Summary: This British edition of the book is the first half of the larger volume. It contains a mixed bag of stories, with very good work from Robert A. Heinlein (his ‘Future History’ story, The Roads Must Roll), Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore (the transcendent Mimsy Were the Borogoves) and A. E. van Vogt (The Weapon Shop, his best story), and good or better work from Lester del Rey (Helen O’Loy), Theodore Sturgeon (a scientist becomes a Microcosmic God), Isaac Asimov (Nightfall, a story of darkness falling on a planet with permanent daylight), Clifford D. Simak (his ‘City’ story Huddling Place) and Murray Leinster (First Contact). All of the included stories may have been considered as classics at one point in time, but I doubt that many of them deserve that description now, and certainly not the stories from Stanley G. Weinbaum and John W. Campbell.
[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:
A Martian Odyssey • novelette by Stanley G. Weinbaum ∗
Twilight • novelette by John W. Campbell, Jr. ∗∗
Helen O’Loy • short story by Lester del Rey ∗∗∗
The Roads Must Roll • novelette by Robert A. Heinlein ∗∗∗∗
Microcosmic God • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon ∗∗∗+
Nightfall • novelette by Isaac Asimov ∗∗∗+
The Weapon Shop • novelette by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗∗
Mimsy Were the Borogoves • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗∗
Huddling Place • short story by Clifford D. Simak ∗∗∗
Arena • novelette by Fredric Brown ∗∗∗+
First Contact • novelette by Murray Leinster ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Introduction (The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I) • essay by Robert Silverberg

_____________________

(Note: this British version of the book contains the first half of the original The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, with the remainder collected in a second volume. I’m reviewing the UK versions because (a) I own and have previously read them, and (b) for length reasons.)

Normally when I read an anthology or magazine I start with the fiction and end with the non-fiction, but this time around I’m going to start with Robert Silverberg’s Introduction, as several of my criticisms of this anthology and its story choices tie back to this essay and the information it contains.
Silverberg starts his essay with this assertion:

This is as nearly definitive an anthology of modern science fiction stories as is likely to be compiled for quite some time.  p. ix

Why’s that then?

Its contents were chosen by vote of the membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America, an organization of some three hundred professional writers whose roster includes virtually everyone now living who has ever had science fiction published in the United States. The book you now hold represents the considered verdict of those who themselves have shaped science fiction—a roster of outstanding stories selected by people who know more intimately than any others what the criteria for excellence in science fiction should be.  p. ix

A number of questions immediately arise: why would the 300 self-selected members (overwhelmingly American) of the SFWA have a “considered verdict” that is better than all the writers, critics and thousands of fans who didn’t or couldn’t join? Do all of these 300 writers extensively read the field? (Unlikely.) If they do, and they “know more intimately than any others what the criteria for excellence in science fiction should be,” why did this group crank out so much rubbish during the period concerned? I could go on. Let’s just agree that there is no real evidence that this group is more likely to pick a definitive selection than any other.²
The next part of the introduction gives us a potted history of the SFWA and its Nebula Awards, and the decision to produce a volume to collect the notable stories produced before the awards began in 1966 (for 1965 stories).
We then get a detailed description of the selection process (look away now if you don’t like watching sausages get made): first, there was a vote on stories shorter than 15,000 words (those of longer lengths were reserved for later volumes), which produced a list of 132 stories by seventy-six writers; then all 300 writers had to select ten stories from the list, one per author, and “keeping historical perspective in mind”. This produced the following selection:

1. Nightfall, Isaac Asimov
2. A Martian Odyssey, Stanley G. Weinbaum
3. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
4. Microcosmic God, Theodore Sturgeon
(tie) First Contact, Murray Leinster
6. A Rose for Ecclesiastes, Roger Zelazny
7. The Roads Must Roll, Robert A. Heinlein
(tie) Mimsy Were the Borogoves, Lewis Padgett
(tie) Coming Attraction, Fritz Leiber
(tie) The Cold Equations, Tom Godwin
11. The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke
12. Surface Tension, James Blish
13. The Weapon Shop, A. E. van Vogt
(tie) Twilight, John W. Campbell
15. Arena, Fredric Brown
.
(Arthur C. Clarke’s The Star would have been the fifteenth story on this list if it had not been disqualified by the presence of another Clarke story in eleventh place. Clarke was the only writer to place two stories in the top fifteen, although both Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury had two stories in the top twenty.)  p. x

Already we can see the wheels beginning to come off. Are these stories by Sturgeon, Heinlein, Leiber, and Clarke really the best these writers wrote in the pre-1965 period? Do A Martian Odyssey and Twilight really belong in the same list as Flowers for Algernon or Nightfall?
The selection procedure becomes even more muddled as editor Silverberg bodges his way through the rest of the list: Arthur Clarke’s The Star is in the top fifteen but is bumped by The Nine Billion Names of God; one writer (Bradbury, I assume) has four stories on the original ballot but none in the top twenty, so Silverberg includes Mars is Heaven, “the story that the writer himself wished to see included in the book” (this, rather than the more obvious There Will Come Soft Rains or The Sound of Thunder); another writer’s stories “made the second fifteen, one vote apart; but the story with the higher number of votes was not the story that the writer himself wished to see included in the book” (presumably that is why the middling Huddling Place is here rather than the slam-dunk Desertion).
Definitive? I think not, and this will become even more apparent when we look at the stories themselves.

