Today is Tolkien’s birthday. I’m not going to write a long post. There are too many writers who have written better posts honoring him than I could ever write. I just didn’t want the day to pass without acknowledging the man. No matter what you think of his work and his influence on fantasy, he casts a long shadow over the field that still has influence today.
Charles Beaumont was born this day in 1929. He passed away in 1967. Beaumont was a protege of Ray Bradbury and a central figure in what’s come to be called the California School. Other members were Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan, Chad Oliver, and the late George Clayton Johnson. Johnson’s story “Your Three Minutes Are Up” is a tribute to his friend.
Beaumont is best remembered today for penning a number of scripts for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. He also wrote the novel The Intruder which was filmed by Roger Corman and starred William Shatner.
Beaumont’s strengths lay in short stories. I came across a slim volume when I was a sophomore in high school; I bought it on the strength of Ray Bradbury’s introduction and read it during a move across the state. Not all of the stories worked for me. Some of them were aimed for a more mature reader. I don’t mean “mature” in terms of sexual content (although that was part of it) but that the themes weren’t something a young teen could relate to.
On the other hand, the stories that did resonate with me blew me away. I was hooked and spent years haunting used book stores trying to find all of his collections. In addition to being the epitome of a professional working writer, Beaumont was an avid race fan. He and Nolan often raced.
Beaumont’s death is usually attributed to some type of early-onset Alzheimer’s. He began to age swifty at the age of 34. His loss was deeply felt.
Centipede Press recently published The Intruder, crime thriller Run From the Hunter (written collaboratively with John Tomerlin), and a massive collection of short fiction, Mass for Mixed Voices (which sold out almost immediately, and no, I won’t loan you my copy.) This past year penguin published Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories. Also available is the collection A Touch of the Creature, which contains all the stories in the limited edition published by Subterranean Press (2000) along with three more. These stories weren’t collected during Beaumont’s lifetime.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going reread some Beaumont short stories. Please turn out the light when you leave…on second thought, better not.
“The Last Days of Shandakor”
Originally published in Startling Stories, April 1952
So here’s a Mars story, a planet we’ve not looked at yet in this series of posts on Brackett. As cool as her Venus stories are (and we’re not done looking at them), Brackett’s stories of Mars are what made her reputation.
In this one, an ethnologist named John Ross is on Mars studying the various tribes and hoping to be awarded an endowed chair at a university on Earth for his work. He’s sitting in a dive, waiting for the final preparations to be made for his caravan, when a man walks in. Ross can see immediately there’s something different about this person. Everyone pretends he’s not there. When Ross asks his caravan master about the man, the caravan master tells him to forget about him. Curiosity getting the better of him, Ross approaches the man and engages him in conversation. He’ll wish he’d heeded the caravan master’s advice. Continue reading