10 stories from the 50s plus 2 from the early 60s; a rocking great early sf collection which exploded my teenage brain way back when. In those days ea10 stories from the 50s plus 2 from the early 60s; a rocking great early sf collection which exploded my teenage brain way back when. In those days each story created entirely new types of thoughts in my brain. Now I’m lucky to get a new thought once every six years. My favourites here are :
- "The First Men" by Howard Fast. A tale full of naïve heartstopping optimism, a rare quality in science fiction. Psychologists create a community of orphan children (grabbed up from all over the world) with the idea of discovering what would happen if such kids were shielded from the toxic environments they usually grow up in and brought up with love. What happens is that they discover their innate mental abilities – telekinesis, telepathy, flying, whatnot – and seal themselves off from the rest of the world. As you would.
- "Build Up Logically" by Howard Schoenfeld. Frank put his hand out in front of him and moved it back and forth a couple of times, inventing the rabbit. Getting to feel the creature’s fur, he built it up logically from the feel. It was the only animal that could have produced that particular feel, and I was proud of him for thinking of it.
- "The Tunnel Under the World" by Frederik Pohl. Starts off as a Groundhog style repeating day (stories (and movies) like that are a whole genre of their own), then gets wilder and crazier. Then more crazier.
In the 50s and 60 science fiction writers had cute ideas and wrote 30 page stories about them. Now they have vast complicated dreams and write 800 page novels about them....more
It’s clear that some kindly authors sit around thinking “What is the exact book that Paul Bryant wants to read? Aha! Got it! I will now write that booIt’s clear that some kindly authors sit around thinking “What is the exact book that Paul Bryant wants to read? Aha! Got it! I will now write that book!” Alec Nevala-Lee is one of those lovely writers. * His book is that perfect thing I never thought could exist, a kind of biography of John W Campbell who was the living embodiment of science fiction from the 30s to the 70s and whose life was entwined with those of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and L Ron Hubbard. As a youthful SF fan I had wondered long about these guys and I never thought I’d ever get to find out what they were like, and what they did apart from type their sometimes brilliant stories.
Lemme tell you, it’s a strange tale.
A DIGRESSION ABOUT THE RECHERCHE NOMENCLATURE OF AMERICAN GOLDEN AGE SF AUTHORS
I was always fascinated by their weird names :
Cordwainer Smith L Sprague de Camp H Beam Piper Theodore Sturgeon Damon Knight A E van Vogt And not forgetting two famous editors Groff Conklin August Derleth
Sorry to say that the science fiction community could not sustain this barrage of otherworldliness and modern writers have really boring names like Christopher Rowe, Colin Davies, Robert Reed and Pat Murphy. No offence, but really, how dull.
WHAT DOES AN EDITOR DO?
I thought in my ignorance that a magazine editor reads stuff and accepts or rejects it and sometimes suggests improvements. John Campbell was not like this. He did himself write one very famous story called Who Goes There? In 1938, which was filmed as The Thing, but he was not a writer. Instead he had a whole lot of tame authors at his disposal, and he would spin plots and ideas out of his brain, and tell them to write stories with these plots and ideas in them. Then he would demand rewrites, and then maybe he would publish them. For instance, he pounced on the starstruck overawed 22 year old Isaac Asimov and more or less made him write the Foundation series of stories & later novels, and also demanded more robot stories too. The famous three laws of Robotics were invented during long conversations between the two. Each said the other invented them.
Campbell believed in SF to an almost painful degree, and this was a good thing. His magazine was the best and paid the best. But also, as we get to find out very dismayingly as we speed through this tremendous book, John Campbell was a total crank, not to mention a rightwing pro-Vietnam War anti-civil rights homophobic racist. I will come back to this in a moment. But first…
THERE’S A SCIENTOLOGIST ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
The story of early SF and the personalities involved is a great story but Alec Nevala-Lee has to hang on tight because one of the three big authors orbiting Astounding magazine was none other than L Ron Hubbard, and HIS crazy mindbending story is way bigger than the main story Alec is trying to tell here. L Ron comes quite close to derailing this book because as soon as the epic mutant wierdness that was L Ron’s life starts to unfold the reader is like to say okay Alec, forget science fiction, this is WAY loonier and way more FUN!
