ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Admiral Ironbombs, Battered, Tattered, Yellowed, & Creased
George Kelley, GeorgeKelley.org
MPorcius, MPorcius Fiction Log
Tom Staicar, Amazing Stories, November 1981
Various, Goodreads

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Editors, Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg

Fiction:
The Cave • novelette by P. Schuyler Miller ∗∗∗+
The Halfling • novelette by Leigh Brackett ∗∗∗+
Mimsy Were the Borogoves • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗∗
Q. U. R. • short story by Anthony Boucher ∗∗
Clash by Night • novella by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lawrence O’Donnell] ∗∗∗∗
Exile • short story by Edmond Hamilton ∗∗∗
Daymare • novelette by Fredric Brown ∗∗
Doorway Into Time • short story by C. L. Moore ∗∗
The Storm • novelette by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗+
The Proud Robot • novelette by Henry Kuttner [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗+
Symbiotica • novelette by Eric Frank Russell ∗∗
The Iron Standard • short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Martin H. Greenberg
Story introductions • by Martin H. Greenberg and Isaac Asimov

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This collection was the fifth volume of a retrospective ‘Best of the Year’ series started in 1979 by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. The series, published by DAW books, would continue for a total of twenty-four volumes and would cover the period from 1939 to 1963. NESFA Press would add a twenty-fifth volume in 2001, Robert Silverberg Presents the Great SF Stories: 1964.
Although this volume isn’t a magazine or original anthology I thought I’d cover it here as it lets me talk about (a) my picks for the 1944 Retro Hugo Awards (nominations for which close at 0700 UTC on Saturday, March 16^th, 2019), and (b) what would be in my own hypothetical Best SF of the Year 1944.
As I’ve discussed some of these stories at length elsewhere I’ll try and be brief here (I’ll add links in the footnotes for my longer reviews and, in the cases where I haven’t yet reviewed the magazines containing the stories, I’ll add full reviews when I have time).¹

