Mortimer Levitan (1890-1968)

Abraham Mortimer Levitan
Author, Lecturer, Attorney, Banker, Gourmet, Book Collector, Traveler, Amateur Photographer
Born February 21, 1890, Leavenworth, Kansas
Died February 16, 1968, Madison, Wisconsin

Mortimer Levitan had a long and distinguished career completely outside the realm of magazine fiction. His writing career was brief, but it included a story, "The Third Thumb-Print," in Weird Tales, his only one for "The Unique Magazine" and his last listed in The FictionMags Index. It's worth noting that Levitan was born in the same year as H.P. Lovecraft and Jacob Clark Henneberger. I have found only one Mortimer Levitan in public records. I assume him to be our man.

Abraham Mortimer Levitan, also called Abe Mortimer Levitan, was born on February 21, 1890, in Leavenworth, Kansas. (Some sources say Glarus or New Glarus, Wisconsin, a place that has its own interesting history.) He was the son of Solomon Levitan and Dora T. (Andelson) Levitan of Leavenworth. Born in the Russian Empire, Sol Levitan (1862-1940) came to America as a child, his journey coming as a reward for having saved his uncle from a pogrom carried out in Crimea. The older Levitan started out as a laborer and a "pack peddler." He worked his way up into prominence, twice serving as Wisconsin state treasurer and working as a bank president. He was also a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1924, which chose Calvin Coolidge as its candidate. Coolidge was of course president during some very good months and years at Weird Tales, from August 1923 to March 1929. We don't often consider the historical context in which Weird Tales was published.

Mortimer Levitan attended grade school in Glarus and graduated from Madison High School. He went on to study at the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1913, and Harvard University, from which school he received his law degree in 1915. Levitan had his own private practice in law in Chicago and Madison until 1932, when he became Wisconsin state assistant attorney general, a post he held for twenty-five years. In his career he handled over 600 cases before the Wisconsin Supreme Court and several before the U.S. Supreme Court. His career as an attorney was interrupted only by his service in the U.S. Navy during World War I.

The FictionMags Index lists six short stories by Mortimer Levitan, all published from 1918 to 1925:

• "The Stop-Over," in Young's Magazine (Mar. 1918)
• "The Manliness of Mr. Barney," in Young's Magazine (May 1919)
• "Daniel Decides," in Snappy Stories (1st, Jan. 1920)
• "Crawford Gets Paid," in Short Stories (Nov. 10, 1921)
• "Legerdemain," in McClure's Magazine (May 1925)
• "The Third Thumb-Print," in Weird Tales (June 1925)

His story for Weird Tales touches on eugenics and phrenology. It involves a means of determining whether a man is a criminal before he commits his crime, as in the movie Minority Report (2002), based on the novella by Philip K. Dick.

Levitan was a world traveler and amateur photographer, but his main avocation was as a gourmet and collector of cookbooks. These eventually numbered 2,615. In 1965, he donated his collection to the University of Wisconsin in honor of his mother.

Mortimer Levitan never married. He died on February 16, 1968, just five days before his seventy-eighth birthday, in Madison. He was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison.

Mortimer Levitan's Story in Weird Tales
"The Third Thumb-Print" (June 1925) 

Further Reading

• "U.W. Savors Gift of 2,615 Cook Books from City's No. 1 Gourmet" by Vivien Hone, in The Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin, January 14, 1965, page 1. This article includes a photograph of Levitan in his kitchen.
• "Mortimer Levitan, 77, Former Attorney General's Aide, Dies," in the Wisconsin State Journal, February 17, 1968, page 15. This article also includes a photograph of Levitan.
•  Many other newspaper articles.

(Abraham "Abe") Mortimer Levitan (1890-1968), his yearbook photograph from his senior year at the University of Wisconsin, 1913.

 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Weird Tales: The Houdini Issues-Part One

Harry Houdini
Né Erik Weisz
Aka Eric or Erich Weiss, Harry Weiss
Performer, Magician, Illusionist, Escape Artist, Actor, Author, Aviator, Technical Advisor, Movie Producer & Director, Public Speaker, Psychic Investigator, Skeptic, & Debunker
Born March 24, 1874 (O.S.), Pest (Budapest), Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire
Died October 31, 1926, Detroit, Michigan

A lot has been written about Harry Houdini. I'm not sure that I can add to it. Instead I'll just write about him in his connections to genre fiction, genre films, and of course Weird Tales.

Born in Hungary to a rabbi and his wife, Houdini grew up in Appleton and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, then in New York City. He began performing--on a trapeze--at age nine and became a professional magician in 1891. He performed on the vaudeville stage, in circuses and museums, at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and--off and on from 1906 to 1923--in films. He was supposed to have played Captain Nemo in an adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but that deal fell though. Instead, he appeared in a number of other genre films:

• The Master Mystery (1918), a fifteen-part thriller/mystery/science fiction serial on which Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) of all people served as a consultant.

• The Grim Game (1919), a crime thriller and aviation picture.

• Terror Island (1920), a South Seas adventure.

• The Man from Beyond (1922), a time-travel adventure with the ever-popular man-frozen-in-the-ice-then-thawed-out-and-reawakened plot device. There is also a depiction of reincarnation in The Man from Beyond, now interpreted as an attempt at reconciliation with Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), whom had been alienated by Houdini's skepticism and debunking of spiritualism, mediums, and séances. (1)

• Haldane of the Secret Service (1923), a crime/detective story. Released on September 30, 1923, it was Houdini's last film. Weird Tales was halfway through its first year when Haldane arrived in theaters.

Although his name was known the world over, Houdini began slipping in his career by the time the 1920s rolled around. His last movies weren't very successful and so he put that business behind him. In February 1924, he announced that he was leaving the vaudeville stage and going on a twenty-four-date lecture tour to talk about "his experience with fraud medium." (2) He also announced that he had signed a contract to write a series of articles on the same subject for none other than Weird Tales magazine.

Maybe it was a step down for Houdini to get involved in pulp fiction, but that's what he did, meeting Weird Tales publisher J.C. Henneberger in his Chicago office in early 1924. (3) The two men swung a deal, and that's how the Houdini issues of Weird Tales came about. I won't go into the particulars here. You can read about the people, places, and events involved in John Locke's history, The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales (2018), pages 136-156. Suffice it to say, Houdini had the cover story in three straight issues of the magazine, March, April, and the quarterly issue of May/June/July 1924. His likeness, by R.M. Mally, appeared on the first of the three, making Houdini the first author to be depicted on the cover of "The Unique Magazine."

To be continued  . . .

