Summary: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame was originally a single book: this is the better second half of the two volume reprint, and contains an excellent collection of stories, with outstanding work from Daniel Keyes, Cordwainer Smith, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, Damon Knight and Roger Zelazny.
[ISFDB link]
Other reviews:1
Charlie Brown, Locus, #55 June 3, 1970
Lester del Rey, If, September-October 1970
Algis Budrys, Galaxy, December 1970
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, March 1971
George Turner, SF Commentary, #23
Tom Easton, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2003
Colin Harvey, Strange Horizons, 15 March 2004
Bud Webster, Anthopology 101: Reflections, Inspections and Dissections of SF Anthologies, (2010)
Various, Goodreads
_____________________
Editor, Robert Silverberg
Fiction:
That Only a Mother • short story by Judith Merril ∗∗∗
Scanners Live in Vain • novelette by Cordwainer Smith ∗∗∗∗+
Mars Is Heaven! • short story by Ray Bradbury ∗∗∗+
The Little Black Bag • novelette by C. M. Kornbluth ∗∗∗∗+
Born of Man and Woman • short story by Richard Matheson ∗∗∗+
Coming Attraction • short story by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗∗
The Quest for Saint Aquin • novelette by Anthony Boucher ∗∗∗+
Surface Tension • novelette by James Blish ∗∗∗∗+
The Nine Billion Names of God • short story by Arthur C. Clarke ∗∗∗+
It’s a Good Life • short story by Jerome Bixby ∗∗∗+
The Cold Equations • novelette by Tom Godwin ∗∗∗+
Fondly Fahrenheit • novelette by Alfred Bester ∗∗∗+
The Country of the Kind • short story by Damon Knight ∗∗∗∗
Flowers for Algernon • novelette by Daniel Keyes ∗∗∗∗∗
A Rose for Ecclesiastes • novelette by Roger Zelazny ∗∗∗∗
Non-fiction:
Introduction (The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I) • essay by Robert Silverberg
_____________________
(Note: this British book contains the second half of the original The Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology. I’m reviewing the UK versions because (a) I own and have previously read them, and (b) for review length reasons. You might want to catch up with the review of the first volume before continuing.)
This part of the larger volume contains mostly stories from the 1950s (the exceptions are the Merril and the Zelazny, either of which wouldn’t have been out of place in that decade), and leads off with That Only a Mother by Judith Merril (Astounding, June 1948). This was her debut SF story, and it tells of a pregnant woman called Maggie looking forward to the birth of her child. This, however, occurs against a background of war, atomic weapons, and the mutations that consequentially occur in the population. Once the short introduction (which is told from her point of view) establishes this background, the story largely takes the form of letters from Maggie to the absent father, Hank.
After Maggie has the child (spoiler), we get the first indications that something is wrong:
Darling,
I finally got to see her! It’s all true, what they say about new babies and the face that only a mother could love—but it’s all there, darling, eyes, ears, and noses—no, only one!—all in the right places. We’re so lucky, Hank.
I’m afraid I’ve been a rambunctious patient. I kept telling that hatchet-faced female with the mutation mania that I wanted to see the baby. Finally the doctor came in to “explain” everything to me, and talked a lot of nonsense, most of which I’m sure no one could have understood, any more than I did. The only thing I got out of it was that she didn’t actually have to stay in the incubator; they just thought it was “wiser.”
I think I got a little hysterical at that point. Guess I was more worried than I was willing to admit, but I threw a small fit about it. The whole business wound up with one of those hushed medical conferences outside the door, and finally the Woman in White said: “Well, we might as well. Maybe it’ll work out better that way.” p. 282
Maggie takes her daughter home from hospital, and we get further hints that (spoiler) it may be a mutant (e.g. it can speak after a few months). Then, in a climactic homecoming scene, Hank returns and finds that the child has no arms or legs, and that Maggie is in denial about the situation.
This isn’t a bad debut, and it is perhaps notable for its female point of view (and examination of what would have once been regarded as “women’s issues”). However, I’m not sure it passes muster as some kind of feminist exemplar2 given that (a) the female character’s role is the stereotypical one of a wife and mother and (b) that she is portrayed as “hysterical” and, later, as delusional and/or mad. If a man had written this story he’d still be getting beaten like a piñata.
The best story, so far, is another debut (and one of his ‘Instrumentality of Mankind’ series), Scanners Live in Vain by Cordwainer Smith (Fantasy Book v01n06, 1950). The opening drops you immediately into another world:
Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci’s face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg were broken. It was not. Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included his legs, abdomen, Chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back with the Mirror. Only then did Martel go back to being angry. He talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its blare and preferred to have him write.
“I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch. It’s my worry, isn’t it?”
When Luci answered, he saw only a part of her words as he read her lips: “Darling . . . you’re my husband . . . right to love you . . . dangerous . . . do it . . . dangerous . . . wait. . . .”
He faced her, but put sound in his voice, letting the blare hurt her again: “I tell you, I’m going to cranch.” p. 288
In the next part of the story we learn that Martel is a Scanner, a human who has been “Habermanned” into a cyborg, and who cannot experience any emotions or receive any sensory input bar sight and hearing. Thus modified he can pilot spaceships through the Up-and-Out (also called “raw space”), something normal humans cannot do because of the pain of space travel (they have to be put into suspended animation). Scanners can, however, return to a state of relative normalcy by undergoing the cranching process.
Martel is then summoned by his superior Vomact to a “Top emergency” Guild meeting, where he meets his uncranched colleagues, and we see how scanners normally behave. When Vomact arrives and takes control of the meeting, he leads the assembled scanners through an almost religious call-and-response. This crystallises information previously hinted at, and further limns the darkness of this society:
“And how, O Scanners is flesh controlled?”
“By the boxes set in the flesh, the controls set in the chest, the signs made to rule the living body, the signs by which the body lives.”
“How does a haberman live and live?”
“The haberman lives by control of the boxes.”
“Whence come the habermans?”
Martel felt in the coming response a great roar of broken voices echoing through the room as the Scanners, habermans themselves, put sound behind their mouthings:
“Habermans are the scum of Mankind. Habermans are the weak, the cruel, the credulous, and the unfit. Habermans are the sentenced-to-more-than-death. Habermans live in the mind alone. They are killed for Space but they live for Space. They master the ships that connect the earths. They live in the Great Pain while ordinary men sleep in the cold cold sleep of the transit.”
“Brothers and Scanners, I ask you now: are we habermans or are we not?”
“We are habermans in the flesh. We are cut apart, brain and flesh. We are ready to go to the Up and Out. All of us have gone through the Haberman Device.”
“We are habermans then?” Vomact’s eyes flashed and glittered as he asked the ritual question.
Again the chorused answer was accompanied by a roar of voices heard only by Martel: “Habermans we are, and more, and more. We are the Chosen who are habermans by our own free will. We are the Agents of the Instrumentality of Mankind.” p. 299
Vomact then informs the scanners that a man called Adam Smith has discovered how to screen out the pain of space—which will make them redundant—and proposes that the Guild assassinate him. After a short break to discuss the matter, during which Martel privately reflects on his life and marriage with a certain amount of self-loathing (atypical in SF stories of the period), the vote is taken. A scanner called Parizianski, who is a friend of Martel’s, is dispatched to carry out the mission.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees Martel fly off to Downport to warn Stone and prevent the killing. He does so, but at a price, and the story has a bittersweet ending.
This is a highly original piece, and one which portrays a vivid and grim future. It’s difficult to believe that it wasn’t published earlier on in another magazine.3
Mars Is Heaven! by Ray Bradbury (Planet Stories, Fall 1948)4 is one of his ‘Martian Chronicles’ tales, and has a spaceship land on Mars in 1960 to find an archetypal American town from fifty years earlier:
It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted down when the wind touched the apple tree, and the blossom smell drifted upon the air.
Somewhere in the town, somebody was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and went, softly, drowsily. The song was Beautiful Dreamer. Somewhere else, a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing out a record of Roamin’ In The Gloamin’, sung by Harry Lauder.
