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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

12 Comments

  1. BerserkRL
    April 3, 2015 @ 1:00 am

    Back in the 90s I met a guy in Chapel Hill's late lamented Second Foundation bookstore (I think he also might have working as a waiter in the restaurant next door to it) whose favourite author was Kuttner.

    Reply

  2. Chris Gonzalez
    April 3, 2015 @ 4:49 am

    Is this the first time that the opening quote has been repeated between entries? Or is it on purpose and there's a thematic reason I'm currently overlooking?

    I'm going to have to look into Kuttner. The brief overview given here has piqued my interest. I may also need to look through Parkhouse's Doctor Who comics, which I was always meaning to get around to, but now that he's come up in the War, I may as well do it now.

    Reply

  3. Elizabeth Sandifer
    April 3, 2015 @ 6:51 am

    No, just the first time I forgot to update the quote and title the post. 🙂

    Reply

  4. Eric Gimlin
    April 3, 2015 @ 9:43 am

    The four Hogben stories in Thrilling Wonder Stories were actually all published under the Henry Kuttner byline; even if they shifted to the Padgett name for later reprints. It would be extraordinarily unusual to shift a series to a different pseudonym for later installments in the pulps; the only exception I can think of off the top of my head would be a few Captain Future stories when Edmond Hamilton had to briefly leave the series due to the WWII.

    Thank you for pointing me at these; I actually have "Exit the Professor" and "See You Later" and enjoyed digging out the magazines to read them. Now to see if I can find the others; the 2013 reprint seems to be a collector's item of its own at this point. I don't think the series could really sustain itself much longer than it did, but like The Bojefferies Saga what little there is is quite fun.

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  5. encyclops
    April 3, 2015 @ 10:06 am

    I can't remember ever reading the Hogben stories, and yet I wrote something in college that sounds almost exactly like what you describe here. Either I read Kuttner in my youth and forgot about it, I read someone who ripped him off, or magic is real!

    Reply

  6. Elizabeth Sandifer
    April 3, 2015 @ 10:24 am

    Yeah, you'll note my conspicuous failure to have any of the Parkhouse illustrations for Hogben as an image, which ought give a clue about the ease of finding them at a sensible price. 🙂

    Reply

  7. Eric Gimlin
    April 3, 2015 @ 10:37 am

    Can't help you there. If you want the original magazine illos for "Exit the Professor" or "See You Later" to supplement the cover that shows a totally different story I can scan those for you, though.

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  8. Mark Pontin
    April 3, 2015 @ 1:27 pm

    Eh. Kuttner & Moore's stature and influence remain a little more prominent than you indicate here — to the extent that in 2007 a Hollywood film called 'The Last Mimzy' based on their 1943 novelette 'Mimsy Were the Borogroves' could still get made.

    In general, unless it's Stanislaw Lem, if you've read good science fiction it was written by writers who were in some degree, however small, influenced by the Kuttners since they were, with A.E. van Vogt, the mainstays of John Campbell's ASTOUNDING science fiction magazine during the 1940s (at the time, they were in fact more prominent than the much-overpraised Robert Heinlein).

    They were a large influence on the SF writers who emerged during the 1950s, most obviously early Philip K. Dick — who takes the Kuttners' themes of androids/robots/what-is-reality and runs with them — and in the early 1970s the Science Fiction Writers of America issued an anthology, edited by Robert Silverberg, which collected some two-dozen SF stories that the members of the SFWA had collectively voted the best American magazine SF stories. Kuttner and Moore's "Vintage Season" was voted into Number One place as best SF story.

    And what killed off Kuttner's career — besides the fact that he planning on moving out of pulp-writing and was going to school to become a clinical psychologist — was simply the fact that in 1958 he died from a heart attack at the age of 42.

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  9. Joe Bowers
    April 3, 2015 @ 4:00 pm

    That bookstore was amazing.

    Reply

  10. Eric Gimlin
    April 3, 2015 @ 6:53 pm

    Heinlein only wrote one story specifically for Astounding after 1942; although he did have a couple books serialized in the mag as well. So yeah, he wasn't nearly as prominent other than that 38 month run from 39 to 42 where he had his first flurry of stories. As you say, Kuttner and Moore were some of the very visible writers in that era; even if you couldn't always tell given the number of pseudonyms they used. A quick glance amazed me with just how often their names showed.

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  11. Daru
    April 4, 2015 @ 4:27 am

    I love the Tides of Time Doctor Who strip. The rare story along with Douglas Adams and the Dalek Masterplan that has ever made cricket interesting to me. Or should that be krikkit?

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  12. Jesse
    April 4, 2015 @ 4:39 pm

    That's one of the bookstores I grew up haunting, going back to when it was the Foundation Bookstore. (Given what blog I'm on, I should mention that when I was 11/12/13 years old I bought Doctor Who books and comics there.) Sorry to hear it's out of business.

    Reply

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