Notes
(1) In his biography, Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls (MacFadden, 1961), William Lindsay Gresham wrote: "The idea [behind The Man from Beyond] was probably suggested to Houdini by a story which appeared in The American Weekly about the body of a viking, complete with winged helmet and flaxen beard, which had been discovered in the Arctic, perfectly preserved after a thousand years." (p. 196) If we had the title of that story, we could add it to the Internet Polar Fiction Database and the Internet Viking Adventure Database. Was it one of A. Merritt's works? (My paperback edition of Gresham's Houdini lacks an index. Mention of Weird Tales and H.P. Lovecraft--"the late, great H.P. Lovecraft"--is on page 236.)
(2) "Houdini Leaving Stage," Minneapolis Star, February 23, 1924, page 8.
(3) John Locke suggests the week of February 11, 1924, as the period during which they met. See The Thing's Incredible!: The Secret Origins of Weird Tales (2018), page 138.

A still from The Master Mystery (1918), starring Harry Houdini. I believe the actress here is Marguerite Marsh (1888-1925). Inside the robot suit is Floyd Buckley (1877-1956), later the voice of Popeye the Sailor on radio and in animated cartoons. The robot is called Q the Automaton. You might think Q was one of the first robots in cinema, but there were robots on film as early as 1897. From The Secrets of Houdini by J.C. Cannell (Dover, 1973), facing page 244.

Here's a French-language version of the movie poster for The Master Mystery. The artist was E.G. I'm not sure why a robot needs a knife in order to carry out its mayhem. Maybe robots were different then.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Jewish Authors in Weird Tales

With his story "Fear" in the April issue of 1923, David R. Solomon (1893-1951) was the first Jewish author that I know of to be published in Weird Tales. There were others who followed and more, I'm sure, awaiting discovery as I go along in this blog.

So far, I have covered the following Jewish authors who were published in Weird Tales:

• Isaac Asimov (1919 or 1920-1992) was born in Russia and grew up in Brooklyn. He was the author of hundreds of books, including books on both science and the Bible. He considered himself a secular Jew.

• Max Brod (1884-1968), a native of Prague, fled the Nazi takeover of his city in 1939 and spent the rest of his life in the land that became Israel, and after 1948 was and still is Israel. He took with him the papers of his friend Franz Kafka (1883-1924), thereby saving them from destruction.

• Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) was one of the most well known--and perhaps notorious--of all science fiction authors. He called himself in more than one interview "a stiff-necked Jewish atheist."

• Myrtle Levy Gaylord (1895-1960), descended from Russian-Polish Jews, was born in San Francisco. She was a pulp fiction author and a journalist who worked in Spokane, Washington.

• S. Gordon Gurwit (1887-1955), originally Gurivit or Gurevit, was the son of Russian-born immigrants to America. His wife, Ruth (Stein) Gurwit (1894-1981), and son, Montgomery Stanhope "Monte" Gurwit (1920-1993), were also writers. They lived in Chicago and Florida.

• Henry Lieferant (1892-1968) was born in Austria, in a city that is now part of Poland. I don't know for a fact that he was Jewish, but I believe that he was. His original surname may have been something other than Lieferant. I base that supposition only on the fact that I haven't found anything on him from before the Great War. He came to the United States in 1910. His wife was Sylvia B. Saltzberg.

• Richard Marsh (Richard Bernard Heldmann) (1857-1915) was a British author of German-Jewish descent. His grandson was the author Robert Aickman (1914-1981).

• Edith Ogutsch (1929-1990), daughter of a cantor and teacher of religion, was born in Germany and escaped from the Nazi regime on board a Kindertransport to London. She grew up in England and came to America in 1947. She was primarily a poet. 

• Sylvia B. Saltzberg (1896-1952), wife and writing partner of Henry Lieferant, was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia or Lithuania. She worked in medicine in New York City before becoming a writer. She and her husband wrote a number of romances involving doctors and nurses.

• Nathan Schachner (1895-1955) was the son of Austrian-Jewish immigrants. He was born in New York City, educated in law and chemistry, and worked as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. He was director of public relations of the National Council of Jewish Women and a consultant with the American Jewish Committee.

• Oscar Schisgall (1901-1984) was born either in Russia or Belgium. Most sources say Belgium. His parents, however, were Russian Jews. According to the 1930 Federal census, he spoke Flemish before coming to America in 1925. His novel Swastika (1939) was adapted to the silver screen as The Man I Married, also known as I Married a Nazi (1940).

• J. Schlossel (1902-1977) was Joseph H. Schlossel, a Jewish writer who was born either in New York or Canada, lived in Canada for several years, after that in New York, and wrote just six published stories.

• Nadia Lavrova (1897-1989) was born Nadia Lavrova Shapiro in Irkutsk, Russia. I don't know for a fact that she was Jewish. At some point she dropped her surname Shapiro and went by the pen name Nadia Lavrova. However, her father was named Lazar Solomonovich Shapiro (1863-1934). If I understand Russian naming properly, that means his father was named Solomon, of course a Hebrew name.

• Henry Slesar (1927-2002) was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants whose native language was Yiddish and who came to the United States in 1921. He was an extremely prolific writer, including for CBS Radio Mystery Theater, a show we listened to when we were kids in Indianapolis. I believe it came out of a station in Chicago, and it played in the evening. I remember the sound of the creaking door and the host's closing words: "Until next time, pleasant . . . dreams?"

• Arthur Leo Zagat (1896-1949) was, like his writing partner Nathan Schachner, born in New York City and studied law and chemistry. In 1941, Zagat was elected to the national executive committee for the pulp writers' section of the Authors League of America. Oscar Schisgall served as chairman, while Zagat was treasurer.

I have also written about Jewish authors of science fiction and fantasy who were not in "The Unique Magazine":

• Ben Hecht (1894-1964)
• Marvin Kaye (1938-2021)
• Barry N. Malzberg (b. 1939)
• Arthur Porges (1915-2006)
• Robert Scheckley (1928-2005)
• Rod Serling (1924-1975)
• Herman Wouk (1915-2019)

I write on this topic today because of the current world situation. In September, I wrote about how old gods have returned to earth. Now we see clearly that an old hatred has returned, too. It is in fact one of the oldest hatreds in the world and has never really gone away. Like the plague in Albert Camus' novel, it withdraws from time to time into its hidden places, only to come forth again with renewed virulence. That hatred is of course Jew-hatred, and it lives again--more accurately it shows itself again--at our highest levels of government and academia, as well as in our news media. It also lives at the lowest intellectual levels, namely among high school and university students, White House interns, people on the Internet, and even members of Congress, who have chased, surrounded, harassed, threatened, attacked, insulted, chanted and protested against, and attempted to silence, intimidate, and dehumanize Jews, as well as the non-Jews who stand with them. These are human beings and our fellow Americans, and yet they have become fair game, as if this were Nazi Germany or tsarist Russia. I never thought we would see such things here, but the America that once was may not be any longer. Maybe we are at the beginning of a new terror and a new tyranny in our country.