The three men stood outside the ship. The port closed behind them. At every window, a face pressed, looking out. The large metal guns pointed this way and that, ready. p. 323
As a three man team investigate the town they find that the inhabitants think they are on Earth in 1925. Then Lustig, one of the men, finds his grandparent’s house. And his grandparents . . . .
After visiting with them for a while the team come out and see a crowd round the ship. Initially the captain is angry at this breach of security—but then he meets his dead brother, who takes him home to his old house, and mother and father.
Eventually, of course (spoiler), the captain realises that that it is all a telepathic illusion created by the Martians, but they get him before he can get back to the ship. The Martians hold seventeen funerals the next day, and destroy the rocket.
The ending of this is gimmicky, but I’d have to admit that they don’t write SF stories about nostalgia like they used to. (Boom, tish.)
If the Smith story gives a hint of the grimmer work that the field would produce in the 1950s, then The Little Black Bag by C. M. Kornbluth (Astounding, July 1950) reinforces that feeling. It has one of the bleakest openings I can remember from this period, which has a Dr Full coming into his apartment building by the back entrance because he is ashamed of the jug of wine he is carrying—then a dog surprises him and, when he tries to kick it, he misses and falls, smashing the jug; he throws broken glass at the dog, then drinks what is left of the wine. While he sits there he drunkenly recalls being struck off the medical register. When a young girl appears and badly cuts her hand playing with the shards of glass, Full, rather than helping her, wanders off to his room to look for a bottle of whiskey.
The story then switches to a ‘Marching Morons’ future (Kornbluth would return to this theme later in the year with the eponymous story) where a would-be scientist builds a time machine and sends Dr Hemmingway’s “little black bag” (essentially an advanced medical unit for use by idiot doctors) back in time to Full’s apartment.
When Full wakes up with a hangover and the DTs he finds the little black bag, but can’t remember where it came from, so he decides to pawn it so he can buy more booze. First though, he decides to give himself a shot—which, strangely, immediately cures his hangover. Then, as he leaves the building, he is intercepted by the mother of the girl who cut herself and has become seriously ill. When she shrugs off Full’s protestations that he is “retired,” he figures he can shake the family down for a couple of bucks, and so treats the young girl using the equipment in the bag. After marvelling at the strange equipment and reflecting on how things have changed since his time, he treats the sick and feverish child:
He slipped the needle into the skin of his forearm. He thought at first that he had missed—that the point had glided over the top of his skin instead of catching and slipping under it. But he saw a tiny blood-spot and realized that somehow he just hadn’t felt the puncture.
Whatever was in the barrel, he decided, couldn’t do him any harm if it lived up to its billing—and if it could come out through a needle that had no hole. He gave himself three cc. and twitched the needle out.
There was the swelling—painless, but otherwise typical.
Dr. Full decided it was his eyes or something, and gave three cc. of “g” from hypodermic IV to the feverish child. There was no interruption to her wailing as the needle went in and the swelling rose. But a long instant later, she gave a final gasp and was silent.
Well, he told himself, cold with horror, you did it that time. You killed her with that stuff.
Then the child sat up and said: “Where’s my mommy?”
Incredulously, the doctor seized her arm and palpated the elbow. The gland infection was zero, and the temperature seemed normal. The blood-congested tissues surrounding the wound were subsiding as he watched. The child’s pulse was stronger and no faster than a child’s should be. In the sudden silence of the room he could hear the little girl’s mother sobbing in her kitchen, outside. p. 344
Full is subsequently blackmailed by an older sister, Angie, who knows he has been struck off, and the pair’s relationship forms the backbone of the rest of the story. After they fail to pawn the bag they eventually set up a medical practice, but tension develops between them when Angie wants to use the bag’s miraculous devices to provide plastic surgery to wealthy patients. Full wants to give the bag to the College of Surgeons so they can investigate and copy the devices and use them for the benefit of all mankind.
Then (spoiler) they fight over the bag, and Angie kills Full using a Number Six Cautery Series knife (“—will cut through all tissues. Use for amputations before you spread on the Re-Gro. Extreme caution should be used in the vicinity of vital organs and major blood vessels or nerve trunks—”). She gets rid of Full’s body, and then decides that she can carry out the procedures herself.
When, the next day, a wealthy client insists on a demonstration of the odd looking instruments, Angie uses them on herself—just as one of the supervisors in the future notices the little black bag is missing and switches it off . . . .
I liked this a lot: the bleak setup and darkness of the piece; the description of the gadgetry in action; Full’s redemption; and the biter-bit ending. I think it is my favourite Kornbluth story.
Born of Man and Woman by Richard Matheson (F&SF, Summer 1950) is a story I didn’t care much for when I first read it—I’m not sure the Younger Lazy Reader understood it—but the Older Lazy Reader likes it better now having read it probably another three times over the last few years.
It gets off to an arresting start with an unusual narrator in a chilling situation:
X — This day when it had light mother called me retch. You retch she said. I saw in her eyes the anger. I wonder what it is a retch.
This day it had water falling from upstairs. It fell all around. I saw that. The ground of the back I watched from the little window. The ground it sucked up the water like thirsty lips. It drank too much and it got sick and runny brown. I didnt like it.
Mother is a pretty I know. In my bed place with cold walls around I have a paper things that was behind the furnace. It says on it SCREEN-STARS. I see in the pictures faces like of mother and father. Father says they are pretty. Once he said it.
And also mother he said. Mother so pretty and me decent enough. Look at you he said and didnt have the nice face. I touched his arm and said it is alright father. He shook and pulled away where I couldnt reach.
Today mother let me off the chain a little so I could look out the window. Thats how I saw the water falling from upstairs. p. 361
As the story progresses—there are further entries in what I presume is a diary—it becomes clear that the child is a mutant who is chained in a cellar. Eventually, after further encounters with the family and visitors, there is a climactic scene where (spoiler) it kills a dog that bites it. When the father tries to beat the narrator, it fights back, and we are left with the threat of vengeance hanging in the air, and the revelation that the child has a spider-like body that produces green ichor.
I suspect that, for readers of the time, the attraction of this story—apart from the brief, dark thrills—was the mutant’s point of view.
Coming Attraction by Fritz Leiber (Galaxy, November 1950) is another bleak vision of the future that starts with an Englishman who is visiting New York saving a woman from a group of men who almost hit her with their car:
The coupe with the fishhooks welded to the fender shouldered up over the curb like the nose of a nightmare. The girl in its path stood frozen, her face probably still with fright under her mask. For once my reflexes weren’t shy. I took a fast step toward her, grabbed her elbow, yanked her back. Her black skirt swirled out.
The big coupe shot by, its turbine humming. I glimpsed three faces. Something ripped. I felt the hot exhaust on my ankles as the big coupe swerved back into the street. A thick cloud like a black flower blossomed from its jouncing rear end, while from the fishhooks flew a black shimmering rag.
“Did they get you?” I asked the girl.
She had twisted around to look where the side of her skirt was torn away. p. 364
As the pair talk to each other and also the police afterwards, we learn that she is masked (a new fashion trend), and that the men were “rippers” who try to snag women’s skirts with fishhooks mounted on their car bumpers. We also learn that the fashion for masking hasn’t entirely taken on in Britain (something that the policeman views “with [either] relish or moral distaste”) and that an area called the Inferno is an irradiated part of New York (there is a nearby beggar woman holding out a baby with webbed fingers and toes).
The rest of the story sees the man picking up the woman later on that evening to take her out. The picture painted by the story becomes even darker: after trying (unsuccessfully) to get the taxi driver to turn off the TV in front of the cab because it’s showing a man wrestling a woman, the Englishman “half-playfully” moves to lift her veil only to have her swipe his hand away. He notices he is bleeding, and then that her fingertips are covered with pointed metal caps.
Matters do not improve in the club, where we learn that she intends to involve him in her personal psychodrama:
Her mask came forward. “Do you know something about the wrestlers?” she asked rapidly. “The ones that wrestle women, I mean. They often lose, you know. And then they have to have a girl to take their frustration out on. A girl who’s soft and weak and terribly frightened. They need that, to keep them men. Other men don’t want them to have a girl. Other men want them just to fight women and be heroes. But they must have a girl. It’s horrible for her.” p. 373
When her wrestler boyfriend, Zirk, turns up at their table and tells her he has just lost his bout, the Englishman leaves—but she does not go with him.
