Questar magazine November 1979

Questar magazine, November 1979

Questar was a 8 x 11"  magazine published from 1978 to 1981 by MW Communications of Pittsburgh, with William Wilson serving as editor. The magazine was a 'slick', printed in color on higher quality paper stock, with a newsstand / magazine rack distribution alongside more mainstream publications .

The runaway success of Star Wars in 1977 had made possible the commercial viability of a new generation of SF magazines devoted to covering the genre in film and television. The leading publication of this type was Starlog, which debuted in 1976 and soon achieved a respectable circulation. Questar was aimed at the same audience. It did not achieve the economic success of its competitors, however, and the magazine folded after issuing its 13th and final issue in 1981.

The November 1979 issue features the hit movie Alien on its cover and devotes a good portion of its interior to articles reviewing the film, and interviews with the cast and crew. In addition to the Alien coverage there are some black and white / graytone comics, an article about a 'Kiss' stage play, another about the newly released James Bond film Moonraker, and an interview with Mike Gornick, the cinematographer for George Romero's zombie film Dawn of the Dead, which was released - to considerable success -  in 1979. 

I've excerpted the Gornick interview here; it's an interesting look at low-budget film-making back in the late 70s. 

The idea of placing a zombie series on network TV with the requisite gore intact, like with AMC's Walking Dead, would have seemed most unlikely back in the Old School days of the late 70s.

Also scanned is the magazine's 'Panorama' section, providing a nice overview of what was going on in the SF / fantasy culture throughout 1979.

Book Review: The Disciples of Cthulhu

Book Review: 'The Disciples of Cthulhu' edited by Edward P. Berglund

3 / 5 Stars

I remember picking the DAW book up from the rack at Gordon’s Cigar Store in October 1976, back when Steely Dan’s ‘The Fez’, ‘Muskrat Love’ by the Captain and Tennille, and “Disco Duck’ by Rick Dees, were playing on the radio. TV offered ‘(Dick) Van Dyke and Company’, ‘Police Woman’, ‘Baretta’, and ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’.

‘The Disciples of Cthulhu’, DAW Book No. 213 (288 pp.) , was issued in 1976 and features a cover illustration by Karel Thole. Long out of print, copies of the DAW version have very high asking prices.

In 1995 Chaosium published a trade paperback reprint, used copies of which unfortunately also go for very high prices. It has some editorial meddlings, in terms of dropping the Carter and Brennan entries (synopsized below) for new ones by Robert Price and A. A. Attansio.

‘Disciples’ is a reasonably good anthology of Cthulhu stories, particularly in comparison with the endless fanfic anthologies churned out over the past 15 years by Chaosium, and the more polished collections (Cthulhu 2000) published by Del Rey. 

All its entries were written specifically for 'Disciples', and veteran authors, as well as newcomers, were included in the lineup. 

As a Cthulhu anthology, ‘Disciples’ tends toward the quieter end of the horror spectrum, focusing less on blood and gore than on the psychological derangement that comes with encountering the Old Ones and their warped human acolytes.

My opinions of the stories:

‘The Fairground Horror’ by Brian Lumley: the creepy owner of an amusement park side show reserves a set of eldritch artifacts and collectibles, for viewing '....by appointment only'. When an archeology professor requests to see the objects, he may see more than he bargained for…...sharing the same English setting as Lumley’s ‘Titus Crow’ stories, ‘Fairground’ takes a leisurely approach in getting to its denouement.

‘The Silence of Erika Zann’ by James Wade: in a seedy music club, an acid rock band named The Electric Commode, led by a striking singer named Erika Zann, starts to attract attention from the hipsters. The band’s music is strange and unearthly, and not all of the sounds are coming from the players on stage. [The theme of rock music as a natural outlet for Cthulhu worship is recycled by Alan Moore in his comics ‘The Courtyard’ (2003) and ‘Necronomicon’ (2010) for Avatar Press.]

‘All Eye’ by Bob Van Laerhoven: in the Canadian wilderness a scholar gets lost and finds himself confronting an evil entity from Beyond Time and Space. Van Laerhoven was a newcomer to writing and his first-person narrative, while holding the reader’s attention, can be confusing at times.

