Twitters of note

Joyce Carol Oates

@JoyceCarolOates

Jul 24

(a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. this is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own “privilege.”) twitter.com/JoyceCarolOate…

jonathan agin

@jonathan_m_agin

·

Jul 24

I’m her friend. sorry guys I’ll do better.

NOT SO LONG AGO, the New York Times did a story about English-language books published between 1950 and 2018 and found white authors wrote 95% of those books. In the last year of the NYT survey, the number was 89%. All this in a country where 57% of the population is white according to the most recent census, which typically under counts POC.

Excuse me for my lack of tears for all those brilliant “privilege” writers—even if they “may” be willing to disparage their birthrights by publishing more books—especially since this literary agent just told POC authors: Do not apply.

A Few Bookshelves

I ONCE heard a Rikers Island inmate say, “Everything good in my life came because I read a book.” Nowadays, like most of us, I have been spending a lot of time at home feeling like a prisoner. Luckily I own a lot of books. The photos here show a few shelves of my library in Delaware. I always thought you can tell a lot about a person from their personal library. (Or maybe not.) All the books I have on my shelves are worth re-reading, including the ones I don’t remember reading in the first place.

Carol Emshwiller Memorial

LAST SATURDAY I went to the memorial for Carol Emshwiller at the Anthology Film Archives in NYC. It was billed as a “gathering of celebration and remembering” and that it was. Carol died the morning of Feb. 2 at the age of 97. I first met her when she was 81, but it seems like I knew her all my life — as if she were family. I did not plan to speak at the the gathering, but listening  to other speakers I got up and said a few words. After a long nonstop drive to get there, and having received bad news the day before of a loved family member possible cancer diagnosis, I felt tongue-tied. What I was trying to communicate was how comfortable I felt around Carol. How warm, open and welcoming she was every time I visited her. She wore her feelings on her sleeve, and I liked that about her.

I felt as if she was family because I have been reading her stories since  the age of 14. I vividly remember the first story of hers that I read. That was “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” in a paperback edition of  Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology. At the time I thought that it was one of the best things in the book. I still do.

Since then I have edited 2 collections of her stories. When I first approached her about doing the Collected Stories she wanted to leave out her very early 1950s fiction, which she believed was clumsily written and not very good. I remember telling her how rare it is for a writer to begin writing at the top of their game. “Not everyone is James Joyce.”

In reading all her stories I was fascinated by her progress and seeing the development of themes and ideas. “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” was the story she had near to hand when Ellison came calling. Carol was writing her own dangerous visions without any prodding. She was not interested in fitting into the “normal” world around her as a writer, and this mindset always seemed to lead her back to science fiction. This was the one place where she could write about anything she wanted to.

What she wrote about was love and insecurity, and dreamers. There is one story where a character crosses the street when someone is on the same sidewalk, so as not to have her daydream interrupted. Carol told me this was something that she did in real life.

Many times Carol felt minimized when she helped her husband in his career — as model, assistant, actor, writer on his films, and general muse. In 1975, after a little contretemps,  Ed created a certificate of appreciation for her. This certificate was read at the memorial so that Ed’s voice, in spirit, was part of the celebration. When I started interviewing her for my  book Emshwiller: Infinity x 2 all those years ago, she seemed surprised that I was just as interested in her life as her husband’s. I told her that I couldn’t tell his story without telling hers. She seemed pleased by this. To my thinking, Carol’s career was the equal of her husband’s. Her stories were generous and candid gifts to readers.

Paul Di Filippo reviews The Science Fiction Fanzine Reader

This immensely valuable and entertaining volume … captures for posterity a chronologically delimited slice of the subculture of science-fiction fandom — currently dying or healthy; vanished or extant? — in such a manner that even those folks who have no prior inkling of the subculture — assuming they possess a modicum of curiosity and intelligence — should still be able to completely grok the subject matter and derive amusement and pleasure and wisdom from this richly annotated compilation.

READ THE FULL REVIEW of our new book The Science Fiction Fanzine Reader at Locus.

Carol Emshwiller is Gone

CAROL EMSHWILLER, the author of wonderfully brilliant fantastic stories and novels, died last Saturday morning at the age of 97. She was born Agnes Carolyn Fries on April 12, 1921 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but from childhood she preferred to be called Carol because at the time it could pass for a boy’s name. It is almost miraculous that she became a writer given that she exhibited signs of dyslexia while growing up and hated anything to do with writing. She once told me that it didn’t help that as a girl living in France she found the combination of hearing English and French spoken together confused her even more. Her father was a linguistic professor but put more emphasis on the education of his sons than his daughter, so it was an easy decision for her to leave college, midterm, to serve in the Red Cross during WWII. She was stationed in Italy where she  happily drove a truck delivering supplies.