There isn’t much plot to this story (it reads like both a travelogue and an extract from a hard-boiled detective novel) but it works as nightmarish look at a future America where the nuclear and sexual fears of the 1940s have progressed. It is an impressively dark and savage piece, and you can see why this one didn’t appear in Astounding.
The Quest for Saint Aquin by Anthony Boucher (New Tales of Space and Time, 1951) is the first story here from an original anthology, and it opens with a future fugitive Pope (in hiding from the Technarchy) sending Thomas to find the legendary Saint Aquin.
Thomas gets on his robo-ass and rides away and, as the pair travel the robo-ass reveals itself as a laconic smart-Alex (when it isn’t tempting Thomas to give up the quest):
[Aquin said,] “Tell me what, if anything, robots do believe.”
“What we have been fed.”
“But your minds work on that; surely they must evolve ideas of their own?”
“Sometimes they do and if they are fed imperfect data they may evolve very strange ideas. I have heard of one robot on an isolated space station who worshiped a God of robots and would not believe that any man had created him.”
“I suppose,” Thomas mused, “he argued that he had hardly been created in our image. I am glad that we—at least they, the Technarchs—have wisely made only usuform robots like you, each shaped for his function, and never tried to reproduce man himself.”
“It would not be logical,” said the robass. “Man is an all-purpose machine but not well designed for any one purpose. And yet I have heard that once . . .”
The voice stopped abruptly in midsentence.
So even robots have their dreams, Thomas thought. That once there existed a super-robot in the image of his creator Man. From that thought could be developed a whole robotic theology . . . p. 381
Then the pair arrive at an inn, which sets off a chain of events: Thomas gets drunk, is revealed as a Christian, is badly beaten and robbed, and eventually left naked in a ditch. The next day he recovers consciousness and calls for the robo-ass, but is rescued by a jew called Abraham who puts him in a room at the inn. Later, as they continue their journey, the robo-ass tries to convince Thomas to turn Abraham in to get safe passage through the checkpoint ahead. Thomas refuses.
Eventually (spoiler) Thomas finds the perfectly mummified body of St Aquin—and the miracle he needs to revivify the church—but then finds that Aquin is a robot in human form.
The rest of the story is an argument between Thomas and the robo-ass about whether or not he should lie about what he has found, at which point it all dissolves into a ecclesiastical debate about whether this proves the existence of God or God’s will.
This is pretty good for the most part, but the last page or so lost me. Those who are more religious than I am may get more from it.
Surface Tension by James Blish (Galaxy, August 1952) is the second of his ‘Pantropy’ series5 and begins with a colonisation crew landing on a planet which will not support them and will result in their deaths. They can, however, seed a microscopic and aquatic version of humanity into the planet’s mudflats before they perish. This prologue is a convincing multi-character beginning to the story, even if the concept is a little far-fetched.
The next section of the story skips forwards in time to two of these seeded microscopic and aquatic pan-humans, Shar and Lavon, who are meeting to discuss their people’s history and the secrets of the metal plates their creators have left for them. They are then joined by Para, a native creature who, later on, suddenly takes the plates away for fear of the humans learning what is on them and leaving him and his species behind.
The next part of the story shows us Lavon’s world, and sees him climb up a stalk to the “sky” (the top of the pond he lives in):
Determinedly, Lavon began to climb toward the wavering mirror of the sky. His thorn-thumbed feet trampled obliviously upon the clustered sheaves of fragile stippled diatoms. The tulip-heads of Vortae, placid and murmurous cousins of Para, retracted startledly out of his way upon coiling stalks, to make silly gossip behind him.
Lavon did not hear them. He continued to climb doggedly toward the light, his fingers and toes gripping the plant-bole.
“Lavon! Where are you going? Lavon!”
He leaned out and looked down. The man with the adze, a doll-like figure, was beckoning to him from a patch of blue-green retreating over a violet abyss. Dizzily he looked away, clinging to the bole; he had never been so high before. Then he began to climb again.
After a while, he touched the sky with one hand. He stopped to breathe.
[. . .]
He waited until he no longer felt winded, and resumed climbing.
The sky pressed down against the top of his head, against the back of his neck, against his shoulders. It seemed to give slightly, with a tough, frictionless elasticity. The water here was intensely bright, and quite colorless. He climbed another step, driving his shoulders against that enormous weight.
It was fruitless. He might as well have tried to penetrate a cliff.
Again he had to rest. While he panted, he made a curious discovery. All around the bole of the water plant, the steel surface of the sky curved upward, making a kind of sheath. He found that he could insert his hand into it—there was almost enough space to admit his head as well. Clinging closely to the bole, he looked up into the inside of the sheath, probing with his injured hand. The glare was blinding.
There was a kind of soundless explosion. His whole wrist was suddenly encircled in an intense, impersonal grip, as if it were being cut in two. In blind astonishment, he lunged upward.
The ring of pain traveled smoothly down his upflung arm as he rose, was suddenly around his shoulders and chest. Another lunge and his knees were being squeezed in the circular vine. Another—
Something was horribly wrong. He clung to the bole and tried to gasp, but there was—nothing to breathe.
The water came streaming out of his body, from his mouth, his nostrils, the spiracles in his sides, spurting in tangible jets. An intense and fiery itching crawled over the entire surface of his body. At each spasm, long knives ran into him, and from a great distance he heard more water being expelled from his book-lungs in an obscene, frothy sputtering.
Lavon was drowning. p. 405-406
Lavon manages to get back into the water but, as a result of the trauma, he reverts to his encysted form and sinks to the bottom of the pond. He is eventually found by Para’s tribe and taken to Shar, who watches over Lavon as he heals.
When Lavon wakes he tells Shar what happened and, eventually (spoiler), there is a decision to build a “spaceship.” The rest of story tells of the pantropic human’s journey into the air above them and then down into a neighbouring pool. The passage where they break through the “sky” is quite exciting.
This is a classic story that has great world-building as well as moments that provide a genuine sense of wonder. It is also a piece that shows you can get away with one impossible thing in a story if the rest of piece adheres strictly to the logic of the premise.
The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke (Star Science Fiction Stories, 1953), reviewed here recently, begins with a Tibetan Lama in a computer company office arranging for the purchase of a machine that will enable the monks to print out the nine billion names of God.
The story then fast-forwards three months to two engineers who are in Tibet maintaining the machine. One of them is friendly with one of the monks, has found out why the monastery is undertaking this task, and tells his colleague what he has discovered:
“Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names—and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them—God’s purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.”
“Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?”
“There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply winds things up . . . bingo!”
“Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world.”
Chuck gave a nervous little laugh.
“That’s just what I said to Sam. And do you know what happened? He looked at me in a very queer way, like I’d been stupid in class, and said ‘It’s nothing as trivial as that.’” p. 192
As the process nears completion the engineers become concerned—not about the monks’ beliefs, but about what their reactions may be when nothing happens. They decide to delay the project so they can be on their way out of the country when matters come to a conclusion.
The story ends with the pair travelling to the distant airstrip, and catching sight of it in the distance:
“There she is!” called Chuck, pointing down into the valley. “Ain’t she beautiful!”
She certainly was, thought George. The battered old DC 3 lay at the end of the runway like a tiny silver cross. In two hours she would be bearing them away to freedom and sanity. It was a thought worth savoring like a fine liqueur. George let it roll round his mind as the pony trudged patiently down the slope.
The swift night of the high Himalayas was now almost upon them. Fortunately the road was very good, as roads went in this region, and they were both carrying torches. There was not the slightest danger, only a certain discomfort from the bitter cold. The sky overhead was perfectly clear and ablaze with the familiar, friendly stars. At least there would be no risk, thought George, of the pilot being unable to take off because of weather conditions. That had been his only remaining worry.