In any case, I can imagine a group of Nazis and klansmen showing up at a pro-terrorist rally on a university campus somewhere in America. They believe the exact same things as the pro-terrorist students and professors, speak the exact same words, carry the exact same signs, only to be told, "Go away. These are our Jews to hate." Although they believe the same things, have the same aspirations, and are ultimately of the same piece, the supporters of terror and the apologists of pogrom believe themselves to be different from Nazis. As always, people on their side of the political spectrum lack self-awareness. I imagine also a different version of the scene in Blazing Saddles in which there are Nazis, klansmen, and other villains waiting in an employment line. Now add some twenty-first century university students and idiot congresswomen to the line and reverse the roles. Now Cleavon Little holds Gene Wilder by his shirt collar, shouting, "Hey, boys, look what I got here." Now the university students go chasing after the Jew, with glee, in hopes of harming or even killing him. Remember that the klansmen in the movie wear on their robes emojis, a major form of communication in our post-literate age.

There are probably those who would prefer that I not name or recognize Jewish authors, especially someone like Max Brod, who was a Zionist and who lived and died in Israel. But even Isaac Asimov, who considered himself an atheist and a liberal, was proud of his Jewish identity and heritage. He would not disavow his religion or culture or his own given name. According to journalist Stephen Silver, Asimov's "own personal success" was unimpeded by antisemitism. Nonetheless, Asimov found it "'difficult to endure . . . the feeling of insecurity, and even terror, because of what was happening in the world'." (From "Judaism Was Complex for Isaac Asimov, Whose 'Foundation' Series Is Now a TV Show" on the website of The Times of Israel, September 24 2021, here. The ellipses are in the original article. The full quote is from I, Asimov: A Memoir [1994], pp. 20-21.)

We know now that liberalism and progressivism are luxuries among Jews. In ordinary times, their political beliefs might be enough to ward off the subtler forms of anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred that live among their fellow liberals and progressives. But in times of terror, they will not protect them. Even an atheistic or socialistic Jew--a cultural versus a practicing or devout Jew--is Jewish enough to be subjected to anti-Semitic terror, murder, and imprisonment. In other words, in the hierarchy of progressivism, some people are worthy and some are not. Like women under transgenderism, Jews can and will be canceled, silenced, and erased, sometimes, as we have seen in the case of Paul Kessler, with lethal aims and results.

If they were still living, I might hesitate to name the Jewish authors listed above, as that might give terrorists, including intellectual terrorists, a list of targets to go after. But I name them, I recognize them, and I give them credit. I stand with them and with the Jewish people as individuals and as a whole, past and present, and with the nation of Israel in its fight against Jew-haters, murderers, rapists, baby-killers, terrorists, and pogromists. Their cause is righteous, God is with them, and I believe they will prevail.

I live in a small city that is home to a big university. On Saturday, October 7, I walked to a local museum to see an exhibit of art created by my friend S.P. Along the way, I walked through a student neighborhood. It was homecoming weekend, and so a lot of students were out in their yards, drinking, partying, and having fun. I saw a student wearing an Israeli flag like a cape. I didn't know then what had happened in Israel that day, but I'm always glad to see signs of support for Israel and for the Jewish people. If nothing else, the atrocities of that day have granted us a great moral clarity. It is absolutely crystalline, in high relief, precisely delineated, razor-sharp along its edges. We know now who is on one side of that line and who is on the other. In this era, there's a lot to be said for college students who like to drink and party and don't care anything at all about politics. Thank God for non-activists. But there is more to be said for one man who would wear--like a superhero--a flag bearing the blue Star of David in support of a people whom so many others, including in American universities, want to see exterminated and their nation destroyed. (Remember that the most popular superheroes were created or co-created by American Jews.) Last week, we witnessed the spectacle of three women on the opposite ends of academic power, three cowardly and morally reprehensible university presidents who were either unwilling or found themselves unable to condemn genocide against the Jewish people. Pick any other group and they would have spoken out against wiping them out. But in the halls of academia in America, the mass murder of Jews is nuanced and contextual, "nuance" and "context" being two words used to defend and apologize for these hateful women and their hateful ideas. Thankfully now one of them is gone from her position. We can only hope that the other two and all like them will soon be gone as well. They could go to work in fast food except that even in fast food there are standards of conduct that they could not meet.

The city in which I live is full of leftists, socialists, statists, progressives, and other kinds of Democrats. Some of these people put out yard signs, "Black Lives Matter" or "We Stand with Ukraine." This is of course extreme virtue signaling and conspicuous moral preening. In strong contrast, I haven't seen any "Jewish Lives Matter" or "We Stand with Israel" signs. The student with the cape stands alone. Never mind that Black Lives Matter, in its own words, "stands in solidarity with Palestinians," or that Black Lives Matter Grassroots issued a statement following the pogrom of October 7 beginning with these words: "When a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense."* In other words, those Israelis got what they deserved for being oppressors, including, I suppose, the Jewish baby baked in an oven.

As for Ukraine, we should remember that the previous democratically elected government in Ukraine was overthrown--with the support of the U.S. government and/or people and/or elements within our government, I might add--and replaced with an unlawful regime; that the current Ukrainian regime has declared martial law, delayed elections, outlawed certain political parties, barred people from traveling freely, silenced dissenters, closed down churches, oppressed ethnic minorities, and now has the power to and in fact does regulate its news media; that Ukraine is utterly corrupt in moral, financial, economic, and political terms, that corruption easily demonstrated in the case of our current president's ties to Ukraine and its oil industry, if not other industries; and that there are or were Nazoid or Nazi-istic elements within the Ukrainian military, if not the Ukrainian government itself. Go ahead if you want, stand with that Ukraine.

