The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1: 1929-1964
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Book Summary Information
Editor: Robert SilverbergEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-02-01
ISBN: 0765305372
Number of pages: 576
Publisher: Orb Books
Book Reviews of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1: 1929-1964
Book Review: There will be spoilers
Summary: 4 Stars
In mid-seventies, I joined the Science Fiction Book Club and this was one of the first books that I received, and I thought that this was a great book then. And Silverberg was always one of the best anthologists that sf ever had. After thirty years I decided to re-read the book, but after thirty years, things change, people change, and times change, and some of the stories here have dated badly.
I haven't seen much in the way of any reviews of most of the stories themselves, so here goes, arranged by loosely by some of the themes to be found here. One of the most prominent themes is the quest story. There are three stories here that clearly fall into the quest theme.
--The first is "The Quest For Saint Aquin" by Anthony Boucher, the original editor of "Fantasy & Science Fiction". Like most quests, this story starts out as a quest for something external (St. Aquin) and ends up a quest for something internal (faith). Set in the near future where the religious is persecuted, a neophyte priest secretly looks for the legendary St. Aquin in an effort re-start Christianity. This story was written during McCarthyism's beginning, and as a quest through ideological territories, it has not lost its relevancy. Five stars.
--Another quest for faith is the gimmick story "The Nine Million Names Of God" by Arthur C. Clarke, a story that won out over his "The Star" (?). "Nine Million" is a hokey, forgettable, by-the-numbers gag story with a telegraphed ending. Some monks are making a religious quest to find and note all of the nine million names of God, then the world will end. Guess what? Once read, there is no desire to ever re-read the story. One star.
--The last quest story is James Blish's classic sf adventure "Surface Tension" in which some genetically engineered micro-humans must learn to co-operate amongst themselves, and learn to refine and reinvent basic technology so that they can make a quest beyond their own small pond, it is a quest story, an adventure, a metaphor, and a coming of age story with an exotic local. Five stars.
There are two stories here that are gimmick stories that actually give their twists out in their beginnings.
--Never being a fan, the "bad seed" story often makes the child smarter than they really could be. While Jerome Bixby's "The Good Life" may superficially be a bad seed horror story, or a metaphor about society's fear of its youth, it is also so much more. It transcends its pulp origins by also being a morality tale about how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Five stars.
--Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" is a sfnal treatment of Jack London's "To Build A Fire", and has always been a source of much discussion. Having been raised by, and having been a factory rat, my take on this story is different than most. Godwin's story is a scathing indictment on the type of the interminable corporate greed and utter cheapness that pervades most industries. Godwin states that physics rule space travel, but, as we have recently seen, bottom-line economics rule more than anything else. The story is about a stowaway that finds that a life saving mission will fail if she is left alive, and the struggle to save her and the mission. There is no doubt that the girl could have been saved if a nickel's worth of pre-planning had taken place, but the corporate idea of placing money over life is clearly what's being portrayed here. I originally liked this story, then hated it, and not because of the story's politics, but, because the story is so shamelessly manipulative. But, in the end, I guess I like it after all. Four stars.
--Richard Matheson's "Born Of Man And Woman" was not only his first published story, but is still one of his best. It also deals with family betrayal; a child is born horribly deformed during the conformitist fifties, and like his later stories "Mute" and "The Faces", it's about child abuse. While shallowly a mere horror story, and only a half a dozen pages long, Matheson's story deals with the pain, and confusion of abuse from the child's point of view. While the sfnal content is tangential, this story still deserves its fame, has not dated since 1950, and shows why Matheson would go on to influence people like Stephens King and Spielberg, and be an influence in the horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres, and be an influence in both prose and film. Five+ stars.
