Reading Diary, Science Fiction Podcast Recommendation And Books For Sale
Manly Wade Wellman's John the Balladeer, A Queer Vampire Story, And More. Plus A Pop-Up Event This Saturday.
Greetings and salutations, beloved readers! Welcome to another edition of the William Emmons Books Official Newsletter. In this issue, I have reviews of a couple of stories that are at least putatively fantasy, a recommendation for a good podcast for you to listen to if you like the kinds of stories I’ve been talking about here, some solicitations for items I have for sale and an exhortation for local folks to come find me at a pop-up event I’ll be at on Saturday. Let’s dive in, shall we?
“Vandy, Vandy” by Manly Wade Wellman
My readers who pay close attention know I’ve been looking for another bona fide fantasy story to read for a little bit now. Despite trying out some stories from The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction Third Series and Beyond Fantasy Fiction July 1953, I haven’t read a proper fantasy story since reviewing Anthony Boucher’s “The Anomaly of the Empty Man.” As I explained in that review,
For reasons of trying to deepen my knowledge of the field, I am mainly focused on reading old science fiction this year and possibly beyond. I want to really understand it. As I’ve gone along, I’ve developed the nagging suspicion that I’ll never do so if I don’t understand its cousin fantasy. So in my studies I also read fantasy…
I really don’t know what what this fantasy stuff is all about. So I was glad to hit pay dirt in reading this story by Manly Wade Wellman, first published in the March 1953 issue of F&SF, out of The Best From Fantasy And Science Fiction Third Series and even gladder to discover it was one of Wellman’s stories about an occult song-collecting everyman called John who travels the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina with a silver-stringed guitar. I live just on the outskirts of Appalachia myself and have an interest in what fiction has to say about the region. Furthermore, at some point I was inculcated with the notion that these ‘Silver John’ stories were really something to look forward to. I took this notion to heart despite having read two very middling science fiction novels by Wellman.
Despite the factors predisposing me to the story, I must confess it left me a little cold. John travels by foot up a sparsely populated holler to meet members of the shoeless and standoffish Tewk clan in hopes of learning the mysterious song from which the title takes its name. One of the Tewks is a beautiful young woman named Vandy like the song and named after some number of women in her family going back to the Revolutionary War era.
The Tewks warm up to John because he is good at playing guitar but their jam session is interrupted by an evil-seeming gentleman called Loden. Long story short, John is able to discern that Loden is a nigh 300 year old witch man who escaped the witch trials at Salem as a little boy. He has tried and failed to seduce successive women of the Tewk line named Vandy and his time on Earth to do so is running short.
There’s a battle between Loden and John that amounts to incantations and counter-incantations. Just when it seems like Loden has the upper hand, John throws a silver quarter into Loden’s magic fire and summons the spirit of George Washington (!) to come down from Heaven and vanquish Loden to Hell. This ending is built up but that doesn’t stop it from being corny.
I’m not trying to be an iconoclast but to me the most interesting part of this story was the editorial epilogue explaining that Wellman himself had collected the real song “Vandy, Vandy” in Appalachian North Carolina and that neither he nor the editors of F&SF knew anything about its origin. I tried, feebly, to find more info about Wellman as a song collector but failed. I’d like to know more about that.
“Share A Like” by Jerome Bixby & Joe E. Dean
This is another one from the inaugural issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction dated July 1953. Like “All of You” by James McConnell, the story from Beyond that I previously reviewed, this is actually a libidinal science fiction horror story under label fantasy rather than fantasy proper. I’ll get to that but first an aside about editor H. L. Gold.
You take in enough information about this stuff and your sources start to become jumbled but the factoid I am remembering is that Gold’s inspiration for launching Beyond as a fantasy companion to Galaxy was the legacy of John W. Campbell’s Unknown, the fantasy companion to Astounding Science-Fiction. In Unknown, which pulp collecting old-timers on Facebook still revere, Campbell published fantasy stories that worked like science fiction. I haven’t read enough Unknown to fully grok the meaning of this but perhaps an example from Gold’s own body of work will be useful.
In the inaugural issue of Unknown dated March 1939, Gold had story titled “The Trouble With Water.” In it, a man fishing on his day off runs afoul of a water elf. The elf curses him and he is not able to touch water so long as he is cursed. Gold takes the reader through the various implications of this in everyday life from not being able to eat soup to not being able to take a bath to repelling rain. Ultimately the man makes good with the elf and the curse is reversed. While scientific factors are considered, this is straightforwardly fantasy.
