Word: fiction
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...themes sometimes got lost in the variations. During World War II, Esquire concentrated on sports, pinups and adventure fiction; Gingrich, who had left the magazine, had to be invited back to give it intellectual tone again. At this point Hugh Hefner, a circulation promotion writer at Esquire decided to start a magazine of his own, freely borrowing Esquire's formula while gambling that the courts might now be more lenient about nudity. Instead of Esky the bug-eyed lecher as a trademark, Hefner created the Bunny. Facing Playboy's runaway success but unwilling to become a "skin book...
Author Geoffrey Wolff tried to capture his own outlandish grifter of a parent in his first novel, Bad Debts (1969). In The Duke of Deception he tries again, this time discarding fiction and giving the facts a chance. They are colorful but not, at first glance, terribly consequential. Arthur Samuels Wolff, nicknamed Duke for his noble pretensions, was neither famous nor accomplished, except at the art of running up unpaid bills, and even that skill deserted him at the end. To Geoffrey and his younger brother Toby, their father's life was a matter of putting on heirs...
...shows little shyness. It boldly confronts the isolation and private logic of madness, and shows how aberration, anguish and longing can be turned into lucid fiction. Beyond this, Frame has a satiric grasp of the absurdities that pass for normal. Intensive Care (1970), for example, is about a future welfare tyranny in New Zealand where tranquilizers are put in the water supply, and all the grass and trees are plastic. Visions of brave new worlds are many, but Frame makes them newer with a brew of personal lyricism, broad cultural allusion and sudden chills...
There is a kaleidoscopic quality to these images. Myth and legend are intertwined. Fiction becomes truth. Good and evil are presented on equal terms; there is no shift in the narrative voice. In the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt so well described, lies its horror. The pre-moral eyes of a growing child and the discipline of the poet lend the narrative the detachment needed to convey this banality. The narrator does not judge, but show, weaving the events into a fabric of legend and death...
...ever been to a science-fiction convention you've seen them in a less egregious form: short, bad complexion, slightly overweight, greasy hair, glasses, copy of Stranger in a Strange Landdiscreetly folded over an otherwise prominent hard-on. At least they have something to talk about: the possibilities of sending Isaac Asimov to Pluto, or the time Mr. Sulu's left ball was shot off by Klingons. It's worse at Dracula conventions: the plastic fangs they wear inhibit conversation, and instead of meeting tall, gaunt, Continental types they find only themselves, or else fat, greasy middle-aged...