He began to sing, but gave it up after a while. This vast arena of mountains, gleaming like whitely hooded ghosts on every side, did not encourage such ebullience. Presently George glanced at his watch.
“Should be there in an hour,” he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, in an afterthought:
“Wonder if the computer’s finished its run? It was due about now.”
Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see Chuck’s face, a white oval turned towards the sky.
“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out. p. 194-195
The first time I read this I hated the ending, which struck me as a religious (irrational) finish to a SF (rational) story. This time around, and having foreknowledge of the ending, I sort of liked it. I still wouldn’t call it a “classic,” but I thought it well crafted. The last half page in particular is very atmospheric, and the final line stunning. I wonder if the people who particularly like this story process the religious ending as a sense of wonder one.
It’s a Good Life by Jerome Bixby (Star Science Fiction Stories #2, 1953) is, I guess, the 1950’s version of Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore’s When the Bough Breaks (both are about children with super powers behaving badly. Very badly.) However, in Bixby’s story there is no Padgett-ish gimmickry such as time travelling toys or aliens to explain the change in Anthony—he was just born that way, and it makes for a cleaner and more contemporary story.
The opening paragraphs show us Anthony’s powers:
Perspiring under the afternoon “sun,” Bill lifted the box of groceries out of the big basket over the front wheel of the bike, and came up the front walk.
Little Anthony was sitting on the lawn, playing with a rat. He had caught the rat down in the basement—he had made it think that it smelled cheese, the most rich-smelling and crumbly-delicious cheese a rat had ever thought it smelled, and it had come out of its hole, and now Anthony had hold of it with his mind and was making it do tricks.
When the rat saw Bill Soames coming, it tried to run, but Anthony thought at it, and it turned a flip-flop on the grass, and lay trembling, its eyes gleaming in small black terror. p. 433
We then find out that Bill Soames mumbles to himself to mask his thoughts because, if Anthony overhears something he doesn’t like, the results can be terminal—as we find out at the end of passage when the rat, having half-eaten itself and died from the pain, is teleported into a grave deep in the cornfield.
The rest of the story introduces us to some of the neighbours who, in response to Anthony’s reign of terror in the town (which now exists in a grey limbo), continually tell each other how “good” everything is, even when they refer to terrible accidents and deaths.
The long final scene has the townsfolk gather that evening (as they do every day because Anthony likes it that way) to watch television—which, as they are cut-off from the world, is a screen filled with grey static. On this occasion it is one of the menfolk’s birthday, but he makes the (spoiler) fatal mistake of singing along to the music playing before they watch TV:
Anthony came into the room.
Pat stopped playing. He froze. Everybody froze. The breeze rippled the curtains. Ethel Hollis couldn’t even try to scream— she had fainted.
“Please don’t take my sunshine . . . away . . .” Dan’s voice faltered into silence. His eyes widened. He put both hands out in front of him, the empty glass in one, the record in the other. He hiccupped, and said, “No.”
“Bad man,” Anthony said, and thought Dan Hollis into something like nothing anyone would have believed possible, and then he thought the thing into a grave deep, deep in the cornfield.
The glass and record thumped on the rug. Neither broke.
Anthony’s purple gaze went around the room.
Some of the people began mumbling. They all tried to smile. The sound of mumbling filled the room like a far-off approval. Out of the murmuring came one or two clear voices:
“Oh, it’s a very good thing,” said John Sipich.
“A good thing,” said Anthony’s father, smiling. He’d had more practice in smiling than most of them. “A wonderful thing.” p. 445
It’s a bleak and terrifying tale but, perhaps, not so effective the second or third time around.
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin (Astounding, August 1954) is one of those stories that everyone knows, so bear with me while I dash through the plot. The story opens with Barton, an EDS (Emergency Dispatch Ship) pilot discovering a stowaway on his spaceship. Regulations state that stowaways must be jettisoned immediately as the ships run on minimum fuel and, if Barton keeps the extra body on board, he won’t have the fuel to land safely at his destination planet and deliver a lifesaving vaccine to the people there. Then Barton discovers the stowaway is a teenage girl.
He delays his plan to get rid of her, and initially decelerates the ship to extend his fuel endurance (although he cannot do this to the point where he can make a safe landing with both of them on board). Then he contacts the Stardust, his mother ship, to see if there are any other vessels in the vicinity. There aren’t, and at this point the girl, Marilyn Lee Cross, realises she is going out of the airlock.
The rest of the story charts the hour she has left to live, and the conversations the pair have about various matters, including the fact that her brother is a colonist at Barton’s destination (the reason she snuck onboard in the first place). There are also various authorial infodumps about the perils of colonising the universe and the absolute physical laws that apply:
She had violated a man-made law that said KEEP OUT but the penalty was not of men’s making or desire and it was a penalty men could not revoke. A physical law had decreed: h amount of fuel will power an EDS with a mass of m safely to its destination; and a second physical law had decreed: h amount of fuel will not power an EDS with a mass of m plus x safely to its destination.
EDS’s obeyed only physical laws and no amount of human sympathy for her could alter the second law. p. 458
Existence required Order and there was order; the laws of nature, irrevocable and immutable. Men could learn to use them but men could not change them. The circumference of a circle was always pi times the diameter and no science of Man would ever make it otherwise. The combination of chemical A with chemical B under condition C invariably produced reaction D. The law of gravitation was a rigid equation and it made no distinction between the fall of a leaf and the ponderous circling of a binary star system. The nuclear conversion process powered the cruisers that carried men to the stars; the same process in the form of a nova would destroy a world with equal efficiency. The laws were, and the universe moved in obedience to them. p. 460-461
Some of this is conveyed in a more indirect way:
“Isn’t it—” She stopped, and he looked at her questioningly. “Isn’t it cold in here?” she asked, almost apologetically. “Doesn’t it seem cold to you?”
“Why, yes,” he said. He saw by the main temperature gauge that the room was at precisely normal temperature. “Yes, it’s colder than it should be.” p. 464
As they draw closer to the planet, and the cut-off time, Barton realises there may be an opportunity for Marilyn to talk to her brother before she dies. This provides an effective scene just before she is put out the airlock.
As to the point of the story, there is internal evidence to suggest that it is meant to show that the laws of the universe are immutable and not subject to human whim (see the passages above), but there are also letters from John W. Campbell (Godwin’s then editor) stating that the point of the story was to show that, sometimes, “It is right and proper to sacrifice a human being.”6 Apparently Campbell had to send the manuscript back to Godwin three times because he kept on coming up with ever more ingenious ways to save her. And it was a “her” because that would make the story even more traumatic for the readers of Astounding (who, coming from a “women and children first” generation, would be appalled at the ending).7
I suspect that the repeated revisions requested by Campbell also resulted in the story’s bagginess, as well as its excessive emotional manipulation: we learn how decompression victims have “their insides all ruptured and exploded and their lungs out between their teeth and then, a few seconds later, they’re all dry and shapeless and horribly ugly”; there is a short aside that outlines the poverty behind her cheap gypsy sandals; we hear a childhood recollection about a kitten that was run down in the street, etc. etc. No opportunity is missed to put the reader’s tear ducts through the mangle one more time, and there were occasions in the story where I’d happily have put both of them out the airlock.
That said, it has a good start and an effective end and, as it is also a SFnal version of the Trolley Problem, people will no doubt continue to discuss it.
Fondly Fahrenheit by Alfred Bester (F&SF, August 1954) has a gripping start which sees a team of armed men search the paddy fields on Paragon III before they come upon a child’s body. She has been beaten to death, and there appears to be android blood under her nails.
The story then cuts to a man called Vandaleur, who is on a spaceship with the android responsible. Here, we get our first experience of the confusing point of view shifts that go on throughout the story:
“Twelve, fourteen, sixteen. Sixteen hundred dollars,” Vandaleur wept. “That’s all. Sixteen hundred dollars. My house was worth ten thousand. The land was worth five. There was furniture, cars, my paintings, etchings, my plane, my— And nothing to show for everything but sixteen hundred dollars. Christ!”