“Share A Like” is another matter. To undersell it, it is a scientific vampire tale. The vampire in the story explains the existence of his kind through various scientific legends: perhaps vampires are a branch of hominid evolution that branched off from ape and man, perhaps they are an extraterrestrial species, or perhaps they are a non-hominid earthly species that evolved to resemble man. The effects of his bite are explained in terms of natural toxins rather than black magic. The vampire dismisses out of hand the idea than he and his ilk may have a Satanic origin. Unlike the elf in “The Trouble With Water,” he is not a magical creature.
While the origin of the vampire is an interesting aspect of the story, it is not a central feature. What pushes this story over into science fiction horror or maybe even fantasy is that the story is about a man’s emotions in the face of the uncanny and ultimately his tragic inability to cope with them. In essence, this is a story about a heretofore straight Protestant man’s reactions to taking comfort in queer erotic experiences while lost at sea.
Is this an overly 2024 reading of a 1953 vampire tale? I don’t think so. The queer reading is not even subtextual here. Let’s dig into the plot and see if you agree with me. To support my argument that this is a queer erotic story, see also the illustration pictured at the top of this section.
The story is about the only two survivors of a sunk Merchant Marine vessel, Craig and Hofmanstahal. They are aboard a lifeboat in a major shipping lane with plenty of supplies to last them. Craig was navigator of the vessel and a mild mannered American with a rough history growing up in the Atlanta slums. Hofmanstahal is an adventurous and globe-trotting Romanian. Even though Hofmanstahal often makes comments about Craig’s small size, the latter finds this charming and direct rather than off-putting.
It comes out pretty quickly that Hofmanstahal is not eating his share of the supplies because he is a vampire and is instead drinking Craig’s blood at night. Craig is aghast of course. But he is weak enough that Hofmanstahal is able to withhold rations from him unless he submits to having his blood drank. They develop a quasi-sexual feeder relationship. The first time Craig consciously lets Hofmanstahal drink from him, he describes it as feeling “lascivious.” After a time, Craig comes to enjoy the sensation of helping his friend out.
Apparently, the “hypnotic” toxins that come along with getting bit cause Craig to spend most of his time totally blissed out. The time on the lifeboat is contrasted to the world at large where people spend their time consuming things to continue existing. People are compared to the sharks that trail the lifeboat. But the experience is not without its emotional pitfalls.
We learn that Craig’s father was a Baptist minister. He is wracked by feelings of guilt for dallying with the unholy and is haunted by images of his disapproving father. As a US Navy vessel comes to save them, these feelings become accompanied by the shame of potentially being found out. Knowing that the refuge the two took in each other is about to come to an end, Hofmanstahal proposes to feed one last time, approaching his friend with “sexual avidity.” Craig panics at the idea of getting caught in the act and flailing kicks Hofmanstahal overboard to be ripped apart by sharks.
The story ends with the regretful Craig realizing his experience with Hofmanstahal has transformed him into a vampire. He begins thinking hungry and libidinous thoughts about the bodies of the sailors on the Navy ship. The last line reads, “Craig licked his lips.”
If this story had been labeled science fiction, I would have found myself struggling with it. It is certainly philosophical but it is more about characters than ideas. Labeling it as fantasy allowed me to take the story for what it was—a psychosexual delight. Beyond Fantasy Fiction is proving to be quite a rewarding magazine to read. I intend to stay the course reading and reviewing mostly pure-quill science fiction most of the time but I’ll be returning to this publication and the fantasy genre as the mood takes me.
Recommendation: The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast
Despite being a frequent podcast contributor, I do not listen to podcasts very much. This is because I prefer to spend my listening time on audiobooks. But earlier this year, a friend and podcasting colleague of mine turned me on to The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast which combines the price point (free) and length (short) of a good podcast with the content (fiction) and high production value of a good audiobook. Owner, narrator and producer Scott Miller, a retired TV newsman and American expat living in Costa Rica, generally puts out a few episodes each week containing vintage public domain science fiction short stories he has curated and performed. He has a backlog of free stuff going back to 2022 and has still more audiobooks for sale on his website. I listen to his podcast on Apple Podcasts but I understand it’s up on all major platforms. The only downside to Scott’s format is that like many podcasters who are trying to make an honest living, he sells ad time on the episodes that are available for free in his podcast feed.
