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Editor, Edward L. Ferman; Associate Editor, Ted White

Fiction:
Sundown • novelette by David Redd ∗∗∗
The Saga of DMM • short story by Larry Eisenberg ∗∗
Brain Wave • novelette by Stuart Palmer and Jennifer Palmer ∗∗
Cerberus • short story by Algis Budrys ∗∗∗+
To Behold the Sun • short story by Dean R. Koontz ∗
The Power of the Mandarin • short story by Gahan Wilson ∗∗
The Chelmlins • short story by Leonard Tushnet ∗∗
The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D • short story by J. G. Ballard ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D • cover by Jack Gaughan
Books • by Judith Merril
Cartoon • by Gahan Wilson
Coming Next Month
Noise • science essay by Theodore L. Thomas
The First Metal • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Index to Volume Thirty-Three – July-December 1967

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This issue of F&SF is from early on in Ed Ferman’s editorship: I read it for a change of pace (it’s a quick read compared with those huge bedsheet issues of Astounding), and because of another project I’m working on.¹
The issue opens with Sundown by new British/Welsh writer David Redd, who had recently published a couple of short stories in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds (the Compact Books incarnation). This was the first of four longer novelettes that he would publish in the US magazines around this time (two were published in F&SF, and two in the pages of Worlds of If).²
The story begins with a prologue about a travelling showman who displays a captive troll from the northern wastes:

He was exhibited in the open air, at night. One morning after the people had departed, just before dawn, the troll was visited by a wandering poet.
“This is not your world,” said the troll to the poet, as they watched a passing satellite and waited for the dawn.
The poet replied: “We are here, therefore the world is ours.”
The troll: “You live in our lands without being part of them. You make your own lands around you, and you huddle together within them, refusing to face the natural world.”
The poet: “We fear the dark and the unknown.”
The troll: “To you, life is light and vision. On your home planet the creatures must dwell in continuous light. Here, we live only in darkness. When the sun sets, all the creatures of the rocks come alive and dance, that the sun shall not rise again. We were born in darkness, and the darkness shall return.”
The poet: “There are eyes in the deep forests, glimpsed by travellers. At night the goblins come out and light fires on the hillsides. Do they too pray for the end of day?”
The troll: “All creatures pray for the end of light. One evening the sun will go down into the mists forever.”  p. 5-6

The story then moves to a dryad called the White Lady, who is watching fur-sprites digging holes down through the frozen snow and ice to a deserted human settlement in search of metal. While the fur-sprites are doing this the twice-a-day wind blows and the White Lady senses a human coming towards them: he is on his way to mine a node of living rock. The White Lady and the sprites stop work and leave for Homeland to raise the alarm.
Once they arrive there the creatures who live in Homeland discuss the matter and decide on their defence. The White Lady offers to go and probe the human for weaknesses, and an oreade, a mountain spirit, says he will go with her, as do two fur-sprites and a gnome:

Travelling so closely together, they could not help overhearing stray thoughts from each other, despite their rigid mental control.
The dryad gradually absorbed the basic personalities of her companions—the unemotional maternalism of the oreade; the earnest passions of Jaerem and Moera, the two fur-sprites; and the comforting stolid strength of the gnome.
Before an hour had passed she knew them as well as she knew her closest friends. This intimacy was a feature of all journeys made by a small number of people.  p. 11

It becomes apparent through this passage and similar ones that, although the story is told in fantasy language, this is a science-fictional world, more or less (the powers the various creatures have are paranormal ones). This is most obvious when the White Lady, who has hidden in the middle of the valley, probes the man as he approaches:

With a shock she realised that the monsters mind was almost empty of surface mental processes. Below the shallow layers of surface thought its mind was a dreadful thing. The finding of the living-rock was equated with the concepts of wealth, sexual achievements, social power and status. Ignorance rather than ambition had brought the human here. It did not understand the forces within it, and it believed that possession of the living-rock would satisfy its needs and somehow atone for the wasted years of its past life. Yet despite this lack of self-awareness, the human could react quickly when faced with a problem—
The dryad ceased her examination of the human’s hidden thoughts before they distracted her further. She should not be wasting time. She should be testing the human’s mental defences, not exploring its vile memories.  p. 13