I leaped up from the table and turned on the android. I pulled a strap from one of the leather bags and beat the android. It didn’t move.
“I must remind you,” the android said, “that I am worth fifty-seven thousand dollars on the current exchange. I must warn you that you are endangering valuable property.”
“You damned crazy machine,” Vandaleur shouted.
“I am not a machine,” the android answered. “The robot is a machine. The android is a chemical creation of synthetic tissue.”
“What got into you?” Vandaleur cried. “Why did you do it? Damn you!” He beat the android savagely.
“I must remind you that I cannot be punished,” I said. “The pleasure-pain syndrome is not incorporated in the android synthesis.”
“Then why did you kill her?” Vandaleur shouted. “If it wasn’t for kicks, why did you—”
“I must remind you,” the android said, “that the second class cabins in these ships are not soundproofed.”
Vandaleur dropped the strap and stood panting, staring at the creature he owned.
“Why did you do it? Why did you kill her?” I asked. p. 472
The pair then have a number of encounters with various people. The first is these is with a woman called Dallas Brady, a jewellery designer who realises that Vandaleur and his android are fugitives but who keeps quiet so she can get the android to work for her for free. This arrangement lasts until the android kills her in her workshop by pouring molten gold over her head. As the android does this it sings “All reet! All reet! . . . Be fleet be fleet, cool and discreet, honey.” There is also the observation that the temperature is 98.1º in the workshop (a 91.9º temperature was previously noted in the paddy fields scene).
This high temperature/homicidal android loop is repeated once more with a pair of students (who track the android to the university power plant furnace, bad move), before Vandaleur and the android end up in London (3º below zero, so I’m guessing mid-June). Here, Vandaleur tries to get the android to rob a blind beggar but the android points out that it can’t obey the order as it is contrary to its prime directive. Then the beggar, a blind mathematician called Blenheim, takes them home in exchange for a number.
Blenheim later deduces why the android malfunctions—the raised temperature—and, at this point, Vandaleur kills the mathematician when the android again refuses to do so. During this episode the pair’s identities appearing to be merging:
We had three hours before the cook returned from her day off. We looted the house. We took Blenheim’s money and jewels. We packed a bag with clothes. We took Blenheim’s notes, destroyed the newspapers; and we left, carefully locking the door behind us. In Blenheim’s study we left a pile of crumpled papers under a half inch of burning candle. And we soaked the rug around it with kerosene. No, I did all that. The android refused. I am forbidden to endanger life or property.
All reet! p. 482
The explanation to all this finally emerges in a later appointment with a psychiatrist (spoiler), where two psychological concepts are advanced: the temperature related homicide is put down to “synaesthesia” (hearing colour, seeing sound, or in this case experiencing temperature as fear or anger), and the point of view changes are put down to “projection” (the android projects his insanity onto Vandaleur, or perhaps Vandaleur allows the projection of that insanity). When the psychiatrist then identifies and denounces Vandaleur and the android, Vandaleur shoots her and they flee.
In the subsequent manhunt the pair are hunted down, and one of them is killed. The other escapes. Or, to be more precise, I escaped. All reet! All reet!
When I first read this story as a teenager I just didn’t think it worked and, even when I read it again in the 1979 anniversary issue of F&SF I still thought it mediocre. The last time I read it I got up to average, and this time I’m up to somewhere between good and very good. I don’t think I’ll get much further: although there is a lot to like here (crazy androids, the panoramic sweep from Paragon III to London, the quirky “All reet!” jingles and black humour, the grisly murders, general bravura writing, etc.), the dual psychological gimmicks stretch one’s suspension of disbelief.
I also note that I don’t think that this is Bester’s best story (The Pi Man, Time is the Traitor, or 5,271,009) but I can see why a group of writers would choose it.
The Country of the Kind by Damon Knight (F&SF, February 1956) is set in the future, and is told from the viewpoint of an atavistic psychopath who, as the story starts, follows a group of people into their underground house. He vandalises the interior, and then corners a woman:
The blonde was over at the near end with her back to me, studying the autochef keyboard. She was half out of her playsuit. She pushed it the rest of the way down and stepped out of it, then turned and saw me.
She was surprised again; she hadn’t thought I might follow her down. I got up close before it occurred to her to move; then it was too late. She knew she couldn’t get away from me; she closed her eyes and leaned back against the paneling, turning a little pale. Her lips and her golden brows went up in the middle.
I looked her over and told her a few uncomplimentary things about herself. She trembled, but didn’t answer. On an impulse, I leaned over and dialed the autochef to hot cheese sauce. I cut the safety out of circuit and put the quantity dial all the way up. I dialed soup tureen and then punch bowl.
The stuff began to come out in about a minute, steaming hot. I took the tureens and splashed them up and down the wall on either side of her. Then when the first punch bowl came out I used the empty bowls as scoops. I clotted the carpet with the stuff; I made streamers of it all along the walls, and dumped puddles into what furniture I could reach. Where it cooled it would harden, and where it hardened it would cling.
I wanted to splash it across her body, but it would’ve hurt, and we couldn’t have that. The punch bowls of hot sauce were still coming out of the autochef, crowding each other around the vent. I punched cancel, and then sauterne (swt., Calif.). p. 489-490
Before he can throw the cold wine over the woman (who will think it is hot cheese sauce), a male voice behind him spoils the surprise. He feels a murderous rage, and blacks out.
We later learn that the narrator attacked a teenage girlfriend when he was younger and was surgically modified to make him (a) have an epileptic seizure when intending violence and (b) emit a strongly pungent odour (to warn citizens of his presence). He was also excommunicated from society, and all citizens instructed to ignore him.
The final part of the story (spoiler) has him carve a small statue which he later hides in undergrowth along with a message. He watches as a boy comes close to discovering it, and pursues him into another house when he does not. Before the narrator can start another rampage, he passes out once again.
The final lines of the story reveal part of his message:
At last I stooped and picked up the figurine, and the paper that was supposed to go under it—crumpled now, with the forlorn look of a message that someone has thrown away unread. I sighed bitterly.
I smoothed it out and read the last part.
YOU CAN SHARE THE WORLD WITH ME. THEY CAN’T STOP YOU. STRIKE NOW—PICK UP A SHARP THING AND STAB, OR A HEAVY THING AND CRUSH. THAT’S ALL. THAT WILL MAKE YOU FREE. ANY ONE CAN DO IT.
Anyone. Someone. Anyone. p. 499
The ending—the final three words which reveal the narrator’s existential loneliness—succeeded in partially flipping my attitude to the narrator from one of horror to one of partial sympathy. I’d also note that the story’s ironic title suggests that his punishment is a cruel one.8
A very good story, and another dark vision of the future (along with the Merril, Smith, Kornbluth, Leiber, Matheson, Bixby, Bester, etc.)
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (F&SF, April 1959) is another story I’ve read recently (and several times before that). The story consists of the diary entries of Charlie Gordon, whose level of intelligence is well below average. However, he wants to improve himself:
Miss Kinnian told that I was her bestist pupil in the adult nite scool becaus I tryed the hardist and I reely wantid to lern. They said how come you went to the adult nite scool all by yourself Charlie. How did you find it. I said I askd pepul and sumbody told me where I shud go to lern to read and spell good. They said why did you want to. I told them becaus all my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb. But its very hard to be smart. They said you know it will probly be tempirery. I said yes. Miss Kinnian told me. I dont care if it herts. p. 501
This latter refers to an experimental procedure that Drs Strauss and Nemur have developed which will, if successful, quadruple Charlie’s IQ from 68 to well over two hundred.
The story follows Charlie through his initial assessment tests (where he loses to a mouse called Algernon in a maze test), the procedure itself, and then his increasing intelligence. During this latter period we see Charlie back at work, and realise his is the unwitting butt of his co-workers’ jokes:
We had a lot of fun at the factery today. Joe Carp said hey look where Charlie had his operashun what did they do Charlie put some brains in. I was going to tell him but I remembered Dr Strauss said no.