‘The Tugging’ is the inevitable entry from Ramsey Campbell. An art critic for a British newspaper is troubled by dreams of an undersea island coming to the surface; these dreams may be triggered by the approach of a rogue planetoid into the solar system. As is usual with a Campbell contribution, the plot is an afterthought, weighted down by a thick encrustation of metaphors and similes: buses ‘quake’ and ‘fart’, telephone calls ‘leap prankishly’ (?!), the dawn ‘clutches’, memories ‘tear’ their way through insomnia…..you get the picture.

“Where Yidhra Walks” by Walter C. DeBill, Jr. : in the wilds of West Texas, a traveler finds himself stranded in a small town named Milando. The townspeople don’t take kindly to strangers, particularly strangers who start to ask too many questions about an ancient cult that worships an entity called Yidhra the Devourer…..this is one of the better tales in the anthology, making a well-crafted transition from the atmosphere of unease that starts out most traditional Mythos stories before ramping things up to a chase sequence reminiscent in some ways of ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’.

‘The Feaster from Afar’ by Joseph Payne Brennan: a supercilious novelist decides to take a sabbatical in a remote area of New England. He begins having disturbing dreams, but dismisses them as manifestations of the depression induced by the gloomy countryside. This is not a good attitude to take when in Cthulhu Country…...one of the best stories in the anthology.

‘Zoth-Ommog’ by Lin Carter: a young museum staffer is troubled by a statue from a collection of artifacts recovered by a South Pacific expedition. He enlists the aid of the faculty at Miskatonic University and discovers the statue is the manifestation of one of Cthulhu’s offspring; there are unpleasant implications for the safety of all who view it. Carter can’t resist belaboring the reader with a detailed exposition on the background of the Mythos, making this novelette too long and rambling to be very engaging.

‘Darkness, My Name Is’ by Eddy C. Bertin: vacationing in Freihausgarten, a remote village in Germany, Herbert Ramon decides to investigate rumors of a temple located somewhere within a nearby Dark Hill. The locals don’t like talking about the Hill, or the strange ceremonies that are supposed to take place during the full moon…This story is the most innovative in the collection, moving from the familiar theme of the seeker into Eldritch Mysteries to a decidedly Cosmic, sci-fi perspective. Bertin’s use of a New Wave prose style in accompaniment of this narrative shift is overdone, but ‘Darkness’ stands as a very capable modern contribution to the Mythos.

‘The Terror from the Depths’ by Fritz Leiber: on the California coast, Georg Fischer has weird dreams of a vast network of tunnels lying under the trails in the hills surrounding his home. Are they connected to the bizarre shrine to a marine Deity in the basement of the house ? ‘Terror’ is a rather pedestrian reworking of the major storylines of the Mythos, and Leiber mimics too closely Lovecraft’s overwrought prose style (caves are referred to as ‘subterranean vacuities’).

Summing up, 'Disciples' is a decent anthology and worth picking up if you are able to find a copy with an affordable asking price. 

'The Dunwich Horror' by Breccia
from Heavy Metal magazine, October 1979 

PART TWO

'The Dunwich Horror' by Breccia
from Heavy Metal magazine, October 1979 

PART ONE

 

'H.P.L.' by Jean-Michel Nicollet

'H.P.L.' by Jean-Michel Nicollet

Despite its brevity, one of the most artistically impressive features ever to appear in the early days of Heavy Metal magazine (October 1979)

Book Review: 'Stickman' by Seth Pfefferle

3 / 5 Stars

‘Stickman’ (279 pp.) was published by Tor in July 1987; the cover art is by John Zielinski.

In an unnamed hellhole of a country in southern Africa, a delegation of US Senators arrives to investigate the massacre of a television documentary crew (‘Sporting Chic’) out in the bush. Escorted by a team of mercenaries and Governor Mobatasi, the local chieftain, the delegation journeys into a barren landscape wracked by drought and starvation. Once at the site of the murders, it becomes disturbingly clear that the ‘rebels’ responsible for the death of the television crew liked to collect the severed heads of their victims.

Kurt Dietrich, one of the more intelligent members of the mercenary team, suspects that something  otherworldly may have been responsible for the massacre. Was it the ‘Stickman’ featured in the primitive paintings made on the walls of a cave located near the massacre site ? Does the Stickman represent the embodiment of a warrior from the spirit world ? If so, can he be killed with earthly weapons ? As events quickly lurch into a disastrous confrontation between the delegation and a predator from another world, the prospect of another massacre at the hands of the Stickman seems likely.....