There are people who have tried to draw parallels between Ukraine and Israel. I would say to them: Ukraine is not a democracy and not an ally of the United States. Its agents and sympathizers in our government actually tried to bring down our president. Israel, on the other hand, is both our ally and a democracy. The Ukrainian government suppresses or has banned the political opposition. The leader of the opposition in Israel is now a member of the war cabinet. Ukraine is a failure, a giant scam disguised as a country, before the war a playground for the worst of Western corruptocrats. Again, witness the ties our current president, through his son, has to Ukraine. Israel on the other hand is not corrupt. It is a free country. Israel is also an economic success, which is, truth be told, one of the complaints that its enemies have against it.** Israel will continue in its war whether the United States and Europe support it or not. Ukraine can't continue in its war without that support. Its president and other leaders act like entitled beggars who believe we must support them, must continue to pour money into their open maws--or else, they threaten. Finally, again, there are or were Nazis, neo-Nazis, or people who play at being Nazis within Ukraine, including within its military. Think of it: we are sending aid, including military aid, to Nazis, or as I've called them, Nazoids. What kind of crazy world are we living in? What have our elites become in their utter derangement?

Anyway, it would of course be an absurdity to say that there are Nazis within Israel. In actuality, the people with Nazi-istic aims are on the opposite side, in Gaza, Judea, Samaria, and perhaps worst of all in Western governments and universities. These people live by pretzel logic. Russia is warring against Ukraine. Russia also supports the terrorists in Gaza. The pro-Ukraine people in the West are against Russia. Many of them are also against Israel (Jews in general) and in favor of the terrorists that are trying to exterminate them. Our current president is soft on Iran, which wants to destroy Israel and the Jewish people, and yet he's called "Genocide Joe" by the pro-pogrom people in America for his support of Israel, such as it is. The Canadian Parliament recently applauded a Ukrainian Nazi for fighting against Russia during World War II. Meanwhile, in America, there are antifa people who want to punch a Nazi, and yet I'm certain that there is a lot of overlap--maybe complete overlap--between them and the Jew-haters in our country. Antifa really likes Nazis and they want to punch them, both at the same time. How do these people keep all of their hatreds and all of their loyalties straight in their heads?

So is this blog the right place for these things? Maybe. Maybe not. But other than my yard, where I could put a sign that would probably be ripped out, it's the only place I have. Also, this is my blog, and I get to use it as I please. Beyond that, as a writer, I would like to have my thoughts known on such important topics, including as they pertain to other writers, their words, their ideas, and most of all their lives. Beyond that still, if we are to be decent people, we must call out and confront indecent people. These are, after all, the two races of men as identified by Victor Frankl, a Jew and a survivor of the Holocaust.

In these past two months, we have seen extremes of indecency and depravity, not only in the terrorists and pogromists of Gaza but also in their supporters and apologists in the West. On October 7, there were more Jews murdered in the world than at any time since World War II, more Americans killed at any one time by Islamist terrorists since 2016, and more Americans taken hostage by that same brand of terrorist since 1981. I think, anyway. It's hard to say for sure because the numbers and the facts are so hard to come by. It's clear that we're not supposed to know how many Americans were killed on October 7 nor how many are being held hostage by the terrorists. The figure I have for the number killed--33--is ultimately from a French-language source. Apparently, American "journalists," a really incurious group when you get down to it, can't bring themselves to look into or talk about these things. Ask the Internet how many Americans were killed or how many American hostages are being held. You will get nowhere fast. The facts and the figures have gone into the memory hole.

To get back to my point, we must speak out against indecency and depravity whenever we can, wherever we can, and in whatever way we can, especially when those around us remain silent.

So today I write in recognition of Jewish authors and in support of Israel and the Jewish people.

-----

*Never mind also that Black Lives Matter was founded by self-admitted "trained Marxists" and that they want to do away with the family, as Marxists do the world over. Remember that Marxism is very often anti-Jewish. In Karl Marx's own words: "In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism." (Apparently, Marx used the N-word when writing about his Jewish rival, Ferdinand Lasalle. That's supposed to be an unforgivable sin, but to Marxists, I guess, Marx was the perfect man.) Remember that a Jew, Leon Trotsky, was one of the lead villains in Stalin's great, horrific, decades-long drama of terror, and that another, the fictional Emmanuel Goldstein, plays that same role in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Now remember the words of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., regarding the oppression of Jews in the Soviet Union, from fifty-seven years ago this week:

"We cannot sit complacently by the wayside while our Jewish brothers in the Soviet Union face the possible extinction of their cultural and spiritual life. Those that sit at rest, while others take pains, are tender turtles and buy their quiet with disgrace."

Whom do you prefer, Dr. King or BLM? Like Ukraine, Black Lives Matter is a scam, essentially a moneymaking operation for its leaders. Go ahead if you want, support that scam, too.

**Socialists, whether they be Nazis or Bolsheviks, are anti-liberal. They despise free-market economics and free associations among men made outside of the State. These things they call capitalism. Where there is freedom, some people will have more than others. Some will be more successful than others. That's one of the reasons that socialists hate freedom, especially free economic activity. Non-Jewish envy of Jewish success partly--or maybe wholly--explains the hatred that socialists have for Jews. As Ambrose Bierce wrote, success is "the one unpardonable sin against one's fellows." Remember here that the Palestinian Liberation Organization includes or has included Marxist, socialist, and Maoist groups. Remember also that some of the most rabid anti-Israel and anti-Jewish Arab regimes are or were Ba'athist regimes, Ba'athism being just another brand of socialism. Finally, remember that António Guterres, the current secretary general of the United Nations, by the way another Jew-hating organization, is also a socialist. He as much as anyone wants Israel to lose and the terrorists and Jew-murderers to win this war. We can predict that the closer Israel comes to victory, the more desperate will be the calls for ceasefire from him and his fellow travelers.

So, as an aside, a maxim:

If people are free, they will not be equal. And if they are to be made equal, they can't be permitted their freedom.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

David R. Solomon (1893-1951)-Another Story of the South

Author, Journalist, Military Officer, Attorney, American Legion Leader
Born July 9, 1893, Meridian, Mississippi
Died November 15, 1951, Birmingham, Alabama

David Rosenbaum Solomon was born on July 9, 1893, in Meridian, Mississippi, to Samuel Isadore Solomon, a bookkeeper/accountant and a native of Nisstadt, Germany/Poland, and Fannie (Rosenbaum) Solomon. I'm not sure where Nisstadt is or was. It may have been Neustadt, a district in Prussia.

David R. Solomon graduated  from the University of Mississippi with a bachelor of arts degree in 1915 and a bachelor of laws degree (Ll.B.) in 1916. He practiced law in Meridian from June 1916 to January 1918. While trying to enlist in the U.S. military during the Great War, he worked as a journalist with the Washington Times. On May 24, 1918, Solomon succeeded in enlisting in the U.S. Army and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He served in the 33rd Field Artillery from May 24, 1918, to December 12, 1918, and was stationed at Camp Jackson, South Carolina. He did not serve overseas.