The fiction opens with The Cave by P. Schuyler Miller. This is a story set on an obsolescent version of Mars and opens with a number of Martian creatures taking shelter in a cave from a sandstorm outside. These creatures are a mix of predator and prey, but we discover that all Martian creatures are grekka and abide, on certain occasions, by a law of mutual help against an inimical universe. So they all settle down and prepare to wait out the storm.
The second half of the story has a human prospector called Harrigan stumble upon the cave after his sand car breaks down. He realises the cave is full of Martian animals, and that some are dangerous, but the uneasy truce continues. Later on however Harrigan does something that unintentionally disturbs the equilibrium, and the situation then unravels.
It is interesting that this one (spoiler) does not comply with Campbell’s supposed requirement that humans always outwit the aliens.
Next up is The Halfling by Leigh Brackett, which is a colourful tale set in “Jade Green’s Interplanetary Carnival Show”. Green hires a dancer called Darrow who wants to earn money to pay for her passage back to Venus. As they wander through the circus to her audition on the main stage they see cat-men from Callisto, Moth people from Phobos, and other exotic beings.
The second part of the story involves escaped Martian sand cats, dead immigration agents, and tribal intrigue on Venus, and it concludes with a big action finish that has the various species of men fighting the escaped circus animals.
This is the first of only four stories in the volume that wasn’t published in Astounding Science-Fiction magazine (it originally appeared in Astonishing Stories, February 1943).
Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is the one story in the volume that readers will probably have heard of, given its multiple reprintings in various anthologies. Its classic status must make it a shoe-in for the 1944 Retro Hugo novelette award.
It starts with a man from millions of years in the future sending two experimental time machines back into the past, both of which use his children’s cast-off educational toys as ballast. They never return to his time so he forgets about them. One of the machines—an odd looking box—is found in 1942 by a seven-year old boy called Scott, who is playing hooky from school.
Scott takes the toys home and he and his sister play with them. The toys start changing the way they think, and how they perceive reality, all of which eventually has far-reaching consequences. While this plays out we are also presented with, among other things, some interesting and atypical (for SF) observations about children (perhaps influenced by the fact that Moore was pregnant around this time).
The story is perhaps more roughly written than you would expect from a classic (I detect Kuttner’s prose in much of the story) but it finishes with an impressively transcendent ending which references Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky.
Q. U. R. by Anthony Boucher gives an account of how the narrator recruits a roboticist called Quinn to form a company called Quinn’s Usuform Robots (a play on Rossum’s Universal Robots, R.U.R., I guess). The struggles they face in building and selling their robots are rather contrived and unlikely. Although the story tries to be light humour it’s really just a piece of rather clunky pulp. Not bad, but not any better than okay, and it is the first of a handful of stories that I would suggest shouldn’t be in this volume.
Clash by Night by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is the novella prequel to the 1947 novel Fury, and starts in Montana Keep, a domed city under the seas of Venus. Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear conflagration, and the survivors inhabit this and other similar keeps because of the inimical Venusian wildlife on the land. The main character in the story is a Dooneman, Captain Scott, a mercenary in one of the Free Companies that settle disputes between the many cities on the planet. The story tells of one of these wars.
This piece is the first of the Kuttner/Moore collaborations where I’ve definitely noticed another writer involved apart from Kuttner,² and the prose at the beginning of the story is more complex and fluent than anything I’ve seen in earlier collaborations. The world-building, characterisation, and inter-personal relationships in the first three-quarters or so are also much more complex and realistic than normal. All of this makes me wonder if the story is mostly Moore’s work (apart from, maybe, the battle scenes at the end, which are flatter, more routine fare, and are more typical of what I believe is Kuttner’s work). So, in brief, it starts very well but tails off somewhat towards the end. Given the lack of novellas published in 1943, it will be a strong contender in that Retro Hugo category.
Exile by Edmond Hamilton is another non-Astounding story (it appeared in Super Science Stories, May 1943) and is the shortest piece in the book. It starts with a group of four sf writers talking about protective colouration. Then one of them tells the others how he once ended up in one of his imaginary worlds and had to survive there. . . .
After a while (spoiler) you can guess where the story is going, but is still ends with a satisfying click.
Daymare by Fredric Brown (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Fall 1943) has an intriguing beginning, which involves Lieutenant Rod Caquer of the Callisto Police arriving at a murder scene. He is one of the last to arrive, getting there just before the utility men take the body away, and sees that the man has died from a sword stroke to the head. However, when he questions the policeman who was first on the scene, the latter says he heard a shot and saw a bullet hole in the corpse. Later, the medical examiner says the man was killed by a blaster, and the utility men think his head was cut off—one thinks it was by an axe, and one with a disintegrator.
There are further bizarre occurrences (the dead man is later seen committing suicide by jumping from a skyscraper, etc.) but this all eventually collapses into a routine tale about (spoiler) a baddy trying to grab political power to foment trouble against neighbouring sectors, and using a hypnotic helmet to do so. This latter device ultimately makes the piece a sophisticated “and then I woke up and found it was all a dream” story.
Even though it has a very entertaining first half, this is another story that shouldn’t be here.
The same is true of Doorway Into Time by C. L. Moore (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, September 1944). This moody tale starts with an alien collector examining the exhibits in his museum cum treasure-house. As he examines his collection he experiences an increasing restlessness, and addresses this by going to his space-time portal to view various locations. He sees a couple from Earth and decides that the woman would make a good addition to his collection. The point of view then switches to the man and the rest of their story is about her abduction, and his attempt to rescue her from this strange museum.
This is better written and is more atmospheric than most of the material of this period (it feels like a much later story) but it is rather straightforward, and a number of details don’t convince (why was the portal left open after the woman was abducted, etc.). The ending is confusing too.
The Storm by A. E. van Vogt is the second of his ‘Mixed Men’ series, which appears to be (I haven’t yet read the first) about Dellian and non-Dellian robots who have fled a massacre they suffered at the hands of humanity for the Fifty Suns region of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. They have now, fifteen thousand years later, been discovered by the human spaceship Discovery, and its Grand Captain Laurr. The Dellians do not want Earth to learn of their location so they put Captain Maltby on the ship to supposedly guide the humans through a nearby galactic storm. However, the Dellians are really planning to put the ship into the storm’s fringes, hoping to disable and then capture it, thus preventing the ship from returning home to reveal their location. Maltby is a Mixed Man, both Dellian and non-Dellian and can switch between his dual minds to evade human probing and interrogation.
The rest of the story centres on Maltby and Laurr, initially as they spar on her ship, and then when they are shipwrecked by the storm on a nearby planet. Of course, by this time, Maltby has been conditioned to love Laurr as a way to break down any resistance while being interrogated, and Laurr is under a legal compulsion to reproduce with Maltby and populate the planet if they are not rescued. Unfortunately, this latter half turns what had been an excellent super science space opera into a boy gets girl story that is not as good—it is rather dated and corny—but overall this is still an impressive piece, and would have been even better in its time.
The Proud Robot by Henry Kuttner is the third and best of the ‘Gallegher’ stories I’ve read so far. In this one the scientist, who can only invent things when drunk—and invariably forgets what they are for when he is sober—has to contend with a disgruntled client whose cinema business is being ruined by pirated material, and a disobedient, narcissistic robot called Joe.
The story gets off to far too rambling a start but improves as it goes along, building to a reveal that is a mini tour de force. In this, Gallegher simultaneously regains control of the robot, and (spoiler) finds out what it is for (it is a can-opener cum content protection device!) I know that this may not seem impressive in summary, but in the context of the story the ending is both amusing and ingenious.
Symbiotica by Eric Frank Russell is the third of the ‘Jay Score/Marathon’ stories about the robot that is part of a space ship crew. Score plays a minor part in this one (I haven’t recently read the others so do not know how prominent he is in those) and the story mostly concerns the kidnap of the crew by the natives of an alien planet. The crew’s problems with the native flora and fauna is initially a pretty good read (Russell writes lucid, fast-paced and absorbing prose) but you need to ignore some idiotic behaviour on the part of the crew (some of whom seem to be practising for the role of short-lived extras in the Alien movies).
Unfortunately the piece goes on for too long, and ultimately descends into one of those humans-slaughter-aliens stories or, more accurately, dumb-humans-who-don’t-get-on-with-each-other-slaughtering-aliens stories—there is an inordinate amount of back-biting among the human crew throughout the story.
Another one to bump from the collection.
The Iron Standard by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is another of their stories that gets off to a rather confused start. This time we have a spaceship crew (which includes an Irishman, and a Native American, etc.) on an inaugural trip to Venus, where they are running short of food due to difficulties with the natives. If they had money (the planet is on the “iron standard”) they could buy what they need but they don’t, so cannot. Moreover, they cannot get jobs as the tarkomars (the native guilds) require a joining fee.
The story tells of the various schemes that undertake to try to make some money, and the many setbacks they experience. Eventually (spoiler) they prevail by disrupting the Venusians’ stable monetary system, and the tarkomars pay them to stop what they are doing.
This is probably one of those stories that is more interesting for the ideas (economic) and attitudes (there is more than a whiff of human exceptionalism and the supremacy of the capitalist system in this, not to mention a generally imperialist outlook about other cultures) than it is for the story, but is entertaining enough for all that.

