Mark Saxton was an editor at Farrar & Rinehart when Wright’s daughter, Sylvia Wright Mitarachi, brought her father’s huge novel into his office; he later assisted her in cutting the book to a publishable length. Saxton later penned a number of books himself, including Paper Chase, before attempting to update the story of Islandia in The Islar (1969), in which the country once again faced a crisis of its relations with outside imperial powers; John Lang’s grandson, Lang III, is the principal character. Unfortunately, by thrusting Islandia into the Vietnam era, Saxton also stripped from it much of the winsome charm that made Wright’s creation so attractive.
Saxton then went back to Wright’s unpublished notes and manuscripts to pen a “prequel,” The Two Kingdoms (1979), essentially an historical novel of the days when Islandia’s unique political system was evolving during a period of national crisis and dynastic change. Here Saxton seemed to capture much of the magic of the original, together with a healthy influx of rousing medieval adventure, a wholly successful amalgamation that is heartily recommended to the follower of Islandia.
Saxton’s new book, Havoc in Islandia, retreats even further into Islandia’s imaginary history, to a period when the Catholic Church, and through it the European powers, threaten the very soul of Islandia, its philosophy, political system, mores, even its very existence. Bren, a young officer, is drawn into a political conspiracy surrounding the King, Alwin, and the Catholic Bishop of Islandia, Anthony, who has dreams of temporal as well as spiritual authority. As the country, from its lords to its peasants, begins taking sides for or against the Church, the possibility of civil war looms ever greater, until armed conflict between the two unyielding parties finally breaks out. Bren finds himself fighting for King and country at the last climactic battle, when the fate of Islandia is finally sealed.
Once again, Saxton has taken the best elements of Wright’s work, and combined them with a tale of adventure and intrigue that elaborates on the Islandian myth without destroying the beauty of its vision. The choices that need to be made here, decisions that become vital to the existence of Islandia and its unique philosophical system, are the pivot around which story and characters revolve. Bren is suitably sure-footed, and Bishop Anthony suitably scheming, a veritable Borgia; and King Alwin is sufficiently weak, at least initially, to provide some dramatic tension about the outcome.
Highly recommended to all fans of Islandia.
(1993)
Chalker, Jack L., and Mark Owings. The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and Bibliographic History. 3rd ed. Westminster, MD: The Mirage Press Ltd., 1991.
Two previous editions of this guide to SF specialty publishers were self-published in 1966. This new version has been expanded some ten times over the original work, reflecting the vast burgeoning of the specialty market.
The basic arrangement of the guide is alphabetically by name of publisher, then chronologically by publication date of each book listed. A typical chapter includes: publisher’s name and logo, ISBN prefix(es) (where appropriate), a one-to-two-page history of the company, a chronological checklist of the firm’s monographic publications, and a one-page summary. A typical book entry gives: book title (boldfaced caps), author, year of publication, pagination, binding (if other than cloth), price at time of publication, number of copies printed, introducers, illustrators, bibliographical notes, contents listings (for collections and anthologies), and current in-print status, mention of previous editions or noteworthy reprints, bibliographical and binding points, and a one-paragraph descriptive summary (in italics), listing general background information but no plot details (e.g., “Civil war fantasy novella.”).
148 publishers are covered in the main sequence (494 pages), and an additional 48 houses in Appendix A: Fellow Travelers (135 pages), in a similar but occasionally less detailed format. Other appendices include: B. Almost-Rans; C. Ordering Directly from a Specialty Publisher; D. Where to Find Them (i.e., addresses); E. “But What’s It Worth?”: Notes on Pricing and Availability; F. The Essential SF Reference Shelf; G. Where They Are: Geographic Breakdown. In addition, the authors provide an informative Preface and User’s Guide to the Third Edition, a twelve-page Introduction: A History of the Science-Fantasy Publishers, a six-page Glossary of Terms Used, an Author & Artist Index, an Index by Title, and a short section of addenda. The indexes correlate authors, titles, and publishers (in the author index), mentioning both page numbers and types (e.g., “collection”); the absence of hanging indents for entries longer than one line makes some sections of the indexes difficult to read. The book is attractively typeset and bound to library standards, but rather poorly proofread. A few rather muddy illustrations of publishers, authors, and book jackets are scattered throughout the text.
This guide generated much controversy on publication, with reviewers both praising and damning it with equal vehemence. Published criticism has focused on the factual accuracy of the data presented, and also on the sometimes lurid comments of the authors about other writers, their works, the publishers, and their presses. Let us examine these in detail.
The authors have undeniably accomplished their stated goal: to record the histories and publications of those houses that have specialized in science fiction, fantasy, and horror books. There are no obvious lacunae in coverage; indeed, many of the books and firms mentioned will be obscure even to the most knowledgeable of fans. However, Chalker and Owings have been less consistent in recording bibliographical data; some paginations are simply wrong, or at the least have been recorded in a different manner from those of other publications. Some titles lack subtitles, while others list subtitles which do not appear on the title page. Some printing counts are certainly off, by an unknown factor; and there are at least a dozen ghost titles included.
