Valentine’s Miscellany
Love Letters to Magazines, Weird Fiction, and My Readers
I Love Old Magazines
Readers of this newsletter will be unsurprised by the above declaration. I take great joy in returning to the science fiction and fantasy magazines of yesteryear and reading old works as they were originally presented. Even with reprints I find value in seeing how they were represented for a new audience.
I bring this up for a few reasons. One is that my magazine read throughs are frequently low engagement when compared to my posts about novels. I’m pure enough not to let this dissuade me and I’ve accepted that the audience for what I’m doing here is likely to remain small.
Still I want to encourage my readers to consider digging in on these magazine-related posts because they contain intellectual treasure and stuff you won’t find elsewhere. Moreover, I am working to make them more readable by keeping them short. If this means it takes three posts to get through a single issue, so be it.
With all that in mind, I want to announce I’ll be adding yet another title to my stable of magazine read throughs. Hopefully starting next week, I’ll begin delving into the first issue of the 1950s volume of Future Combined With Science Fiction Stories. I am very interested in its editor ex-Futurian Robert W. Lowndes (later Robert A. W. Lowndes) for his idiosyncratic personal interests and activities. He had a reputation for putting out good magazines that belied his employer’s low word rates because of his skill and because of his relationships with editors of more prestigious magazines. This is the kind of thing that really gets me going and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
I Love Classic Weird Fiction (With Criticisms)
These days when I’m done with work and study, my primary form of relaxation is listening to audiobooks of classic weird fiction. I’ve been making great use of the Audible Plus catalog1, my public library’s access to the Libby and Hoopla apps, and podcasts like HorrorBabble to cycle through short stories and novelettes by Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and H. P. Lovecraft.
It’s a good sideline for a guy whose primary intellectual interest is early to midcentury American science fiction. Some weird fiction is in fact straight up science fiction—if with a different philosophical tenor—and it was a genre that many science fiction fans, writers, and editors read with gusto. A lot of it is stylistically superior to the science fiction that I read so in that sense I think it is a good influence. I’m especially fond of Smith’s gorgeous and outre prose.
I don’t fully understand weird fiction—classic or contemporary. My sense is it uses the elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror to treat reality as menacing and unknowable and is therefore a counterbalance to science fiction’s positivist tendencies. Mostly I like to let classic weird fiction wash over me while I enjoy it and consider it.
That said, one of my strengths and weaknesses as a reader is that I always want to criticize the things I love. It’s become sort of banal in the science fiction/fantasy community to speak about the racism in old weird fiction. As banal or self-serving as much of this conversation is, I think it’s still one worth having. People keep coming back to the source on Lovecraft and situating their work as a response or alternative to his oeuvre and, by Crom, they’re still coming out with new Conan novels.
For me, it’s not a question of whether certain works are racist or not for the purpose of determining whether or not they are appropriate reading material. Instead I am curious about the contours of the racism and how it affects what old weird fiction is doing in terms of genre.
I recently read two stories from the 1920s and 30s, “An Adventure in Futurity” by Smith and “Wolfshead” by Howard, where the strange and unknowable menace that flavored the narrative was that of the slave revolt. Both of these stories are about what uncanny jungle-crazed Africans might do to Western civilization if they ever get the upper hand, though Smith sublimates his Africans into jungle-crazed cannibal Venusians. In Smith’s story, the rebel Venusians spell doom for the most advanced human civilization that has hitherto existed. In Howard’s, enslaved West African natives provide an explosive backdrop for a werewolf murder mystery among European aristocrats set in a colonial Portuguese castle. When the natives revolt, a noble-hearted werewolf is able to overcome demon possession and save his soul by rending the natives limb from limb.
What’s interesting to me about these stories is how the specter of the slave revolt could linger as a nightmare in the brains of American white men into the 1930s. The subjectivity of masters is noble, rational, and understandable. Both stories feature sensitive men of the master class carrying on with each other kind of sweetly and tenderly even as they matter-of-factly kill members of the enslaved class. By contrast, the subjectivity of the oppressed can only be chaotic and destructive. The stories don’t bother to fathom it and instead use it as an element of the weird.
This is a lot to take in if, as I do, you love this genre of stories and find value in them. But take it in, I think we should. There’s some usefulness to the truism, “Every accusation is a confession.” Everything that these stories imagine rebel slaves doing to white people or Western civilization mirrors some outrage wrought on African and diasporic people or African and diasporic civilizations and cultures since the advent of the Transatlantic slave trade.
I Love My Readers
How often is too often to declare one’s appreciation for the people who read one’s Substack newsletter? I made similar declarations on my birthday in December and in my New Year’s Miscellany. The latter was accompanied with an appeal to send me funds via Buy Me A Coffee and/or to purchase old books and magazines from my eBay store because one of our feral yard cats had surgery.2 Following that missive, I got a positive response from a handful of my regular readers and correspondents. Cat surgeries being what they are, this barely dented the vet bill but the remittances and sales provided warmth and encouragement.
I consider this newsletter to be the contemporary equivalent of an ancient fanzine. Paraphrasing Frederik Pohl in The Way The Future Was, the fanzine writers’ real reward is reader feedback—the money was appreciated in part because it let me know you, dear readers, are out there. I also love hearing from readers who haven’t supported me financially for the same reason. Of course, I appreciate my readers who don’t write in as well but I’d really love to hear from you.
In order to assess interest and explore another avenue for readers to let me know I’m not toiling in total obscurity, I have activated Substack’s function that allows subscribers to pledge to purchase a paid subscription to William Emmons Books should I ever activate paid subscriptions. The catch is that I would not be offering paid subscribers special access to paywalled writings. It’s not that I’m not worth it. I just don’t like paywalls.
If my net worth ever recovers from paying feline veterinary bills, funds I raise from this newsletter would theoretically go to defraying the cost of collecting the publications I write about here. All to a good cause in any event.
As always, thanks for reading and have a great Valentine’s Day be ye single or paired off etc.
I have stopped buying new and used books and ebooks from Amazon but I haven’t figured out how to extract myself from Audible’s walled garden.
Fortunately, the cat is now thriving though she hasn’t forgiven me for capturing her and taking her to have her belly cut open.