Summary:
The 25^th volume of this long running series collects the stories and associated material from the first six of the magazine’s Special Author issues, and it includes work by Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, and James Blish. It is a bit of a mixed bag, but generally of good quality, and worth getting for Fritz Leiber’s Nebula Award winning Ship of Shadows, and Poul Anderson’s Hugo and Nebula Award winning Queen of Air and Darkness.
[ISFDB link] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:
Anonymous, Vertex, December 1974
Jim Harris, Pantsers vs. Plotters, Classics of Science Fiction
Chris Morgan, Vector #72, 1976, p. 32
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Edward L. Ferman

Fiction:
When You Care, When You Love • reprint novelette by Theodore Sturgeon ∗∗+
To the Chicago Abyss • reprint short story by Ray Bradbury ∗∗
The Key • reprint novelette by Isaac Asimov ∗∗∗
Ship of Shadows • reprint novelette by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗+
The Queen of Air and Darkness • reprint novella by Poul Anderson ∗∗∗∗+
Midsummer Century • reprint novella by James Blish ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Edward L. Ferman
Theodore Sturgeon • essay by Judith Merril
Sturgeon Bibliography • by Sam Moskowitz
Ray Bradbury • essay by William F. Nolan
Bradbury Bibliography • by William F. Nolan
Isaac Asimov • essay by L. Sprague de Camp
Asimov Bibliography • by Isaac Asimov
Fritz Leiber • essay by Judith Merril
Leiber Bibliography • by Al Lewis
Poul Anderson • essay by Gordon R. Dickson
Anderson Bibliography
James Blish • essay by Robert A. W. Lowndes
Blish Bibliography • by Mark Owings

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This volume is another of my Facebook group reads,¹ a Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine anthology that collects the material from the first six of its Special Author issues. The content of those generally consists of a story from the featured writer, sometimes more (there were three in a later, 1977, Harlan Ellison issue), an appreciation, a bibliography, and a cover painting featuring the writer alongside various scenes and characters from their work (see below). There have been sixteen Special Author issues so far.²

The first of the stories is from Theodore Sturgeon, When You Care, When You Love (F&SF, September 1962), which begins with a woman watching a man in bed. Then he wakes, and writhes in agony. The woman summons a man called Keogh, her General Manager, who bundles her out of the room, and then calls a doctor called Rathburn. Eventually a specialist called Weber is summoned, and we find that the man, Guy Gibbon, has a condition called choriocarcinoma, and has six weeks to live. Choriocarcinoma involves cancerous sex cells metastasizing, spreading, to the lungs.³
Now this story development appears relatively straightforward, but it takes half the story to get to this point because of constant flashbacks and the at best oblique, at worst rambling style Sturgeon adopts:

Science, it is fair to assume, can do what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not do, and totally restore a smashed egg. Given equipment enough, and time enough . . . but isn’t this a way of saying, “given money enough”? For money can be not only means, but motive. So if enough money went into the project, perhaps the last unknown, the last vestige of, anonymity could be removed from a man’s life story, even a young man from (as the snobs say) nowhere, no matter how briefly—though intimately—known.  pp. 15-16

What?
As for the half dozen or so flashbacks that occur in the first part of the story some, like the woman’s (infrequently called Sylva), and Guy’s childhoods, are probably pertinent, but I’m not so sure about Keogh’s, and I’d suggest that the passage about Cap’n Gamaliel Wyke, who founds a business empire four generations previously—that Sylva eventually inherits—are completely superfluous.
The remainder of the story yo-yos back and forth in time, and shows us how Guy and Sylva met and fell in love when he trespassed on her huge hidden estate. Then we get to the SFnal part of the story. Here, Sylva’s plan (spoiler) is to create clones from the sex cells that are in his lungs, and which she incorrectly refers to as “ova.” This is another of the story’s problems—while the cells in women’s choriocarcinoma would be diploid, and potentially viable, the cancer cells in his lungs would be haploid—this is never addressed.⁴
And this is not the only problem the story has: the idea of replicating Gibbon’s childhood for the clones so he or they can grow up be identical to him doesn’t convince, nor does the last minute development of a cryostasis chamber for Sylva to jump into. Then the story finishes with only one of the clones surviving to become a baby, and everything is left hanging in the air (the story was meant to be the first part of an unfinished novel).
Although it took ages to get going, I found I enjoyed this moderately by the end—but there is no hiding the fact this is the beginning of a novel that was unlikely to work (and this is probably why it wasn’t written).

