Harbottle knows of other missed opportunities. (The executor at least did make some amends by later rescuing several further manuscripts.) Yet this was material condemned as valueless by both the solicitor and the executor whose duty it was to hand over the legacy! Be warned. Since then, Harbottle has overseen the recent publication of surely a hundred-plus Fearn books, old and new, including one which I reviewed right here in Bewildering Stories, issue 242. (Some were lost anyway, one I particularly regret being Little Winter, Fearn’s unpublished but heartfelt mainstream novel of theatre life in Blackpool.) Moreover, when Mrs Fearn died, Philip Harbottle (to whom she had left the Fearn literary estate) arrived at her house in the nick of time to stop the executor bagging up all Fearn’s manuscripts for destruction. Here is one which should send a shiver down the spine of anyone relying on “professional advice.”Īfter the death of author John Russell Fearn - a Thirties mainstay of Astounding Stories, and a Fifties big seller as “Vargo Statten” - his widow was told by her solicitor that Fearn’s huge legacy of pseudonymous stories was worthless because copyright could not be proved. Harbottle devotes many valuable pages to detailing what books or magazines came out when, who wrote them and who published them his anecdotes are more colourful than my description conveys, and include some quite personal recollections. (Prudently no names are named in that one, but from evidence outside this book I consider the whole horrific story to be absolute truth, albeit dated a few years later than its actual occurrence.) And you’ll read astonishing tales from the dark underside of publishing, such as the luckless writer imprisoned in a publisher’s cellar, starving and ill, to hack out 10,000 words a day. You’ll find fond memories of old books too, including quotations “by popular request” demonstrating just how bad British original paperback sf could be, as if certain covers included in the 166 black-and-white illustrations are not demonstration enough. The central chapters of Vultures recreate this explosion for you, with leading players including John Carnell and Kenneth Bulmer recalling the madcap inside stories of UK magazines such as New Worlds, Authentic, Nebula and the later Visions of Tomorrow. Finally, Chapters 17-21 describe the later efforts by editor Harbottle, author E C Tubb and others to maintain the adventurous spirit of those formative Fifties.īack in the Fifties, of course, a whole decade’s-worth of creative energy held back by World War II came bursting out. Chapters 6-16 - an amazing lucky-dip of revelations - survey the crazy boom years of roughly 1950-55 when both very good sf and very bad sf proliferated mightily as never before.
Chapters 1-5 sketch the pre-1950 struggles to establish British sf magazines in an uncomprehending publishing scene.
Vultures of the Void: The Legacy is Philip Harbottle’s history of the UK science fiction he has read, published, edited, agented, written about and loved for six decades. Taken together, the books make a fascinating double package for readers, especially if those readers are also writers. Harbottle’s strength is in cautionary tales about publishing, Budrys’ is in guidelines for a writer’s life. Here are two labours of love: two books about science fiction and fantasy, written and published by genuine enthusiasts, two homegrown harvests of insights into writing, reading, and generally keeping sf alive in an increasingly commercialised world. Vultures of the Void: The Legacy Author: Philip Harbottle
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