To measure the depth of this problem, I contacted a half dozen publishers whose lines are covered in the guide; all had seen the index, and all reported substantial errors in the description of their own firm’s publications, despite the fact that each had submitted correct information to Chalker, and (in several cases) had asked to help proofread their own sections, but were never contacted further.
More troubling, perhaps, are the liberal scattering of the authors’ outspoken opinions throughout the text. Unsupported judgments are presented as facts, hard data and soft opinions are merged together haphazardly, and the worth of publishing lines and their publishers and sometimes their books are too often measured against the yardstick of The Mirage Press (Chalker’s own line) or against Chalker himself, a standard of dubious validity. This stirring together of fact and fancy may occasionally make for entertaining reading, but it leaves the researcher with the unsettling feeling of never knowing what is true and what isn’t, and completely invalidates the guide’s worth as a reference tool.
Finally, this book is touted in its front matter as having been produced in “instant” small printings of no more than 20-100 copies a run. Later (1992) printings are known to have incorporated additions and changes to the main text of a greater or lesser degree, but these subsequent printings can in no way be identified by the average user, nor can the changes be readily noted, nor can the sequence of the changes, making future elucidation of the priority of such alterations virtually impossible. For this alone the compilers should be swiftly dispatched to the lower circles of the bibliographer’s Hell.
The best that can be said of this hodgepodge is that it does contain a myriad of interesting facts floating about in a stew of unsupported speculation, and that we shall undoubtedly be seeing this particular broth again, rebrewed and restirred, but no more palatable for all that.
Muddle is as muddle does.
Kies, Cosette N. Supernatural Fiction for Teens: More than 1300 Good Paperbacks to Read for Wonderment, Fear, and Fun. 2nd ed. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1992.
The 1987 edition of this annotated bibliography of horror fiction covered 500 works of dark fantasy suitable for the young adult reader; the 1992 version more than doubles the page cou
nt (from 127 to 267 p.) and the number of entries (from 500 to 1304).
Books are arranged in two sections, novels/collections and anthologies, alphabetically by author or editor, and then by title. Materials are numbered consecutively throughout the book from the number one. A typical entry gives item number, reading level code letter (e.g., A=written for teens), author’s name, title (boldfaced), place of publication, publisher, year of publication, pagination, ISBN, publisher and publication date of previous cloth editions, a mention of any sequels, movie versions, or other titles of interest by the same author, a two-to-three-sentence descriptive annotation, and subject categorization (e.g., “paranormal abilities). The anthology section gives a one-sentence annotation followed by complete contents listings.
A brief and somewhat inadequate series index is arranged alphabetically by series title, with a short annotation for the series as a whole, and a list of the books and their authors in publication order, without, however, noting series numbers or dates (for example, one title is missing from the “Twilight” series, although annotated in the author section, but its absence is not immediately obvious to the casual user). Other end matter includes a four-page glossary of terms, a movie index, a title index, and subject index. The indices are keyed to item number, and are stripped to the bare minimum; the title index, for example, lacks mention of corresponding authors (except where titles are exactly duplicated), while the series index consists of roughly a hundred terms followed by a list of cross-referenced numbers. For a topic such as “Santa Claus,” which has only two items associated with it, the subject index provides good access; but broader terms (e.g., “horror” or “ghosts”) have hundreds of references appended, requiring the user to examine each item to make an assessment. The volume is attractively designed and typeset, but is available only in paperbound form.
Entries from the first edition are repeated verbatim in the second, although all text has been reset. No attempt has been made to evaluate the works covered, and not all of the novels are supernatural, despite the book’s title; Kies uses a loose definition of horror fiction which encompasses such non-fantasy works as Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera.
Although there is some overlap between Kies’s book and Lynn’s Fantasy Literature for Children and Young Adults (3rd ed., Bowker, 1989), and with Barron’s Horror Literature: A Reader’s Guide (Garland, 1990), all three volumes cover works not noted in the others, with at least half of the titles in Kies not annotated elsewhere. One wonders, in fact, about Kies’s rather eclectic selection criteria, and why certain very minor fictions were included, while others more notable were omitted. The author herself states, “the intent has been to give an idea of the various works available,” and within this very loose parameter she has succeeded in providing a unique and occasionally valuable resource for a modern genre which has thus far received scant attention from scholars and bibliographers.
Rosenberg, Betty, and Diana Tixier Herald. Genreflecting: A Guide to Reading Interests in Genre Fiction. 3rd ed. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1991.
This reader’s guide to genre fiction is divided into seven chapters, of which the last three, covering science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature (comprising 90 out of 281 pages of text), are of interest to the SF scholar.
Each chapter is divided into two sections, “Themes and Types” and “Topics.” The former includes 10-20 subchapters, arranged in no apparent order (except for part of the middle section of the SF list, which is alphabetical by theme name); each theme (e.g., “Hard Science” or “Messianic/Religious”) includes a one-paragraph definition (100-200 words) as introduction, followed by a list of 5-30 suggested titles (averaging 15) in alphabetical order by author’s name. No bibliographical data other than author and title are noted, except for the theme anthologies list, which also includes (for no apparent reason) publisher and year of publication, in addition to subject appellations following half of the entries (e.g., “alien beings”).
