imagery and authors to mainstream fascism and advocate for the overthrow of the state.

You can buy an inexpensive physical copy ($10) directly from the University of Minnesota Press website or an eBook version ($3.79) on Amazon.

Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. First, can you introduce yourself and research interests?

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My 2024 in Review (Best Science Fiction Novels and Short Fiction, Articles/Podcasts, Reading Initiatives, and Bonus Categories)

/ Joachim Boaz / 53 Comments
  • Graphic created by my father

Here’s to a happy reading in 2025! I hope you had a successful reading year. Whether you are a lurker, occasional visitor, a regular commenter, a follower on Bluesky or Mastodon, thank you for your continued support. It’s hard to express how important (and encouraging) the discussions that occur in the comments, social media, and via email are to me. This was the third year running of record-breaking numbers of viewers and views in the 13-year history of my site. What were your favorite vintage SF reads–published pre-1985–of 2024? Let me know in the comments.

Clifford D. Simak defined my 2024. Starting with a February review of his collection Worlds Without End (1964), I embarked on a fiction and non-fiction reading extravaganza that culminated in my article for Journey Planet, which I spent most of the summer writing, titled “‘We Must Start Over Again and Find Some Other Way of Life’”’: The Role of Organized Labor in the 1940s and ’50s Science Fiction of Clifford D. Simak.” Despite his Grand Master status, there’s little scholarship on Simak’s work and so much more to be done. As expected, there was little response to the article outside of my website. I also wrote two Exploration Logs on six of his interviews and his 1971 Worldcon speech and contributed to a podcast on “The Huddling Place” (1944) (the second City story). Sometimes you find a little niche that you never expected to inhabit which you feel there’s so much more to explore and say. I hope my Simak focus continues into 2025.

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Book Review: Future Power, ed. Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (1976) (Ursula K. Le Guin, Damon Knight, James Tiptree, Jr., Gene Wolfe, etc.)

/ Joachim Boaz / 17 Comments
  • Uncredited cover for 1st edition

4/5 (collated rating: Good)

What a way to finish 2024! Future Powers, ed. Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (1976) is a well-crafted thematic anthology with seven original stories and two older classics. Other than R. A. Lafferty’s average contribution, all the tales effectively engage with the theme of the complexities of future control both in everyday and the macropolitical contexts.

A few tantalizing fragments: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Diary of the Rose” (1976) explores the operations of dystopic control through the eyes of a neophyte doctor (“scopist”); Damon Knight ruminates on the nature and treatment of the psychopath in “The Country of the Kind” (1956); and A. K. Jorgensson’s “Coming-of-Age-Day” (1965) takes the reader through all the unnerving and confusing moments of a child in a strange future attempting to understand the nature of sex.

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What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. XVIII

/ Joachim Boaz / 67 Comments
  • A selection of read volumes from my shelf

What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading or planning to read this month? Here’s the November installment of this column.

Last week I wrote a post about Clifford D. Simak’s delightfully inclusive 1971 speech at the height of the New Wave in which he celebrated science fiction as a “forum of ideas” open to all voices. While reviewing the various snarky comments leveled at the movement by “classic authors” like Asimov, a faint memory of James Blish’s own anti-New Wave sentiments tickled my memory. I randomly opened up a book on my desk to figure out a fascinating SF tidbit to start this post, and voilà, the James Blish story.

Jacqueline Foertsch’s Reckoning Day: Race, Place, and the Atom Bomb in Postwar America (2013) contains a sustained analysis of Samuel R. Delany’s various post-apocalyptic novels. She includes a discussion of the response to Delany’s Nebula-winning The Einstein Intersection (1967). At the 1968 Nebula Awards Banquet, moments after Delany received his prize for Einstein (and where moments later he’d collected another award for “Aye, and Gomorrah”), Blish lambasted the New Wave. Blish complained about the “loosening of the genre’s parameters” and the “re-christening of the genre” as “speculative fiction” (98). I find all of this hilarious as Blish himself wrote fantasy novels like Black Easter (1968) (that would also nab a 1969 Nebula nomination) and far earlier oblique proto-New Wave speculative fictions like “Testament of Andros” (1953). I wonder if Blish aimed such vitriol at a figure like Simak, who took the loosening of the genre’s parameters to extremes during the New Wave–i.e. novels like The Goblin Reservation (1968), Destiny Doll (1971), and Out of Their Minds (1970). Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s surprising that Blish took especial issue with one of the few black SFF authors of the day.

And let me know what pre-1985 science fiction you’ve been reading!

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