“Historical perspective” means that we have a couple of clunkers to sit through before we get to anything remotely worthy. The first of these, A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum (Wonder Stories, July 1934) starts with the crew of Ares discussing their explorations of the surface of Mars. Most of the conversation comes from Jarvis the chemist, who gives an account of his journey across the planet after his spaceship malfunctioned. This involves him rescuing an alien called Tweel from a “dream beast”:

All I could see then was a bunch of black ropy arms tangled around what looked like, as Putz described it to you, an ostrich. I wasn’t going to interfere, naturally; if both creatures were dangerous, I’d have one less to worry about.
“But the bird-like thing was putting up a good battle, dealing vicious blows with an eighteen-inch beak, between screeches. And besides, I caught a glimpse or two of what was on the end of those arms!” Jarvis shuddered. “But the clincher was when I noticed a little black bag or case hung about the neck of the bird-thing! It was intelligent! That or tame, I assumed. Anyway, it clinched my decision. I pulled out my automatic and fired into what I could see of its antagonist.
[. . .]
“The Martian wasn’t a bird, really. It wasn’t even bird-like, except just at first glance. It had a beak all right, and a few feathery appendages, but the beak wasn’t really a beak. It was somewhat flexible; I could see the tip bend slowly from side to side; it was almost like a cross between a beak and a trunk. It had four-toed feet, and four-fingered things— hands, you’d have to call them, and a little roundish body, and a long neck ending in a tiny head— and that beak. It stood an inch or so taller than I, and— well, Putz saw it!”
The engineer nodded. “Ja! I saw!”  p. 5

Thereafter, Jarvis and Tweel journey together across Mars, finding other exotic aliens such as the pyramid builder, the barrel beasts, etc. There is no real story, just endless description—and is consequently quite boring to read. Presumably the novel aliens were the reason this was so popular at the time.³
Next up is Twilight by John W. Campbell, Jr. (Astounding Stories, November 1934) which also uses a narrator listening to a story from a third party. The latter recounts a tale about how he picks up a hitchhiker, who turns out to be a time traveller who has visited Earth in the far future where man has lost his curiosity, and the machines run automatically.
This is an okay mood piece I suppose, but it is rather dry fare; presumably acclaimed at the time for its more reflective, action-less narrative.
Helen O’Loy by Lester del Rey (Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1938) yanks the book into the future with a more modern writing style and a good hook:

I am an old man now, but I can still see Helen as Dave unpacked her, and still hear him gasp as he looked her over.
“Man, isn’t she a beauty?”
She was beautiful, a dream in spun plastics and metals, something Keats might have seen dimly when he wrote his sonnet. If Helen of Troy had looked like that the Greeks m ust have been pikers when they launched only a thousand ships; at least, that’s what I told Dave.
“Helen of Troy, eh?” He looked at her tag. “At least it beats this thing—K2W88. Helen . . . Mmmm . . . Helen of Alloy.”
“Not much swing to that, Dave. Too many unstressed syllables in the middle. How about Helen O’Loy?”
“Helen O’Loy she is, Phil.” And that’s how it began—one part beauty, one part dream, one part science; add a stereo broadcast, stir mechanically, and the result is chaos.  p. 42

Initially the story has the two men try to upgrade an existing domestic robot before giving up and ordering Helen. However, after they modify the new arrival, she/it later watches various romances on TV, etc., and develops a clingy, over-needy love for Dave. He is eventually so ground down by Helen that he leaves to run a fruit ranch.
When the other character, Phil, has to suffer the Helen’s emotional fallout over Dave’s departure, he calls him to say that he is going to replace her/its coils. Dave has a volte-face, and comes and picks up Helen.
They live happily together until Dave dies, when Phil gets a letter from Helen:

Dear Phil,
As you know, Dave has had heart trouble for several years now. We expected him to live on just the same, but it seems that wasn’t to be. He died in my arms just before sunrise. He sent you his greetings and farewell.
I’ve one last favor to ask of you, Phil. There is only one thing for me to do when this is finished. Acid will burn out metal as well as flesh, and I’ll be dead with Dave. Please see that we are buried together, and that the morticians do not find my secret. Dave wanted it that way, too.
Poor, dear Phil. I know you loved Dave as a brother, and how you felt about me. Please don’t grieve too much for us, for we have had a happy life together, and both feel that we should cross this last bridge side by side.
With love and thanks from,
Helen  p. 51

A poignant ending to the story.
Going beyond the synopsis, this is one of three stories in the anthology (the van Vogt and the Goodwin are the others) that cause the red mist to descend in many modern readers, who take great exception at the supposedly chauvinist portrayal of Helen (Beverly Friend: “a blatant statement of woman as mere appendage to man—a walking, talking doll who performs better as an android then she could possibly do as a human”; Peter Nicholls: “a classic of sexist sf”, “one of the most unconsciously disgusting stories in the genre”.)⁴
If you want to be angry at this story I guess that there is enough here for you to do so—there is, at points, conflation of “domestic robot” and “woman,” not to mention comments about Helen’s beauty, etc. On the other hand, it’s also worth noting that, to begin with, the pair only want a utility robot to keep house—the choice of a female chassis is an afterthought, and picked because the previous model was a “feminine” one. And, up until two pages before the end of the story, the men are still explicitly referring to Helen as a robot—they do not see her as a woman, or certainly not entirely. It’s only in the last couple of pages that their perception of her flips and. up until that point, I suspect that Helen is meant to be seen as a slightly wonky machine—A Proud Robot, if you will. Further, what Helen becomes after watching the TV soaps and reading cheap fiction isn’t at any point portrayed as what Phil and Dave want in either a robot or an “ideal woman”—far from it: if anything they both find Helen something of a nuisance, yet they fall for her in the end.
It’s also worth remembering that this story was bashed out over an afternoon over eighty years ago, partly for the money, not as a literary statement about sexual politics, and it reflects the attitudes of the time. As to why contemporary readers liked it, I’d guess it was because (a) it’s a lightweight piece with a sentimental ending and (b) the thought of a female robot seemed pretty cool to its teenage readers (and for neat tech rather than misogynistic reasons).
If the del Rey story pulls the volume part of the way into the modern age of SF, then The Roads Must Roll by Robert A. Heinlein (Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1940), which I’ve reviewed here previously, completes the job. This novelette is set in a America crisis-crossed by high speed moving walkways introduced after the use of cars became untenable because of congestion, among other reasons:

They contained the seeds of their own destruction. Seventy million steel juggernauts, operated by imperfect human beings at high speed, are more destructive than war.  p. 58

Told from the viewpoint of Chief Engineer Gaines, who is showing a visiting Australian politician around, this tells of a rebellion by Functionalist inspired workers who shut down the high speed 100 mph lane of the rolling roads but leave the other slower lanes running. Gaines and his guest are at a restaurant situated on this strip when it comes to a halt. They go outside to see what is happening on the stationary roadway:

The crowd surged, and pushed against a middle-aged woman on its outer edge. In attempting to recover her balance she put one foot over the edge of the flashing ninety-five-mile strip. She realized her gruesome error, for she screamed before her foot touched the ribbon.
She spun around and landed heavily on the moving strip, and was rolled by it, as the strip attempted to impart to her mass, at one blow, a velocity of ninety-five miles per hour—one hundred and thirty-nine feet per second. As she rolled she mowed down some of the cardboard figures as a sickle strikes a stand of grass. Quickly, she was out of sight, her identity, her injuries, and her fate undetermined, and already remote.
But the consequences of her mishap were not done with. One of the flickering cardboard figures bowled over by her relative moment fell toward the hundred-mile strip, slammed into the shockbound crowd, and suddenly appeared as a live man—but broken and bleeding—amidst the luckless, fallen victims whose bodies had checked his wild flight.  p. 65

The rest of the story is an exciting account of Gaines and the paramilitary transport engineers putting down the revolution.
I’d have to say that the rolling roads idea isn’t completely convincing at first but it grows on you as the story develops and, by the time I finished the passage above, I was hooked! If I have one minor criticism of this it is the slightly unconvincing climactic encounter between the ring-leader, Van Kleeck, and Gaines which, by the way, echoes If This Goes On— in that Gaines uses psychological information from his opponent’s personnel file to manipulate him. Another similarity to that other story is a reference to mob psychology:

Personnel did not behave erratically without a reason. One man might be unpredictable, but in large numbers personnel were as dependable as machines, or figures.  p. 81

The best story in the book so far.
Microcosmic God by Theodore Sturgeon⁵ (Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1941) is a story I’ve read before but didn’t remember and, when I reread it here, I realised that may be because George R. R. Martin’s superior Sandkings has replaced it in my memory.
Sturgeon’s piece tells the story of Kidder, a genius scientist who moves to a remote island and breeds a race of miniature beings, called Neoterics, which live and evolve much more rapidly than humans. Kidder does this so he can harvest their inventions and, initially, Conant, his sole human contact at the bank, is pleased. However, Conant wants more than his job as President of the company—he is a man with political ambitions, and so asks Kidder to invent a new power source. When Kidder does so, but announces he isn’t going to pursue it, Conant arrives on the island with a couple of thugs and takes the device. He then tells Kidder to build a power plant, or the island will be bombed. Conant later blackmails the President and mounts a coup d’état, something that Kidder overhears via the bugged radio device he uses to communicate with Conant.
Parallel to this we learn about the development of the Neoterics (improved by the regular genocides Kidder commits to improve the quality of his stock), and the religion that they develop to worship their creator. Towards the end of the story (spoiler) Kidder instructs the Neoterics to create a force shield, and they are eventually cut-off from the world.
This isn’t a bad story—in fact parts of it are pretty good—but it’s not a classic. The extended opening section, which gives an account of Kidder’s (and Conant’s associated) rise, is just a data dump, and far too much of the story is concerned with pulp power-play shenanigans between the two men. It’s pretty obvious that the average SF reader’s interest would be in the sections of the story that concern the Neoterics, an area that George R. R. Martin focused on more in his later tale. What is also notable in the two stories is the cruelty shown by both men to their creations. In the Martin story, if I recall correctly, this is shown as a negative character trait, whereas in the Sturgeon it isn’t commented upon at all. Different times.
Nightfall by Isaac Asimov (Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1941) is the story that, historically, has always come top of polls for the best SF short story (for one such example, see the list above). Set on the planet Lagash, where is perpetually daylight (it is in a solar system with six suns), the story concerns Aton 77’s reports on the upcoming eclipse of Beta, the one remaining sun in the sky at that point in the planetary cycle. This eclipse will cause complete darkness on the planet, an unknown phenomenon for the people who live there.
Theremon 762, a reporter who is following the story, tries to get an interview with Aton 77 at the observatory, but the latter angrily refuses due to previous unflattering articles. Theremon ends up talking to a psychologist called Sheerin and, while the astronomers prepare for the eclipse, the two talking heads discuss a number of matters: the unseen and hitherto unknown dark planet that will cause the eclipse; what will happen to members of their race when they experience total darkness (insanity); archaeological records which suggest that previous civilizations have risen and fallen according to a two thousand and forty nine year cycle—something that matches up with the Cult’s Book of Revelations; and so on.
These building blocks are all skilfully deployed before events start spiralling out of control. Then, two astronomers return from a failed darkness experiment that did not yield the expected results, and a Cultist breaks in and smashes the astronomers’ “heretical” photographic plates. Theremon and Sheerin still have time, however, for a quick conversation about how the Cultists managed to get the information for their Book of Revelations, a passage that amusingly shows Asimov’s atheism at work:

“How do the Cultists manage to keep the ‘Book of Revelations’ going from cycle to cycle, and how on Lagash did it get written in the first place? There must have been some sort of immunity, for if everyone had gone mad, who would be left to write the book?”
Sheerin stared at his questioner ruefully. “Well, now, young man, there isn’t any eyewitness answer to that, but we’ve got a few damned good notions as to what happened. You see, there are three kinds of people who might remain relatively unaffected. First, the very few who don’t see the Stars at all; the blind, those who drink themselves into a stupor at the beginning of the eclipse and remain so to the end. We leave them out—because they aren’t really witnesses.
“Then there are children below six, to whom the world as a whole is too new and strange for them to be too frightened at Stars and Darkness. They would be just another item in an already surprising world. You see that, don’t you?”
The other nodded doubtfully. “I suppose so.”
“Lastly, there are those whose minds are too coarsely grained to be entirely toppled. The very insensitive would be scarcely affected—oh, such people as some of our older, work-broken peasants. Well, the children would have fugitive memories, and that, combined with the confused, incoherent babblings of the half-mad morons, formed the basis for the ‘Book of Revelations.’
“Naturally, the book was based, in the first place, on the testimony of those least qualified to serve as historians; that is, children and morons; and was probably extensively edited and re-edited through the cycles.”  pp. 132-133

The story ends (spoiler) with the eclipse starting, a mob approaching from the city, and all the astronomers going mad because of the darkness . . . and the millions of stars that become visible.
It’s a very good, if uneven piece, whether or not you entirely buy the idea of darkness and stars causing madness.
Of the five remaining stories, the only one I haven’t reviewed previously is First Contact by Murray Leinster (Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1945), so I’ll comment on that now and cut and paste the other reviews in afterwards.
Leinster’s story opens onboard an FTL space ship on an exploration trip to a star in the Crab Nebula. There, Tommy Dort, the navigator, has just finished taking a series of photos showing its development over 4000 years when the crew detect another ship coming towards them—a first contact with aliens. Both ships come to a halt at some distance from each other, and the alien ship sends an object to the halfway point between them. Dort’s captain (something of a drama queen) asks Dort to go and examine it. He finds that the aliens have sent out a viewing screen, so his captain does the same, and the two sides begin communicating.
Throughout all this an atmosphere of paranoia reigns throughout the ship—Dort’s captain doesn’t want to reveal, by turning tail and heading for home, or by being captured, where Earth is—for fear of an alien invasion. When the Earth crew finally communicate with the other ship they find the aliens have similar concerns. The rest of the story revolves around the further communications between the ships (including a friendship that develops between Tommy and one of the aliens he calls “Buck”), and the plan that Dort comes up with to let both ships go home.
This has a number of things that don’t work that well, the first of which is the suspicious and adversarial setup between the humans and the aliens: the latter seem too much like us (and if this had appeared a few years later, it would be easy to view the encounter as a thinly veiled Cold War standoff). I also found the ending unlikely and contrived (spoiler: both sides plan to blow up each other’s ships unless they agree to a mutual exchange). Finally, the two non-experts dispatched to deal with the translation problem do so far too quickly.
On the other hand, this story some good astronomical description:

The nebula itself was the result of the most titanic explosion of which men have any knowledge. The explosion took place sometime in the year 2946 B. C., before the first of the seven cities of long-dead Ilium was even thought of. The light of that explosion reached Earth in the year 1054 A. D., and was duly recorded in ecclesiastic annals and somewhat more reliably by Chinese court astronomers. It was bright enough to be seen in daylight for twenty-three successive days. Its light—and it was four thousand light-years away—was brighter than that of Venus.
From these facts, astronomers could calculate nine hundred years later the violence of the detonation. Matter blown away from the center of the explosion would have traveled outward at the rate of two million three hundred thousand miles an hour; more than thirty-eight thousand miles a minute; something over six hundred thirty-eight miles per second. When twentieth-century telescopes were turned upon the scene of this vast explosion, only a double star remained—and the nebula. The brighter star of the doublet was almost unique in having so high a surface temperature that it showed no spectrum lines at all. It had a continuous spectrum.
Sol’s surface temperature is about 7,000° Absolute. That of the hot white star is 500,000 degrees. It has nearly the mass of the sun, but only one fifth its diameter, so that its density is one hundred seventy-three times that of water, sixteen times that of lead, and eight times that of iridium—the heaviest substance known on Earth. But even this density is not that of a dwarf white star like the companion of Sirius. The white star in the Crab Nebula is an incomplete dwarf; it is a star still in the act of collapsing. Examination—including the survey of a four-thousand-year column of its light—was worthwhile. The Llanvabon had come to make that examination.  pp. 259-260

The first of the other four previously reviewed stories is The Weapon Shop by A. E. van Vogt (Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1942).
This begins with an opening paragraph that gives us several pieces of information:

The village at night made a curiously timeless picture. Fara walked contentedly beside his wife along the street. The air was like wine; and he was thinking dimly of the artist who had come up from Imperial City, and made what the telestats called—he remembered the phrase vividly—“a symbolic painting reminiscent of a scene in the electrical age of seven thousand years ago.”  p. 144

However, the couple’s pleasant evening walk is interrupted when Fara notices a newly opened Weapon Shop in a side street. Fara, a loyal supporter of the Empress, is enraged at this desecration of his timeless home by an organisation that does not recognise her authority. As a crowd gathers outside the shop he becomes even angrier when neither the townspeople nor the constable take any action. The latter states it is impossible to break into the shops, so Fara goes home and returns with an atomic cutting torch, which fails to get them inside.
Then one of the bystanders states that the Weapon Shop doors only open for those who will not harm the occupants and Fara, though he ridicules the statement, reaches forward and attempts to open the door. It opens. However, when he urges the constable go inside and arrest the owners, the door slams shut again. Fara grabs the doorknob once more, which gives us one of the story’s great images:

Fara stared stupidly at his hand, which was still clenched. And then, slowly, a hideous thrill coursed along his nerves. The knob had—withdrawn. It had twisted, become viscous, and slipped amorphously from his straining fingers. Even the memory of that brief sensation gave him a feeling of unnormal things.  p. 149