Upon returning to civilian life, Solomon relocated to Birmingham, Alabama, and that's where he spent the rest of his life. On November 1, 1920, he married Madeline Alva Hirshfield in Birmingham. He was with a firm called Leader & Ullman in that city until November 1922, when he opened his own law practice. Even then he was known as an author of magazine short stories.

The first credit by David R. Solomon listed in The FictionMags Index is a vignette called "Her Visit" in Saucy Stories, April 1917. That was in the same month in which the United States entered the Great War. Solomon's next credit, a short story called "The Pikesteps of Pindar," didn't arrive until the May 31, 1919, issue of Argosy. From then until September 1934, Solomon had stories in Argosy, The Black Mask, Cosmopolitan, The Designer and the Woman's Magazine, Detective Story Magazine, Hearst's International, Munsey's Magazine, People's Story Magazine, Top-Notch Magazine, and other titles. He had just one story in Weird Tales and two in Detective Tales, both in the first year those two magazines were in print.

It looks like David R. Solomon's younger brother, Mendel Moses Solomon, was also an author of pulp stories. Born on August 20, 1895, in Meridian, Mississippi, he enlisted on the same day as his brother, May 24, 1918. Whereas David remained stateside, Mendel served overseas with the 152nd Infantry Regiment, from October 1918 to May 1919. He was discharged on May 12, 1919. From 1922 to 1931, Mendel had stories in Argosy Allstory Weekly, Detective Story Magazine, Thrilling Detective, and Top-Notch Magazine. He also had one story in Detective Tales, "The Double Cross," in March 1923, the same month in which David R. Solomon's story "Fear" was in Weird Tales. A businessman, author, and philosopher, he died in Meridian, Mississippi, on September 30, 1954. Neither man survived his fifties.

David R. Solomon was well known in Birmingham both as an attorney and as a writer. He was associated with other Birmingham writers, too, some of whom also contributed to Weird Tales. In October 1936, he served as a judge on the board for the fifth anniversary of the Birmingham News-Age-Herald's short story department. That department was conducted by Artemus Calloway (1883-1948). The other judges were Pettersen Marzoni (1886-1939) and Edgar Valentine Smith (1875-1953). The winner of the fifth-anniversary contest was Don Elwell. The story the following week was by Howard Ellis Davis, Jr., son of Howard Ellis Davis (1883-1948), who also had a story in the first issue of Weird Tales. That one is still to come in this series.

I have a couple of more credits for David R. Solomon, "The Official Ear," a short story syndicated by the Chicago Tribune in December 1923; and a short story called "Man Shy" which was to have been turned into a movie by the Birmingham Amateur Movie Association in 1928. "His short stories delighted readers of the big slick magazines," wrote the Birmingham News, "[b]ut he loved the law more than writing entertaining fiction, so he dropped writing altogether." (1) That appears to have been in 1934. Solomon afterwards devoted himself to serving his community and his fellow veterans.

Solomon was the commander of the Birmingham post and a member of Jewish War Veterans; commander of General Gorgas Post No. 1, American Legion; and state judge advocate of the Alabama department of American Legion. He also served with the Red Cross during World War II. He died prematurely, four days after Armistice Day, on November 15, 1951, in Birmingham. His hometown paper remembered him: "This community misses David R. Solomon--and he will long be missed. For Dave Solomon was one of those rare souls with a zeal for good work and a sense of humor that sparkled the path before him" (2)

David R. Solomon's Stories in Weird Tales and Detective Tales

Weird Tales

• "Fear" (Mar. 1923)

Detective Tales

• "The Invisible Assassin" (Feb. 1923)
• "Fog" (Mar. 1923)

Further Reading

A full and very interesting page on the Birmingham News-Age-Herald's short story department, October 4, 1936, feature and magazine section, page 2.

Notes
(1) "The doughboy's friend" in the Birmingham News, December 3, 1951, page 1.
(2) Ditto.

David R. Solomon's Story:

"Fear" is a very short story, taking up only three and a half pages in the first issue of Weird Tales. It's a pretty minor story, really just a brief tale. Once again, we have a story set in a Southern swamp. Once again, there is a conversation that begins around a campfire. Once again, we have a man and his daughter, who is named Ruth, with the mother nowhere in sight, just as in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes." (Surely there were other names for women besides Ruth in the 1920s.) And once again, there is a recounting of a man getting snake-bitten, just as in "Hark! The Rattle!" There is a mild, possibly humorous, twist at the end of "Fear." The story is only three and half pages long. You might as well read it as skip over it.

1922

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

S. Gordon Gurwit (1887-1955)

Newspaper Reporter, Cartoonist, Author, Poet, Playwright, Screenwriter, Painter, Pianist

Born December 14, 1887, New York, New York

Died March 11, 1955, Miami, Florida

Samuel Gordon Gurwit was born on December 14, 1887, in New York City. His parents, Isaac and Lucy (Rosenberg) Gurivit or Gurevit, were Russian-born Jewish immigrants recently arrived in America. Their surname is a variation of Gurevich or Gurevitch and related to Horowitz, denoting an origin in Horovice, a place in Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic. We have seen another variation of that name before: Richard S. Shaver's first wife was Sophie Gurvitch (1903-1936).

I haven't found the Gurivit family in the 1900 census, but in 1910, they were in Chicago. Isaac was a designer in a cloak and suit factory. Both Samuel G. Gurivit and his younger brother Peter S. Gurivit (1893-1971) were working as newspaper cartoonists. Also in the household was thirteen-year-old May Gurivit.

On May 11, 1917, in Chicago, Samuel G. Gurwit--note the change in spelling--married Ruth Stein (1894-1981). Their son, Montgomery Stanhope "Monte" Gurwit, was born three years and a month later, on June 13, 1920, in Chicago. No one knew it then, but a writing family was thereby formed. Many years later, a Florida newspaper columnist called them "the 'writingest' family in St. Petersburg." ("Your Pinellas: Writing Family" by Peter Pinellas, Tampa Bay Times, June 17, 1941, p. 2.)

S. Gordon Gurwit started selling his stories and poems at around that time. His first credit in The FictionMags Index is an item called "--The Harder They Fall" in The Parisienne Monthly Magazine for February 1921. Before the year was out, he had a story in Breezy Stories, a poem in Snappy Stories, and his first genre story, "The Ghost Plays a Hand," in Mystery Magazine. Gurwit had his first story, called "The Letter," in Weird Tales in March 1933. His next contribution was a letter to "The Eyrie," published in June 1933. In all, Gurwit had dozens of stories and poems in pulp magazines and story magazines from 1921 to 1941. And then his byline seems to have disappeared, or at least that's the story suggested by the list in The FictionMags Index. Gurwit had previously been treated for incipient tuberculosis. A newspaper photograph from 1941 (below) shows him to have been very slightly built. (He was also smoking a cigarette or cigar.) Could he have fallen ill?