As well as the stories Martin Greenberg contributes an Introduction, which gives a history of 1943 before covering events in the SF world:

In the real world it was another good year, despite the fact that most of the writers and fans were in the armed forces or otherwise engaged.
The news was not completely good. Astonishing Stories folded in April, and the beloved Unknown Worlds published its last issue in October—it instantly became a legend.
But wonderous things were happening in the real world: Fritz Leiber published Gather Darkness. Donovan’s Brain by Curt Siodmak and The Lost Traveller by Ruthven Todd appeared, as did Judgement Night by C. L. Moore, The Book of Ptath by A. E. van Vogt, and Perelandra by C. L. Lewis. Some of these were magazine serials which would not see book publication for many years. Donald A. Wollheim broke new ground with The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, the first paperback sf anthology. And James H. Schmitz made his maiden voyage into reality in August with “Greenface.”
Death took Stephen Vincent Benet, A. Merritt, and The Spider.
But distant wings were beating as Joe Haldeman, Christopher Priest, James Baen, Mick Farren, Robert M. Philmus, Cecelia Holland, Chris Boyce, and Ian Watson were born.  p. 9

There are also Story introductions by both Martin H. Greenberg and Isaac Asimov. Greenberg’s introductions are informative, but Asimov’s are sometimes more about himself than the writer:

I certainly can’t quarrel with Marty’s view that Kuttner and Moore were the most successful husband-and-wife writing team in science fiction. There have been others, of course; Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm are perhaps the most prominent contemporary example, although I don’t believe they collaborate. As a personal touch, my wife, Janet Jeppson, has published two science fiction novels and several shorter pieces. If she hadn’t gotten started so late in life (being a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst is time-consuming both in training and the practice) why, who knows, we might have given them all a run for their money.  p. 58

I have somehow developed the notion that I have a patent on robot stories or, at the very least, that no one’s robots, either in reality or fiction, are allowed to deviate from the Three Laws of Robotics. That’s just fantasy on my part but it’s a harmless fantasy, I hope. In any case, my robots are not usuform and I have on occasion argued vehemently against usuformity. However, I always liked Tony Boucher so much (who didn’t?) that I wouldn’t have dreamed of arguing with him. If he wants to infringe on my patent rights, why let him, say I.  p. 91

For some fifteen years after “Clash By Night” appeared, it was still possible to write of Venus’s oceans and I published Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus in 1954.  p. 114