There were two stories in Ray Bradbury’s special issue a few months later, and editor Ferman decided to go with the much weaker one (which I’ve reviewed here previously⁵), To the Chicago Abyss (F&SF, May 1963). This, presumably written a decade and a half after the first story (an associational Fahrenheit 451 piece) isn’t bad but it illustrates the difference in quality between his early and later work.
The story tells of an old man in a post-Annihilation Day society who approaches people and reminds them of things lost:

“Raleighs,” said the old man. “Lucky Strikes.”
The young man stared at him.
“Kent. Kools. Marlboro,’’ said the old man, not looking at him. “Those were the names. White, red, amber packs grass-green, sky-blue, pure gold with the red slick small ribbon that ran around the top that you pulled to zip away the crinkly cellophane, and the blue government tax-stamp—”
“Shut up,’’ said the young man.
“Buy them in drug-stores, fountains, subways—”
“Shut up!”  p. 58

After the old man is physically assaulted another man takes him home and hides him when the secret police call. He suggests to the old man that it would be better to address several people at a time in private rather than individual strangers in public.
I wasn’t really convinced by the concept, and the writing isn’t as good as in the first story.

The Key by Isaac Asimov (F&SF, October 1966) is one of his ‘Wendell Urth’ series, although that character doesn’t appear onstage until the third act.
The story starts with two men finding an alien device on the Moon. When the narrator, Jennings, later handles it, he gets a telepathic flash from his colleague that reveals him as an Ultra, someone who believes that the Earth’s population of six billion should be reduced by radical means. Jennings fears the device falling into the Ultras’ hands, and tension increases between them. Later, they fight, and Jennings is stabbed. The rest of the first act has him on the surface of the Moon trying to hide the device and leave a clue to its whereabouts.
The second act has a two investigators from the Bureau discussing Jenning’s death and the missing device. When they fail to decode a copy of the written card found in Jenning’s hand, they contact Wendell Urth.
The third act has them questioning the idiosyncratic (and agoraphobic) Urth in his lair, where the latter masterfully decodes the clue for them.
The first part of this suffers from having a slightly clunky set-up but the rest of it, even given the endless talking heads and a contrived setup, is reasonably entertaining if minor fare, and I liked it.

Ship of Shadows by Fritz Leiber (F&SF, July 1969) has Spar the narrator wake up to find a cat talking to him. We gradually learn that Spar is half-blind, and that he appears to live in a zero gee environment:

Out along Spar’s arm moved the cat, a black blur to his squinting eyes. In teeth Spar could not see, it held a smaller gray blur. Spar touched the latter. It was even shorter furred, but cold.
As if irked, the cat took off from his bare forearm with a strong push of hind legs. It landed expertly on the next shroud, a wavery line of gray that vanished in either direction before reaching a wall.
Spar undipped himself, curled his toes round his own pencil-thin shroud, and squinted at the cat.
The cat stared back with eyes that were green blurs which almost coalesced in the black blur of its outsize head.
Spar asked, “Your child? Dead?”
The cat loosed its gray burden, which floated beside its head.
“Chchchchild!” All the former scorn and more were back in the sibilant voice. “It izzzz a rat I sssslew her, issssiot!”
Spar’s lips puckered in a smile. “I like you, cat. I will call you Kim.”
“Kim-shlun!” the cat spat. “I’ll call you Lushshsh! Or Sssot!”  p. 130