He tries the handle again but the door remains locked, and then his mood rapidly changes from anger to fear as he realises that maybe even the soldiers of the empress would be powerless in this situation. At that point he tries the handle again, and this time gains entry.
Inside the shop more unsettling events await Fara. He meets a silver-haired man and, quickly collecting himself, Fara tells him he wants to buy a gun for hunting. He is met with a recitation of the bye-laws that the Weapon Shops impose with respect to the use of their weapons (they can only be used defensively, or for hunting). When Fara eventually gets hold of a gun he turns it on the silver-haired man. The latter barely reacts, but starts discussing Fara with a man standing at the rear of the shop. They conclude that his one-sided outlook about the Empire would be difficult to change, and finish by showing him a disturbing vision of the Empress in the metropolis arranging for the murder of one of her ex-lovers. Fara is then ejected out of a side door. Worse is to come: when Fara gets home he finds out that the Weapon Shop has put out black propaganda on the telestat about him being the shop’s first customer.
All of this is a great start to the story: having started with a couple enjoying a bucolic evening walk in the village, we are quickly introduced to the enigmatic Weapon Shops and their near magical technology, and also shown the dark underbelly of the ruling Empire.
The subsequent narrative arc (multiple spoilers) has Fara slowly fall from grace: his son (there is ongoing familial strife that helps ground the story) ends up taking a huge amount of money from his account. Fara takes a loan from the bank to cover this and then loses his business to a large competitor when they buy the loan and foreclose.
After the local court treats him badly, and his mother-in-law refuses to offer any financial support, he ends up going to back to the Weapon Shop to buy a gun so he can commit suicide. After his purchase he finds himself transported to the off-world site and finds himself standing in front of a huge machine:

A machine, oh, a machine—
His brain lifted up, up in his effort to grasp the tremendousness of the dull-metaled immensity of what was spread here under a summer sun beneath a sky as blue as a remote southern sea.
The machine towered into the heavens, five great tiers of metal, each a hundred feet high; and the superbly streamlined five hundred feet ended in a peak of light, a gorgeous spire that tilted straight up a sheer two hundred feet farther, and matched the very sun for brightness.
And it was a machine, not a building, because the whole lower tier was alive with shimmering lights, mostly green, but sprinkled colorfully with red and occasionally a blue and yellow.   Twice, as Fara watched, green lights directly in front of him flashed unscintillatingly into red.
The second tier was alive with white and red lights, although there were only a fraction as many lights as on the lowest tier. The third section had on its dull-metal surface only blue and yellow lights; they twinkled softly here and there over the vast area.
The fourth tier was a series of signs, that brought the beginning of comprehension. The whole sign was:
WHITE — BIRTHS
RED — DEATHS
GREEN — LIVING
BLUE — IMMIGRATION TO EARTH
YELLOW — EMIGRATION
The fifth tier was also all sign, finally explaining :
POPULATIONS
SOLAR SYSTEM 19,174,463,747
EARTH 11,193,247,361
MARS 1,097,298,604
VENUS 5,141,053,811
MOONS 1,742,863,971
The numbers changed, even as he looked at them, leaping up and down, shifting below and above what they had first been. People were dying, being born, moving to Mars, to Venus, to the moons of Jupiter, to Earth’s moon, and others coming back again, landing minute by minute in the thousands of spaceports. Life went on in its gigantic fashion—and here was the stupendous record.  pp. 169-170

This is a scene that has perhaps become more credible in the age of meta-data than it was when I first read it many years ago.
A passer-by tells Fara he is at the Weapon Shop courts. As Fara subsequently completes a number of  interviews and court procedures, he receives justice and restitution for a conspiracy he was unaware of between the bank and the company that bought his shop. We also find out a lot more about the Weapon Shops and what they do.
The most intriguing thing about this section is that Van Vogt doesn’t go for the easy option of the Weapon Shops as a government-in-waiting, or a resistance movement waiting to usurp the Empress and take over power, but instead paints them as an near-omnipotent, altruistic and almost neutral organisation. As well as being warned about any future bad-mouthing of Her Majesty, they tell him:

It is important to understand that we do not interfere in the main stream of human existence. We right wrongs; we act as a barrier between the people and their more ruthless exploiters.
[. . .]
People always have the kind of government they want. When they want change, they must change it. As always we shall remain an incorruptible core—and I mean that literally; we have a psychological machine that never lies about a man’s character—I repeat, an incorruptible core of human idealism, devoted to relieving the ills that arise inevitably under any form of government.  p. 176

I liked this story a lot, in particular its almost dreamlike progression. One of his best.
Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (Astounding Science-Fiction, February 1943) starts off with a similar time-travel idea to the earlier The Twonky (Astounding, September 1942). In this story a man from millions of years in the future sends two experimental time machines back into the past, using his children’s cast-off educational toys as ballast. One of the machines—an odd looking box—is found in 1942 by a seven-year old boy called Scott playing hooky from school.
Initially the events in the story are those you would expect from an archetypal two-parent, two-child family situation and all that entails (the odd questions children ask, the illegible scribbles that Scott’s two year old sister Emma writes, and that he can understand but the adults can’t, etc.). Eventually the parents begin to notice the children’s increasingly odd behaviour, especially in their interactions with the strange toys:

“Any homework?”
“N-no,” Scott said, flushing guiltily. To cover his embarrassment he took from his pocket a gadget he had found in the box, and began to unfold it. The result resembled a tesseract, strung with beads. Paradine didn’t see it at first, but Emma did. She wanted to play with it.
“No. Lay off, Slug,” Scott ordered. “You can watch me.” He fumbled with the beads, making soft, interested noises. Emma extended a fat forefinger and yelped.
“Scotty,” Paradine said warningly.
“I didn’t hurt her.”
“Bit me. It did,” Emma mourned.
Paradine looked up. He frowned, staring. What in—
“Is that an abacus?” he asked. “Let’s see it, please.”
Somewhat unwillingly Scott brought the gadget across to his father’s chair. Paradine blinked. The “abacus,” unfolded, was more than a foot square, composed of thin, rigid wires that interlocked here and there. On the wires the colored beads were strung. They could be slid back and forth, and from one support to another, even at the points of jointure. But—a pierced bead couldn’t cross interlocking wires—
So, apparently, they weren’t pierced. Paradine looked closer. Each small sphere had a deep groove running around it, so that it could be revolved and slid along the wire at the same time. Paradine tried to pull one free. It clung as though magnetically. Iron? It looked more like plastic.
The framework itself— Paradine wasn’t a mathematician. But the angles formed by the wires were vaguely shocking, in their ridiculous lack of Euclidean logic. They were a maze. Perhaps that’s what the gadget was—a puzzle.  p. 186