[Hamilton’s] The Universe Wreckers was one of the delights of my childhood. It embarrassed me that when I finally met him, I had become better known than he was. It struck me as lèse majesté. He was a gentle, self-possessed soul, though, and he didn’t seem to mind.  p. 172-173

In conclusion this isn’t a bad anthology, and (from what I’ve read so far) it represents the year fairly well. That said, I’d drop the Boucher, Brown, Moore, and Russell stories, and include the following (I’ve currently only read around a quarter of the five hundred or so stories published this year so this selection may change—see the 1944 Retro Hugos tab above for an almost complete list of 1943 stories):

Malcolm Jameson, Blind Alley (Unknown, June)
Ray Bradbury, The Scythe (Weird Tales, July)
Robert Bloch, It Happened Tomorrow (Astonishing Stories, February)
Fritz Leiber, Thieves’ House (Unknown, February)
A. E. van Vogt, The Witch (Unknown, February)
E. Mayne Hull, The Ultimate Wish (Unknown, February)

And possibly/probably:

Fritz Leiber, The Mutant’s Brother (Astounding, August)
Lester del Rey, Whom the Gods Love (Astounding, June)
Robert Bloch, Yours Truly–Jack the Ripper (Weird Tales, July)
Henry Kuttner, Wet Magic (Unknown, February)

You’ll note from the list above that I have included several fantasy stories in my list: one problem that the Asimov/Greenberg volumes have (in common with many, many other reprint “SF” anthologies from the mid-1940s onwards) is that they do not include fantasy, which is then omitted from the body of work that is “remembered” by the field. I think this is a shame as Jameson’s Blind Alley deserves to be as well-known as any of the other stories in this book (except Mimsy, maybe).
Other factors that distort the body of work remembered by the field are: the limited number of anthologists (gatekeepers) collecting short fiction (it sometimes seems like 90% of all reprint anthologies are edited by the same dozen people); story length (novellas are, I would argue, under-represented in anthologies because of their length, whereas short, gimmicky stories are over-represented—I’m looking at your To Serve Man, Damon Knight); whether reprint rights are available (three Heinlein stories were missing from an earlier volume, and in other cases it is difficult to find out/and or contact the deceased writer’s estate, etc.); and myriad other factors, such as how well the anthologies sell or how long they are in print for, etc.
I’m not sure what the answer to this is (or whether it really matters—we are all dust in the end) but perhaps it would be a good thing if more SF readers looked out an old magazine or two now and then, and proselytized about any good but forgotten work they find. There are a lot of old magazines on archive.org nowadays—give it a go, you may be pleasantly surprised.  ●

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1. Here are the links to the full reviews of stories I’ve covered before, for both the Greenberg/Asimov anthology, and for my own ‘Best of’ picks:

The Cave • novelette by P. Schuyler Miller (Astounding, March 1943)
The Halfling • novelette by Leigh Brackett (Astonishing Stories, February 1943)
Mimsy Were the Borogoves • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (Astounding, February 1943)
Q. U. R. • short story by Anthony Boucher (Astounding, March 1943)
Clash by Night • novella by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (Astounding, March 1943)
Exile • short story by Edmond Hamilton
Daymare • novelette by Fredric Brown
Doorway Into Time • short story by C. L. Moore
The Storm • novelette by A. E. van Vogt
The Proud Robot • novelette by Henry Kuttner
Symbiotica • novelette by Eric Frank Russell
The Iron Standard • short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

Blind Alley • novelette by Malcolm Jameson (Unknown, June 1943)
The Scythe • short story by Ray Bradbury (Weird Tales, July 1943)
It Happened Tomorrow • novelette by Robert Bloch (Astonishing Stories, February)
Thieves’ House • novelette by Fritz Leiber (Unknown, February 1943)
The Witch • novelette by A. E. van Vogt (Unknown, February 1943)
The Ultimate Wish • short story by E. Mayne Hull (Unknown, February 1943)
The Mutant’s Brother • Fritz Leiber,
Whom the Gods Love • short story by Lester del Rey (Astounding, July 1943)
Yours Truly — Jack the Ripper • short story by Robert Bloch (Weird Tales, July 1943)
Wet Magic • novella by Henry Kuttner (Unknown, February 1943)

2. Greenberg starts his introduction to Clash By Night with this:

There is considerable debate about the authorship of this powerful story, with some sources claiming that Kuttner did this one alone, while others claim that it was a collaboration.  p. 113

I doubt that it is a solo Kuttner effort, and Greenberg does not say what his sources are.  ●