The story then follows Spar as he reports for work at a torus shaped bar (also in zero-gee) and there, one by one, we are introduced to a series of characters: Keeper, the owner of the bar; three “brewos” who are waiting when Spar lifts the shutters (“Sky strangle you!” “Earth bury you!” “Seas sear you!”; “Language, boys!” Keeper reproved); Lucy, a prostitute; and finally Rixende, who is supposedly looking for a black bag for Crown the coroner. When Rixende demands a drink, and Keeper refuses because of Crown’s standing orders, it looks like there will be trouble, but Rixende gets her way by using particularly blasphemous language (“Earth Mother!”) and pulling out a gold earring for payment, which leaves her bleeding. Then Crown arrives, and there is a moment of peril but, after he braces Keeper, Spar, and Kim the cat, the couple leave without any further trouble.
Later on, Doc arrives, and we get an inkling that he knows much more about the ship and its environment than Spar (it’ll be apparent to seasoned SF readers at this point that the story takes place in a generation spaceship; non-SF readers will probably be very puzzled or no longer reading). Spar returns the black bag to Doc, which was stolen by Rixende the previous night but later filched by Spar. In exchange for this Spar receives a promise of false teeth, and spectacles to improve his sight.
The remainder of the story, which takes place against the backdrop of rumours about “vamps” and witches active during Sleepday, has Keeper send Spar on a trip through the ship to complete various errands to Crown and the Bridge. As Spar and the cat later approach Crown’s quarters, Kim warns Spar to stay back, and he dimly sees five people connected by tubes. Spar passes by, and goes on to deliver a message to the Bridge, where he talks to an Ensign about the strange nocturnal activity around the bar. Finally, Spar goes to his appointment with Doc.
These events set up the remainder of the story, and further plot complications involve all of the characters mentioned so far. After further twists and turns (during which Spar’s eyesight improves and so does his and the reader’s comprehension of environment surrounding him) the story climaxes (spoiler) in a scene where Spar is captive, and watches as Crown and his posse drink the blood of Lucy (the five tubes earlier were connected to another victim). Once they are (literally) finished squeezing her dry, her body is put into a recycler. Then the Ensign and other ship’s crew intervene to save Spar and Doc, and there is a final scene that reveals the ship is in orbit around a molten, war-torn Earth.
This, for the most part, is a very good piece—Leiber is a colourful, inventive, and stylish storyteller—but the vampirism scene at the end is somewhat ridiculous (not to mention anomalous—why would they be doing that?), and the data dump at the end about what and where the ship is far too rushed. A pity, but you can see why readers liked it, and I wouldn’t rule it out of any ‘Best of the Year’ I might have edited either.

The Queen of Air and Darkness by Poul Anderson seems at first as if the story is going to be a Midsummer Night’s Dream-like fantasy:

A shape came bounding over Cloudmoor. It had two arms and two legs, but the legs were long and claw-footed and feathers covered it to the end of a tail and broad wings. The face was half human, dominated by its eyes. Had Ayoch been able to stand wholly erect, he would have reached to the boy’s shoulder.
The girl rose. “He carries a burden,” she said. Her vision was not meant for twilight like that of a northland creature born, but she had learned how to use every sign her senses gave her. Besides the fact that ordinarily a pook would fly, there was a heaviness to his haste.
“And he comes from the south.” Excitement jumped in the boy, sudden as a green flame that went across the constellation Lyrth. He sped down the mound. “Ohoi, Ayoch!” he called, “Me here, Mistherd!”
“And Shadow-of-a-Dream,” the girl laughed, following. The pook halted. He breathed louder than the soughing in the growth around him. A smell of bruised yerba lifted where he stood. “Well met in winterbirth,” he whistled. “You can help me bring this to Carheddin.”
He held out what he bore. His eyes were yellow lanterns above. It moved and whimpered.
“Why, a child,” Mistherd said.  p. 188

In the next section the story changes into a planetary colonisation tale, which starts with a woman called Barbro Cullen visiting an investigator called Eric Sherrinford in a town called Christmas Landing. Her child has gone missing on a field trip to the north of their planet, Roland, and she fears he may have been abducted.
Sherrinford agrees to take the case, and it isn’t long before they head north to an outpost called Portolondon. In a video interview with the local constable, Sherrinford probes the officer about the incident, and also the local myths:

[Sherrinford] cradled his pipe bowl in both hands and peered into the tiny hearth of it. “Perhaps what interests me most,” he said softly, “is why—across that gap of centuries, across a barrier of machine civilization and its utterly antagonistic world view—no continuity of tradition whatsoever—why have hard-headed, technologically organized, reasonably well-educated colonists here brought back from its grave a belief in the Old Folk?”  p. 201