--The third story is Judith Merrill's "That Only A Mother", and while this could have been a story about a mother's blind love, the father's shock at being kept in ignorance, and how the family as a whole has to pull together and rise above adversity, it's not. Maybe it's because we get a saccharine build-up, then the child's disability is revealed in the same manner as a Lovecraftian monster, EVEN with italics. While I don't have any children, and I don't know how I would react in the same situation; being handicapped, I found the story offensive. While the story comes from the conformatist fifties, it dates horribly. Zero stars.
America was at war during the early forties and its influence comes through in four war stories reprinted here:
--Merrill's story also falls into this category and is dealt with above, leaving three others, the first being A. E. van Vogt's "The Weapon Shop". Again, it is a story whose theme hasn't dated. A clandestine organization is fighting the good fight against a corrupt dictatorship, by selling weapons, and while a thinly veiled bit of fifth columnist war propaganda, the story ends up still being a good relevant cautionary story. Four stars.
--Fred Brown earned his reputation, by being a writer of the gag story. Still, when he got down to business, like in "Arena", he took a back seat to nobody, and "Arena" is a superior war-adventure story about a man against an alien. It has been filmed (movies and episodic tv), and while "Arena" may be predictable, it has the power of good heroic storytelling. The lead character is an everyman, the alien is really alien, the landscape is truly hostile, and the stakes are high, as this everyman must fight for the destiny of human race. Five stars.
--Murray Leinster really was one of the great ones, but, unfortunately, "First Contact" wasn't one of his best. It's pure war paranoia about two space ships of two civilizations who meet, and have to decide how to, and whether to trust or kill each other. An impossible situation, Leinster gives us two solutions, one barely believable, and the other truly lame and having to do with telling dirty jokes. This story does Leinster no service, and the plot has been done better on tv. Two stars.
Science fiction wouldn't be science fiction with some serious social commentary, and the first two deal with unions.
--Robert Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" is about the work stoppage of a future highway by a union. This story is an anti-union tirade, and deserves a tirade in response. Here all the unionists are greedy, self-serving, cold-blooded, sociopathic, whining murderers, while the man that represents the "establishment" is a good, family oriented, empathic, organized, natural leader. Bah! Zero stars.
--Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live In Vain" is the story that made Smith's reputation, and is also anti-union. Here scanners are cyborgs who ferry humanity around space, but, unfortunately, somebody has come up with a refined method of space travel. The possibility is that scanners might become obsolete, so the scanners then do what all "subversive" union groups do, they become assassins. However, one scanner "comes to his senses", realizes that his brother scanners are wrong, turns them in to the establishment, they see the light, become "good" citizens, and start devoting themselves to the betterment of society. Propaganda. Zero stars.
These two stories where written back in, ah, who the Hell cares. Both stories are horribly dated, conservative, anti-union propaganda in that the "establishment" is portrayed as always good, and good for you, but unionists are bad, subversive, greedy malcontents, and are only in it for their own self-serving purposes. Both authors have done much better work that should have been recognized.
--Another story that uses sf for the purpose of social commentary is Fritz Leiber's dark "Coming Attractions", and Leiber's story is more relevant today than it was back when it was first published. This is because, I think, that the situations described are more acknowledged today than they were then. This was one of sf's first experiments with decadence. It broke new ground by mentioning a nasty form of joyriding, nude dancing, underground knife fights, unmarried sex, techno musik of some kind, and how this all seems to exist in a type of puritanical society that exists in many religiously conservative nations. Leiber also nastily rips apart the whole "boy-meets-girl" theme, in what was perhaps sf's first story to seriously examine the symbiotic/parasitic relationship that exists between one abusive person and their submissive partner. Truly a "dangerous vision" in its time. Five stars.
--"Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov was voted the best sf story of all time, and is about the death of a civilization due to a 2500 yearly nightfall. The story seems to date because of too many scientific implausibilities to list here, and that the civilization is too much like ours. I kept wondering just what WOULD a society in which there has been no darkness REALLY be like, and what WOULD their physiology be like if they had evolved in total sunlight. Asimov has done so much better. Three stars.