The Gurwit family was in Chicago in 1930, Manhattan in 1935, Pelham Manor, New York, in 1936, and in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1940. (Their name was spelled "Gurevit" that year.) By 1950, they were in Miami. Monte was a writer for magazines in 1950. Neither his father nor his mother gave an occupation.

S. Gordon Gurwit died five years later, on March 11, 1955, in Miami. He was sixty-seven years old. He was buried at Mount Nebo Cemetery in West Miami. Gurwit's widow married his brother, Peter Sherlock Gurwit, on June 11, 1957, in Alexandria, Virginia. Once employed with the Jahn & Ollier Printing Company in Chicago, Peter Gurwit died in 1971. Ruth Stein Gurwit Gurwit died in 1981, and her son Monte on July 8, 1993, in Lee County, Florida. Thus the writing Gurvits came to an end. They seem to have been a close and happy family.

* * *

S. Gordon Gurwit got his start as a reporter and cartoonist in 1909 working for the Denver Republican. In 1910, he moved to the New York Journal, where he was an assistant to editor Arthur Brisbane (1864-1936). From 1911 to 1914, he traveled in Europe while working for the London Graphic. Gurwit began writing fiction while he was working as a newspaper reporter. He also wrote poetry and at least one play, Other Men's Wives, which was adapted to film, possibly in 1919 under the same title. Gurwit may also have written movie scenarios, but I haven't found any credits for him in that realm.

From 1921 to 1941, Gurwit had dozens of stories in Argosy All-Story Weekly and Argosy, Breezy Stories, Five-Novels Monthly, Holland's Magazine, Liberty, Nickel Detective, Snappy Stories, South Sea Stories, Thrilling Adventures, Thrilling Detective, Thrilling Western, Wayside Tales, and other titles. He had three stories in Weird Tales and one in The Magic Carpet Magazine. He also had two letters in "The Eyrie." In its issue of August 10, 1938, the London Evening Standard published his "Law Is Law," No. 98 in its Six Minute Short Story series (p. 19). He also wrote a hardbound novel called Alias the Promised Land (1939).

Again, Gurwit led a writing family. Using the pen name Ruth Goodwin, his wife Ruth (Stein) Gurwit (1894-1981) wrote romances that appeared in Sweetheart Stories, Thrilling Love, and possibly other titles in 1941-1942. She was also a singer and worked in radio. The Gurwits' son, Monte Gurwit, wrote true crime articles as well as short stories, also for pulp magazines and story magazines. He was also a photographer and cartoonist and sometimes illustrated his own stories. He had true crime stories in Official Detective (Dec. 1940) and Intimate Detective. His name is not in The FictionMags Index. Maybe he wrote under a pseudonym like his mother. Official Detective and Intimate Detective are also not in that index, so no luck finding him in that way, either.

* * *

S. Gordon Gurwit's Stories & Letters in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazines
(from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database)
"The Letter" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1933)
Letter to "The Eyrie" in Weird Tales (June 1933)
Letter in Astounding Stories (Jan. 1934)
"Speed Planes for Moscow" in The Magic Carpet Magazine (Jan. 1934)
"World Flight" in Astounding Stories (Jan. 1934)
"The Pistol" in Weird Tales (Oct. 1934)
"The Golden Glow" in Weird Tales (Nov. 1934)
"'G'-Trap in Secret Agent X (Oct. 1936)

Further Reading

"Writing Gurwits Only Triple-Threat Family in St. Petersburg" by Dick Bothwell in the Tampa Bay Times, September 7, 1941, page 16. By the way, Bothwell was one of the first artists to draw a picture of the Flatwoods Monster.

S. Gordon Gurwit's "Speed Planes for Moscow" was the cover story in The Magic Carpet Magazine in January 1934. The artist was Margaret Brundage.

Gurwit had another cover story, "The Masked Terror, or, The Voice on the Wire," in Nickel Detective, March 1933. The cover artist was Eric Lundgren.

Gurwit's "G-Trap," a "G-Man" novelette, was the cover story of Secret Agent X Detective Mysteries. This cover, executed by William F. Luberoff, has a weird component.

I always like to show foreign-language versions of American short stories and novels. Here's "Dubbel Dynamit" by S. Gordon Gurwit in Detektivmagasinet Number 30. I don't know the title of the original story. I'm also not sure whether this is a Norwegian or a Danish title. This image is a distorted version of the original that I found on the Internet.

The Writing Gurwits, left to right, Monte, Ruth, and S. Gordon Gurwit, from 1941.

Text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley   

Marvin Kaye (1938-2021)

Né Marvin Nathan Katz

Author, Journalist, Editor, Publisher, Anthologist, Teacher, Magician, Actor, Comedian, Playwright, Stage Director

Born March 10, 1938, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Died May 13, 2021, New York, New York

Marvin Kaye died last year. He was the editor of Weird Tales magazine from 2012 to 2019. There were four issues published in that time, Fall 2012 (Elder Gods Issue), Summer 2013 (Fairy Tales Issue), Spring 2014 (Undead Issue), and 2019 (No. 363). There has been just one issue published since then, in 2020 (No. 364), this one under the editorship of Jonathan Maberry. Mr. Kaye was also the editor of six issues--the entire run--of H. P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror, from 2004 to 2009.

Marvin Nathan Katz was born on March 10, 1938, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents were Morris Katz (b. March 7, 1902, Joprow, Austria-Hungary; d. ?) and Theresa (Baroski, Barosky, Barowski, or Barowsky) Katz (b. May 30, 1904, Pennsylvania or New Jersey; d. March 16, 1966, Orlando, Florida). Morris Katz served on the Mexican border with the U.S. 13th and 6th Cavalry Regiments in 1917, so either he was a young teenager when he served or his birth year is inaccurate. I wouldn't rule out the former nor the latter. Either or both could be true.

The Katz family were Jewish. Marvin Katz was born in the same month as the Anschluss, in which Nazi Germany took over Austria. I don't know where in the old Austria-Hungary is the city or town of Joprow. Maybe Morris Katz's native place fell under Hitler's reign in the same week that his son was born. By the way, Marvin Katz was also born 360 days after the death of H.P. Lovecraft.