Then Frank Reilly said what did you do Charlie forget your key and open your door the hard way. That made me laff. Their really my friends and they like me. p. 505
Charlie’s mistreatment is a running thread through the story, and surfaces again when he wakes up covered in bruises after a night at the bar, and once more when his teacher Miss Kinnian reads some of his diary entries. This subplot climaxes when Charlie, his intelligence massively increased, is in a restaurant—but not in the way you would expect:
May 20 I would not have noticed the new dishwasher, a boy of about sixteen, at the corner diner where I take my evening meals if not for the incident of the broken dishes.
They crashed to the floor, shattering and sending bits of white china under the tables. The boy stood there, dazed and frightened, holding the empty tray in his hand. The whistles and catcalls from the customers (the cries of “hey, there go the profits!” . . . “Mazeltov!” . . . and “well, he didn’t work here very long . . .” which invariably seem to follow the breaking of glass or dishware in a public restaurant) all seemed to confuse him.
When the owner came to see what the excitement was about, the boy cowered as if he expected to be struck and threw up his arms as if to ward off the blow.
“All right! All right, you dope,” shouted the owner, “don’t just stand there! Get the broom and sweep that mess up. A broom . . . a broom, you idiot! It’s in the kitchen. Sweep up all the pieces.”
The boy saw that he was not going to be punished. His frightened expression disappeared and he smiled and hummed as he came back with the broom to sweep the floor. A few of the rowdier customers kept up the remarks, amusing themselves at his expense.
“Here, sonny, over here there’s a nice piece behind you . . .”
“C’mon, do it again . . .”
“He’s not so dumb. It’s easier to break ‘em than to wash ’em . . .”
As his vacant eyes moved across the crowd of amused onlookers, he slowly mirrored their smiles and finally broke into an uncertain grin at the joke which he obviously did not understand.
I felt sick inside as I looked at his dull, vacuous smile, the wide, bright eyes of a child, uncertain but eager to please. They were laughing at him because he was mentally retarded.
And I had been laughing at him too.
Suddenly, I was furious at myself and all those who were smirking at him. I jumped up and shouted, “Shut up! Leave him alone! It’s not his fault he can’t understand! He can’t help what he is! But for God’s sake . . . he’s still a human being! p. 517
There is much more than this going on in the story but, this time around, the passage above struck me as a particularly anti-Marching Morons moment.
The rest of the piece (spoiler) charts Algernon the mouse’s decline and death, and then we watch as Charlie loses his intelligence too. Throughout this tragic arc one of the few positives is that the workers who previously tormented him at the factory become his protectors when Charlie reverts to his previous intelligence level and a new hire tries to make fun of him.
An excellent story, and the best piece in the volume.
A Rose for Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny (F&SF, November 1963) opens on old Mars (the Mars of Burroughs) and has its narrator Gallinger, a brilliant poet and linguist, finding out from the base commander that he has been given permission to enter the Martian temple and learn the natives’ language. During this exchange we find out that Gallinger is an arrogant and unlikeable sort.
He later goes to the temple:
I don’t remember what I had for lunch. I was nervous, but instinctively that I wouldn’t muff it. My Boston publishers expected a Martian Idyll, or at least a Saint-Exupery job on space flight. The National Science Association wanted a complete report on the Rise and Fall of the Martian Empire.
They would both be pleased. I knew.
That’s the reason everyone is jealous—why they hate me. I always come through, and I can come through better than anyone else.
I shoveled in a final anthill of slop, and made my way to our car barn. I drew one jeepster and headed it toward Tirellian.
Flames of sand, lousy with iron oxide, set fire to the buggy. They swarmed over the open top and bit through my scarf; they set to work pitting my goggles.
The jeepster, swaying and panting like a little donkey I once rode through the Himalayas, kept kicking me in the seat of the pants. The Mountains of Tirellian shuffled their feet and moved toward me at a cockeyed angle.
Suddenly I was heading uphill, and I shifted gears to accommodate the engine’s braying. Not like Gobi, not like the Great Southwestern Desert, I mused. Just red, just dead . . . without even a cactus.
I reached the crest of the hill, but I had raised too much dust to see what was ahead. It didn’t matter, though; I have a head full of maps.
I bore to the left and downhill, adjusting the throttle. A cross-wind and solid ground beat down the fires. I felt like Ulysses in Melebolge—with a terza-rima speech in one hand and an eye out for Dante.
This latter sentence is one of many literary and cultural references that permeate the text, and you get the distinct impression that Zelazny’s liberal arts degree gets a good work out in this piece.
At the temple Gallinger meets the Matriarch, M’Cwyie, and starts learning the High tongue. During this we learn more about Gallinger’s backstory, which involves a religious father and precocious childhood.
The next part of the story (after he masters the High Tongue with ease) sees Gallinger become involved with a female Martian called Braxa after she performs a dance for him: they become lovers. More or less simultaneous with this Gallinger discovers a bio-historical mystery in the Temple texts, which suggest that the Martians, although humanoid, are a remarkably long-lived race. And possibly sterile . . . .
An idyllic period follows for Gallinger as he spends time with Braxa, continues his researches, and writes poetry. Then, one day, she disappears, and Gallinger spends days searching for her in the desert. When he finally finds her he discovers she is pregnant, but she refuses to go to Earth with him.
In the climactic scene in the Temple, Gallinger tells the Martians that their race isn’t doomed—Braxa is pregnant, and the rest can interbreed with humanity—but it is a pyrrhic victory: M’Cwyie tells Gallinger that he is part of a prophecy that was made centuries earlier, and for which Braxa trained. She does not love him.
He is then told that the temple will soon be empty, and Braxa will not return. Gallinger later tries to commit suicide, but fails and returns to Earth.
The Old Mars setting, the exobiological romance, the stream of literary references, the rose metaphor, etc., all give this story a superficial attractiveness, but it strikes me as a triumph of style over substance as, underneath, it’s essentially an account of a failed love affair. Still pretty good though.10
Introduction (The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I) by Robert Silverberg is the same piece that is in the first book.
This volume is a much superior group of stories to the first, although even this selection could be better (a different Bester and Bradbury, drop the Merril for something by another writer, perhaps Zenna Henderson, or Robert Sheckley, etc.). That said, this half is a must read.11 ●
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1. (These reviews have already appeared in the first part of this review and are copied here for convenience.)
Lester del Rey one of the contributors, begins his review of the complete volume (If, September-October 1970) with some interesting history:
Back in 1946, when only a few fan publishers were trying to bring out science fiction, Random House issued Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. It was a huge book, containing 997 pages of fiction, totaling almost half a million words. There were 35 stories, culled from the virgin territory of all the science-fiction magazine work published to that date. And it sold, as I remember, for $2.95!
Whenever librarians ask me to submit a list of science-fiction books they should stock, this ancient anthology heads the list. Until very recently, at least, it was still available in the Modern Library edition (under a different title—Famous Science Fiction, I believe-and less a couple of stories that don’t matter that much). It’s a book that should still be on the shelves of every genuine fan of the field; if you don’t have it, get it-new or secondhand, it’s still I a great bargain.
During the same year another anthology appeared-this edited by Groff Conklin and put out by Crown Publishers: The Best of Science Fiction. It wasn’t quite the huge bargain the first was and Groff had sometimes been unable to get the stories he wanted because they were already purchased for the earlier book. But its success in the market and in sales to libraries also helped to convince publishers that there was money to be made in this crazy field.
Since then there have been hordes of anthologies. Some, like Groff Conklin’s excellent later ones, were gathered with love and by means of diligent reading of the magazines. Some were put together shoddily by mining earlier anthologies. A few have been simply excuses to get stories by a clique into print.
He goes on to have a moan about current theme anthologies and those with “extraneous” matter to pad out the volumes, before commenting on the this volume. “I’m forced to give it a rave review on its merits”, he says, and goes on to add:
Silverberg did the work of collating their responses and the present book represents his efforts at putting together the results of the summed judgment of the professionals in the field. He did his work’ brilliantly and I cannot but agree with the few cases where he admitted to the need of some personal weighing of the results. p. 65
He adds this about the voting in the first few years of the Nebula:
Actually they’re a lot better in my opinion than some of the stories that have won [the Nebula Award]—and represent a far more balanced judgment. Apparently time and distance have removed the personal angles that must so often motivate the voting for current awards, and the result is a list of some genuine classics. p. 66
He would say that of course, as this volume has no New Wave stories (see the comment from Judy del Rey above).
