[SKRIVA] About SaM, Sam J and sf magazines

From: Ahrvid <ahrvid@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "skriva@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <skriva@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "rgparaliteraria@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <rgparaliteraria@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "planetasf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <planetasf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2014 03:00:15 +0100
After Loncon Andy Sawyer sent me a bundle of Foundation, the adademic journal 
of the SF Foundation, to replace some issues lost, and leafing through them I 
find an interesting article in Foundation No 36 (Summer, 1986) which I would 
like to comment. It is a piece by Sam Moskowitz (SaM from now on), "Setting the 
record straight: A response to Lundwall's 'Adventures in the pulp jungle'". 
That Lundwall is Sam J Lundwall (Sam J from now on) who wrote the article 
refered to in Foundation No 35. SaM also comments Sam J's previous books SF - 
What's It All About (1971) and SF - An Illustrated History (1977).
  The debate between SaM and Sam J is largely about two things: 1) What is an 
sf magazine, and what was the  earliest one?; and 2) what was the nature, 
extent and importance of early US/UK science fiction and stuff from the rest of 
the world? (To this I will add a couple of non debate-related things from SaM's 
Foundation article that I found interesting.)
  In SF - What's It All About Sam J promotes Otto Witt's Hugin (1916-20) as the 
earliest sf magazine. In SF - An Illustrated history he instead  switches to a 
publication, a supplement to another magazine, named Stella said to have been 
published with four issues 1886-1888.
  Many who knew SaM may consider him old-fashioned in his views about 
literature and a bit dry (when he goes into details, there are a lot of 
details! - but I enjoyed his article nonetheless). He was always a careful 
researcher, though. For Hugin, he reports in his Foundation article, he took an 
issue he owned to Hans Stefan Santesson, who knew Swedish, and let him report 
about the contents. And he reported back it had two articles about telescopes, 
two about astronomy, one about perpetual motion machines, one about metallurgy, 
etc.  "There was *no fiction at all*", SaM notes, so it can't be an sf magazine 
he concludes.
  I have read more of Hugin. While other issues would have fiction, SaM is 
basically correct. Hugin was a poular science magazine for young boys. The 
fiction content was sometimes very strange. Witt wrote stories there to teach 
youngsters science and technology, where he for instance let elements like 
carbon and hydrogen appear as living characters and talk to each other to 
reveal their chemical properties... In a formal sense it is fiction, maybe even 
science fiction, but it is a bit odd and the purpose was to teach science. 
Other  pieces were more straight sf, but as I remember such stuff was a small 
minority of the contents. (Many of Witt's novels where straight sf, though. He 
was no doubt interested in that kind of literature.)
  For Stella SaM argues that a sort of magazine which is an irregular 
supplement to another magazine (in this case Svenska Familj-Journalen Svea, 
"Swedish Family Journal Svea") can't be considered as a proper magazine or sf 
magazine. But the problem here is instead that this Stella probably never 
existed!
  Since Sam J began to write about Stella, local sf fans have been searching 
for it extensively - and found nothing. The Royal Library, university 
libraries, catalogues of different kinds, there is nothing about this Stella.
  One Hans Persson (of the Linköping SF Society) has probably done the most 
extensive research and he has presented his (lack of) findings in this article 
from 2007:

http://vetsaga.se/?p=29

Unfortunately it is in Swedish, except for some quotes in English. Anyone 
interested may try some net-based translation service. The title of the piece 
is "Stella - sf-magasin eller bluff?" ("Stella - Sf magazine or a bluff?") 
which says it all.
  Sam J has mentioned Stella several times, and also reproduced covers (Jules 
Verne Magasinet No 487 and 489) in small size, which very well could have been 
produced in any graphic program or even a word processor, since it is without 
illustrations and only has typeset text.
  Towards the end of his article SaM writes: "Lundwall describes his 'love/hate 
relationship' with science fiction. I am not a psychiatrist, nor do I know the 
subject well enough to diagnose the base roots of his attitudes." This takes us 
to the second main topic of the SaM/Sam J debate: Anglosaxon sf Vs the Rest of 
the World.
  It's not a matter of psychiatry, but of world view and politics. (Let me just 
first mention that SaM regarding US/UK Vs Others argues for instance that 
Gernsback, who also spoke French and German, published a lot of foreign sf in 
Amazing Stories and he also calculates that up to his Foundation article more 
than 450 non-English sf novels had been published in the US and UK.)
  Here's the thing: Sam J Lundwall formed his world view in a time of the 
"youth revolt", the 1968 generation, Woodstock, anti-war demonstrations, and 
all that, ie a strong left-wing current that embraced society. This also meant 
being against most things from the US and everything "commercial". Much science 
fiction is and was from the US, to put it mildly, and much is of course also 
commercial.
  Sam J is now retired and doesn't do anything in the genre anymore. But if you 
for instance followed his magazine Jules Verne Magasinet (JVM), which folded 
only a few years ago, you could see how he constantly talked about that US sf - 
the UK was treated with more mercy - was just commercial garbage, and that sf 
from the rest of the world was much better, quite underrated and much more 
important than that junk comming from the other side of the North Atlantic. He 
would often present historical genre stuff from the rest of the world to 
strengthen the thesis that US sf isn't and has never been of the importance in 
the sf field many of us feeble minded beings have believed. Strangely enough, 
JVM also published a lot of American sf, quite much more than from any other 
country...
  And this went on year after year, decade after decade. The small stencilled 
sf newsletter I was co-editor of (VÄ, later Fanytt, now transmogrified to the 
twitter news account SFJournalen) did a long interview with Sam J in 1979, 
where his world view was already heavily established. We learned eg that 
America was illiterate because "there are only three bookstores in New York", 
the biggest sf magazine in the world came from the Soviet Union (the truth: the 
youth communist league once did *one* special future issue of their regular 
magazine), sf fandom was much bigger in Poland than America, the Hugo award was 
a joke because there was a secret conspiracy to auction it off to the highest 
bidder, etc etc.

But there's no reason to complain too much. People are of course entitled to 
have their own opinions.
  I found other things of interest in SaM's Foundation article. He mentions 
that the magazine The Overland Monthly in 1890 had "an entire issue inspired by 
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward". And: "During the twenties and early 
thirties Russian magazines reprinted a substantial number of stories from 
Gernsback's magazines" - which was total news for me. This must have been 
before Stalinism had taken a definite strangehold on the Russian society, when 
there was a period of more artistic freedom. Someone should research this more. 
How did the Gernsback magazines end up in the USSR? Did Hugo Gernsback himself 
have contacts with the Russian editors? Etc.
  And this was also news to me:
  "...the publisher of Swedish Häpna stopped in my office one day to negotiate 
the rights to reprint from Science-Fiction Plus /SaM was managing editor/ and 
when I suggested to him that since he was paying a fair rate he pick and choose 
from close to 30 other existing magazines, he frankly stated he wanted ours 
because in our first few issues the less sophisticated stories would be more 
easily understood."
  The publisher in question would be either KG or Kurt Kindberg, and the 
interesting thing is that this was *before* Häpna started. It clearly happened 
while SF Plus existed, which was only for seven issues in 1953, and Häpna No 1 
came in March 1954. I didn't know that the Kindberg brothers  took such 
contacts before launching their magazine and actually visited SaM in his 
office, though it must have been in connection with a business trip for their 
other activities.
  A closing note about early sf magazines: I have myself written in Foundation 
(No 72, Spring 1998) about what I would call a "proto-sf" magazine, Relationes 
Curiosae - from 1682! A German popular science magazine, with many stories 
about "fantastic things" written in a fictionalised style, which the very same 
year was translated to Swedish and published in a short-lived Swedish edition. 
Speculations about people living on the Moon, dragons, green people popping up 
from underground, fantastic machines, etc. And that magazine does exist. It is 
preserved, the Swedish edition at least, in a bound volume in the Royal Library 
in Stockholm.

--Ahrvid

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