The couple later become so concerned about their children’s behaviour that Paradine asks a psychologist colleague called Holloway for help. Holloway causes them more disquiet with his rambling (and rather unlikely, to be honest) speculations that the toys are from elsewhere in space or time, his musings on non-Euclidean space, and lectures on how children think differently. He does, however, recommend that the toys are taken away from the two children.
However, the children’s thought processes have gone past a critical point, and Emma, the two year old, gets Scott to start collecting various objects for her:

Scott kept bringing gadgets to Emma for her approval. Usually she’d shake her head. Sometimes she would look doubtful. Very occasionally she would signify agreement. Then there would be an hour of laborious, crazy scribbling on scraps of note paper, and Scott, after studying the notations, would arrange and rearrange his rocks, bits of machinery, candle ends, and assorted junk. Each day the maid cleaned them away, and each day Scott began again.
He condescended to explain a little to his puzzled father, who could see no rhyme or reason in the game.
“But why this pebble right here?”
“It’s hard and round, dad. It belongs there.”
“So is this one hard and round.
“Well, that’s got vaseline on it. When you get that far, you can’t see just a hard round thing.”
“What comes next? This candle?”
Scott looked disgusted. “That’s toward the end. The iron ring’s next.”
It was, Paradine thought, like a Scout trail through the woods, markers in a labyrinth. But here again was the random factor. Logic halted—familiar logic—at Scott’s motives in arranging the junk as he did.
Paradine went out. Over his shoulder he saw Scott pull a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket, and head for Emma, who was squatted in a corner thinking things over.  p. 206

There is another hint of what the toys are teaching the children to do (spoiler) in a later conversation between Paradine and Scott, when the boy asks about eels’ and salmons’ reproductive behaviour, where they lay their eggs, and why, when it is time to breed, they don’t just “send their eggs” back. This is followed by more questions, concluding with one about why people live on Earth. When Paradine asks if he means “And not the other planets?”, he gets this chilling reply:

Scott was hesitant. “This is only—part—of the big place. It’s like the river where the salmon go. Why don’t people go on down to the ocean when they grow up?”
Paradine realized that Scott was speaking figuratively. He felt a brief chill. The—ocean?  p. 205

Before the climax of the story there is a short section which details what happened to the first time machine/box sent into the past: this has a girl telling her Uncle Charles a nonsense rhyme she has made up. The two are Charles Dodgson (“Lewis Carroll”), and Alice Pleasance Liddell (the Alice of Alice in Wonderland): the poem later produced is Jabberwocky.⁷ This sequence sets up the end of the story:

Downstairs the telephone stopped its shrill, monotonous ringing. Paradine looked at the paper he held.
It was a leaf torn from a book. There were interlineations and marginal notes, in Emma’s meaningless scrawl. A stanza of verse had been so underlined and scribbled over that it was almost illegible, but Paradine was thoroughly familiar with “Through the Looking Glass.” His memory gave him the words‍—
.
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimbel in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe
.
Idiotically he thought: Humpty Dumpty explained it. A wabe is the plot of grass around a sundial. A sundial. Time— It has something to do with time. A long time ago Scotty asked me what a wabe was. Symbolism.
Twas brillig—
A perfect mathematical formula, giving all the conditions, in symbolism the children had finally understood. The junk on the floor. The toves had to be made slithy—vaseline?—and they had to be placed in a certain relationship, so that they’d gyre and gimbel.
Lunacy!
But it had not been lunacy to Emma and Scott. They thought differently. They used x logic. Those notes Emma had made on the page—she’d translated Carroll’s words into symbols both she and Scott could understand. The random factor had made sense to the children. They had fulfilled the conditions of the time-span equation. And the mome raths outgrabe—
Paradine made a rather ghastly little sound, deep in his throat. He looked at the crazy pattern on the carpet. If he could follow it, as the kids had done— But he couldn’t. The pattern was senseless. The random factor defeated him. He was conditioned to Euclid.
Even if he went insane, he still couldn’t do it. It would be the wrong kind of lunacy. His mind had stopped working now. But in a moment the stasis of incredulous horror would pass— Paradine crumpled the page in his fingers. “Emma, Scotty,” he called in a dead voice, as though he could expect no response.
Sunlight slanted through the open windows, brightening the golden pelt of Mr. Bear. Downstairs the ringing of the telephone began again.  p. 207-208

This is a story deserving of its classic status for its transcendent ending if nothing else. That said, it is a bit baggy in places (Holloway’s comments are more discursive than needed) and, in general, it feels longer than necessary.
I note in passing that there are also some interesting and atypical observations about children⁸.
Huddling Place by Clifford D. Simak (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1944) is the second in his ‘City’ series, and opens with Jerome A. Webster at the funeral of Nelson F. Webster in 2117. After this, we get an update on societal conditions:

John J., the first John J., had come after the breakup of the cities, after men had forsaken, once and for all, the twentieth century huddling places, had broken free of the tribal instinct to stick together in one cave or in one clearing against a common foe or a common fear. An instinct that had become outmoded, for there were no fears or foes. Man revolting against the herd instinct economic and social conditions had impressed upon him in ages past. A new security and a new sufficiency had made it possible to break away.
The trend had started back in the twentieth century, more than two hundred years before, when men moved to country homes to get fresh air and elbow room and a graciousness in life that communal existence, in its strictest sense, never had given them.
And here was the end result. A quiet living. A peace that could only come with good things. The sort of life that men had yearned for years to have. A manorial existence, based on old family homes and leisurely acres, with atomics supplying power and robots in place of serfs.  p. 212