Of the stories he says that Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey is “revolutionary”, that Campbell’s Twilight inspired a first fan letter. Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God is del Rey’s favourite Sturgeon piece, but that he agrees with Asimov that he has written better stories than Nightfall. Van Vogt’s story “has some of his best writing and, in my opinion, all of his best characterization,” and Mimsy Were the Borogoves “was something of a key story also, since there were a number of imitations in handling and intent to follow that.” Before coming to an end he comments that “The next decade from 1944 to 1953 seems to be more a period of consolidation” before singling out Scanners Live in Vain as “one great innovation.”
The Algis Budrys review (Galaxy, December 1970) is also interesting, because I’m not quite sure he liked the volume or not, especially when he comes out with comments like this:
Then we have several stories that are outright stunts; venture to say duds That Only a Mother, Born of Mon and Woman, Mars is Heaven! and The Nine Billion Names of God. (The Star placed 15th in overall standings, and is Clarke at his best short-story level, only one cut below his talent as a novelist. But Nine Billion placed eleventh and is therefore exhumed here. This my stomach cannot reconcile with any pretense of a professional appraisal). p. 94
P. Schuyler Miller (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, March 1971) says this:
I don’t think good early science fiction is adequately represented— there are only three stories published before 1940—but the book was deliberately planned as a definitive anthology of modern SF. Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey,” John Campbell’s “Twilight,” and Lester del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” are certainly as modem as anything published today.
My judgment doesn’t always match the judgment of my peers. I can’t see choosing Bradbury’s “Mars Is Heaven” over “There Will Come Soft Rains.” I’d have picked Van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer” over “The Weapon Shop,” and I’d have preferred a couple of Cordwainer Smith’s other stories to “Scanners Live in Vain,” which was his first. p. 171
George Turner, SF Commentary, #23 takes issue with several of the choices (although, to be honest, his are probably worse) before observing:
All of which impels me to stick my neck out and make a guess; that the voters, who are all s f writers, did what you and I might do under the same circumstances—picked the tales which lingered in the memory rather than got down to business and really winnowed out the best.
Thus Blish is predictably represented by Surface Tension (whose popularity has always puzzled him, so he says). But where, oh where, is the much more subtly marvellous Common Time? Shame upon the SFWA! p. 13
Finally, Colin Harvey’s piece in Strange Horizons, 15 March 2004 is worth a skim for a more modern take on the book.
2. Algis Budrys has this to say about That Only a Mother at the end of a long critique of Pamela Sargent’s anthology, Women of Wonder (F&SF, November 1975):
Sargent’s most revelatory shot is in selecting and honoring the Merril in this context. What “That Only a Mother…” says about women is that the unique essence secreted by feminine intelligence under stress is paranoid schizophrenia; that in reference to the same child in the same situation, the father is ‘analytical’ and the mother is ‘intuitive.’ Finding it here is like finding Troy at work on its own horse.
Merril went on after this story to found and aggrandize the steaming-wet-diaper school of SF, which in many examples defines and dramatizes women as beings whose “sensitivity and humanism” are at constant odds with something inherently messy in their bodies. In addition to direct imitators male and female, she inspired offshoots such as Margaret St. Clair’s Oona-and-Jik sitcom stories, and the Vilbar-party imitation ladies’ slick fiction of Evelyn E. Smith.
No artist should be held to ideological account for creative work sincerely done. It is hard enough to fight off the cumulative weight of one’s assertive peers and righteous elders long enough to utter a few words of one’s own. But there is no way to read Merril’s prominence in the 1950s except as an expression of shibboleth and sexism, and a disaster to any believable ideology of the unique in women, much less of their right to simply go about doing whatever damned well pleases. p. 58
The whole review is worth reading. (Benchmarks Continued: F&SF “Books” Columns 1975-1982 by Algis Budrys is available at Ansible Editions but in print only, sigh).
3. According to Wikipedia, Scanners Live in Vain was written in 1945 and rejected a number of times before its eventual appearance. It became more widely known when Fredrik Pohl reprinted it in the 1952 anthology Beyond the End of Time.
4. There were four Bradbury stories that placed in the SFWA poll but none high enough to automatically feature in the anthology. Robert Silverberg acquiesced to Bradbury’s choice of this story rather than one of the others. By way of comparison, the Ray Bradbury FB group had a recent poll where members voted for their favourite story. These were the top six results:
There Will Come Soft Rains (46 votes)
A Sound of Thunder (34)
The Veldt (24)
The Fog Horn (15)
Kaleidoscope (12)
Mars is Heaven! (9)
5. The first of Blish’s ‘Pantropy’ series was Sunken Universe (Super Science Stories, May 1942). It is a particularly well written and effective story for its time, and arguably should have been included in the Asimov & Greenberg’s The Great Science Fiction Stories #4, 1942. I note, however, as Surface Tension doesn’t appear in The Great SF Stories #14 (1952), this may have been a book rights problem.
In the book version of Surface Tension (The Seedling Stars, 1956) Sunken Universe appears as “Cycle One” of the Surface Tension section (it appears between the prologue of the story above and the remainder).
6. As I said at the start of the first review, Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations is one of the three stories in this anthology that drive people nuts. If you want to see how people miss the point, have a look at the “Reception” section of the story’s Wikipedia page:
Gary Westfahl has said that because the proposition depends upon systems that were built without enough margin for error, the story is good physics, but lousy engineering [. . .] Cory Doctorow has made a similar argument, noting that the constraints under which the characters operate are decided by the writers, and not therefore the “inescapable laws of physics”. He argues that the decision of the writer to give the vessel no margin of safety and a marginal fuel supply focuses reader attention on the “need” for tough decisions in time of crisis and away from the responsibility for proper planning to ensure safety in the first place. Doctorow sees this as an example of moral hazard.
Both of these comments appear oblivious to either of the story’s possible dual concerns (immutability and/or sacrifice). As to the comment about “ensuring safety,” that will never by achievable for space travel—we can’t even do it for automated cars now.
A more recent comment from Doctorow is even more ridiculous:
In a 2019 essay in Locus, author Cory Doctorow criticized Campbell’s decision as one to turn the story “into a parable about the foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold, hard facts of life.”
This is just tendentious agitprop which either ignores, or is unaware of, Campbell’s stated intentions for the story, and appears to be more about denouncing him than anything else.
I note in passing that the three “Reception” comments on Wikipedia are from the last twenty-five years: presumably there was silence for the first thirty years of the story’s life.
7. There are three letters in The John W. Campbell Letters, Vol. I which mention Godwin’s The Cold Equations:
To Isaac Asimov August 13, 1954
This letter’s primarily to acquaint you with some interesting data that’s been showing up. “The Cold Equations” has received a hell of a reception; some are hotly mad, some are warmly enthusiastic—but none are coldly indifferent.
You know the old business about a novel being supposed to show the development of a personality. Well there’s a reverse English on that that an author can get away with . . . if he’s good enough. That is to present an unacceptable character, and not change him, but make the reader change! Godwin accepted the unacceptable proposition “It is right and proper to sacrifice a young woman.” That’s been out of fashion, highly unacceptable, since the Aztecs stopped sacrificing them 1000 years ago. But you see, it’s not wholly wrong! Godwin made the point; the reader is forced to agree that there is a place for human sacrifice.
To Theodore Sturgeon November 30, 1954
I’m trying for stories that don’t ask you to identify with an improbable individual in an extremely different situation—but with someone so damned close to home it’s a test of the reader’s psychic courage to take on the role. Those my friend, can scare the living bejayzus out of you—and they’ll leave you changed for life.
If the direction of that change is a good one—he’ll be back for more, gasping, shaking his head, but grinning. If the direction is a bad one . . . he may be after you, quite literally, with a .38. He won’t appreciate having a permanent, ugly scar on his personality The scar may be deep enough to be called insanity.