‘Stickman’ is certainly creepy and engrossing for its first 140 or so pages. Author Pfefferle keeps the Stickman’s on-screen appearances sparse, but holds the reader's attention by letting the squalor and brutal violence plaguing the postwar African landscape represent a parallel horror story in and of itself.

Unfortunately, the middle section of the book sees the action slow to a crawl as the author devotes way too much text to exploring the psychodramas between the various members of the delegation and its guardians. Page after page unfolds filled with squabblings, arguments, selfish behaviors, and various acts of domestic mayhem, until the point was reached where I wanted all of the characters to be snuffed out by the Stickman. [To be fair to Pfefferle, this sort of middle-act meandering is the bane of many horror novels, particularly ‘The Ruins’ (2006) by Scott Smith].

The narrative doesn’t regain momentum until the last 30 pages of the novel, at which time it does deliver on the requisite suspense. But I came away from ‘Stickman’ thinking that it would have benefited from being a good 60 – 75 pages shorter in length.

Readers looking for a decent mid-80s horror novel reminiscent of the 'Predator' franchise, and with a willingness to put up with a great deal of melodrama among the beleaguered party, may want to give 'Stickman' a try.

'Skull' comix No. 4: H.P. Lovecraft issue

‘Skull’comix No. 4 (1972) was a special issue devoted to H. P. Lovecraft stories and contained some good material, such as Richard Corben’s ‘The Hound’, ‘The Hairy Claw of Tolen’ by Charles Dallas, and ‘Pickman’s Model’, with noteworthy pen-and-ink artwork by Herb Arnold, which I’m posting here.

 

Border Watch SUNY Binghamton

Border Watch

SUNY-Binghamton

October 1978

Back in the Autumn of 1978, at my college campus of the State University of New York at Binghamton (SUNY-Binghamton, now renamed Binghamton University), student groups and organizations could procure funding from the Student Association to produce booklets and magazines for free distribution to the student body. 

Since SUNY-Binghamton prided itself at that time on being ‘The Berkeley of the East’, many of the publications were devoted to left-wing or proudly Marxist political pursuits. But there were student groups that sought to produce publications representative of what we nowadays would call geek or nerd culture.

Foremost among the geek publications was the L5 Society’s magazine about constructing space habitats in earth orbit. The L5 magazine had meticulously detailed artwork and technical essays and was arguably the most professionally produced magazine to be issued during my time at the campus.

For stoners and fans of magazines such as Mad and The National Lampoon, a number of one-shot humor publications appeared on an irregular basis. October 1978 saw the appearance of Border Watch, a newspaper devoted to satirizing some of the more pretentious movements on campus.

The Letters column I’ve scanned here represents a satire of the Letters page appearing the official campus newspaper, Pipe Dream. The letters page in Pipe Dream almost always featured at least one missive from some Aggrieved Group; here the Border Watch staff is on target with their parody of a letter from an outraged coalition of ‘the women of SUNY Binghamton.’

 

I’ve also scanned a cartoon that calls to mind Bill Griffith’s comic ‘Zippy the Pinhead’; as of 1978 Zippy was still very much an underground phenomenon, and the idea that he would one day be the star of a syndicated strip in major newspapers in the US would have seemed very 'far out'.

 

Finally,  I’ve scanned an untitled but entertaining little strip that deals with Halloween, and what happens when you piss off a Wizard with your Trick or Treating.

  

For a paper put together part-time by students at a time when 'desktop' publishing was still a good five or six years into the future, Border Watch was worth picking up, giving you something compatible to read while stoned.

Fractal Leaves

Fractal leaves

From ‘Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos’ by John Briggs, p. 13, Touchstone / Simon & Schuster 1992

Book Review: New Dimensions 12

Book Review: 'New Dimensions 12', edited by Marta Randall and Robert Silverberg

1 / 5 Stars

From 1976 to 1983, SF was a genre in the doldrums. The New Wave movement was dying out, but many authors - lacking the ability to come up with an alternative approach to their fiction - continued to produce New Wave content, albeit even more contrived and self-indulgent than was the case in the movement's early days.

Even as the New Wave style became more and more tired, the runaway success of Star Wars in 1977, followed by that of Close Encounters and Alien, reignited ‘traditional’ SF as a commercial venture. As the 70s drew to an end, publishers increasingly looked for works that were plot-driven, as opposed to the character- and mood- driven approaches of the New Wave scene.

Some writers successfully adapted to this change in the landscape of SF. For example, Robert Silverberg abandoned the introspective style that had characterized much of his output during the 60s and 70s and released in 1980 one of his best, and best-selling, novels with ‘Lord Valentine’s Castle’.

But many authors simply dithered, unsure of where to go, lost and aimlessly seeking a new direction, a new direction that wouldn’t begin to manifest until 1984 and the publication of ‘Neuromancer’ and the advent of the Cyberpunks.

‘New Dimensions 12’ (1981; 223 pp., Pocket Books / Timescape, cover artist unknown) provides a rather depressing snapshot of the efforts to prop up the corpse of the New Wave movement even when it was clear that its time had come and gone.

The anthology leads off with Michael Swanwick’s ‘Walden Three’, about an L5 colony where all 10,000 inhabitants are required to be outfitted with an implant that guarantees happy behavior. A clown / standup comic / mime tries to rebel. This is the most ‘hard’ SF tale in the collection, but it’s pretty weak. Better things were to come from Swanwick as the decade progressed.

Gregory Benford contributes ‘Cadenza’, which deals with the familiar near-future scenario of the terminally ill person seeking Death with Dignity. It’s sentimental and predictable.

Newcomer Richard Grant provides ‘Drode’s Equations’, in which a man riding a train in a quasi-Victorian world ponders the Meaning of Life. What little plot exists is suffocated by a belabored prose style (this is the first time I’ve ever seen the verb ‘effulges’ in print ?!). No other story in the collection displays as severe a New Wave hangover as this entry.

Elizabeth Lynn’s entry, ‘The Woman in the Phone Booth’ is a story dealing – half-humorously – with alien abductions. It’s a sign of how slim the pickings were that this slight tale made it into the anthology.

‘Elfleda’, by Vonda McIntyre, is set on a planet where a hapless race of humans have been genetically engineered to resemble the centaurs, satyrs, and nymphs of Greek mythology. Their masters periodically visit with rather… lubricious… designs in mind. There is angst about this state of affairs on the part of the first-person narrator, a centaur named Achilleus. This story certainly has a provocative theme, but at the same time it carries with it a sticky, grubby sensibility. I finished ‘Elfleda’ thinking that someone like Joe R. Lansdale could take the concept and do something much more intriguing (and gruesome) with it….

‘Pain and Glory’, by Gordon Eklund, deals with a Jewish family gifted (or cursed) with the ability to draw upon themselves the physical and emotional pain of others. There is much angst about the psychological burden of employing this ability. There is an obligatory Holocaust flashback. Another ‘speculative fiction’ entry with little in the way of true SF content.

‘Parables of Art’ by Dann and Malzburg is a short-short tale dealing with the antics of two unhappy artists. Another bottom-of-the-barrel selection.

Michael Ward’s ‘Delta D and She’ is a cutesy tale of a young woman struggling to regain her identity with the assistance of AIs, which manifest as holograms beamed from kiosks scattered throughout the city. Over the course of the story the woman acquires the name ‘Pitspipple’. This entry is…...really lame.

Tony Sarowitz contributes ‘A Manner of Speaking’, which places another young woman, this one named Elinor, in a dystopian, near- future setting. Elinor provides an unusual service to her clients, at some cost to her own personality. The story tries to evoke a sense of pathos and anomie, but instead comes across as one giant cliché of New Wave prose; for example, the story ends with this sentence: ’Silence like a pair of vacant eyes.’

  

Juleen Brantingham provides ‘The Satyrs’ and Dryads’ Cotillion’, in which a group of jaded aesthetes bicker and connive in preparation for a stylish costume ball. Unremarkable.

‘The Last Concert of Pierre Valdemar’, by Carter Scholz, is a short-short story that provides a satirical examination of the limits to which Artistry may go.

Peter Santiago C. (no, the single-letter surname is not a typo, but a stylish affectation) contributes ‘The Celebrants’, set on a far-future Earth in the aftermath of an invasion by an alien race called the tiiyn. Peace has been arranged between the tiiyn and the Earth’s surviving humans; an elaborate artistic ceremony is planned to consummate the treaty. Of all the stories in the anthology this one seems most like a New Wave piece written in 1971, so overloaded with figurative, empurpled prose that navigating even a single page induces fatigue in the reader.

In summary, even die-hard New Wave aficionados will find little to hold their attention among the contents of this volume of ‘New Dimensions’.