The Tucker Issue S F Commentary 43
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S F COMMENTARY 43 THE TUCKER ISSUE S F COMMENTARY 43 August 1975 63 pages COVER . Helena and Kelvin Roberts EDITORIAL 4 INTRODUCTION A TOUCH O' TUCKER Ed Connor 5 THE WRITER BOB RUCKER interviewed by PAUL WALKER 7 THE MYSTERIES THE MYSTERIOUS WILSON TUCKER Lesleigh Luttrell 15 THE SCIENCE FICTION HIDDEN HEROES: THE SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS OF-WILSON TUCKER Bruce Gillespie 26 THE YEAR OF THE QUIET SUN WHERE WE'RE ARRIVING Bruce Gillespie 52 ICE AND IRON TUCKER'S TWO FUTURES Hank and Lesleigh Luttrell 59 BIBLIOGRAPHY THE WORKS OF,WILSON TUCKER . Denny Lien 61 Edited, printed,' and published by BRUCE GILLESPIE, GPO BOX 5195AA, MELBOURNE , VICTORIA 3001, AUSTRALIA (03) 347 8902 SUBSCRIPTIONS Australia: F or S1 per copy; $5 for 5. JACKIE FRANKE Overseas: without whom... Please do not send local cheques. Send local cash, International Money Order, SUBSCRIBERS AND LIBRARIANS: or cheque already converted This is the fabled Bob Tucker to Australian currency. Issue, temporarily delayed. For USA and Canada: accession purposes, this is the $6 for 5. August issue, and should be placed before SFC 44/4$ on the UK: shelves. However, for subscrip £3 for 5. tion purposes, this is SFC 45, and subscription renewal notices Last stencil typed will be sent out on that basis. 29 April 1976. EDITORIAL No issue of S F Commentary has suffered more difficulties than the Bob Tucker Issue. If you are holding a copy in your hands (and, at the time of writing, there is no absolute guaran tee that further difficulties do not await it), give thanks for your good fortune. The Bob Tucker Issue, as the cover date shows, should have appeared in August 1975. S f read ers in America and Australia had raised more than $2000 to ensure that Bob Tucker could travel from USA to the World Convention held in Melbourne in August last year. I wanted very much to be able to hand a copy of SFC 43 to him there. It's the end of April 1976 as I type this, b'ut keep remembering that it should be August 1-975. This Issue has been the victim of vaulting ambi tion. Lesleigh and I made plans to publish it in October 1974. Hank and Lesleigh had written their pieces, by the end of 1974, and Jackie Franke contributed a cover. I kept making plans to write my piece. ..about..Tucker’s s f, and kept putting off the actual work. Then came the advent of John Counsel. John is a printer who had great plans-for producing SFC offset, cheap ly and well. He also said that he could do it quickly. I began my Tucker piece in May 1975 and finished it in July, about two weeks before the issue was due to appear. .. John Counsel said he could doit, but cduidn’t. (The whole issue was typeset and illustrated; I don’t know what has happened to the plates.) Aussiecon passed, with great enjoyment of Tucker's company, but no SFC 43 to give him. And then came the real problems. I don't know why John Counsel never managed to print the Tucker Issue, but certainly he didn't. Also, we have never received back the artwork, in cluding Jackie's cover, which was due to appear here. After an entire summer during which Carey Handfield and I attempted to retrieve material, I typed the stencils for this edition. Eventually, Helena and Kelvin Roberts were the source of the cover photo. Months went by, and now The Tucker Issue exists. I hope you enjoy its contents. Each of the contributors has been introduced at the beginning of each section - but I do want to thank Carey in particular for his efforts to stave off the various catastrophes which have delayed this issue - and Lesleigh and Hank, who waited nearly two years to see their contribu tions in print - and Jackie Franke, who conduct ed the Tucker Fund, supplied a marvellous cover which doesn't appear here, and who is really responsible for everything - and Bob Tucker, who is worth all the trouble. 29.4.76 INTRODUCTION 000 00 000 000 000 000 000 000 0 ■ 0 0 0 0 0 □ 0 0 0 0 0 000 0 0 ..... - G 0...0.. 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 o 0 0 0 O' O' 0 0 0 -□ .00.. 