Three stories deal with time travel:
--"Twilight" by John Campbell, Jr., is about a man from the future who finds himself in the past, our present, telling about the eventual eclipse of mankind. "Twilight" doesn't quite work for me, it's too talky; some of this may just be my fault. Three stars.
--Despite it being a scathing satiric tirade, "The Little Black Bag" by C. M. Kornbluth unfortunately seems to be better known for its O. Henry ending than for the story itself. Kornbluth had little use for humanity, and it shows here as a medical bag from the future is accidentally transported into the hands of an unlicensed drunken doctor, who transforms his life, and helps others. While this could have been a story about the salvation, and, rebirth of a man into a better human being, while saying a few things, good and bad, about medicine, the story sadly ends up as being nothing more than yet another vehicle for one of Kornbluth's rants of superiority and intellectual nazism. The story fails, because in the end, the characters are all cliché, and the supersmart end up being no smarter than the superstupid. That may be the point, but, the story could have been better. Three stars.
--"Mimsey Were The Borogroves" by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore is easily the best of the three, and while promoting nurture over nature, Kuttner & Moore speculate on what is the basis of intelligence. This story deals with the same theme as Kornbluth's, this time some disposable toys are transported back into the past, are picked up by some "modern" children, the toys then transform the children's way of thinking. The story also focuses on the relationship between the children and their parents, who are fairly clueless as to the toys eventual impact. Right or wrong, the story contains some serious speculation on the origins of, and the formation of intelligence, with a truly heartbreaking ending. Five+ stars.
There are two just plain people stories with an sfnal bent:
--"Helen O'Loy" is a marriage of the romance and robot genres to good effect by Lester Del Rey, and it proves that the sf romance genre is nothing new. Just an old-fashioned sf story about love, it is reminiscent of some of Theodore Sturgeon's later stories, while interesting for its time, the story's plot is fairly commonplace now. Four stars.
--"Huddling Place" by Clifford Simak is one of his inter-related "City" stories, makes a point that seems more and more valid, in dealing with how mental illness, in this case agoraphobia, slowly develops. A surgeon is required to save his best friends life in an emergency, but, he can't leave his "Huddling Place". The ending is predictable, but still has power, and like in Fred Pohl's story "The Man Who Ate The World" we see how the effects of mental illness can make even the powerful and intelligent helpless. Five stars.
Mental illness also figures in the next two stories, which are also classic sf crime stories.
--The first is dazzling, "Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester will be a real surprise to anyone who thinks of Bester as merely a humorist. This is because it is a mean, vicious, chilling psychological horror story in which a man is cursed with owning a psychotic android that keeps committing sadistic murders. The story constantly blurs the line between the android's and the master's identity, from the first person to the third person, all sometimes in the same paragraph, so in the end we are never sure as who the killer really is, or who is really the master, or the slave. The story also seems to feature an almost sexual symbiotic/parasitic to the relationship of the man and android. Five+ stars.
--Bester's story is immediately followed by "The Country Of The Kind", in which Damon Knight writes of a future where sociopath criminals are set free into society. They are however, altered so that they cannot commit interpersonal violence, and their bodies are altered so that their body odors force them to be ostracized by the other members of society. These criminals may commit whatever property crimes they wish, but this is an empty act, as nobody will acknowledge either their offenses or their presence. Five stars.
There are two stories here dealing with research and science:
--The first being Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God", and is about a man's pure unadulterated love of research and what happens when the man meets and underestimates another man with an equal amount of passion, this time for power and money. Sturgeon is in excellent form here as he examines the amorality of both sides, and the self-divorcing of their own humanity, and of two men who, in the end, were more alike than they were different. Still, I didn't care for this story as much as I do for much of Sturgeon's other works, but this is my fault. Four stars.