Trying to contain (some of) the story of the amazing fraud that was L Ron Hubbard in this book is like igniting some jumping jacks and then throwing them in a tin box.
It began with the invented gibberish called Dianetics. Campbell was in on the ground floor, taking it all in and suggesting lines of enquiry to the madman Hubbard. It was trailed in an article in Astounding. Dianetics was going to be like the second coming, a new science of the mind which would replace psychiatry, which was totally wrong, and would fix everybody’s mental ailments in one go. Just purchase this slim volume, Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health, published in May 1950, yours for ten measly bucks.
Campbell wrote to Heinlein about the life-saving properties of Dianetics:
We have case histories on homos. One we worked on for ten days got married three months later. A fifteen year record of homosexuality behind him, too.
Naturally the psychiatry industry did not take this seriously, when they noticed it at all they figured LRH was another in a long line of quacks. But of course this was at the time when the psychiatric profession was dishing out electro-shock therapy, insulin comas and pre-frontal lobotomies right and left to their poor customers. So who were the quacks? Well of course just because I’m wrong doesn’t make you right.
So Dianetics became Scientology and for tax reasons Scientology stopped being a therapy and started being a religion, as you know.
ASIMOV, THE LIBERAL-LEFT SCEPTICAL SEX PEST
So Hubbard and Campbell involved Robert Heinlein in this dianetics/scientology mumbo jumbo, and Isaac Asimov, the other big name author of the day, immediately saw this was a crock and wanted nothing to do with it. Good old Isaac. Also, he always stuck to his socially progressive liberal left ideas when these three looming conservatives were wagging their fingers in his direction. Again, good old Isaac! I always loved his stories.
Unfortunately this book reveals that he was an incessant abuser of all and every women that came within his grasp, and I mean grasp. He was the traditional octopus man. People made jokes about it. Women denounced him. But he never stopped. I hated reading all that.
At another publisher, the women found excuses to leave the building whenever he was scheduled to visit
…but if this treatment of women was often inexcusable, or worse, it did little to diminish the affection in which he was held by other men
CAMPBELL THE TOTAL RACIST
This is a warts ‘n’ all book and there is some serious racist shit you have to contend with from Campbell. For instance he defends using the n word, he defends slavery, he votes for George Wallace, he believed that some races had lower IQs than others… he was truly awful.
CAMPBELL THE CLASSIC CRANK
He ran the best SF magazine for decades but he was the guy who would believe like ANYTHING. Psi powers, the Dean drive (don’t ask), any flake that came in the door, he was Yeah! This will change all of human life! He was a really silly guy.
ALEC NEVALA-LEE HAS ONLY GOT ONE PAIR OF HANDS
As I was reading I kept saying hey Alec – tell me more about that guy, or more about this thing here, that thing there…. Bring some more of those old names to life for me… who was H Beam Piper?? But this book was already 525 pages long.
4.5 stars, a must for anyone with a fondness for ancient SF
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*There’s the other type too, the one who think “What is the book that will fool Paul Bryant into thinking he will like it but when he reads it he will be driven half crazy with aggravation? I will write that book!” Thank you for nothing, Declan Kiberd and A O Scott....more
This gets the same rating as Volume 1 in this series - FIVE STARS for the concept and the execution (the complete short Sturgeon in chronological ordeThis gets the same rating as Volume 1 in this series - FIVE STARS for the concept and the execution (the complete short Sturgeon in chronological order in THIRTEEN lavish volumes) but two stars for this particular volume because he was only 22 and 23 when he wrote these in 1940 and 1941 and just between me and you they aren't that good.