Later, Sherrinford and Cullen head north and, one night at their campsite, he tells Cullen his theory that there is an advanced indigenous race on Roland which is hiding from the human race. Little do the couple know that they are being spied upon by Mistherd, a previous human abductee, who now swears allegiance to the Queen of Air and Darkness.
The rest of the story follows the pair as they track down the child.
This is an impressive piece, and what is particularly notable is the texture of this world. Not only do we see things from both the indigenous alien’s and settler’s point of view, but we also learn about the myths and legends that have been created by the limited contact between the two. This is perhaps most evident in two sequential scenes: the first takes place in the house of William Irons, a settler who lives in the far north, and who tells the couple about the rules and customs that apply there with respect to the “Queen”; the second is when Cullen and Sherrinford are later at their campsite talking about a folk song performed by Iron’s son but interrupted by an emotional outburst from Cullen. She finishes the song for Sherrinford, and he hears of a story about a ranger, Arvin, and how he refuses to become part of the Outling folk. The Queen tells him he will regret his choice:

I do not need a magic
to make you always mourn.
.
I send you home with nothing
except your memory
of moonlight, Outling music,
night breezes, dew, and me.
And that will run behind you,
a shadow on the sun,
and that will lie beside you
when every day is done.
.
In work and play and friendship
your grief will strike you dumb
for thinking what you are—and—
what you might have become.  p. 216

It is a stunning moment which not only elegantly and succinctly lends the story hundreds of years of history, but also dangles the prospect of human uplift or transcendence in front of the reader. And, as if all this doesn’t already build a convincing world, there are also a couple of short passages that sketch the spread of humanity through space, something that gives the tapestry of the story even more colour and depth.
If the piece has a flaw it is probably the ending (spoiler), which degenerates into a guns blazing rescue of the boy, a rather crude end to such a sophisticated story—although, to be fair, that event is preceded by a haunting section where Cullen is kidnapped and telepathically induced to think that her dead husband is taking her to the Queen of Air and Darkness.
A deserving Hugo and Nebula Award winner.

Midsummer Century by James Blish is a long novella,⁶ and is the second story here that I’ve already reviewed.⁷ The story starts with an atypical passage, for SF, describing the class and politics of Martels, the young astronomer who is the protagonist of the story:

Martels, unmarried and 30, was both a statistic and a beneficiary of what his British compatriots were bitterly calling the brain-drain, the luring of the best English minds to the United States by higher pay, lower taxes, and the apparent absence of any class system whatsoever. And he had found no reason to regret it, let alone feel guilty about it. Both his parents were dead, and as far as he was concerned, he owed the United Kingdom nothing any more.
Of course, the advantages of living in the States were not quite so unclouded as they had been presented to him, but he had never expected anything else. Take the apparent absence of a class system, for instance: All the world knew that the blacks, the Spanish-Americans, and the poor in general were discriminated against ferociously in the States and that political opposition of any kind to the Establishment was becoming increasingly dangerous. But what counted as far as he was concerned was that it was not the same sort of class system.
Born of a working-class family in the indescribably ugly city of Doncaster, Martels had been cursed from the outset with a working-class Midlands dialect which excluded him from the “right” British circles as permanently and irrevocably as if he had been a smuggled Pakistani immigrant. No “public” school had been financially available to his parents to help him correct the horrible sound of his own voice, nor to give him the classical languages which in his youth had still been necessary for entry into Oxford or Cambridge.
Instead, he had ground, kicked, bitten and otherwise fought his way through one of the new redbrick polytechnics. Though he emerged at the end with the highest possible First in astrophysics, it was with an accent still so atrocious as to deny him admittance to any but the public side—never the lounge or saloon—of any bar in Britain.  pp. 245-246

After a little more of this, and a brief description of his job in America as a radio astronomer, he falls down the waveguide of a large telescope and finds himself 25,000 years in the future.
Martels does not immediately find out this information, of course, but initially wakes and sees what appears to be a museum. It then becomes apparent that he is in a receptacle that contains an intelligence called Qvant, and he watches as a primitive human comes into the museum to question Qvant about a problem his people are having. Martels speaks up during this transaction: the native flees and in a subsequent conversation Qvant tells Martels where and when he is before attempting to eject him and failing:

“It appears that I cannot be rid of you yet,” Qvant said. The tone of his amplified voice seemed to hover somewhere between icy fury and equally icy amusement. “Very well, we shall hold converse, you and I. It will be a change from being an oracle to tribesmen. But sooner or later, Martels-from-the-past, sooner or later I shall catch you out—and then you will come to know the greatest thing that I do not know: What the afterlife is like. Sooner or later, Martels . . . sooner or later . . .”
Just in time, Martels realized that the repetitions were the hypnotic prelude to a new attack. Digging into whatever it had been that he had saved himself with before, that unknown substrate of the part of this joint mind that belonged to him alone, he said with equal iciness:
“Perhaps. You have a lot to teach me, if you will, and I’ll listen. And maybe I can teach you something, too. But I think I can also make you extremely uncomfortable, Qvant; you’ve just shown me two different ways to go about that. So perhaps you had better mind your manners, and bear in mind that however the tribesmen see you, you’re a long way from being a god to me.”
For answer, Qvant simply prevented Martels from saying another word. Slowly, the sun set, and the shapes in the hall squatted down into a darkness against which Martels was not even allowed to close his unowned eyes.  pp. 253-254

The story subsequently charts the game of cat and mouse between the pair as Martels tries to learn more about this world. Every time he thinks he is getting nearer to forming a plan that will help him get back to his own time Qvant falls silent for months. Nevertheless, Martels eventually discovers a number of things: that Qvant is a brain in a box, and that the natives can communicate with their dead ancestors; he also learns that the ‘Birds’ are a threat to humanity and will wipe out what is left of the human race in the near future.
When Qvant appears to be sleeping another native appears, and Martels urges him to get his tribe to make alliances with the others against the Birds. The native, thinking he is being mocked, leaves. Qvant has meantime awoken and laughs: he had previously told Martels of the futility of this course of action.
In the middle and final sections Martels manages to escape by taking possession of one of the natives’ bodies and heads south through the Birds’ territory to what was Antarctica, home of Terminus and the survivors of Rebirth 3.
As you can gather from the above, this story has something of a Van Vogtian feel to it (the far future setting, the sudden changes of direction, the hand-waving explanations of sentience, etc.) and I wondered if Blish was making it up as he went along. What sets him apart from Van Vogt is that the narrative is easier to follow, and Blish’s writing and vocabulary is superior. He also takes the time to do a number of quarter or half page digressions on various matters that he wants to discuss or describe (the social and political observation referred to above, the mechanism of telepathy and Rhine’s experiments, etc., etc.).
As it turned out I didn’t enjoy this as much as I did when I originally read it, but found it an entertaining read for all that. But probably one not to take too seriously.

There is quite a lot of associated non-fiction in the book, and it leads off with a one-page Introduction by Edward L. Ferman. In this we learn that the Special Issues were the idea of Joe Ferman, Ed’s father and publisher of the magazine, in an attempt to increase sales. Ferman says this ploy succeeded “well enough” and adds that there was “continual demand” for back issues. He credits the writers and their stories for the issues’ popularity.
As for the various appreciations that accompany the stories, they vary in depth: L. Sprague de Camp contributes a short personal portrait about Isaac Asimov but doesn’t touch on his writing.
William F. Nolan provides an eminently quotable piece on Ray Bradbury, and I’ll limit myself to one anecdote from when Bradbury was still trying to break into the professional magazines:

“During this period I began haunting the doorsteps of the local professionals, many of whom belonged to the club,” says Ray. “I was desperate to learn the secrets of the pros, and would pop up with a new story nearly every week which I passed around for criticism and advice from Hank Kuttner to Leigh Brackett to Ed Hamilton to Bob Heinlein to Ross Rocklynne to Jack Williamson to Henry Hasse, all of whom were incredibly kind and patient with me and with these dreadful early efforts. In fact, the above-named authors grew lean and rangy from countless flights through the rear exits of walk-up apartments when Bradbury would suddenly appear at the front door with a new manuscript in his teeth.”  p. 74

Judith Merril contributes pieces on Theodore Sturgeon and Fritz Leiber. In the first she talks about Sturgeon himself, his writing, and how she learned how to write under his guidance (and got her pseudonym).
In Leiber’s piece she has this to say about his early work:

[Another brief try at free-lancing in 1942 was] just long enough to write the two novels that would place him firmly in the top rank of science-fantasy, and keep him there through his first long dry spell of five years. Conjure Wife (later filmed as Burn, Witch, Burn!) combined traditional witchcraft and a realistic contemporary setting derived largely from the year at Occidental; Gather, Darkness! went further in two directions, at least, using the apparatus and literature of witchcraft in juxtaposition with technological extrapolation and political prophecy to create one of the first truly modern science fiction novels.
If he had written nothing more, Leiber would still be a leading genre author. Few 30-year-old fond memories can stand intimate revisiting. These do. If I were coming across them for the first time today, I think I would respond with the same sense of discovery and astonishment I had in 1943.  p. 174