Despite hiding herself with a camouflage ‘spell’, the human almost steps on her, and she launches an all-out mental attack, only to discover that it has no effect on him. While she escapes the two fur sprites distract the man by throwing snowballs at him, but they are shot and killed. The man recovers their bodies, and the White Lady senses that this is so he can eat them later: she and the others are horrified, and they follow him in order to recover their fallen comrades. When the man stops they distract him and retrieve the two dead sprites.
The story concludes with the group returning to Homeland. En route they meet the troll from the prologue and, as they approach the seam of living rock (spoiler), the man arrives and the story comes to a bloody and brutal climax, one which is even more jarring given the almost fairytale feel of most of the rest of the story.
It is interesting to compare this piece with Redd’s first two appearances in New Worlds. Whereas the first two could be identified as the work of a new writer, this one is considerably more polished.
The Saga of DMM by Larry Eisenberg is the first of his ‘Duckworth’ stories. In this one the scientist invents a highly calorific substance called DMM. It is later found to be an aphrodisiac, and also turns people into human bombs. This is all a setup for an okay punchline.
Brain Wave by Stuart Palmer³ and Jennifer Palmer has a college student telepathically contacted by aliens:

His first impression was that of a flashlight being flicked across the ceiling by some joker, or maybe it was the reflection of auto headlights from the street outside. But there it was, a little lost erratic light where no light should reasonably be. He could see it just as well with his eyes closed as open, which was odd. The apparition was faintly prismatic, in subdued technicolor. And it was somehow attractive, too—just as a lure skipping the surface of a stream might be attractive to a fish down below.  p. 36

The message now seemed to come clearer and stronger. “Brother Garyjones, do not be alarmed. We are (I am?) rejoicing at making first contact with any mind on your world. Praise God (Allah, Buddha, Osiris, Siva, Somebody Up There?) for this important breakthrough. All the best minds of our planet (world, earth?) are linked in this effort, amplifying each other and helping to project thought”
“Who are you?” Gary managed to whisper, still not believing.
“We are (I am?) speaking for the people (folk, denizens?) of our world, the second planet of our star. Will you, of your own free will, try to keep in mental communication with us, oh please?”
“Why not? Only I’m not sure I dig you.”
“Please to understand that we can only send thoughts. You must translate them into language, using your own vocabulary. Perhaps this contact may be of great value to both peoples as we learn to think together. It may seem very new and strange to you, but please be patient.”  p. 37-38

The rest of the piece is a light-hearted and inconsequential tale of what happens when he tries to talk about this visitation to his on/off hippie girlfriend and, later, a college friend. He gets no help from either of them.
After further telepathic contacts, and when his unhappiness becomes obvious to the (humanoid) aliens, they offer him the chance to translocate to a vacant body on their planet. The minor twist (spoiler) is that he ends up in the body of an infant.
This is lightly peppered with hippie neologisms, references to casual drug use, and mentions of the Vietnam war, etc., so the story sounds very much of its time.
Cerberus by Algis Budrys is, as Ferman says in the introduction, neither fantasy nor SF, but it is an unusual and original piece of black humour that fits perfectly into the magazine. It starts at a party of advertising execs where Marty’s wife is canoodling outside on the balcony with another man, something that apparently happens at all parties she attends (and with a different man each time). This makes the other party-goers uncomfortable but, whereas Marty appears oblivious to his wife’s actions, he always senses the tension in the room and habitually tells shaggy dog stories to improve the atmosphere.
The rest of the piece consists of three of Marty’s tales: he tells the last one (spoiler) after an accidental confrontation with one of his wife’s illicit partners, which leaves him lying on a broken coffee table with a shard of glass sticking through his chest. While the assembled group wait for an ambulance, they lean over Marty to hear his final story. . . .
An impressive piece.
To Behold the Sun by Dean R. Koontz has more than a whiff of Zelazny about it: the poem at the beginning; the tortured hero who is training to ‘cybernetic’ (mentally control) a spaceship going on a voyage to the sun; the beautiful ex-film star girlfriend who is ignored as he starts his preparation for the trip.
There are other crew going on the mission along with the narrator, but their function is never convincingly explained:

In the shadows stood the captain, without duties, trying to look like his job really mattered. We all knew that it didn’t; he was an ornament, a leftover from the days when men sailed the seas and lower skies.  p. 75

In due course (spoiler) we find that their role is as cannon-fodder. Bad things start happening on the ship while Jessie’s consciousness is out of his body and in the ship: an entity, something as “big as a robomech”, with “two gaping craters instead of eyes”, terrorises the crew while muttering “Not to the sun, my boy. Not to the sun, the sun.”
The stylistic and emotional froth of this piece doesn’t conceal what is an unconvincing story that doesn’t make a lot of sense. One to put in the “mad astronaut” file, probably.
Gahan Wilson not only has a cartoon in this issue but one of his rare short stories, The Power of the Mandarin. This starts with an alarming conversation:

Aladar Rakas gave a wicked grin and raised his brandy glass.
“To the King Plotter of Evil. To the Prophet of our Doom. To the Mandarin.”
I joined the toast willingly.
“May he never be totally defeated. May he and his vile minions ever threaten the civilized world.”
We drank contentedly, Rakas leaned back, struck a luxurious pose, and wafted forth a cloud of Havana’s very best.
“How many have been killed this time?”
Rakas tapped an ash from his cigar and gazed thoughtfully upward. I could see his lips moving as he made the count.
“Five,” he said, and then, after a pause, “No. Six.”
I looked at him with some surprise. “That’s hardly up to the usual slaughter.”
Rakas chuckled and signaled the waiter for more brandy.
“True enough,” he said. “However, one particular murder of those six is enough to make up for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ordinary ones.”

We soon find that Rakas is a popular writer who is talking to his editor about the Mandarin, the evil mastermind of his books, killing off the clean cut English hero. Rakas has committed this rather perverse act as he is a Hungarian émigré who has a chip on his shoulder from his time in Britain.
Later in the story Rakas uses a model of himself as the hero in his new book. He then finds that the reality of the book starts seeping into his life. . . . At this point Rakas’s editor (and narrator of the story) is involved, and discovers that Rakas is unable write a story that kills off the Mandarin.
There are a couple of reasonable twists at the end of this, and it is competently done but, for whatever reason, I wasn’t particularly enthralled. I either partook of the story too late at night, or there is a limit to the number of stories you can read where the writer ends up in, or is affected by, a world of his own creation.
The Chelmlins by Leonard Tushnet is an example of a what I think is probably a distinct F&SF sub-genre: fantasy stories based on Jewish folklore or culture. Avram Davidson published a few of these and Ed Ferman would continue that tradition throughout his editorship.⁴
This piece is about the foolish people of a Polish village called Chelm, and how the Chelmlins, a form of Polish gremlin, protect them from their stupidity.
After WWII the survivors of Chelm move to the USA (given that only six survive the Holocaust out of a population of two thousand you may observe that they need more able Chelmlins) and eventually form a corporation like RAND to sell ideas and inventions:

Edward Everett [had] the first idea. “Listen, brothers,” he said, “why don’t we make big bubbles out of plastic to fit over the electric light bulbs so bugs won’t come to them. Bugs are attracted by the light, everyone knows, so let us make black bubbles and the bugs won’t see the light.”
“Brilliant! A genius! Another Edison!” Acclaim was general. HEHE pooled the resources of its members, got a manufacturer to make thousands of the black plastic bubbles,—and then discovered that no one wanted insect-free non-illumination. Here the chelmlins took over. A toy merchant bought the entire stock (at a profit for HEHE, it goes without saying), made eye holes in the bubbles, and marketed them as children’s space pirate helmets.  p. 109

And so it continues. Like the Palmer story, this is a pleasant enough piece, but there’s just not much of a story here.
The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D by J. G. Ballard is one of his ‘Vermilion Sands’ stories and it gets off to a cracking start:

All summer the colud-sculptors would come from Vermilion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West. The tallest of the towers was Coral D, and here the rising air above the sandreefs was topped by swan-like clumps of fair-weather cumulus.
Lifted on the shoulders of the air above the crown of Coral D, we would carve sea-horses and unicorns, the portraits of presidents and film-stars, lizards and exotic birds. As the crowd watched from their cars, a cool rain would fall on to the dusty roofs, weeping from the sculptured clouds as they sailed across the desert floor towards the sun. Of all the cloud-sculptures we were to carve, the strangest were the portraits of Leonora Chanel.
As I look back to that afternoon last summer when she first came in her white limousine to watch the cloud-sculptors of Coral D, I know we barely realised how seriously this beautiful but insane woman regarded the sculptures floating above her in that calm sky. Later her portraits, carved in the whirlwind, were to weep their storm-rain upon the corpses of their sculptors.  p. 113

The story then flashbacks three months to Major Parker, the narrator, arriving at Vermillion Sands: he is a disabled pilot, and takes over a disused studio where he starts manufacturing kites and gliders. Later, while he is flying them and a sudden gale starts, two men appear and help him recover his fleet. They are a malformed dwarf called Petit Manuel, and another man called Nolan. Manuel suggests using the larger glider the narrator is building, along with silver iodide, to “carve clouds”:

So were formed the cloud-sculptors of Coral D. Although I considered myself one of them, I never flew the gliders, but I taught Nolan and little Manuel to fly, and later, when he joined us, Charles Van Eyck. Nolan had found this blond-haired pirate of the cafe terraces in Vermilion Sands, a laconic teuton with droll eyes and a weak mouth, and brought him out to Coral D when the season ended and the well-to-do tourists and their nubile daughters returned to Red Beach. “Major Parker—Charles Van Eyck. He’s a head-hunter,” Nolan commented with cold humour, “—maidenheads.”
Despite their uneasy rivalry I realised that Van Eyck would give our group a useful dimension of glamour.
From the first I suspected that the studio in the desert was Nolan’s, and that we were all serving some private whim of this dark-haired solitary. At the time, however, I was more concerned with teaching them to fly—first on cable, mastering the updraughts that swept the stunted turret of Coral A, smallest of the towers, then the steeper slopes of B and C, and finally the powerful currents of Coral D. Late one afternoon, when I began to wind them in, Nolan cut away his line. The glider plummeted onto its back, diving down to impale itself on the rock spires. I flung myself to the ground as the cable whipped across my car, shattering the windshield. When I looked up, Nolan was soaring high in the tinted air above Coral D.
The wind, guardian of the coral towers, carried him through the islands of cumulus that veiled the evening light.
As I ran to the winch, the second cable went, and little Manuel swerved away to join Nolan. Ugly crab on the ground, in the air the hunchback became a bird with immense wings, outflying both Nolan and Van Eyck. I watched them as they circled the coral towers, and then swept down together over the desert floor, stirring the sand-rays into soot-like clouds. Petit Manuel was jubilant. He strutted around me like a pocket Napoleon, contemptuous of my broken leg, scooping up handfuls of broken glass and tossing them over his head like bouquets to the air.  p. 114-115

The three of them start displaying their cloud-sculpting skills to spectators who arrive in their cars:

Nolan turned from the cloud, his wings slipping as if unveiling his handiwork. Illuminated by the afternoon sun was the serene face of a three-year old child. Its wide cheeks framed a placid mouth and plump chin. As one or two people clapped, Nolan sailed over the cloud and rippled the roof into ribbons and curls.
However, I knew that the real climax was yet to come. Cursed by some malignant virus, Nolan seemed unable to accept his own handiwork, always destroying it with the same cold humour. Petit Manuel had thrown away his cigarette, and even Van Eyck had turned his attention from the women in the cars.
Nolan soared above the child’s face, following like a matador waiting for the moment of the kill. There was silence for a minute as he worked away at the cloud, and then someone slammed a car door in disgust.
Hanging above us was the white image of a skull.
The child’s face, converted by a few strokes, had vanished, but in the notched teeth and gaping orbits, large enough to hold a car, we could still see an echo of its infant features. The spectre moved past us, the spectators frowning at this weeping skull whose rain fell upon their faces.  p. 116-117

After this Leonora Chanel’s secretary hire them to perform at Lagoon West, with the condition that they are only allowed to create images of their employer, a famous movie star.
The remainder of the story has a number of threads: there is the initial show put on for Leonara and her guests; she and Nolan (apparently an old lover) later fall out; Van Eyck, sensing an opportunity for another conquest, moves in. The climax comes when (spoiler) the storm clouds make the final performance too dangerous, but Leonora goads Petit Manuel into trying anyway. His glider disintegrates and he dies, whereupon Nolan takes to the air and guides a nearby tornado over the villa. Leonara and Van Eyck are later found dead the wreckage.
There is some amazing imagery in this extraordinarily imaginative story but towards the end it becomes a rather too straightforward story of jealousy and revenge—I never thought I’d ever complain about a story of Ballard’s being a little too mechanistic. I’m quibbling here though: it is a striking piece and one I would expect to see if the ‘Year’s Bests’ anthologies.

The convincingly Daliesque Cover is for Ballard’s story (which mentions that artist) and is, I think, one of Jack Gaughan’s better works.
Books, by Judith Merril, is largely taken up by a long and interesting review of Dangerous Visions by Harlan Ellison, and it starts by noting that Ellison’s ‘New Thing’ is not the same as hers or Moorcock’s, and is “characterized by pyrotechnic style and shock content”. She then mentions the anthology’s original raison d’etre of publishing “taboo” stories and mentions an earlier attempt of her own some years before, and how nearly every story in that collection was later published anyway. From this Merril learned there was probably no such thing as a (good) unpublishable story:

Presumably, Ellison made the same discovery I did, because the emphasis in his introduction to the completed anthology is much more on his concept of The New Thing than on the Dangerous Visions idea.
And certainly the large majority of the inclusions would seem quite in place, for instance, in the pages of this magazine.  p. 28-29

She then notes that there are only half-a-dozen stories out of the thirty-three that might have had to go outside the American SF magazines for publication (“the Emshwiller, Bunch, and Sladek stories; possibly Delany’s, Ballard’s, and Spinrad’s.”)
She then goes on to observe that the anthology does contain dangerous visions and that:

The Dangerous Vision has become a commonplace of our society; the forecasting of such visions is one of the chief roles science fiction has played in the past twenty or thirty years. Yet this book, which began as a direct request to presumably stifled authors to voice their most terrifying, shocking, or extreme viewpoints, is (with two—well, perhaps three—exceptions) most effective in those stories which concentrate on literary values and technical excellence, rather than idea content.  p. 29

She then mentions her dislike of the introductions (and how she ignored them until she finished the fiction):

Even more than the editorial selections, the extensive and often painfully personal and detailed introductions confirm the evidence of Ellison’s earlier collections of his own work: as writer and editor, he is a man of vision, boldness, determination, generous loyalty, intense sensitivity, strong beliefs, unbelievable egocentricity, and very nearly complete lack of taste.
With any reasonable exercise of editorial judgement, one standard length anthology could have been selected from this giant, to match and perhaps surpass any previous collections of imaginative fiction.
As it stands, the total wordage breaks down into four roughly equivalent portions: one quarter is composed of twelve titles ranging from good to superb; one quarter consists of four stories of remarkable, but flawed, quality—each or any of which should have been susceptible to marked improvement with discerning criticism; one quarter are fair-to-good stories, which would neither grace nor quite disgrace an average-good issue of F&SF; and one quarter (almost exactly by length) is composed of commentary by Ellison or about him (including Asimov’s forewards and the personal material on Ellison contained in some authors’ comments)—comprising one of the least pleasant autobiographies I have ever been unable to stop reading.  p. 30-31

Merril identifies Delany’s Aye, and Gomorrah as the standout story and, after listing the rest of the best, she provides detailed commentary on Philip José Farmer’s Riders of the Purple Wage:

[This] is perhaps the one story in the book that would not have been published anywhere else—in its present form. It is certainly one of the most entertaining—and least “dangerous”—selections, and it suffers only from the fact that it is not quite good enough to sustain its highly specialized humor for more than 30,000 words. It is a cheerful, careening combination of neo-Joycean word-gaming and science-fiction imagery, homespun philosophy, homeloomed psychiatry, and witty comment on the contemporary scene—particularly in the arts and academia. But so much of the humor is (Joycean or s-f) in-group, that I suspect there is a relatively small audience eager for such a large dose. I myself laughed delightedly for 10,000 words, grew quieter for another ten, and then put it down to finish—as a duty—later on. (Turned out the only plot point was a lovely pun on Finnegan’s Wake.)
Some incisive editing might have done a great deal, also, for the stories by Robert Silverberg and Frederik Pohl: both of these seemed to me to be written with an emotional involvement, and on a level of prose, right at the (rarely touched) top of both writers considerable powers—and both concluded with endings that seemed so feeble by comparison as to be virtually unrelated to the body of the story.  p. 32

She continues by commenting on Sturgeon’s story, and its weak ending, before finishing with this:

Summing up, then—I am afraid Ellison’s New Thing resembles to a great degree the same New Thing Anthony Boucher and J. F. McComas brought into s-f in 1949: the not-so-radical-really notion that literary standards could and should be applied to science fiction. A good thing, but—
But, among other things, it needs an outstanding editor to use that principle as the main line of guidance—an editor with taste.  p. 32-33

An interesting—an obviously opinionated—review, but one worth reading in its entirety.
There are short reviews of a couple of other books at the end of the column, plus this about Day of the Minotaur by Thomas Burnett Swann:

Classical mythology has cluttered up the pages of so many recent ponderous-philosophical s-f novels, and magical trappings have become routine accessories for so many shabby medievalist-heroic romances (flourishing for some reason under the “science-fiction” label), that Thomas Burnett Swann’s Day of the Minotaur (Ace, 40ȼ) came as a complete surprise. Imaginative, entertaining, and original, it sometimes approaches a Mary Renault level of sophistication in prose and concept, and conveys throughout a color and charm reminiscent of the first-viewing impact of Disney’s Fantasia.  p. 34

Gahan Wilson’s Cartoons are usually hit or miss for me—usually, and in this case, the latter.
Coming Next Month has news about a significant event:

Next month will mark our 200th issue, a milestone which we think is certainly deserving of some small celebration. A proposal to fly staff and subscribers to Acapulco for a weekend has been temporarily shelved. (We are told that the weather is uncertain.)  p. 95

Stories by Richard McKenna, Robert Sheckley & Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, Fritz Leiber and Lloyd Biggie, Jr., and Sonya Dorman are promised.
Noise is an interesting short-short science essay by Theodore L. Thomas:

By checking the hearing of the Meban tribe in Africa, a quiet-living bunch if there ever was one, the scientists have about established that people’s hearing does not get worse simply because they grow older. The din of modern living does it.
What we need, then, are tunable ear plugs. Our skills at microminiaturization could develop an ear plug that would pass only those sounds we choose to hear. The ear plugs could be set for conversation or music, or whatever. Truck and traffic noise could be reduced to a susurrus. There would be no more shouting and yelling because no one would hear it. The shriek of jet aircraft and the sonic boom would no longer be with us. At night the white noise would put everyone to sleep who wanted to sleep. People’s dispositions around the world couldn’t help but improve.  p. 68

The First Metal by Isaac Asimov is a science essay about the metals that were known to the ancients. Although these essays are often dull, there is usually an interesting fact or two to be found:

The Latin word for “lead” is “plumbum,” and now you can see what a “plumb line” must be. Since you would attach a piece of lead to a line you wanted to throw into the ocean and have sink as far as possible, you see what “to plumb the depths” means.
Again, since the ancients believed that the heavier an object the faster it fell, it seemed to them that a lead weight would fall faster than the same-sized weight made of other less dense materials. So you see what “to plummet downward” means.
Finally, since a lead weight makes a line completely vertical, there grew to be a tie-in between lead and completeness, so that now you see why, in a Western movie, the old rancher says to the young schoolmarm, “By dogies, Ah’m shore plumb tuckered out, missie.” (At least you know why he says it if you know what the other words mean.)  p. 104

Index to Volume Thirty-Three — July-December 1967 is another of F&SF’s very useful indexes (or at least they were before the likes of ISFDB and other internet resources). A quick skim shows that Ferman was friendlier to British writers than most US editors: in this six month period he published stories by Hilary Bailey, J. G. Ballard (x2), John Brunner, George Collyn (a Moorcock New Worlds regular), J. T. McIntosh, David Redd, & Josephine Saxton.

Not a bad issue.  ●

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1. I’m just finishing an interview with David Redd, and it will appear here sometime next month.

2. David Redd’s first two sales were to Micheal Moorcock at New Worlds, Prisoners of Paradise (New Worlds #167, October 1966) and The Way to London Town (New Worlds #164, July 1966): they appeared in reverse order of purchase (this information was provided in an answer for the upcoming interview). The other three novelettes subsequently sold to the American magazine market were: Sunbeam Caress (If, March 1968), A Quiet Kind of Madness (F&SF, May 1968), and The Frozen Summer (If, March, 1969). Redd’s ISFDB page is here.

3. Stuart Palmer appeared in the first issue of F&SF with A Bride for the Devil. His ISFDB page is here.

4. It was Avram Davidson who published Tushnet’s first story in F&SF. Most of the rest of his stories were published there too but he also appeared in Vertex magazine and New Dimensions #1. His ISFDB page is here. I note in passing that the very first issue of F&SF I bought, the July 1976 issue, contained another story about Jewish folklore, Mel Gilden’s The Golem (reviewed here). His daughter (or granddaughter), Rebecca Tushnet, has kindly provided copies of his stories on her website.  ●