I bring this podcast up now because I’ve gotten back into listening it recently after a couple months away. I have a long term goal of listening to the full backlog of free episodes. In the past week I’ve listened to five episodes which I’ll detail briefly below. Before that I’d like to say a little bit more about what I like about the The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast. I don’t actually think every story that Scott selects is good and I’m really against the kind of massaging boosterism where fans and critics tell lies to support creators they like. The whole world suffers under this regime. Of the five stories I listened to recently, one was excellent, one was good, one was okay, and two didn’t line up with my idea of science fiction. All of them had something to say and each was interesting as a piece of science fiction history. Scott is resurrecting works for us to consider and reconsider. He says he is mostly focused on stories that there aren’t already audiobooks of. I would add his selections are unbound by the tastemakers of today or yesterday. Because of Scott, I’ve listened to a lot of stories from Imagination: Stories of Science and Fantasy, a not very famous magazine from the science fiction magazine bubble of the 1950s. The Lost aspect of the Lost Sci-Fi Podcast is not for nothing.
Listening Diary
It would be excessive to give full reviews of all five episodes of the Lost Sci-Fi Podcast that I listened to recently. But this newsletter is self-indulgent and autobiographical enough for me to at least list them all. Find them below with brief summaries in order of how much I enjoyed them:
“Task of Kayin” by William Morrison (50 min.) - Planet Stories July 1953 - An alien scientist comes to love Earth and its ways while working as a low wage construction laborer. When he learns the facility he is helping build could destroy the world on accident, he takes resolute action. Excellent story. Sensitive. One could write something about the immigrant experience and about the community spirit of the interstellar working class.
“Prison of a Billion Years” by C. H. Thames (25 min.) - Imagination April 1956 - A condemned man takes a hostage and escapes from a prison located a billion years in the past before there was life on Earth. Good discussion of what Earth was like at that time and interesting to have a science fiction story where the protagonist is a doomed criminal. Good story.
“Doorstep” by Keith Laumer (15 min.) - Galaxy Feb. 1961 - An ambitious, vengeful and overzealous general goes against orders and destroys an alien being before learning its true nature. The effect of the story hinges on an exposition heavy surprise ending. Okay story.
“Two Weeks in August” by Frank M. Robinson (17 min.) - Galaxy Feb. 1951 - Joke story. A guy plays a trick on his coworker who is always one upping him by pretending to have vacation plans to go to Mars. Naturally the one-upping coworker somehow manages to actually take a vacation on Mars. Maybe there is some kind of critique of the alienation of white collar workers in post-war America here but mostly this story didn’t do much for me.
“Journey For The Brave” by Alan E. Nourse (42 min.) - Imagination April 1954 - To me, this story is less science fiction than it is an attempt at psychological realism in a story that happens to be about a moon rocket in the pre-Apollo era. The protagonist is a short astronaut who is going to be the first guy to go the moon. Most of the story is about him sitting in the rocket on the launch pad considering instances of his own cowardice during World War II and childhood and his poor relationship with his father. He basically loses it. When there’s a malfunction and his fuel supply becomes insufficient to get him to the moon and back, he disobeys orders to stop and goes off to the moon anyway, probably to die, because he can’t handle life on Earth. This story wasn’t for me but I can get why some men would be into it. I don’t think it’s good science fiction. Additionally, I thought it was too long.
If any of you listen to any of these stories, shoot me a message and let me know what you think. I always want to chitter with others about the stuff I’m reading and listening to.
For Sale: Paperbacks Galore and More!
I’ve mostly spent this week making humble attempts to build out my eBay store with offerings from Galaxy Science Fiction and higher end paperbacks in diverse genres including sleaze, Western, espionage and of course science fiction. On any of my listings, do feel encouraged to make me an offer either via eBay or privately.
Outside of eBay, I was pretty busy during the second half of last week over on Facebook attempting to hawk cheap science fiction paperbacks. Below are some pictures of my selection of books that are $5 for 1 or $20 for 5 plus S&H which is media mail plus $1. You can see their spines and backs here and here. Do “like” and “follow” my Facebook if you haven’t already. I hope to throw up some more cheap paperbacks there later this afternoon, though I will be taking a moment to chill after I get this newsletter out.
Note: I have already sold the two Murray Leinster paperbacks The Aliens and Operation: Outer Space in the second photo.
If any of the above paperbacks interest you DM my page on Facebook, reply to this email or shoot me a message here to ask questions or arrange for purchase. I am happy to provide more pictures of anything. I also have many more paperbacks in stock if there are any vintage authors in particular you are looking for.
Pop-Up Event: Spring Fur-Fest Vendor Fair at The Richmond Peddler’s Mall, Saturday 5/18/24, 10AM-6PM
I will have a booth on Saturday at the Spring Fur-Fest Vendor Fair put on by the local Humane Society. I’ll have a lot of cheap paperbacks in science fiction and other genres. Come on out, buy some books and think about adopting a dog!