New Release: "Mixology: Science Fiction Stories" by William Campbell Gault

Mixology: Science Fiction Stories by William Campbell Gault 3 Play, 2024     Introduction   William Campbell Gault—born on March 9, 1910 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to John and Ella Hovde Gault—is one of the most critically acclaimed post-WW2 writers of genre fiction. He is best known as a mystery and juvenile sports writer for boys, but he successfully published in a variety of genres and in his early career wrote more than 300 stories for the pulps. The novelist Ed Gorman wrote, “[Gault] was a compelling short story writer who looked at the world honestly if sardonically and found a good deal of it to be depressingly hilarious.” Gault had the knack, as the Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia says, of combining “various motifs from the different pulp magazine genres—sports, mystery, science fiction—and blend them into a distinctive style of his own.” Another trait separating Gault’s fiction from that of his peers—it is about something. It is filled with ethical dilemmas, racial tensions, bigotry, and political tolerance. Gault’s writing career began in 1936 when he won a $50 prize in a short story competition sponsored by the Milwaukee Journal. His first professional sales were to the sex magazines of the 1930s, including Paris Nights and Scarlet Adventuress “where”—according to a 1979 interview with Bill Crider—“the dirtiest word we used was ‘curvaceous’.” Gault published those stories with the pseudonym Roney Scott, which he dusted off for his early crime novel, Shakedown (1953), published with Howard Fast’s The Darkness Within as an Ace Double. Shakedown introduced Gault’s popular series character, Joe Puma, but the Joe Puma of Shakedown is a different man from what he is in the later novels and most knowledgeable readers exclude Shakedown from the official Puma literary canon. In the late-1930s Gault began writing for the sports pulps and quickly moved into the mystery pulps “because the sports magazines came out so erratically, ten one month, four the next” that he needed a larger market to earn a living. Gault’s stories appeared in many of the better pulps, including Argosy, Black Mask, Adventure, Dime Detective, and Short Stories. As the popularity of the pulps waned in the late-1940s—which forced Gault to take outside work with McDonnell Douglas and then the U.S. Post Office—he cracked the hardcover and paperback original markets. With Don’t Cry for Me (Dutton, 1952), Gault won an Edgar Award for best first novel. Like most of Gault’s mysteries, Don’t Cry for Me is set in Southern California—Kirkus called it “California complicated”—and its mid-century timeframe is still vibrant with readers more than 70 years after its first publication. Gault wrote a string of standalone crime novels before introducing his first series character, Beverly Hills private eye Brock “The Rock” Callahan, in the 1956 novel, Ring Around Rosa (Dutton). Callahan is a former WW2 OSS operator and he played guard for the Los Angeles Rams. He is an ethical cuss and there is no doubt he will do the right thing every time out. In 1958, Gault’s other private eye, Joe Puma, hit the page in End of a Call Girl (Fawcett Crest). While Callahan is upright, Puma is a little shifty and, as the critic Jon L. Breen wrote, “Joe threatens to spin out of control.” While both the Callahan and Puma books have become cult favorites, Gault claimed he never made much money with any of them. His biggest commercial successes were his juvenile sports novels for boys. The first of these, Thunder Road (Dutton, 1952), remained in print for close to 30 years and was reprinted by two different paperback houses, which, according to his 1979 interview, “helped keep me in used golf balls through my dotage.” So in 1966, Gault quit writing mystery—and everything else—to focus on the more lucrative juvenile market. He wouldn’t return to mysteries again until the late-1970s. But our interest is with William Campbell Gault’s science fiction. A genre that represents only a tiny fraction of his total output, but he served the genre well with several high-quality and thoughtful stories that are as much about morality—and not the easy kind you find in the Bible—as they are about entertainment. Gault’s speculative stories are fine examples of his genre-mixing style. He combines the tension and precise plotting of the mystery with, at times, sports and sporting events, and the audacity of idea-driven science fiction. They are damn entertaining, too. Mixology: Science Fiction Stories, brings together three of Gault’s best speculative tales—two novelettes and one short—published in the 1950s. “Title Fight” (Fantastic Universe, 1956), which showcases Gault’s bona fides as sports story writer with its vivid setting in the boxing ring, is a marvelous story about freedom and equality. As a bonus, the main player is a robot. “I’ll See You in My Dreams” (Imagination, 1951) is a sardonic tale about marriage, longing, and disappointment. It is played out using the machinations of an unknown alien civilization, a squirrel, and Venus. The final story, “Made to Measure” (Galaxy, 1957), would have made a brilliant episode for the original The Twilight Zone television series. At its center is a theme of appreciating what you have without looking too closely at its faults. William Campbell Gault died on December 27, 1995, in Santa Barbara, California. He had been married twice and had two children—a son and a daughter. During WW2, Gault served with the 166th Infantry in Hawaii from 1943 until the end of the war. He was awarded The Private Eye Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He received a Shamus for his 1980 novel, The Cana Diversion—after returning to writing mysteries—and another Lifetime Achievement Award, this one from the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, in 1991.

Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon. The cover was designed by Karadraws.com *            *            *

 

New from 3 PLAY: "Casinos, Motels, Gators" by Ben Boulden

 

Available For Pre-Order

Casinos, Motels, Gators by Ben Boulden 3 Play, 2024   Big news for the 3 Play imprint. The first contemporary collection is available for pre-order. Casinos, Motels, Gators is a collection of four crime stories by Ben Boulden. The release date is one week from today: May 28, 2024.   Here is the Author’s Note, which gives you a little insight into Casinos, Motels, Gators: The four short stories in Casinos, Motels, Gators were written between 2017 and 2020 in a broom closet-sized office in my former home in Salt Lake City, Utah. I worked fulltime and wrote in the early mornings and late at night. I conjured the character Jimmy Ford, appearing in the first three stories, during a long ago visit to the casinos of the Utah-Nevada border town of Wendover.      Wendover is a desert town nestled in a desolate valley about 120 miles west of Salt Lake City on I-80. It started life as a railroad town in the early-20th Century and boomed during World War Two when an Army Air Corps training base was built. The Enola Gay and the rest of the 509th Composite Group, which were responsible for dropping Fat Man and Little Boy on Japan, trained there. After the war, the old Air Corps base was largely left to rot and Las Vegas-style casinos came in, luring both the respectable and seamier residents of the City of Saints into their gambling pits.      These three Jimmy Ford stories—“121,” “No Chips, No Bonus,” and “Junkyard”—were all published in 2019. I think they work well as modern updates on the hardboiled detective genre, something like the old pulp Manhunt would publish if it was still around. Jimmy Ford as a character isn’t exactly likable—he is too violent, a bit smug, too easily manipulated by his unsavory boss, Jenkins—but he usually ends up doing the right thing even if it’s done the wrong way. These three stories are all of the Jimmy Ford’s misadventures, but who knows, Jimmy may rise from the page again. I should also tell you, the Wendover of my imagination and the real thing are different places. The Desert Diamond casino, where Jimmy is a security consultant, doesn’t exist, and as far as I know, no one like Jimmy Ford or his unscrupulous boss, Jenkins, exist, either.      The fourth and final story in the collection, “Asia Divine,” was written for a tribute anthology honoring the late-writer and all-around good guy, Bill Crider. It was published in 2021 with a table of contents filled with writers outside my weight class. There were stories by Joe R. Lansdale, William Kent Krueger, Charlaine Harris, Bill Pronzini, and Sara Paretsky. But—and I say this with all humility—I think “Asia Divine” held its own. “Asia Divine,” like the Jimmy Ford stories, is set in Utah’s West Desert but none of the action is as far west as Jimmy Ford’s Wendover.      Now, let’s get to the stories… *           *           * Oh, we should add. The New York Times bestselling author, James Reasoner, called “121” a “Manhunt story for the 21st Century.” A high accolade indeed!

Casinos, Motels, Gators is available for pre-order here as an ebook at Amazon. A paperback edition will drop either May 27 or 28 everywhere and the Kindle edition will be available on Kindle Unlimited with a subscription.

"Dusky & Other Tales" by Jim Kjelgaard

 

Dusky & Other Tales by Jim Kjelgaard Vintage Lists, 2023   Dusky & Other Tales collects six of Jim Kjelgaard’s original short tales published by the famous pulp magazine, Short Stories: “The Wild Pack” (Mar. 10, 1944); “Reputation” (April 25, 1945); “Cheena” (Nov. 10, 1945); “Billy Dancer’s Bull” (Dec. 25, 1945); “Dusky” (Feb. 10, 1946); and “Arbey Holden Rides Again” (Mar. 10, 1947). Short Stories is considered as one of the big four pulp magazines by aficionados. The others are: Adventure, Argosy, and Blue Book. Short Stories began life in 1890 as a literary magazine. It published stories by highly regarded writers like Rudyard Kipling, Émile Zola, and Bret Harte. After being acquired by Doubleday in 1910, Short Stories became an “all-fiction” magazine, which is a fancy way of saying a genre magazine. While the magazine began publishing genre fiction, it was, perhaps, the most highly regarded of the pulps. Its stable of writers included luminaries such as Harold Lamb, Max Brand, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace, James B. Hendryx, and Sax Rohmer. As the magazine market weakened in the 1950s, Short Stories switched to a “men’s magazine,” and rebranded itself with the obvious Short Stories: A Men’s Magazine in 1957, and then in 1959, shortly before its demise that same year, as Short Stories for Men. Jim Kjelgaard was a regular contributor to Short Stories during, and after, World War 2. The magazine published 25 stories with Kjelgaard’s byline. The first, “Month of Madness,” appeared in the May 10, 1942 issue and the last, “Larrigan Joe’s Poaching Ring,” saw print in the June 1950 issue. Like Kjelgaard’s young adult fiction, much of his output for Short Stories was centered around boys, animals, and nature. The stories included here a marvelous sampling of Kjelgaard’s work for Short Stories. “The Wild Pack,” which is told from the perspective of a blue jay, is about two dogs vying for control of the pack. “Reputation” is an Old West gunfighter tale with a refreshing twist. “Cheena” is a clever post-WW2 tale about wartime collaboration and vengeance. “Billy Dancer’s Bull” is something of a tall-tale about a wanna-be rancher and love, and “Arbey Holden Rides Again,” which is similar to Kjelgaard’s brilliant Handle Hoe Charlie stories, is a fun take on poachers and game wardens.

The Vintage Lists edition of Dusky & Other Tales is paired with Jim Kjelgaard’s excellent 1953 novel, The Spell of the White Sturgeon set on the wild shoreline of Lake Michigan in the mid-1850s. Part adventure story and part historical tale, The Spell of the White Sturgeon, introduces an 18-year-old orphan named Ramsay. Ramsay is traveling to Three Points, Wisconsin, where he has been promised a job, but arrives to find the job gone and he is forced to labor on a small family farm. But Ramsay’s prospects brighten when he saves a Dutch fisherman from drowning. Click here to purchase the Kindle version or here to purchase the paperback edition of The Spell of the White Sturgeon / Dusky & Other Tales at Amazon.

"Women Wrote the Future, Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy" edited by J. LaRue

Women Wrote the Future, Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy edited by J. LaRue Vintage Lists, 2023     Introduction     A mythology in science fiction circles—academia and readership alike—claims women were excluded from the genre until the late-1960s and early-1970s, when writers like Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler jumped the sexism barrier that had kept women out. While these writers are culturally important, both inside and outside the genre, it is nonsense to imagine they appeared on the science fiction scene without precedence. The first woman to publish a story in a science fiction magazine was Clare Winger Harris when her tale, “The Fate of Poseidonia” was published in the June 1927 issue of Amazing Stories. It was that same pulp, Amazing Stories, that created the entire modern science fiction genre when its first issue hit newsstands in April 1926. And those first few years, between 1926 and 1929, were a dark period for women and science fiction because only 17 stories by six known female authors were published. The next ten years (1930 – 1939) weren’t much better with 62 stories by 25 women published, but the 1940s saw a significant gain with 209 stories by 47 female writers, and in the 1950s women exploded on the scene with 634 tales, by 154 writers. While these numbers represent a slim ratio of the total number of science fiction stories published during this period, it was a beginning that ultimately led to the celebration of women as some of the best writers in the genre.* This anthology, which is intended as a tribute and to bring attention to these early female writers, is a survey of the fiction published by the most respected science fiction magazine of the 1950s: Galaxy. Galaxy’s first issue reached newsstands in October 1950. The list of contributors for that issue included many of the genres’ brightest stars: Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Fritz Leiber, and Isaac Asimov. It also started a trend of publishing women writers by publishing Katherine MacLean’s brilliant novelette, “Contagion” (which, unfortunately, isn’t included in this collection). Although three other marvelous stories by MacLean—“Pictures Don’t Lie” (Aug. 1951), “The Snowball Effect” (Sep. 1952), and “Games” (Mar. 1953)—are scattered across its pages. Over the rest of the 1950s, Galaxy published 30 stories written by thirteen women. The tales ranged from imaginative adventures—Rosel George Brown’s “From an Unseen Censor” (Sep. 1958)—to cultural critique, “One Way” by Miriam Allen deFord (Mar. 1955), to homegrown silliness, with a feminist bent, like Ruth Laura Wainwright’s “Green Grew the Lasses” (July 1953). These stories, along with thirteen others written by women and published by Galaxy in the 1950s, are reprinted in Women Wrote the Future, Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy. And frankly, they are some of the best tales to appear in Galaxy during its 30-year run. Included are gems by genre stars like Katherine MacLean, as mentioned above, and Betsy Curtis, and rising stars like Rosel George Brown. Each story and its author are briefly introduced and while some of the writers are little-known with only a few publishing credits, others had impressive careers both in and out of science fiction. Miriam Allen deFord—“One Way” (Mar. 1955) and “The Eel” (Apr. 1958)—was a suffragette, wrote for Nation, and won an Edgar Award for Best Crime Fact Book. Phyllis Sterling Smith—“What is POSAT” (Sep. 1951)—attended Stanford and Tufts, she worked for the Psychological Testing Corporation, and she was an energy consultant for the Environmental Protection Agency. Ann Warren Griffith—“Zeritsky’s Law” (Nov. 1951)—attended Barnard College, piloted as a WASP in WW2, and wrote for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. And those are only three of the 12 writers inside this anthology.   __________   *publishing statistics come from Partner in Wonder, by Eric Leif Davin (Lexington Books, 2006)   Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.

Table of Contents   “Games” by Katherine MacLean / “The Pilot and the Bushman” by Sylvia Jacobs / “One Way” by Miriam Allen deFord / “Rough Translation” by Jean M. Janis / “Pictures Don’t Lie” by Katherine MacLean / “The Vilbar Party” by Evelyn E. Smith / “What is POSAT?” by Phyllis Sterling Smith / “Green Grew the Lasses” by Ruth Laura Wainwright / “The Trap” by Betsy Curtis / “Know Thy Neighbor” by Elisabeth R. Lewis / “Tea Tray in the Sky” by Evelyn E. Smith / “Homesick” by Lyn Venable / “The Snowball Effect” by Katherine MacLean / “Zeritsky’s Law” by Ann Griffith / “From an Unseen Censor” by Rosel George Brown / “The Eel” by Miriam Allen deFord   Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.

"A Memoir of Colonel Seth Warner" by Daniel Chipman, L.L. D

 

A Memoir of Colonel Seth Warner by Daniel Chipman, L.L. D Vintage Lists, 2023 Introduction:  In the first several decades after the American Revolution, Seth Warner’s name was a footnote in most historical accounts of the American Colonies’ struggle for independence. His contributions were overshadowed by the mythical figure of his fellow Vermonter, Ethan Allen. In 1848, Daniel Chipman—the author of the book you are holding—politely called Warner’s absence in Vermont’s history as “unintentional errors,” but looking back it appears the Allen family, particularly Ethan and his brother Ira, made a concerted effort to amplify Ethan’s reputation at the expense of Seth Warner’s.      The traditional view of Seth Warner as a chivalrous, but unaccomplished, sidekick to Allen saw print in the early historical accounts of Vermont. This vision of Warner as nothing much was created and propagated by the Allens. Ethan, in his A Narrative of Col. Ethan Allen’s Captivity (1779), gave a single sentence to Warner’s capture of Fort Crown Point, while he spun his own victory at Fort Ticonderoga into a spectacle of personal heroism. He even included a brilliant one-liner for good measure: When asked by Ticonderoga’s British commander whose authority Allen was demanding the garrison’s surrender, Allen responded, “In the name of the great Jehovah, and the Continental Congress.” Ira Allen, first as a source in Samuel Williams’s Natural and Civil History of Vermont (1794), and then in his own The Natural and Political History of the State of Vermont published in 1798, continued to minimize, often completely ignoring, Warner’s contributions to America’s struggle for independence.      And Warner’s contributions were significant, arguably eclipsing that of Ethan Allen’s. Warner was elected as the commander of Vermont’s militia, The Green Mountain Boys in 1775 in Dorset, Vermont. He fought the British valiantly from 1775, when Warner and his men captured Fort Crown Point in New York, until the illness that prematurely took his life forced him to retreat from his post in 1781. He volunteered to command the rearguard as the Northern Army retreated from Canada ahead of the British Army in 1777, taking care of the sick and injured all the way to Fort Ticonderoga. His leadership at the battle of Hubbardton on July 7, 1777, while technically a battlefield defeat for the Americans but a pyrrhic victory for the British, allowed their Northern Army to escape and fight another day ahead of Burgoyne’s troops. Warner’s regiment was pivotal in the Continental Army’s decisive victory at Bennington later that summer. Yet most casual readers of history know little or nothing about Seth Warner.      He was a strong and moral leader. His concern for those in his charge is obvious from the correspondence between he and George Washington, since each letter is asking for things his men needed, clothes especially. He was respected by his superior officers. General Stark, who led the Americans at Bennington, complimented Warner’s help in planning the engagement and his performance on the battlefield in a letter to General Gates. In his last years, Warner was afflicted with an illness that had nagged at him since the late-1770s. It developed into dementia, which many historians think may have been caused by exposure to mercury then used to cure animal hides, that robbed him of his faculties and his dignity.      While Seth Warner’s legacy is still shadowed by Ethan Allen, his star has risen in the eyes of those interested in the history of New England and the Revolutionary War. This rehabilitation of his reputation began with the book you are holding, Memoir of Colonel Seth Warner, by Daniel Chipman, published by L. W. Clark in Middlebury, Vermont, in 1848. Chipman, as a boy, had known Seth Warner and his desire in writing this slim biography was to correct those “unintentional errors” accepted as historical fact about Warner. Chipman’s writing is precise, interesting, and well-documented. It is a book that both entices and informs nearly 200 years after its first printing. The cover was designed by Karadraws.com Purchase the Kindle edition here or the paperback here at Amazon.

"Tales of the Macabre / The Black Fawn" by Jim Kjelgaard (Robert Bloch)

Tales of the Macabre / The Black Fawn by Jim Kjelgaard Vintage Lists, 2023    Introduction to Tales of the Macabre    Jim Kjelgaard was a regular contributor of short stories to pulp magazines in the late-1930s and throughout the 1940s. His first known published fictional tale, “River Man,” appeared in the November 5, 1938 issue of Argosy, and his byline regularly popped-up in diverse magazines like Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine, Black Mask, 10 Story Western, The Phantom Detective, Thrilling Adventure, Argosy, Adventure, and others. It wasn’t unusual for 20 or more of Kjelgaard’s stories to reach print each year; his best annual output was in 1946, which saw an astonishing 36 of his tales hit newsstands across the country.      While the genre Kjelgaard was writing for changed—Western, romance, mystery, adventure—his stories were charmingly consistent and familiar to his regular readers. They often featured animals and thoughtful protagonists living in wild places. A genre Kjelgaard rarely visited was horror, but that changed when a tale of the supernatural, “The Thing from the Barrens,” appeared in the September 1945 issue of Weird Tales. This story, and the three others published by Weird Tales over the next ten months—“The Fangs of Tsan-Lo” (Nov. 1945), “Chanu” (Mar. 1946), and “The Man Who Told the Truth” (July 1946) —had Kjelgaard’s traditional hallmarks, but were also dependent on their supernatural elements: a stalking creature from the wastelands of the Arctic, an ancient dog, a sinister hybrid ape-man, and…      While the stories all appeared under Jim Kjelgaard’s name, a young Robert Bloch—the writer that gave us Psycho (1963)—revised the stories for publication. Both Bloch and Kjelgaard belonged to a writing group, the Milwaukee Fictioneers, which included the Western writer Lawrence A. Keating, the golden age science fiction writer, Ralph Milne Farley, and the cult-favorite science fiction writer Stanley G. Weinbaum. In Bloch’s 1994 autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, he mentioned his work with Kjelgaard and another of the group’s members: “I rewrote and sold stories which appeared under the bylines of Ralph Milne Farley and another member, Jim Kjelgaard.”      Robert Bloch was a supernatural horror specialist and his participation in the stories can be seen from the eerie descriptions— “I seemed to hear the rustle of leaves, to see snarling, man-beast faces” —but the concepts and plotting are in the classical vein of Jim Kjelgaard. Things changed a bit for the fourth tale, “The Man Who Told the Truth,” which is less Kjelgaard and more Robert Bloch. In fact, this story was included in Bloch’s posthumous collection, Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies (1998). These collaborations often appeared alongside stories under Bloch’s own name. “The Thing from the Barrens” appeared with Bloch’s “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade”; “The Fangs of Tsan-Lo” with “Soul Proprietor”; and “Chanu” with “Bogy Man Will Get You.”      For the first time in more than 70 years, Jim Kjelgaard’s first three tales of the macabre are back in print. And we’re betting you’ll enjoy them as much today as their original readers did so long ago.   Click here to purchase the Kindle edition or here for the paperback edition at Amazon.
Tales of the Macabre / The Black Fawn is part of Vintage Lists’ Jim Kjelgaard Collection, which includes seven “2-in-1” books, with two books in each volume, in both Kindle and high-quality trade paperback editions. The JIM KJELGAARD COLLECTION Double Challenge / Rescue Dog of the High Pass [Purchase at Amazon] The Duck-footed Hound / We Were There at the Oklahoma Land Run [Purchase at Amazon] Fire-Hunter / The Explorations of Père Marquette [Available only in Canada / Purchase at Amazon Canada] The Spell of the White Sturgeon / Dusky & Other Tales [Purchase at Amazon] Swamp Cat / The Story of Geronimo [Purchase at Amazon] Tales of the Macabre / The Black Fawn [Purchase at Amazon] Trading Jeff and His Dog / Hi Jolly! [Purchase at Amazon]

 

"Heretic: Stories" by Philip José Farmer

 

Heretic: Stories by Philip José Farmer 3 Play, 2024   Introduction   The critic Leslie Fiedler called Philip José Farmer “the greatest science fiction writer ever” and Isaac Asimov proclaimed him as “a far more skillful writer than I am.” Farmer is widely considered to have broken the genres’ taboo with sexuality. His first significant publication, the novella “The Lovers” (Startling Stories, Aug. 1961), used sexuality—specifically a sexual relationship between a human male and an extraterrestrial—as a central theme, which would have been a volatile topic in mid-century America. According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, “[‘The Lovers’] concerned xenobiology, parasitism and sex, an explosive mixture, certainly for the SF genre of that era.” Farmer’s fiction was consistently critical of religion, too, which is where the title of this collection, Heretic, is derived. As a boy Farmer attended religious training in the Church of Christ, Scientist (Christian Science), but by 14 he had become an agnostic and later in life he described himself as an atheist. Farmer’s criticisms of religion, particularly how it segregates people by creating false differences, can be seen in much of his fiction, including the stories in this collection. He is best known for his Riverworld series—which features such luminaries as Richard Francis Burton and Mark Twain in a world where every person who has ever lived is resurrected into a world dominated by river valleys—and his World of Tiers series about parallel universes and the origins of humanity. Farmer’s science fiction won three Hugo Awards—Best New SF Author or Artist, 1953; Best Novella, 1968, for “Riders of the Purple Wage”; and Best Novel, 1972, for To Your Scattered Bodies Go. He was awarded the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award from Science Fiction Writers of America and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Farmer’s birth name was Philip Josie Farmer. “Josie” was meant as an honor to his paternal grandmother, Josephine, but it he disliked it because of its feminine sound. As an adult Farmer legally changed his middle name to José, which he thought livened his rather bland and alliterative name: Philip Farmer. He was born in North Terre Haute, Indiana, on January 26, 1918, to George and Lucile Theodora Farmer (née Jackson). The Farmers moved frequently, at least six times, during the 1920s; living in Indiana, Missouri, and Illinois. In 1936, Farmer graduated from Peoria Central High School (Illinois) and enrolled at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he studied journalism. He left school in 1937 to take a job with Illinois Power and Light—reportedly to help his father payoff a debt—and returned to school, Bradley Polytechnical Institute, in 1939 to study English literature. In 1941, he transferred back to the University of Missouri where his future wife, Elizabeth Virginia Andre, attended as a music student. He graduated with a B.A. in 1949 from Bradley in Peoria. Philip and Elizabeth were married on May 10, 1941. The couple had two children, a son and daughter. Farmer volunteered to become a pilot with the Army Air Corps in 1941, but he was discharged and took a job with the Keystone Steel & Wire Co. where he worked until becoming a fulltime writer in the early-1950s. During much of the 1950s and 1960s Farmer worked as a technical writer for defense contractors, including General Electric, Motorola, and McDonnell-Douglas. He became a fulltime fiction writer in 1969. Philip José Farmer died on February 25, 2009, in Peoria, Illinois. The three stories included in Heretic—a novelette and two shorts—are excellent examples of Farmer’s best work: thoughtful, critical of authority and religion, and downright fun to read. “The Celestial Blueprint” (Fantastic Journey, July 1954) is an entertaining and ironic journey into religious zealotry, distrust, and revenge. The central theme of “How Deep the Grooves” (Amazing Stories, February 1963) is free will and absolute predestination; a thinking person’s dilemma written as highspeed entertainment. The final story is the novelette, “Tongues of the Moon” (Amazing Stories, September 1961), which is a space opera-like adventure—hasty pacing, space blasters, and explosions—with a serious look at nationalism and religion.   The cover was designed by www.karadraws.com   Click here to purchase the Kindle edition and here to purchase the trade paperback.

Philip José Farmer’s Heretic: Stories is the first volume in Vintage Lists’ 3 PLAY series, which is a line of high-quality books featuring three stories—every so often a bonus tale appears to keep things interesting—from authors both old and new. Each entry features stories from a single author with an emphasis on story quality. The books are short, anywhere between 95 and 120 pages and each is designed for readers with a discerning eye and a love of genre fiction—crime, mystery, horror, and science fiction—at its very best.      Plus, and this is a big thing, the books are designed for easy reading—paperbacks have an easy-to-read font size—and affordability in both paperback and electronic editions.

Introducing 3 PLAY

 

Introducing 3 PLAY
Vintage Lists Presents: 3 PLAY is a line of high-quality books featuring three stories—every so often a bonus tale appears to keep things interesting—from authors both old and new. Each entry features stories from a single author with an emphasis on story quality. The books are short, anywhere between 95 and 120 pages and each is designed for readers with a discerning eye and a love of genre fiction—crime, mystery, horror, and science fiction—at its very best. Plus, and this is a big thing, the books are designed for easy reading—paperbacks have an easy-to-read font size—and affordability in both paperback and electronic editions. We hope you will come back again and again to enjoy our 3 PLAY line-up of vintage and contemporary short fiction. Visit us at www.vintagelists.blogspot.com for a complete listing of available titles.
HERETIC: STORIES by Philip José Farmer
The three stories included in Heretic—a novelette and two shorts—are excellent examples of Farmer’s best work: thoughtful, critical of authority and religion, and downright fun to read. “The Celestial Blueprint” (1954) is an entertaining and ironic journey into religious zealotry, distrust, and revenge. The central theme of “How Deep the Grooves” (1963), is free will and absolute predestination; a thinking person’s dilemma written as highspeed entertainment. The final story is the novelette, “Tongues of the Moon” (1961) which is a space opera-like adventure—hasty pacing, space blasters, and explosions—with a serious look at nationalism and religion. Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the trade paperback.
THE FITTEST & OTHER STORIES by Katherine MacLean
The four tales included in The Fittest & Other Stories are a sampling of MacLean’s best work. “The Fittest” is a marvelous telling of first contact, moral dilemmas, and the violent nature of humanity. “Where or When?” is a misty-eyed love story that will ring true for anyone that has ever loved. “Carnivore” is a disturbing view of humanity’s sectarian and violent nature without, unfortunately, much redemption. “Contagion”—which is one of MacLean’s most popular tales—is about colonization, fear, and loss of self. Available on Amazon as a Kindle and trade paperback.