Short Story Wednesday: Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, Jerome Bixby, Manly Wade Welllman, Ray Bradbury, Gahan Wilson et al: THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION March 1954 edited by "Anthony Boucher" and J. Francis McComas and FANTASTIC April 1954, edited by Howard Browne

Two issues off the shelf, and I thought I'd mention (in first pass, anyway) the stories I particularly remembered, from collecting and reading these two some years back or from reading beforehand the stories collected elsewhere, contemporary issues (as Fantastic was a bimonthly that year) and both published just over a decade before I was born. 

Neither has the best cover that either magazine would sport in their early years, though the F&SF cover did inspire Alfred Bester to write the impressive cover story, my default choice for his best short fiction.

Shirley Jackson's first short story for F&SF, "Bulletin", is a fine jape in the form of a story of apparatus, several fragments or documents returned from a time-traveler's investigation of the U.S. in 2123, including a scrap from the New York Herald-Tribune (well, it Could be possible again, eventually), a US history exam questions sheet from a frosh course in an unnamed college, a letter home from summer camp from a young boy, and a Your Weight and Fortune card...something a bit Retro even in 1954, I think. Jackson has the most fun with the history exam questions, running some jokes by us that could be a bit recondite even for relatively well-informed readers today, seven decades later ("Identify Twelve of the Following:", with the appended list including "Sinclair (Joe) Louis", and "Sergeant  Cuff"--the pseudonym once used, adorably, by Saturday Review magazine crime-fiction reviewer John Winterich, after the character in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone).

"5,271,009" digs a bit deeper, and is just as funny, as Alfred Bester introduces us to a humanoid alien who chooses to aid a human artist whose work he has admired, the latter currently locked up in a psychiatric hospital after some acting out. The mysterious Mr. Solon Aquila, who speaks in a jazzy patois that drops in phrases from various languages and types of English-language slang, forces Jeffrey Halsyon to undergo a series of psychodramas that rather savagely mock a number of childish and adolescent fantasies not altogether uncommon to fantasy readers/fans and rather more conventional people, alike. Bester once had it collected in an early volume as "The Starcomber" (a reference to Aquila, as akin to a beachcomber), but was convinced to revert to the magazine title for subsequent reprints.

"All Summer in a Day" is one of Ray Bradbury's most widely-reprinted stories, set on his fantasy of the planet Venus as an environment of endless rain, albeit at a livable temperature for its largely unprotected human colonists, including a young girl who is locked by her classmates away so that she misses the one afternoon of relatively clear skies and opportunity to romp about in recess one year. A bit heavy-handed, I thought even as I read it for the first time in a 7th-grade reading textbook, but makes its points; Bradbury apparently approved a 2002 sequel story by one Jason Marchi, originally published in Verbicide magazine, and eventually in a chapbook with the Bradbury story and introduction by Bradbury's old friend William F. Nolan.

"Dumb Supper", as Manly Wade Wellman originally called and would again title this John the Balladeer story, in the collection Who Fears the Devil? and subsequently, is a fine entry in this cycle, but I'll have to reread it to recall which events occur in this entry in the series vs. the others. They reward rereading, as prime examples of folk horror and fantasy decades before that term achieved its current fashionable status.

Robert Bloch's "Mr. Steinway", with a handsome, boldly inked illustration by Bill Ashman in this issue of Fantastic, is a fine example of a kind of haunted object story that Bloch executes here (and on most other occasions) with panache, one of the earlier examples of his work in this mode to appear other than in Weird Tales, the magazine which folded for the first long stretch in 1954, and which had helped launch or further the careers of so many of the best fantasy and horror writers of the early 20th century in English.

Jerome Bixby's "The Young One", involving a New Kid in town who definitely seems to have Something Odd going on (as do his parents), is an utterly charming story that I first encountered in one of Robert Arthur's YA "Hitchcock"-branded anthologies published by Random House in the 1960s. Happily, this kid is far less threatening than the protagonist in Bixby's most famous story, "It's a Good Life--"

Gahan Wilson has two of his first professional cartoons in this issue, having sold his very first to Fantastic for publication in the January, 1954 issue, and one can see the seeds of his career in the early examples here, and in the other Fantastic and stablemate Amazing Stories issues of the period...his drawing style not yet as distinctive, but the kind of subject matter he was drawn to already clear. His tenure at the Ziff-Davis magazines not nearly as long as it would be at F&SF during Edward Ferman's editorship; a pity for the ZD magazines and their readers.

Much as with the Wellman story, I know I've read (and enjoyed) the Sturgeon, which I read at least in Sturgeon in Orbit under his preferred title of  "Extrapolation", but will have to reread, at least skim, it to help segregate it from other good Sturgeon stories of the era.

Fantastic, April 1954 --can be read here

• Editor: Howard Browne
• Cover: Fantastic, April 1954 by Augusto Marin
• fep/inside front cover • Louis Priscilla: A Portfolio • essay by uncredited
• fep •  Louis Priscilla: A Portfolio • interior artwork by Louis Priscilla
• 4 • According to You ... (Fantastic, April 1954) • [According to You (Fantastic)] • letter column by various
• 6 • The Letter • short story by Doris E. Kaye
• 6 •  The Letter • interior artwork by Ernest Schroeder
• 23 •  Cartoon: no caption • interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
• 25 • Mr. Steinway • short story by Robert Bloch
• 28 •  Mr. Steinway • interior artwork by Ashman [as by Bill Ashman]
• 38 • The Young One • novelette by Jerome Bixby
• 38 •  The Young One • interior artwork by Sanford Kossin
• 62 • One Foot in Yesterday • essay by William Lindsay Gresham
• 62 •  One Foot in Yesterday • interior artwork by Ashman [as by Bill Ashman]
• 68 •  Cartoon: no caption • interior artwork by Hanna
• 70 •  A Portfolio • interior artwork by Louis Priscilla
• 74 • Beware the Fury • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon (variant of Extrapolation)
• 74 •  Beware the Fury • interior artwork by Louis Priscilla
• 79 •  Cartoon: "Could you direct me to the Vampire State Building?" • interior artwork by Frosty
• 95 • The Moon and Nonsense • novelette by William P. McGivern
• 97 •  The Moon and Nonsense • interior artwork by Louis Priscilla
• 101 •  Cartoon: "Sorry, sir--no browsing in the occult section." • interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
• 114 •  Cartoon: "No, No, Smithers! I said get me Rosenbaum!" • interior artwork by uncredited
• 116 •  Anything to Declare? • interior artwork by uncredited
• 116 • Anything to Declare? • short story by Eric Frank Russell [as by Naille Wilde]
• 127 •  Cartoon: "That surrealist stuff bores me." • interior artwork by Carl Geren