The story continues with Webster in his study, where he has a virtual teleconference with Juwain, a philosopher friend who lives on Mars. They discuss Webster’s reluctance to visit him there, and also Webster’s son’s upcoming visit to the planet. When Webster later goes to see his son depart at the spaceport he has an agoraphobia attack and, as he tries to get Jenkins to arrange transport home, he is told that his father and grandfather suffered the same condition.
The rest of the story pivots around Webster’s condition. He writes an article pointing out that almost no-one wants to leave home nowadays. Then (spoiler), an old acquaintance called Claybourne calls from Mars, and tells Webster, a surgeon, that he is needed to perform an life-saving operation on Juwain. Webster says he can’t come, but Claybourne says that Juwain is on the verge of a philosophical breakthrough that is vital to humanity, and that a ship will come to pick him up.
Webster packs for the trip and tries to control his agoraphobia. After he has been waiting for some time, Jenkins tells him that two men arrived earlier to pick him up, but the robot told them that Webster couldn’t possibly go. The story ends with this:

Webster stiffened, felt chill fear gripping at his heart. Hands groping for the edge of the desk, he sat down in the chair, sensed the walls of the room closing in about him, a trap that would never let him go.  p. 224

Arena by Fredric Brown (Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1944) opens with Carson, a scout ship pilot, engaging an alien Outsider warship beyond the orbit of Pluto—then he wakes up naked, lying on blue sand under a blue dome, and notices a red spherical object in the distance.
Carson hears a disembodied voice which says that the speaker, an alien super-being, chanced upon the human and the Outsider fleets about to destroy each other. Rather than allowing this mutual destruction to occur (neither the human race or Outsiders would win outright, and both races would be left crippled by the encounter), the super-being decrees that Carson and an Outsider (the red sphere) will engage in single combat: the loser’s race will be annihilated, leaving the victor’s unscathed.
The rest of the story tells of the fight between the Carson and the Outsider, which starts when the “Roller” moves towards him but is stopped by a force field. The pair throw rocks at each other for a while, and then the Outsider lobs a decapitated blue lizard which it caught and killed.
As the rest of the story unfolds, Carson becomes increasingly weak and thirsty, and makes an unsuccessful attempt at negotiating peace (Carson can sense the Outsider’s malevolent emotions in response). He also experiments to see what will pass through the force field. Eventually, Carson passes out, but comes round again when one of the lizards in the dome approaches him:

“Hello,” said the voice.
It was a small, thin voice. It sounded like—
He opened his eyes and turned his head. It was a lizard.
“Go away,” Carson wanted to say. “Go away; you’re not really there, or you’re there but not really talking. I’m imagining things again.”
But he couldn’t talk; his throat and tongue were past all speech with the dryness. He closed his eyes again.
“Hurt,” said the voice. “Kill. Hurt—kill. Come.”
He opened his eyes again. The blue ten-legged lizard was still there.
It ran a little way along the barrier, came back, started off again, and came back.
“Hurt,” it said. “Kill. Come.”
Again it started off, and came back. Obviously it wanted Carson to follow it along the barrier.
He closed his eyes again. The voice kept on. The same three meaningless words. Each time he opened his eyes, it ran off and came back.
“Hurt. Kill. Come.”
Carson groaned. There would be no peace unless he followed the blasted thing. Like it wanted him to.
He followed it, crawling. Another sound, a high-pitched squealing, came to his ears and grew louder.
There was something lying in the sand, writhing, squealing. Something small, blue, that looked like a lizard and yet didn’t—
Then he saw what it was—the lizard whose legs the Roller had pulled off, so long ago. But it wasn’t dead; it had come back to life and was wriggling and screaming in agony.
“Hurt,” said the other lizard. “Hurt. Kill. Kill.”
Carson understood. He took the flint knife from his belt and killed the tortured creature. The live lizard scurried off quickly.  pp. 244-245

Carson (spoiler) then has an epiphany about the nature of the force-field, and renders himself temporarily unconscious to get through the force field.
This is an inventive and entertaining story, and is much better than the later Star Trek episode (which made Brown’s story more famous today than it might otherwise have been).⁹

In conclusion, a mixed bag of stories, and one selected by parochial¹⁰ (none of their choices comes from outside the American SF magazines) and rose coloured spectacle-wearing voters. A better choice of anthology would be the Asimov and Greenberg’s Best Science Fiction series, whose 25 volumes run from 1938 to 1963. God knows that is far from perfect, but the series will give you a better idea of what the field’s best stories are than this.  ●

_____________________

1. Lester del Rey one of the contributors, begins his review (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 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. p. 64

Ah, the “clique” comment will be him have another go at the Orbit series, edited by Damon Knight (see footnote 2 below). He goes on to have a moan about current theme anthologies and those with “extraneous” matter to pad out them out.
When he finally gets around to this volume he says, “I’m forced to give it a rave review on its merits”, 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 (again, see the comment from Judy del Rey in footnote 2 below).
Of the stories themselves he says that Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey is “revolutionary”, that Campbell’s Twilight inspired his 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 whether 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 Man and Woman, Mars is Heaven! and The Nine Billion Names of God. (The Star placed 15^th 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 aren’t much better) before observing:

All of which impels me to stick my neck out and make a guess; that the voters, who are all sf 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. The SFWA has, at various times in its history, been as dodgy an electorate as any other—as one can see from the high correlation of peculiar winners to individuals holding office in the organisation (who conveniently had access to the mailing list of members)—and that’s before you factor in the tendency for a group of professionals to engage in “Buggins’ Turn” (see the Wikipedia article).
Let us also not forget that roughly the same set of voters made sure that the 1971 Nebula Award short story result was “No Award” so that none of the “New Wave” nominees would win, a partisan act that led to the mortifying scene where Isaac Asimov announced Gene Wolfe’s The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories as the winner at the Nebula Awards before having to correct himself.
As Gardner Dozois recalls in Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugos:

I was there, sitting at Gene Wolfe’s table, in fact. He’d actually stood up, and was starting to walk toward the podium, when Isaac was told about his mistake. Gene shrugged and sat down quietly, like the gentleman he is, while Isaac stammered an explanation of what had happened. It was the one time I ever saw Isaac totally flustered, and, in fact, he felt guilty about the incident to the end of his days.
It’s bullshit that this was the result of confusing ballot instructions. This was the height of the War of the New Wave, and passions between the New Wave camp and the conservative Old Guard camp were running high. (The same year, Michael Moorcock said in a review that the only way SFWA could have found a worse thing than Ringworld to give the Nebula to was to give it to a comic book.) The fact that the short story ballot was almost completely made up of stuff from Orbit [Damon Knight’s anthology series] had outraged the Old Guard, particularly James Sallis’s surreal “The Creation of Bennie Good,” and they block-voted for No Award as a protest against “nonfunctional word patterns” making the ballot. Judy-Lynn del Rey told me as much immediately after the banquet, when she was exuberantly gloating about how they’d “put Orbit in its place” with the voting results, and actually said, “We won!”

Are those the kind of people you would trust to make an informed and dispassionate vote?

3. I liked the Weinbaum better the first time I read it in 1980 or thereabouts. Here are the star ratings I awarded then in brackets for comparison:

A Martian Odyssey • novelette by Stanley G. Weinbaum ∗ (∗∗∗)
Twilight • novelette by John W. Campbell, Jr. ∗∗ (∗)
Helen O’Loy • short story by Lester del Rey ∗∗∗ (∗∗)
The Roads Must Roll • novelette by Robert A. Heinlein ∗∗∗∗ (∗∗∗)
Microcosmic God • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon ∗∗∗+ (∗∗∗∗)
Nightfall • novelette by Isaac Asimov ∗∗∗+ (∗∗∗)
The Weapon Shop • novelette by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗∗ (∗∗∗∗)
Mimsy Were the Borogoves • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore ∗∗∗∗ (∗∗∗)
Huddling Place • short story by Clifford D. Simak ∗∗∗ (∗∗)
Arena • novelette by Fredric Brown ∗∗∗+ (∗∗∗)
First Contact • novelette by Murray Leinster ∗∗∗ (∗∗∗)

As you can see, I’m a softer touch nowadays.

4. The damning comments about del Rey’s story come from Dominick M. Grace’s Rereading Lester del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” (Science Fiction Studies Vol. 20, No. 1, March 1993, pp. 45-51, and currently available for free on JSTOR). If you want to read an essay where a story is over-analysed to the point that there is no connection left with the source, then this is for you.
Lester del Rey says this of Helen O’Loy in the afterword to The Best of Lester del Rey:

What I say about them must be taken as the thoughts of a man writing of his favorite children—since brain children are enshrined hi the heart almost as tenderly as are real offspring.
Best beloved of all—since I do have favorites—is “Helen O’Loy.” This was the second story I sold, proving I was not a one-story author. It came easily, taking up only one pleasant afternoon of work and needing almost no rewriting; in fact, even the first paragraph came without effort, which is unusual for me. And out in the world, Helen has always brought me more than I could expect. After almost forty years, she still earns more than a dozen times annually what I was paid for her initial appearance, which indicates others also share my love for her. Her spirit remains unquenched, and I am well-pleased with the lady, to say the least.
In those days of long ago, any sale to John W. Campbell was something of a triumph. His magazines were considered tops in the field, and he was gathering a stable of writers who have remained leaders down to the present. In my opinion then and now, he was one of the three greatest magazine editors of all time. I wrote as much for his approval as for payment; and I rarely thought of submitting my work to anyone else. To be considered one of his regulars was the ultimate achievement.

5. There is a noticeable difference between Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God and the later Killdozer! in terms of writing development and maturity. It’s definitely from a different period.

6. In Asimov’s Nightfall there is a jarring mention of Earth after Theremon first sees the stars:

Not Earth’s feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye—Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shown down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.  p. 142

This was editor John W. Campbell’s meddling, according to Asimov’s biography In Memory Yet Green, 1979:

Yet in one respect, I must admit, I was dissatisfied with ‘‘Nightfall.” Campbell, finding my ending lacking, had inserted a paragraph of his own very near the end that was very effective but simply wasn’t me. It has been praised as proof that I could write “poetically,” which gravels me, since I don’t want to write poetically; I only want to write clearly. Worst of all, Campbell thoughtlessly mentioned Earth in his paragraph. I had carefully refrained from doing so all through the story, since Earth did not exist within the context of the story. Its mention was a serious literary flaw.  p. 313

Exactly. What was Campbell thinking? (I almost said “What on Earth was Campbell thinking?”)

7. Jabberwocky can be read here.

8. Catherine Moore was pregnant around the time of the writing of this story, although her contributions to this piece were minimal. One wonders to what extent her pregnancy informed the observations about children (and the anxiety about them growing up different). There is no mention of any children on Moore’s Wikipedia page, and another FB source mentions that she suffered several miscarriages.

9. The Arena episode of Star Trek was written before the discovery of Brown’s story—probably why it is so naff. The Wikipedia page for that episode is here.

10. By calling the SFWA members “parochial,” I mean, where is (for example) Brian W. Aldiss’s Old Hundredth, Charles Harness’s The Rose, something by Ballard? And while I am about this volume’s shortcomings, where is Walter Miller, Robert Sheckley, etc.?