I am not trying to flick the boys glands, Ted; I’m trying to flick their underlying cultural orientation—their deepest beliefs—the things that make their glands work. “Cold Equations” warn’t no accident, pard—I had Godwin sweating on that one four times. And it stems straight from the totally unacceptable (in our misguided society) postulate “It is right and proper to sacrifice a human being.” We made it a girl, because the ancient instinct of the mammalian male is that the female of the species is not expendable —the male is. That made the cheese more binding— and the impact stuck in deeper. That wasn’t your reacting—that was 300,000,000 years of evolutionary instincts backfiring.
I’m sabotaging the cultural orientations, Ted. I’m saying “Human beings can be sacrificed to the good of the race—when the circumstances warrant.”
In both the previous letters Campbell also alludes to another supposedly controversial story, Pigs, presumably On the Care and Breeding of Pigs by Rex Jatko (Astounding, December 1954), a one-shot wonder, and recently reprinted in Gordon Van Gelder’s repopulation anthology, Go Forth and Multiply.
Campbell adds:
I’m still looking for the stories that get in and really twist things in the reader—and that does NOT mean a few endocrine glands. You can scare a guy for ten seconds with a rubber dummy in a dimly lighted room; that gives his glands a work-out.
But you can shock him out of a life-time pattern, and change him for the rest of his natural existence, if you can find and break one of his false cultural orientations. You’ll scare hell out of him, too—for weeks, not seconds, incidentally—because, when he gets through, he discovers that a barrier he thought was a great stone wall . . . has become painted cellophane, and has been ripped a bit, at that. It lets him out, sure—but what scares him is that it means that other Things can get In, because the barrier isn’t real.
Yeah—I know this isn’t as popular a type of story . . . yet. But give us some time! We’re developing an art-form that hasn’t been more than started—as a conscious effort.
To Philip José Farmer July 30, 1955
Science-fiction begins when you take a divergent viewpoint, and make the reader gradually understand that that cockeyed viewpoint—that he strongly rejected at first—is a sound, wise, and rational way of life under the circumstances of the situation at hand.
“The Cold Equations” was a test of that idea; I got Godwin to write that piece. The proposition there is the culturally abhorent proposition, “It is proper for a man to kill a girl, to make her a human sacrifice, knowingly and with intent.” The trick is to make the divergent proposition powerful enough to cause a strong reaction when first encountered, and then gradually make it clear that the divergent proposition is valid.
That makes for stories with deep, lasting impact—the kind readers will remember subconsciously, even if they forget the exact name and plot. Because when a man accepts a new viewpoint on life, he will never again be quite the same person he was; you’ve changed him permanently.
Campbell takes a slightly different tack in the July In Times to Come:
Also coming up is “The Cold Equations,” by Tom Godwin. Tom’s done some good yarns for us, and handled some strong themes. This story is a genuinely memorable one, in effectively combining powerfully antithetic elements—harsh and brutal forces, and gentleness, a conflict that never was a conflict, because the answer existed before the problem was stated. It represents the one type of situation wherein there is but one solution—and that solution is both inescapable and unacceptable; the situation of a problem whose answer is known before the problem is!
It is, incidentally, a miniature of the problem of the whole world; sometimes we’re actually living out a bit of already-recorded history, when we think we are living in the ever-changeable present. Sound impossible?
Not at all; it happens any time an irreversible decision-point has been passed. What follows is history—even when it hasn’t happened yet! p. 75
He added this in the November Brass Tacks:
“The Cold Equations” was not received coldly; it was warmly appreciated and it was hotly denounced . . . but obviously it wasn’t simply ignored! A lot of readers irately insisted on doing something to get the girl out of the jam. But evidently the general net reaction was that, whether you liked the way it worked out or not, you fell it was a good, and a strong, story! It’s seldom that a novelette—and a short novelette at that—succeeds in clawing a serial out of first place! p. 63
8. Wikipedia has a different take on Knight’s The Country of the Kind:
The story ends with a desperate plea from the protagonist for someone, anyone to join him in his rebellion against what he perceives to be a wholly passive society, which has lost any spark of creativity or will to achieve greatness.
The story links violence to artistic expression. The protagonist “invents” drawing and sculpture, only later realizing, from old books, that these things had existed in the past, and notes that all great artists had lived in especially violent times.
I’m not sure the above analysis is correct, but I’d have to reread the story with it in mind.
9. Flowers for Algernon had a long, troubled gestation, which is detailed in Algernon, Charlie, and I: A Writer’s Journey by Daniel Keyes (F&SF, May 2000)—this article is five chapters from the book of the same name (out of twenty-three).
There is a singular anecdote: Keyes’ new agent Harry Altshuler has sent him over to Horace Gold’s flat. Gold (the editor of Galaxy) would read the manuscript while Keyes waits. Gold emerges some time later:
“The ending is too depressing for our readers,” he said. “I want you to change it. Charlie doesn’t regress. He doesn’t lose his intelligence. Instead, he remains a super-genius, marries Alice Kinnian, and they live happily ever after. That would make it a great story.”
I stared at him. How does a beginning writer respond to the editor who bought one story from him, and wants to buy a second? The years of labor over this story passed through my mind. What about my Wedge of Loneliness? My tragic vision of Book Mountain? My challenge to Aristotle’s theory of The Classic Fall?
“I’ll have to think about it,” I mumbled. “I’ll need a little time.”
“I’d like to buy it for one of the upcoming issues, but I’d need that revision. It shouldn’t take you long.”
“I’ll work on it,” I said, knowing there was no way I’d change the ending.
“Good,” he said, showing me to the door. “If not, I’m sure you’ll write other stories for Galaxy in the future.”
I called Harry Altshuler from a pay phone and told him what had happened. There was a long pause. “You know,” he said, “Horace is a fine editor, with a strong sense of the market. I agree with him. It shouldn’t be too hard to make that change.”
I wanted to shout: This story has a piece of my heart in it! But who was I to pit my judgment against professionals? The train ride back to Seagate was long and depressing.
When I told Phil Klass [William Tenn] what had happened, he shook his head. “Horace and Harry are wrong. If you dare to change the ending, I’ll get a baseball bat and break both your legs.”
“Thanks.”
Even though I’ve read this account several times, it still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I think how close this classic story came to being editorially mangled.
10. There other stories of failed love affairs apart from Zelazny’s that have also done well, e.g. the Hugo Award-winning A Song for Lya by George R. R. Martin.
11. Here are the star ratings I awarded (in brackets for comparison) at the time of first reading this anthology in the late-70s, early 80s:
That Only a Mother • short story by Judith Merril ∗∗∗ (∗∗∗)
Scanners Live in Vain • novelette by Cordwainer Smith ∗∗∗∗+ (∗∗∗)
Mars Is Heaven! • short story by Ray Bradbury ∗∗∗+ (∗∗∗)
The Little Black Bag • novelette by C. M. Kornbluth ∗∗∗∗+ (∗∗∗∗)
Born of Man and Woman • short story by Richard Matheson ∗∗∗+ (∗∗)
Coming Attraction • short story by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗∗ (∗∗∗)
The Quest for Saint Aquin • novelette by Anthony Boucher ∗∗∗+ (∗∗∗)
Surface Tension • novelette by James Blish ∗∗∗∗+ (∗∗∗∗)
The Nine Billion Names of God • short story by Arthur C. Clarke ∗∗∗+ (∗)
It’s a Good Life • short story by Jerome Bixby ∗∗∗+ (∗∗∗∗)
The Cold Equations • novelette by Tom Godwin ∗∗∗+ (∗∗∗)
Fondly Fahrenheit • novelette by Alfred Bester ∗∗∗+ (∗∗)
The Country of the Kind • short story by Damon Knight ∗∗∗∗ (∗∗∗∗)
Flowers for Algernon • novelette by Daniel Keyes ∗∗∗∗∗ (∗∗∗∗)
A Rose for Ecclesiastes • novelette by Roger Zelazny ∗∗∗∗ (∗∗∗)
I’m becoming a slightly softer touch with age. ●
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