The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, and Charles Beaumont—who follows here —form a sort of magic triangle of masters of the macabre moderns. All three live, currently, in the Los Angeles area: two are movie scriptwriters, the third, the son of a well-known actor. When the classic Leiber witch novel. Conjure Wife, was filmed in Britain a few years ago (under the even more classic Merritt title. Burn, Witch, Burn!) Matheson was one of the scenarists. Beaumont and Matheson have both worked on the recent gaggle of neo-Poe movies, Leiber and Beaumont ore, separately, authors of two of the finest and most fearfully “rear fantasies of modern city life I have ever read (“The Vanishing American” and “Smoke Ghost”).

Each of the three has written across the whole range of science fantasy, and well out of it; in fiction, essay, and dramatic farm; from vignette to book length. (Notable navels: Matheson’s I Am Legend; Beaumont’s The Intruder) Leiber’s The Wanderer.) All three were included in the first issue of Gamma, a new magazine of imaginative fiction, edited by William Nolan (author of “One of Those Days,” in the 8th Annual).