Forgotten Books: A Cupful of Space -- Mildred Clingerman

The SF magazines I read back in the '50s were mostly filled with stories by men, but a few women were there, too, most often in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  One of them was Mildred Clingerman.  Some of her best stories are collected in this little volume published by Ballantine in 1961.  All but three of them first appeared in F&SF.  Two appeared in Collier's and one in Woman's Home Companion. 

Notice the line under the book's title.  It's quite misleading, since few of the stories are actually science-fiction.  They're horror and fantasy, mainly, though a couple of them do have science-fictional elements.  This isn't the place to get into a discussion of what SF is, but I'll just mention that in the '50s when I was reading this stuff by the boatload, I made no distinction.  It was all science-fiction to me, no matter what it really might have been.

"First Lesson" is from Collier's, and it's one of those "did it happen or didn't it?" Stories that kind of wants to have it both ways. Not bad, but not the best in the collection.  That honor might go to "The Wild Wood," which is definitely creepy and not as dated as "First Lesson."  It's more horror than anything.  "Letters from Laura," told in epistolary form, is about a trip to Crete.  Not a trip you'd want to take. "The Word" is a short-short that you'll catch onto immediately, but it's kind of cute.  "The Gay Deceiver" is pure horror.  "Stair Trick" is about doorways to another dimension, so that would be science-fiction, I suppose.  Not that it matters.  No matter what you call them, all the stories are well written worth looking at even after all these years.