Woo-hoo!
I just got the final issue I needed to complete my set of the old SF/F pulp magazine UNKNOWN (aka UNKNOWN WORLDS). I’ve been hunting for these for years and at long last I’ve gotten the final issue I need.
UNKNOWN was an attempt by John W. Campbell to steal some readership from WEIRD TALES. He felt that by publishing more intelligent fanatasy (as opposed to the “the noisesome horror slithered from the sewer” type stuff that he felt populated WEIRD TALES) he could get more loot from his readership and get more critical acclaim.
To that end, he started collecting stories from his stable of authors (at the time, the best around. Even to this day, he probably had the single greatest collection of SF talent under one magazine) to do what today would be called “Urban Fantasy”. Stories where, if there was magic, it had rules, if there was horror, it wasn’t arbitrary. (He didn’t always succeed: the occasional WEIRD TALES type story crept (slithered?) in from time to time, but overall there’s a very distinct “feel” to an UNKNOWN story.)
Some of the classic UNKNOWN stories include [ul]
[li]“Mr. Arson” by L. Sprague DeCamp: A school-by-mail company sends a magic textbook to an raw beginner who tries to summon a fire-elemental. It gets loose in the real world and only modern psychology can defeat it.[/li][li]“The Devil Makes the Law” (aka “Magic, Inc”) by Robert Heinlein: What happens in a world that uses magic like we use technology if the magicians unionize. [/li][li]“Conjure Wife”, by Fritz Leiber. A scary story about faculty wives who use black magic to advance their husband’s careers, [/li][li]“The Coppersmith” by Lester DelRey about one of the Little People who awakens in the modern age: he used to make his living as a tinker, but he can’t repair stainless steel or alumninum.[/li][li]"A Gnome there Was**, by Henry Kuttner (and probably C.L. Moore): A union boss gets lost in a coal mine and stumbles into the land of the gnomes. Who he promptly decides to organize. It features one of the all-time classic last lines: “Still, that was completely natural…under the circumstances.”[/li][li]“IT” by Theodore Sturgeon. The original “Man dies in a swamp and a swamp-monster appears” story.[/li][li]“Typewriter in the Sky” by L. Ron Hubbard which is about a guy who gets trapped in a story that’s being written by a friend of our hero who’s a a bad pulp writer. Unfortunately, our hero’s cast in the role of the villain. No matter how he tries to change things, he keeps getting thrust back into the role of the villian. And more unfortunately, the hack writer always kills his bad-guys in the end. And even more unfortunately, it’s getting close to the last chapter…[/li][/ul]
I’m not a huge Hubbard fan. Even his best stuff is, at best, competent, his dialogue iffy and he couldn’t end a story to save his soul. His early stuff DID have lots of energy and some great story ideas, but they just didn’t click with me. As a result, I held off on getting the Hubbard issues.
Mistake.
BIG mistake.
A few years ago (I blame eBay, as the timing’s right and I remember being surprised when I started noticing that eBay ads that had $cientology and Hubbard in the titles started getting BIG $$$$ while the same issue without mentioning Hubbard went for far less). I guess $cientologists realized that there were uncollected words by Elron 'cause the prices of the Hubbard issues tripled overnight. :rolleyes:
The magazine only lasted 39 issues, killed in large part by the WWII paper-shortage. But IMHO there’s never been a Science Fiction or Fantasy magazine with such an astonishingly good signal to noise ratio. Almost every issue of those 39 issues generated a classic, oft reprinted SF/F story.
I’ve started setting up a page with the covers and links to a story index in each issue here, if anyone’s interested. (Comments would be appreciated)
Anyway, anyone else an UNKNOWN fan?
Fenris
) but there’s never been an editor better at finding and nurturing new talent.