After the war she met Ed Emshwiller in a life drawing class at the University of Michigan where both were art students. They married soon after they graduated and on their honeymoon toured a post-war Europe on the back of a motorcycle. Returning to America the couple settled in in the newly built community of Levittown, outside New York City, where Ed quickly established himself as a much-in-demand commercial artist specializing in science fiction illustrations. During this time Carol would tag alone with her husband to science fiction gatherings where she met Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Cyril Kornbluth, Arthur C. Clarke, Judith Merril and other science fiction writers. Listening to their conversations about the mechanics of fiction writing led her to attempt her own stories.

Carol published her first science fiction story in Future Science Fiction (December 1955), and became a semi-regular presence in science fiction magazines over the next decade. Writing was done whenever she found time outside her everyday job as wife and mother. But it was not until one of her stories appeared in Harlan Ellison’s landmark 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions that the science fiction field took notice of her. “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” was already written when Ellison’s call for “dangerous” cutting edge stories came, but the story, about a woman spying on an alien-like, obese neighbor, with a “moon face”, whose only real peculiarity, to her, is a penis, captured the theme of the book perfectly and was a notable story in a book full of notable stories. In one scene the unnamed protagonist is hiding under a desk in Mr. Morrison room:

Where could he have bought those elephantine undershorts? In what store were they once folded on the shelf? In what factory did women sit at sewing machines and put out one after another after another of those otherworldly items? Mars? Venus? Saturn more likely. Or perhaps, instead, a tiny place, some moon of Jupiter with less air per square inch upon the skin and less gravity, where Mr. Morrison can take the stairs three at a time and jump the fences (for surely he’s not particularly old) and dance all night with girls his own size.

At the time “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” was published she was already moving away from science fiction, and her writing took a deliberate literary turn after she met Kenneth Koch and became a student in his poetry classes. Her first book, a collection of stories, titled Joy In Our Cause came out in 1972 and eschewed much of her science fiction (it did include the hard to classify “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison”).

By the early 1980s she had lost patience with the slow response times of literary magazines and went back to writing fantasy and science fiction. She now embraced genre fiction whole-heartily and began turning out some of her best writing. Stories began to appear in Omni, Twilight Zone Magazine, The Village Voice Literary Supplement, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. This was a period when she was writing confidently and most of her stories found a home.

Her first published novel Carmen Dog (a previous attempt was stopped midstream when her agent Virginia Kidd give the manuscript a negative evaluation), a picaresque tale about a world where all the women turn into beasts and beasts become human came out in 1990 and was seen by many as a feminist tract. She wrote a western novels, Ledoyt and its sequel Leaping Man Hill, because she wanted to write about the west after having live there.

Carol became a full-time writer after Ed died in 1990. In 2002 she won the Nebula Award for her story “Creature”, and Philip K. Dick Award for her novel The Mount. A World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award followed in 2005, after which she said, “This should be typical of a mother of three’s career”.

Emshwiller was a meticulous writer, constantly tinkering with her prose. Before she brought her first computer she would cut pages into pieces (like William Burroughs, a writer she disliked) and work on rewrites by rearranging pieces of her typescript on the floor.

In the introduction to The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1 (Nonstop Press) she wrote, “I’ve never known quite what to call my writing. When I’m boasting I call it Magic Realism…and some of it is…. It’s often fantasy though lots of it is actually science fiction.” It didn’t matter if she was writing fantasy, magic realism, westerns, mysteries, slipstream, or science fiction, all of Carol’s stories fell within a uniquely inventive, human-centric fantastika all her own. Carol continued to write until 2011 when failing eyesight due to macular degeneration made it impossible for her to see or read words on her Mac laptop.

I always looked forward to seeing Carol every time I visited her in that cramped one bedroom apartment on East 15th Street, in Manhatten. Over Starbucks coffees in paper cups we would gossip about authors and people in publishing before talking about family and what projects we were working on. I remember my first visit years ago; I mentioned that I was having trouble finding a copy of her first book Joy In Our Cause. She stepped behind the futon that served as the living room sofa and pulled out a box-full of books that likely weighed half as much as she did and handed me a copy.  She told me she had to dump boxes of the book when she made the move from the Levittown house to the smaller apartment. “I still have lots of them. I don’t think Harper & Row sold many copies.”

Over the past few years her health had been a concern to friends and family. She suffered a heart attack in 2012 and her children took turns coming to New York to take care of her. In 2018 as her health declined, and she needed a walker to get around, Carol finally moved in with her daughter Susan, also a writer.

I once asked her about the feminist tag that some people attached to her and she told me that she always made it clear to anyone who would listen that she wasn’t one of those feminist that disliked men. Many of her stories dealt with the frustrations of motherhood, and being a woman living in the same world with men. In her work, if one read closely, there was always love and  a lot of empathy directed toward men. At the end of my visits Carol would always kiss me goodbye on both cheeks in the French manner. I will miss her very much.

(Art — painting by Ed Emshwiller of Carol, c. 1957.)

