Jim Harmon - Fiction

Fiction

During the 1950s and 1960s, Harmon wrote more than 50 short stories and novelettes for Amazing Stories, Future Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, If, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Venture Science Fiction Magazine and other magazines. These were collected in such science fiction anthologies as Fourth Galaxy Reader, Galaxy: Thirty Years of Speculative Fiction and Rare Science Fiction.

The best of Harmon's science fiction stories were reprinted in Harmon's Galaxy (Cosmos Books, 2004) with an introduction by Richard A. Lupoff. The collection includes one from the December 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction ("The Depths") and five from Galaxy—"Charity Case" (December 1959), "Name Your Symptom" (May 1956), "No Substitutions" (November 1958), "The Place Where Chicago Was" (February 1962) and "The Spicy Sound of Success" (August 1959).

His only science fiction novel, The Contested Earth (Ramble House,1959), was given its first publication in 2007 along with seven short stories in The Contested Earth and Other SF Stories. In the introduction, Harmon reflected on the novel's history:

This is a period piece, written during the last years of the pulp era. I was 26 in 1959, and some science fiction magazines were still in the old familiar pulp magazine style of about seven by nine inches, such as Science Fiction Quarterly... Due to a health problem, I had little formal education. But I read a lot and thought a lot and imagined a lot. I became a science fiction writer. The Contested Earth was my first science fiction novel. I had written a number of novelettes and short stories and sold a good number to the aforementioned SF Quarterly and more to one of the leading SF magazines, Galaxy. The editor there, H. L. Gold, was incredibly supportive of a teen-age writer. In one editorial, he referred to me as a “Vesuvius of flaming, literary lava”. What more can be said after that! Yet he did not accept this novel. One reason (but only one) was that in those days novels were accepted almost exclusively by the leaders in the field like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon, by both magazines and paperback and hardcover publishers. After a number of submissions back then, I stopped submitting this novel. As the years passed and the number of manuscript I kept got down to a single Stor-All box, I would go through these yellowing bundles of pages and throw some away—ones I had published and ones I thought I would never publish. Somehow, I decided to keep this novel “a little while longer.” Finally, I encountered Fender Tucker and his wonderful endeavor, Ramble House, and got a go-ahead to put out The Contested Earth. I made changes in it, but mostly in writing style.

Harmon also wrote Western tales for such magazines as Double-Action Western, plus detective and crime stories (Smashing Detective, Pursuit). Eight of his mystery novels have been slightly revised by Harmon and reprinted by Ramble House in trade editions,