Morris and Theresa Katz were married in 1925 in Philadelphia. They had four children, Dorothy H. (1926-2020), Evelyn S. (1928-2017), Harold D. (1929-2001), and Marvin N. (1938-2021). You can find more about Marvin Kaye's life and career in other places on the Internet. I'll include here that he married Saralee Bransdorf on August 4, 1963, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. They had one daughter, Terry. She survives. We offer her and the whole Kaye family and their friends our condolences.

I don't know whether Marvin Katz ever changed his surname legally to Kaye. And whether it was a legal or literary move, I don't know when the change might have happened. Marvin Kaye's first science fiction or fantasy credits listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) are from 1975. Dozens of essays and other writing and editing credits followed, the last coming in 2019. It looks like Marvin Kaye was the one who originated the moniker "Weird Tales: The Magazine that Never Dies" in an anthology of the same name published in 1988. His wife, Saralee Kaye (1942-2006), was co-editor of that book and several others.

I wrote about Marvin Kaye in August 2015 regarding a then-recent Weird Tales controversy. Click here to read Part One of that series. I may have been a little hard on Marvin Kaye at that time. I may have written about some things beyond my direct knowledge. But then one of the problems then as now with Weird Tales is that there seems to be an effort on the part of the editors and publishers to hide what really goes on with the magazine. My question is Why? It's not like national security is at risk. (Secrecy is usually a pretty good sign of dysfunction in any organization, including in families.) Just tell us, the reading public, what is happening and let us figure out for ourselves how we ought to think about things. Anyway, I hope that I didn't give offense. If I did, I apologize.

Marvin Kaye was certainly multitalented. He had an admirable career, the kind that few men or women born in later decades have been able to attain. We should be thankful to him--and his wife--for bringing so much back from the past and placing it before us so that we might all enjoy it once again. Marvin Nathan (Katz) Kaye died on May 13, 2021, in New York City. He was eighty-three years old.

* * *

We have had another death in our own family. This is one too many. I will continue to write, but this year, which started out so well, has suddenly become one filled with grief for all of us.

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Readings Over Christmas No. 2-The "Lomokome" Papers by Herman Wouk

On the Monday after Christmas we drove all the way to the top of the great state of Indiana. We ate lunch in a local restaurant, visited a local museum, and shopped at a national chain, Half Price Books, the only store that I'm likely to name on this blog. I found a few books, including The "Lomokome" Papers by Herman Wouk (Pocket Books, 1968). I had not known that the late Mr. Wouk (1915-2019) wrote a science fiction story. I was happy to find it, especially considering that it's illustrated. The artist was Harry R. Bennett (1919-2012), a near contemporary of the author.

Herman Wouk wrote a preface to the paperback edition of his story. It's dated May 27, 1967, his fifty-second birthday. He wrote that he was inspired to try his hand at science fiction by reading Marjorie Hope Nicolson's "charming book" Voyages to the Moon (1948). "The moon trip can be a romantic adventure, a social satire, or a utopian sermon," Wouk wrote. "Mine is a mixture of these." The "Lomokome" Papers has a good deal in common with The Moon Maid (1925) by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Maza of the Moon (1929-1930) by Otis Adelbert Kline, including a crashdown on the Moon's surface, the captivity of the lunanaut, an examination of lunar society, and accounts of war among the people of Earth's lone natural satellite.

The word Lomokome deserves explanation. According to the author, it's a Hebrew word meaning "Utopia" or "Nowhere." So we have another utopian/dystopian work, as well as another utopian/dystopian work about the Moon and its necessarily alien society, one that may be uncomfortably close to our own. The "Lomokome" Papers is self-consciously in the tradition of the fantastic voyages of literature dating from ancient times to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of these are satires, as is Wouk's short novel, the narrator of which is Lt. Daniel More Butler, USN, his name self-consciously derived from the names Daniel Defoe, Thomas More, and Samuel Butler. What Lt. Butler discovers on the Moon is a solution to the murderous destruction of warfare. What he finds, we would not like.

The "Lomokome" Papers was written in 1949 and apparently first published in Collier's in its issue of February 17, 1956. Again, Wouk wrote his preface on May 27, 1967. According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb), the paperback edition was published in March 1968. My edition, with Harry Bennett's cover as shown below, is dated May 1968. It has since been published in Italian- and German-language editions. The timing of all of this is worth knowing, for The "Lomokome" Papers, in its proposed solution to the problem of war, is very much like the Star Trek episode "A Taste of Armageddon," written by Gene L. Coon and broadcast on February 23, 1967. Rather, it's the other way around. I have a feeling that if you look closely enough, you will find the roots or inspiration for many, if not most, Star Trek episodes in the magazine and book science fiction of the 1940s, '50s, and early '60s.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Summer Reading List No. 5-Strange Gods, edited by Roger Elwood

Strange Gods is an anthology of science fiction stories about religion. The editor was Roger Elwood (1943-2007). The cover artist was Charles Moll, about whom it's hard to find much of anything on the Internet. The book was published in 1974 by Pocket Books.

There are twelve stories in Strange Gods. The thirteenth at the table is an introduction by George Zebrowski (b. 1945). My favorites are the opening story, "High Priest" by J.F. Bone (1916-2006); "The Director" by James Howard (possibly a pseudonym); and the closing story, "Musspelsheim" by Richard A. Lupoff (1935-2020). "High Priest" is a post-apocalyptic story. "The Director" is dystopian, the other side of the Apocalypse-Dystopia (or fire-and-ice, or circle-and-arrow) coin. "Musspelsheim" is something different.

Barry N. Malzberg (I wrote about him last time) is represented twice in Strange Gods, once under his own name and again under his pseudonym K.M. McDonnell, which is Mr. Malzberg's tribute to C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner. Virginia Kidd (1921-2003) is here, too, with a poem. She was married to James Blish (1921-1975) for a time. You have seen his name in this blog lately, too.

I'll write only about "Musspelsheim" by Richard A. Lupoff. The late Mr. Lupoff is known for his work on Edgar Rice Burroughs, but his story in Strange Gods is obviously in the mode of  H.P. Lovecraft. The prose style is different, and that's good. No one should try to write like Lovecraft. His style was his and his alone. Nonetheless, "Musspelsheim" is Lovecraftian in tone and structure. There is even a a list of books, obscure and not, arcane and not, perhaps real and not, in its pages (pp. 186-187). "Musspelsheim" takes place in the then-modern day of the 1960s or 1970s. It involves technology, specifically sound technology. That might be a Lovecraftian touch as well.* There is fascinating detail here on a topic that might otherwise have been mind-deadingly dull for the reader: this is science fiction for audiophiles, and it reads almost like non-fiction, like an article from Rolling Stone or The New Yorker. (There is a description of a rock group in Mr. Lupoff's story. Could they be the Rolling Stones?) The ending is also Lovecraftian, though perhaps more positive, being suggestive of a positive transcendence.** I would not call "Musspelsheim" a great science fiction story, but it is an interesting story. You might even call it extraordinary. And if you want to call it a pastiche, it was at least done in the right way.