Harlan Ellison: R.I.P or Approaching Oblivion

MOST CREATIVE PEOPLE want to be remembered after they die for their art — not bad divorces, bad-boy tantrums, sexual harassment, or general pugnacious behavior. I think that Harlan Ellison, who died in his sleep last week at the age of 84, would have been appalled at all the obits that give as much weigh to his antagonistic behavior — at times — as to his writings.  Some of these obits have compared Ellison to Hemingway and Norman Mailer, but they are not talking about literary merit.

These are two writers that Ellison wouldn’t have mind being linked to — in a literary context. The bad behavior is another thing. Some of this bad press is due to Ellison’s own myth making over a long career, including the fist and knife gang fights, run-ins with mafioso thugs, and a take-no-prisoners mindset when it came to dealing with editors, publishers, movie producers, network tv honchos, and fugghead fans. I can well believe one story that as a young author Ellison, after being stiffed on payment for a piece of writing, made a visit to the magazine office and ran out with a stolen typewriter that must have weigh a quarter of his own weight. But I don’t believe another story — when Ellison supposedly punched a network executive hard enough that he hit a wall and broke his hip — though Harlan would have been happy to tell you that story in detail. If Ellison had done a fraction of the violent things he, or his detractors, said he had done,  Ellison’s career would have been more like that of Chester B. Himes, who spent time in prison.

Ellison could be violent verbally, not to say that he was violent physically. Many times the object of his literary/verbal violence was justified, sometime not so much. Anger could get the best of him. But another trait in him was remorse. The macho posing belied a person bullied much of his childhood. As a grown-up he was not someone who suffered people he believed were trying to take advantage of him.

The last time I spoke to Ellison was some years ago when he phoned me, after his internet posse had “alerted” him to a book that I was suppose to be doing that used one of his stories without authorization. He was pissed-off until I explain things to him — by the end of the phone call he was offering all sorts of advice and support, and recommending stories of his for the project.

Now Harlan did not use a computer, and did not understand the internet. I don’t thing he realized that it was like an iceberg, with truth making up the flea on the penguin standing on the tip, and the gigantic underwater bulk of the iceberg being all the BS of everything else. So Harlan had a knee-jerk reaction — that fear, always, of being taking advantage of, of being bullied, is in his DNA. Did Harlan do some bad things? YES. Should his lifework be forever linked to, and devalued, because of all the bad things people think he has done? I don’t have an answer to that question. I think there will be more stories coming out about him — good and bad — in the coming years. My bet is that there will be more good than bad.

But all of these obits… My friend Paul Di Filippo has called the writers of these types of obits “graveyard ghouls”. I agree, it is fashionable nowadays to print myths told in the crowd than do the hard work of looking into the heart and soul of a complicated human being.

I will also point at Nat Segaloff’s recent bio of Ellison, A LIT FUSE, which, like these obits, does little to balance Ellison writings and his own macho-myth-fantasy. Why do people behave the way they do is one of those cosmic questions? Towards the end of A LIT FUSE we are told that in 2010 Ellison was diagnosed as bipolar shortly after attempting to end it all, like Hemingway, with a gun. Suddenly, without much of a lead-in, Segaloff  is ticking off boxes on a behavior health clinic intake sheet: Attention Deficit Disorder, hyperactivity, obsessive-compulsive, father issues.

There is an emotional analgesic effect that Ellison appears to have gotten from writing and Segaloff’s info-dump, late into a long bio, without any insight or any real sympathy, does not enlighten the proceedings.

Neither do all of these “graveyard ghouls” obits. Harlan Ellison deserved better.

Quote of the Month: Carl Sagan

1951 High School Yearbook photo of Carl Sagan

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…”

―Carl Sagan (born in Brooklyn, raised in the universe), The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995

Science Fiction Ruminations on Book Art

A SITE we recently discovered, sciencefictionruminations, showcases many book covers from our favorite genres and artists. Check out their Jack Gaughan page – ADVENTURES IN SCIENCE FICTION COVER ART: JACK GAUGHAN’S COVERS FOR WALKER & CO. (1969-1970).

Playboy Magazine & Imaginative Writers

HUGH HEFNER died this week but I’m not going to get into his role in the sex life of males post 1950s, or his debased brand of “feminism” here. One of the best things about Playboy magazine to me was its fiction. That it regularly published stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Finney, Roald Dahl, Frank Herbert, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen King, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Fred Pohl, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Avram Davidson, Robert Silverberg, Robert Bloch, J.G. Ballard, Bernard Wolfe, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and many other imaginative writers has not been fully recognized, I believe, by fans of the science fiction and fantasy genre. Lithub has done us the favor of presenting 10 of, what it believes are, the best stories published by Playboy magazine.

50-Year-Old SF Film Predicts the Future

THE FOLLOWING bit of dialog is from the British science fiction movie Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

“If we found the Earth was doomed, say by some climatic event, what would we do about it?”

“Nothing. We’d just go on squabbling, as usual.”

(American title is Five Million Years to Earth.)