The second section, “Topics,” is a guide to anthologies, bibliographies, history and criticism, awards, journals, film books, associations and conventions, publishers, and other topics of interest. As with the previous section, each topic includes a general, one-paragraph descriptive annotation, plus lists of materials in alphabetical order by main entry. Bibliographical data for individual titles include: author and title, publisher, year of publication, and (occasionally) a brief, one-sentence annotation or contents listing.
The author/title index interfiles books and their authors in one alphabetical sequence, keyed to item number; however, the author listings lack book titles, and the books lack any indication of authorship, requiring the user to flip back and forth constantly to the main text.
Although Genreflecting has added some ninety pages of text since publication of the first (1982) edition, a significant portion of the material appears dated or incomplete. For example, the “Critical Journals” listing in the Topics section of the Science Fiction chapter lists Starship and Science Fiction Review as open entries, although both journals ceased publication many years ago; and also fails to include Science-Fiction Studies, a major academic journal of SF, or the Journal of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. On the same page the authors devote an entire paragraph to the International Science Fiction Yearbook, which was published once in 1978, and is now totally useless; and in a subsection on “Reviews” they specifically highlight Fantasy Review, which they indicate as still being published (but which actually shut down in 1987)—and fail to mention SFRA Review, now the major review publication in the field. These lapses suggest a knowledge of the field which is at best superficial.
This is a mediocre guide to genre fiction, of use primarily to high school level libraries. Prefer Neil Barron’s guides, Anatomy of Wonder, Fantasy Literature, and Horror Literature.
44. SELECTED OBITUARIES
(1983-2003)
Robert Adleman
Robert H. Adleman, 76, died on Nov. 16, 1995 at Ashland, Oregon. He was primarily known for his war novels, including The Devil’s Brigade, his first book, which was made into a 1968 film starring William Holden. He later attended Rutgers and Temple Universities, earning a law degree at the latter institution. His only novel in the SF field (out of ten books published) was Annie Deane (World Publishing Co., 1971). He was a dedicated environmentalist, and after moving to Oregon in 1975, transformed his ranch into a wildlife preserve.
Spiro Agnew
Spiro Theodore Agnew, 77, died of leukemia on Sept. 17, 1996 at Berlin, Maryland. He was born on Nov. 9, 1918 at Baltimore, the son of Greek immigrants. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he received an LL.B. degree from the University of Baltimore in 1947, and an LL.D. from the University of Maryland. After working for ten years as an attorney, he was appointed to the Baltimore County Government in 1957, became County Executive in 1962, was elected Governor of Maryland in 1967, and Vice-President of the United States in 1969. He resigned in 1973 after pleading “no contest” to charges of taking bribes while Governor. Three years later he published his only fiction, The Canfield Decision (Playboy Press), a near-future political novel in which a Vice-President proposes arming Israel with nuclear weapons.
Bibi Besch
Bibi Besch, 56, died of cancer on Sept. 7, 1996 at Los Angeles. She was born on Feb. 1, 1940 at Vienna, Austria, the daughter of actress Gusti Huber. Her parents brought her to the United States after World War II, settling in Westchester County, New York. She attended Connecticut College for Women, and later studied with Bill Hickey, Herbert Berghof, and Milton Katselas, making her stage debut in Pygmalion in 1964. From the theatre she moved into TV soap operas, guest appearances on series, and television movies, and then to motion pictures in 1975. In the SF world she is primarily known for her role as Dr. Carol Marcus, Captain James Kirk’s former flame and the mother of his only child, in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). Sadly, the actor who played her and Kirk’s son in that film, Merritt Bu
trick, had already perished of AIDS in 1989.
Whit Bissell
Character actor Whitner Bissell, 86, died on March 5, 1996 at Woodland Hills, Calif. He was born on Oct. 24, 1909 at New York City, and began his career in acting on Broadway during the 1930s. He debuted on film in the 1943 production, Holy Matrimony, and appeared in ninety-eight motion pictures overall, plus numerous television movies and TV series roles. His work in SF films included: The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Target Earth (1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), The Time Machine (1960), Seven Days in May (1964), City Beneath the Sea (TV movie, 1970), Soylent Green (1973), Psychic Killer (1975), and The Time Machine (TV movie, 1978). He also appeared in the TV series, The Time Tunnel (1966-1967).
Thomas D. Clareson
A giant has died. The father of science-fiction criticism has passed. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the academic study of fantastic literature could have developed in quite the same way without Tom Clareson. His stature and influence were in many ways comparable to that of John W. Campbell, Jr.’s contributions to the Golden Age of SF literature. Like Campbell, he served as editor of the major periodical of the field for over thirty years; however, Clareson actually founded and for many years published Extrapolation, nurturing it from its beginnings in 1959 as a typed 8.5” x 11” newsletter into a sophisticated quarterly journal published by Kent State University Press. Its first issue featured a lengthy bibliography by Clareson himself, material which would later form the basis for his definitive guide, Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources (Green-wood Press, 1984).
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