I checked and I think volume 4 (Thunder and Roses) is where they start getting great. You may wish to start there. I know it might feel wrong but you probably don't want to spend such a lot of time with such a very jokey young adult like Theodore was....more
Modern science fiction writers try to do too much all at once. By modern I mean anything after 1990. Before then, they came up with a nice idea and wrModern science fiction writers try to do too much all at once. By modern I mean anything after 1990. Before then, they came up with a nice idea and wrote a story round their single idea set either in the present or on a planet that only had three things different from Earth or in the future which only had three things different in it than 1975. These days, that’s all way too simple. If you’re writing about another planet it has to have a complex thoroughly worked-out ecology based on methane and involving magnetic semipoles connected by superstrings. If you’re writing about the future you have to cram thirtyfive edgy inventions into your first three paragraphs (and please, that old internet-in-your-eyeballs is so passe now), to assure the reader that when you talk about the year 2278 you don’t just mean they replaced all those concrete buildings with shiny mirrored ones and they now have flying taxis.
All of this franticness gives me a headache. It is like they think they have to invent a whole new original world in every story. Still, of course there are many great sf stories being written, and this book had lots of excellent ones. My favourites were
Greg Bear: "Blood Music" (which became a really bonkers novel, read that instead) Lucius Shepard: "Salvador" Bruce Sterling: "Dinner in Audoghast" John Crowley: "Snow" Eileen Gunn: "Stable Strategies for Middle Management" Mike Resnick: "Kirinyaga" Terry Bisson: "Bears Discover Fire" Connie Willis: "Even the Queen" Joe Haldeman: "None So Blind" Brian Stableford: "Mortimer Gray's History of Death" Michael Swanwick: "The Dead" Stephen Baxter: "People Came From Earth" David Marusek: "The Wedding Album"
Reading old science fiction is like moving into a much smaller house while you’re drunk. You are going to bang your head and stub your toe on those atReading old science fiction is like moving into a much smaller house while you’re drunk. You are going to bang your head and stub your toe on those attitudes - here's one guy talking about his secretary -
Since the day when Lew had noticed that Tina had the correct proportions of dress-filling substances, Sam’s chances had been worth a crowbar at Fort Knox.
The stories themselves have a very clear cartoonish quality, they’re all about The Idea. The tellers of these tales all seem to be wry guys in armchairs smoking pipes, but the ideas themselves are a lot sharper and clearer than modern sf because they were coming up with them for the first time. Modern sf has almost no new ideas but instead has massive style, beautiful writers, it’s art.
This book is part of a series of 25 retrospective year’s-bests running from 1939 to 1963. It’s one of several hundred anthologies where Martin Greenberg does the actual work involved and Isaac Asimov steps in at the last minute and sprinkles a few comical remarks here and there, puts his name in the title and cashes the cheque. Yes, he was a giant of the field, but didn’t he love to tell you he was! The size of Isaac Asimov’s ego! It’s like one of those interstellar cruiseships he wrote about. In the introductions to these stories he’s always bragging about this, bragging about that, and then bragging about how modest he is! (That’s supposed to be comical.) This is Isaac, from one of the story intros -
Some science fiction writers are pertinacious and seemingly endless, to the delight of their readers. As an example, Bob Heinlein, Arthur Clarke and I (the endlessly cited “Big Three”) have been at it for forty years and more, and show absolutely no signs of any loss in ability.
It has to be said – Isaac Asimov was annoying....more
Kyrie by Poul Anderson The Worm that Flies by Brian W Aldiss Going Down Smooth by Robert Silverberg Masks by DaThis has no less than five great stories :
Kyrie by Poul Anderson The Worm that Flies by Brian W Aldiss Going Down Smooth by Robert Silverberg Masks by Damon Knight The Dance of the Changer and the Three by Terry Carr
The third and the fourth of those are very paranoid, the second and the fifth are very weird and the first one is a wow. ...more
I'm beginning to think that the problem with 60s science fiction is it's seeming irresistible tendency to turn stories into parables, usually with a BI'm beginning to think that the problem with 60s science fiction is it's seeming irresistible tendency to turn stories into parables, usually with a Biblical flavour to them. And that is not a good thing. ...more
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