000 00 000 000 0 0 0 0 000 0 0 A TOUCH c' TUCKER ((EDITOR: Ed Connor lives in Peoria, Illinois, edits S F Echo (formerly called Moebius Trip) and, I'm told, is known for his fairly shy and retiring nature - in a literary field where we're all known for our shy dispositions. Apart from that, I know little about him, except that he has been a friend of Bob Tucker's for many years. Also, I'm glad to say, he's willing to do a favour at a moment's notice. This Introduction arrived back in my letterbox only a short time after I wrote ask ing for it some time in Duly 1975. Too bad that Ed, like everybody else, has had to wait so long to see this in print. I'm sure you would like to subscribe to Ed's magazine; his address is 1805 N Gale, Peoria, Illinois 61604, USA.)) A few. short stories comprised Bob Tucker's earliest professionally published mater ial. They were: not necessarily the best of his production. By then, his longest- running fanzine of the 1930s, D'Journal, had been replaced by Le Zombie, in which his writing proclivity ran unchecked. By the immediate post-Uorld War II days, Tucker had probably overcome any shortcomings in "book learning" occasioned by his early termination of formal education. His friends (in and out of the s f field) were pleased at Tucker's small successes, but in the limited scope of the pulp magazine field, in the even further restricted genre of science fiction, his by-line was - and remained - one of the most obscure. Competition for sales found numerous writers who'd become veritable giants of the field in just the time since Bob's first yarn had seen print; he was just as far be hind them, it seemed, as ever. He kept at it, never stopping to this day. And all the while he has been an s f fan, in the intimate sense of being involvedin the camaraderie of the hooked addict. He's done an incredible amount of travelling since his long-ago departure from an orphanage; most of it, I dare say, has been go ED CONNOR S F COMMENTARY 43 5 INTRODUCTION ing to and returning from conventions. He'll be in his element in Melbourne. In spite of somewhat denigrating generalities that Tucker himself has applied to his short fiction, I happen to think that some of his best writing is short in length; it is not professional only in the sense that it was not done for pay. His material found its way regularly into many fan publications. The finest of it proves the worth of the author's striving to do his best - even if each particular factual art icle, or satire, or whatever, is "only" destined for printing in a fanzine. For example: Bob very ably captured the aura of nostalgia tinging a bookperson's de parting a well-used habitat; "Den's End", first published in 1944, has worn to per fection. And with his "A Chucklehead Has No Honour in His Own Country" (1967, in Dick Geis' psychotic) he humorously - and neatly - pinned well-known s f critic Damon Knight to the board. (Knight had made a simple, but horrendous, blunder in asserting that s f writer Berry Sohl had erred in having a character in one of his books see his reflection in a basin of water in a normally lighted room. "Impos sible," crowed Damon. Tucker cheerfully - and brilliantly - made the critic look very foolish, helped immeasurably b\ the fact that anyone who could see could verify instantly the point in question.) In his interview with Paul Walker, Tucker states that his two "worst" s f books are his first, The City in the Sea (1951) and To the Tombaugh Station (1960). Thank fully, he did not abandon the field after his initial s f sale. In the case of To the Tombaugh Station, it appears that at the time he may have been dissatisfied enough to devote all his efforts for years thereafter to his mystery/detective/sus- pense artistry. There was no more ,s f until 1970, when he scored again (after no little effort) with The Year of the Quiet Sun. While several of his greatest successes were published before 1960, Tucker's writing has matured considerably in recent years. While the .cynic might counter with "What is maturity?", I suggest that he compare early and late Tucker in search of subtle ties - which should not be all that obscure - for himself. what might Tucker do today with today's ."new freedoms", as applied to such a novel as To the Tombaugh Station? In the only (out-of-print) existing version, the author delineates the inconveniences, etc, of a male being confined in a miserably small space capsule with an individual (female) whom ho dislikes. No doubt Tucker would, if doing it over now, change it greatly, making it a different story (it would, be yond doubt, be better). Such a metamorphosis is, of course, extremely unlikely. While Bob has revised old tales for publishers in new editions, I don't think he'd want to plough over old ground on his own.