Adventures in Time and Space

July 7, 2014 1:35 PM

Little did Maria E. Alonzo know back in the eighties when she started tracking down her grandfather's missing brother -- lost to the family since 1913 -- that he would turn out to have been one of science fiction's most influential early editors.
posted by MartinWisse (4 comments total)

Man, that was a weird read. To me, J. Francis McComas is better known than some of the lesser presidents of the US; I grew up loving F&SF best of all the magazines, and he and Tony Boucher (rhymes with "voucher," not some damn Frenchified way!) were heroes of my childhood. To read someone laboriously figuring out who he was is like a bulletin from an alternate universe. (Also, he was not "one of science fiction's most influential early editors," fer chrissake. Hugo Gernsback was an early editor. An sf magazine that started in 1949 is from the period of high classicism.)
posted by languagehat at 5:18 PM on July 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Twentythree years between Gernsback and tF&SF; sixtyfive years since: early.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:46 PM on July 7, 2014

I mean, Galaxy has been dead longer than Amazing Stories was old then.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:51 PM on July 7, 2014

What you're saying is that I'm old. I reject that hypothesis!
posted by languagehat at 7:06 AM on July 8, 2014