I read both recently and thought they are still outstanding.
Towards the end of this second essay, Merril has this observation about both men:

Both men have been singularly uneven writers. Much of what they published was too hastily written, or too much limited by the narrowness of the specialty field they wrote for. But it is true of both of them that the best of what they wrote, at any time, remains as valid now as when it was written.  p. 176

Gordon Dickson’s essay on Poul Anderson provides a good mix of biographical and literary observation, and James Blish by Robert A. W. Lowndes, the last piece, is another quotable one:

I’ll never forget the subject of our conversation around a table at the old Dragon Inn on West 4th Street, Manhattan, that evening. Here we were, a group of science fiction editors, writers, and fans, welcoming a fellow enthusiast on leave from the army, and what were we talking about? Science fiction? Fantasy? The shape of the postwar world with its science fiction aspects? No; what Jim wanted to talk about was FINNEGANS WAKE.
Don Wollheim’s argument was that Joyce’s final work was little more than an elaborate puzzle for the elite literateur. I hadn’t read it, so I just listened. Jim’s argument was that if you applied yourself to it, the story came to a great deal more than a melange of puns and esoteric references. And right there, although I did not realize it at the time, I had been given one of the keys to this multitalented, charming, and irascible personality I would get to know, respect, and love in later years: any work of literature, or any other art worth paying attention to, makes demands upon the reader, listener, or viewer.  p. 317

The second of the Advent books [More Issues at Hand, a book of criticism] shows a slight mellowing of the waspish qualities; he says in his foreword: “While I still believe that it is desirable to be merciless to a bad story, I am no longer quite so sure that the commission of one represents flaws in the author’s character or horrid secrets in his ancestry.”  p. 322

It is an essay that is definitely worth reading.
There is one final quote of note:

At 50, with developed interest, and recognition, in numerous fields (he’s still working on a book relating to music “ the hard way” ), we may not see quite so much more science fiction from Jim as we have in the past.  p. 322

Unfortunately, Lowndes was correct, but not in the way he expected: Blish would die four years later of cancer, age 54.
Although the Bibliography articles were hugely useful at the time, these have all been superseded by the likes of isfdb.org. In any event, the ones published here, while updated, are truncated versions of the originals (they omit the short story and article information).

This volume is a mixed bag of stories, although most are good or better—and in some cases, much better (the Leiber and Anderson). Given that not all of these are stand-outs, I wonder if the idea for most of these issues came before the stories?  ●

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1. This is the third group read of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction of the Year Facebook Group. The second, still ongoing (it’s going to take a while), is The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, volume I, edited by Robert Silverberg. The upcoming fourth group read is going to be the 2020 Hugo Award short stories.

2. From Mike Ashley’s F&SF entry at the Science Fiction Encyclopedia:

Davidson produced the first two “author special” issues, featuring Theodore Sturgeon (September 1962) and Ray Bradbury (May 1963). This has since become an occasional but important part of F&SF’s history. Subsequent special issues featured Isaac Asimov (October 1966), Fritz Leiber (July 1969), Poul Anderson (April 1971), James Blish (April 1972), Frederik Pohl (September 1973), Robert Silverberg (April 1974), Damon Knight (November 1976), Harlan Ellison (July 1977), Stephen King (December 1990), Lucius Shepard (March 2001), Kate Wilhelm (September 2001), Barry N Malzberg (June 2003), Gene Wolfe (April 2007) and David Gerrold (September/October 2016).

I should work my way through these issues.

3. Choriocarcinoma at Wikipedia.

4. Gametes, diploid and haploid cells at Wikipedia.

5. The Ray Bradbury Special Issue (May 1963) is reviewed here.

6. ISFDB says that the book form of the work is an “expansion of the version published in Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in April 1972.” Meanwhile, the introduction in the magazine says “MIDSUMMER CENTURY will be published in hard covers by Doubleday, but not one word has been cut in the version you are about to read.” p. 5 (and it appears they have reduced the type size to squeeze it all in).
An OCR word count of the magazine vs. book version shows 29,500 vs. 29,300 words.

7. The James Blish Special Issue (April 1972) is reviewed here. ●