---

*"Musspelsheim" makes me think of Lovecraft's "Cool Air" or "The Statement of Randolph Carter."

**On the other hand, the subject of the story, named Poletsky, may have just gone off the deep end. And it occurs to me now that "Musspelsheim" has similarities to The Great Gatsby, too: Poletsky as Gatsby.  

Strange Gods, edited by Roger Elwood (1974), with cover art by Charles Moll, illustrating "High Priest" by J.F. Bone.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Summer Reading List No. 4-The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg

I had planned on finishing this series before the end of summer. My Internet non-provider had other plans though. Call it (this series) now obsolete. But maybe not quite, for it will end with books by Edgar Rice Burroughs and an imitator of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and so I'll be back to the previous series, which may also be, if not quite obsolete, at least late in arriving.

* * *

Before getting to Barry N. Malzberg's book, I'll bring up another book I read more recently, Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (1980; paperback edition, 1981). It's a crazy, funny book, full of crazy, funny, and inventive expressions, similes, metaphors, and other turns of phrase. Reading it is likely to color your own thoughts and words for a time. It did mine. First, I'll offer you the opening paragraph of chapter one:

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting--with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui--for something momentous to occur. (p. 3)†

So even in the late 1970s when Mr. Robbins was tapping out his story on an "all-new Remington SL-3," decline had set in. I can't say whether we're in the same curve now--maybe we climbed out of it somewhere along the line, at least for a while--but signs of decline are all around us. The image that came to me while I was reading Still Life with Woodpecker is that we live in an elaborate and carefully constructed world, one like a great palace--except that it's made of sugar. And the rains have started to fall. Things might be okay where you are, but over here, there is already pitting, like acne scars or astroblemes, in the surface of this sugar-palace of a world. Things might be okay where I am, but over there it's starting to melt and crumble. Soon the melting might look like the acid-blood of a face-sucking alien burning through the decks of the Nostromo, threatening the whole ship with destruction. How long can it hold?

Although Still Life with Woodpecker is not really a genre work, there is talk of UFOs, ancient aliens, pyramid power, and other outré subjects in its pages. (The book is divided into phases, like the moon, and so "the last quarter" of the opening sentence carries with it a double meaning.) You might call the whole book outré. But in seeing what has happened in our world over the past year and a half, and in witnessing what is happening now, I wonder whether we might be headed for some kind of science-fictional situation, something previously only imagined and not really foreseen. Maybe something momentous will occur after all, and we will no longer be, in our everyday lives, bored and tired. We will live in interesting times.

* * *

In August, I read The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties by Barry N. Malzberg (Bluejay Books, 1984). It's a good and interesting book, but I wish there were more detail in it. The subtitle is misleading, for Mr. Malzberg copyrighted his book in 1982; the Bluejay edition is from September 1984. In other words, less than half of the decade had passed by the time The Engines of the Night was published; there is no mention of William Gibson and his Neuromancer.

There are some interesting discussions of science fiction during previous decades, though. More than once, Barry Malzberg referred to science fiction in the late 1940s as "dystopian." I think he used that word in a general, less precise way, meaning pessimistic or negative, dim or dark. He didn't really provide examples, and I don't know enough about science fiction to say, but if it's true that the genre was dystopian in the late 1940s, it's no wonder that science fiction writers--Raymond A. Palmer and L. Ron Hubbard specifically--came up with more hopeful or positive or affirmative visions. Maybe that's how the religions of science fiction were born.

There were of course seeds of dystopia in Hubbard's belief system. He seems to have been afflicted with a totalitarian personality and riddled like a disease with totalitarian impulses and ambitions. So his vision became spoiled soon enough. The flying saucer vision, though, was more hopeful and positive. These were, after all, our space brothers, and they were bringing to us messages of peace, love, and salvation. It was not merely by chance that The Day the Earth Stood Still was released in 1951, four years after the first sighting of flying saucers and a year before the great flap of 1952.* In contrast to Dianetics and Scientology, the more freeing and hopeful vision of the flying saucers endured . . .

But only for so long. Remember that The Thing from Another World was also released in 1951. It provided an alternate version of the visitation-from-outer-space story. Its giant walking carrot was no space brother. By the mid fifties, certainly by the end of the flying saucer era in 1973, the hope represented by a belief in flying saucers had been replaced with fear, paranoia, conspiracy, even madness and despair.** Maybe it's no coincidence, either, that science fiction again became more negative or dystopian in the 1970s. Barry N. Malzberg was there to write some of it and to write about some of it in The Engines of the Night.

* * *

Mr. Malzberg has been canceled, or something like canceled. I don't have anything to say about that controversy. I'll just point out that in his essay "The Cutting Edge," he listed his choices for the ten best science fiction stories of all time. His top two are by women, "Vintage Season" by C.L. Moore (1946) and "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon; 1974). I have never read Alice Sheldon's story, but I won't argue with anybody who says that "Vintage Season" is the greatest science fiction story ever written.

-----

*In Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins continued: "Something momentous was bound to happen soon. [. . .] But what would it be? And would it be apocalyptic or rejuvenating? [. . .] A change in the weather or a change in the sea [. . . .] or a UFO on the White House lawn? (p. 3) That image, of course, is straight from the movies (but before Independence Day [1996]).

**Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers were both released in 1956. In the real world, UFO investigator Morris K. Jessup, a troubled man to be sure, killed himself in 1959. The supposed first alien abduction case, with all of its dark overtones, came two years later, in 1961, when Betty and Barney Hill were taken aboard a flying saucer, reliving in the process the experiences of General Hanley (no relation) and the police officer in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. As I have suggested before, things happen in science fiction--and in the works of artists--before they happen in the real world.

†Update (Jan. 11, 2024): It occurs to me now that Mr. Robbins' introductory paragraph to his novel echoes that of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1897):

     No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. 

The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties by Barry N. Malzberg (1984), with cover art by Wayne Douglas Barlowe. The title is suggestive of something dark or dystopian. Mr. Barlowe's illustration depicts that kind of darkness.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley