"James E. Gunn - The Witching Hour" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

Pellucidar novels were even more entrancing; and I fell in love with A. Merritt’s romantic fantasies as
soon as I discovered them inFamous Fantastic Mysteries in 1939.But I wanted to write science fiction.

All that changed when John Campbell createdUnknown , as a companion fantasy magazine to
Astounding , in 1939. Campbell’sUnknown offered fantasy with a difference. It was fantasy written like
science fiction, what has sometimes been called “rationalized fantasy.” Campbell told his science-fiction
writers, “Grant your gadgets and get on with your story.” InUnknown the gadgets were supernatural.
Assume there is magic, say — how would it really work? If there are leprechauns, how would they exist?
what would they want? what could they do? If there are ghosts, what would be their limitations? If one
acquires magical powers, what is their psychological or economic cost?

Unknown(later calledUnknown Worlds ) lasted only five years, from 1939-1943. It was killed by
wartime paper shortages. During its tooshort lifetime, it published some classics: Eric Frank Russell’s
Sinister Barrier , L. Rob Hubbard’sFear, Typewriter in the Sky, andSlaves of Sleep , L. Sprague de
Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s Harold Shea novels of magical misadventures, de Camp’sLest Darkness
Fall and several of the stories collected inThe Wheels of If, Jack Williamson’sDarker Than You Think
, Fritz Leiber’sConjure Wife, Robert A. Heinlein’sThe Devil Makes the Law (Magic, Inc.), and
dozens of short stories such as Theodore Sturgeon’s “It” and “Shottle Bop.”

I was only 16 in 1939 and never had a chance to write forUnknown , but fantasy magazines had a
re-birth in the 1950s when I was freelancing full time. The best of these wasBeyond, created by Horace
Gold as a companion fantasy magazine toGalaxy , which he had created three years before.Beyond
Fantasy Fiction aimed at the same rationalized fantasy niche thatUnknown had established and to
which Gold had contributed stories. I saw it as an opportunity to broaden my range and indulge myself in
a different kind of narrative imperative.

The first story in this collection might have been published inBeyond but was published inGalaxy under
the title of “Wherever You May Be.” I had given up a position as junior editor with Western Printing &
Lithographing Company of Racine, Wisconsin (which at that time produced the Dell line of paperbacks)
on the strength of four stories that I had sold. Fred Pohl, my agent, told me about them when I attended
my first science-fiction convention, the World SF Convention of 1952, in Chicago. One of them was to
Astounding , one toGalaxy . I decided to make a trip to New York to talk to editors.

Horace Gold offered me a job as assistant editor ofGalaxy , but I know my wife wouldn’t want to live in
New York, with our three-year-old son. John Campbell gave me an idea for a story. He gave the same
idea to a lot of authors (he often said that he could give the same idea to a dozen writers and get a dozen
different stories). The British Psychical Society, he said, had investigated poltergeist phenomena and
discovered that it almost always happened in the neighborhood of a disturbed adolescent. I thought about
it on the way home: what would happen, I asked myself, if someone — a psychologist, say — should
find such an adolescent and make her (it should be a “her”) more disturbed until she gains control of her
psychic powers.

I sat down and wrote that story in a few weeks. It was a short novel and it rolled out of my typewriter
without conscious effort (unlike most stories, which are work). I called it “Happy Is the Bride” and sent it
off to Fred Pohl, asking him to send it to John Campbell. But Gold was desperate for a lead short novel
for an upcoming edition ofGalaxy , and Pohl sent it over to him. A. J. Budrys, who became the assistant
editor toGalaxy, told me later that Gold would rather have used it inBeyond , butGalaxy’s need was
greater.Gold asked Budrys to add some five thousand words of explanation to “Happy Is the Bride” to
make it suitable forGalaxy , but I’ve never been able to identify them. Maybe Budrys did it too well.
Gold published the short novel in the May 1953Galaxy , but changed my title (he was fond of changing