NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

FANTASY COMMENTATOR is one of the oldest and most distinguished fanzines in existence, having originally started publication in 1943. Having said that, calling FC a fanzine is rather like calling the QE2 a boat. The bulk of FC's content is non-fiction of a value and quality that, because of its specialised content, would be unlikely to find publication elsewhere. And despite the magazine's title, FC tends to concentrate on articles and bibliographical data about science fiction literature and sf personalities from the period of the ascendancy of Hugo Gernsback and the John W Campbell years — roughly 1926 to 1950.

This issue is a double one of 134 pages. Paul Spencer provides an article surveying the (currently) unpublished writings of David H Keller (1880-1966). Keller was a distinctive and distinguished contributor to the sf and horror pulps for ten years or so from the late 1920s. The value of his work lay in the using of his medical qualifications and experiences in his fiction — he pioneered a psychological rather than a hardware approach to his characters and situations. Never a stylist, Keller's work is of continuing importance because of the themes he tackled: many of which have a modern feel about them, although he was writing for the pulps seventy years ago. A valuable reminder of an important and very neglected author.

PRESUMPTION OF PREJUDICE by Eric Leif Davin and Norman Metcalf is a major examination of the received wisdom that female sf writers were discriminated against in the magazines. The authors' arguments demolish this view, and they provide an exhaustive bibliography and examples, often using previously unpublished primary sources. This is an excellent example of the sort of piece that FC excels in providing — scholarship without the academic unreadability that so often dominates non-fiction publications in the sf field. This sort of work might be that of amateurs, but the sources are documented and provide the evidence for conclusions drawn. Further debate and argument at least starts off on the right footing.

(I do feel it necessary to point out that one massive error slipped through the net: the unsupported assertion that Hazel Heald and Zealia Bishop were one and the same person. Perhaps a minor point, but of such errors are the bibliographical Augean stables of the future made! However, editor Searles assures me that this will be corrected.)

Langley Searles himself provides an amusing insight into the sort of debate that went on in the letter-columns of the science fiction magazines in the late 1930s. MUSH AND SLOP documents letters from Isaac Asimov in ASTOUNDING as he weighed into a controversy about the place of female characters and love interest in science fiction.

The late Sam Moskowitz was a sf historian who had seemed to keep everything — no matter how apparently ephemeral — connected with his involvement and activities in the field for nearly fifty years. This issue of FC has the third (of four) parts of Moskowitz's THE RETURN OF HUGO GERNSBACK — a detailed and critical examination, by one who worked for him, of Gernsback's attempted return to sf magazine publishing in 1953, with the ill-fated SCIENCE FICTION PLUS.

FC doesn't only cover older science fiction and fantasy. Everett F Bleiler interviews Ray Russell, the publisher of Tartarus Press, the UK high quality small-press publisher of work by such major figures in the field as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Aickman, and Sarban.

Although there are no letters in this issue, there are also the usual sprinkling of reviews and verse.

FANTASY COMMENTATOR is specialised scholarship at its most accessible and useful. The magazine gives the word amateur a good name — emphasising, as in the meaning of the word, something done for love. The best and most worthwhile reason of all.

The first article in this mammoth journal is HIDDEN FROM HISTORY. Eric Leif Davin and Norman Metcalf open by exploding the myth or urban legend of name-changing. It is seemingly believed that immigrants to the USA were forced by officials to change their name. The facts, if investigated, prove that this popular misconception is untrue. Similarly, they seek to explode the off-repeated common knowledge notion that women, with only rare exceptions, read and wrote science-fiction prior to the 1950s. Instead of relying on what other commentators have repeated, they have examined the magazines themselves. Fascinating as this introduction was, once they got into the detail, I became somewhat bored. However the conclusions do require the evidence to be presented.

Other articles include a remembrance of Lloyd Biggle Jnr. and Andrew Darlington on FRANCIS G. RAYER: STAR-SEEKER.

The heaviness of the articles is relieved by some excellent poetry from Bruce Boston, John Grey, Steve Sneyd and others.

Magnificent double-issue devoted entirely to the life and work of Fritz Leiber (1910-1992). Essays by various hands examine in depth Leiber's fiction and poetry and look at the effect on his work that his friendships with Harry Fischer and H P Lovecraft had.

The magazine reprints some of Leiber's letters to Franklin MacKnight between 1932 and 1951 and also reprints three of Leiber's poems. I particularly liked these lines of defiance from CHALLENGE:

	Trading rich days for doubtful coins
	Which may or may not buy me one tomorrow
	In the exchequer of the careless fates.
	Fool's gold, farewell.