--Daniel Keys knocked about sf for a fair amount of time as an editor and writer, but before finding mainstream fame, he published "Flowers For Algernon" an emotional gem about Charlie Gordon, a retarded man whose ambition is merely to be smart, and to be normal. Charlie's brain is operated on, and we see his rise and fall in the form of a personal diary. Rarely has such a stylistic device been used so effectively, and we are torn apart by the ending, which is one of sf's true emotional highpoints. Five+ stars.
What about that good ol' fashioned sense of wonder? The romance of adventure, the exotic, the very thing that made most of us want to read sf in the first place? COINCIDENTLY, the book is bracketed by two of these, one published about thirty years after the other, and showing it, but with neither showing the worse for the wear as far as imagination goes.
--The first, and the anthology's opener, is Stanley Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey", and with its non-exploitive, non-sensationalistic title, it set itself apart from the typical sf of its day. While the characters are cliché Hollywood stock characters, and the telling is dated, with peripheral characters constantly interrupting the protagonist to "to keep the story moving", the story itself is still grand early world building. Told in a semi-documentary mode, it's the story of an astronaut who crashes on Mars, treks across an alien landscape, and makes first contact with three very different types of alien creatures, none of which were much like anything else in the adventure pulps of its day. Sadly, Weinbaum died of cancer before he could see this printed. What a writer he could have been. Three stars, only because of the dated storytelling style.
-- The anthology's ender is Roger Zelazny's " A Rose For Ecclesiastes" shows not only a more mature writing style than Weinbaum's, but shows us a much more mature, although just as impossible, Martian civilization. This may also have been the first serious sf story to seriously use linguistics as a science, as a scholar must learn the Martian language so that our civilization are the Martian's can interact. This story is notable in that it is one of the very few stories that I have read over the last forty years to accurately portray the sheer JOY that one can experience while doing research.
The lead character is a snotty, self-superior, linguistic genius, but despite his age, he has yet to reach maturity. Eventually though, we sympathize with him as he gradually realizes that the others on the expedition to Mars nearly aren't as DUMB as HE thinks they are, and HE isn't nearly as smart as HE thinks he is.
This is a pure classic about love, growing up, and the love of a chosen scientific endeavor. It took me thirty years to re-read this story, to understand what I originally missed. For this I should be flogged, but, thankfully I have lived long enough to rectify my ignorance, and for this I am grateful. "A Rose For Ecclesiastes" is a story that should be mandatory reading for everybody in sf. Five+ stars.
In the end however, looking back at these stories, very few would fit into just one pre-fab niche, or even genre, as all good fiction is more than just the marketing genre they are published as. Are these really the best sf stories published from the years 1934-1963? Probably not, I know I would have picked some, and not some others, but then, I wasn't asked. All-in-all though, this truly is one of those "essential" volumes that we keep hearing about.
Summary of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1: 1929-1964
The definitive collection of the best in science fiction stories between 1929-1964.
This book contains twenty-six of the greatest science fiction stories ever written. They represent the considered verdict of the Science Fiction Writers of America, those who have shaped the genre and who know, more intimately than anyone else, what the criteria for excellence in the field should be. The authors chosen for The Science Fiction Hall Fame are the men and women who have shaped the body and heart of modern science fiction; their brilliantly imaginative creations continue to inspire and astound new generations of writers and fans.
Robert Heinlein in "The Roads Must Roll" describes an industrial civilization of the future caught up in the deadly flaws of its own complexity. "Country of the Kind," by Damon Knight, is a frightening portrayal of biological mutation. "Nightfall," by Isaac Asimov, one of the greatest stories in the science fiction field, is the story of a planet where the sun sets only once every millennium and is a chilling study in mass psychology.
Originally published in 1970 to honor those writers and their stories that had come before the institution of the Nebula Awards, The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame, Volume One, was the book that introduced tens of thousands of young readers to the wonders of science fiction. Too long unavailable, this new edition will treasured by all science fiction fans everywhere.
The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame, Volume One, includes the following stories:
This book contains twenty-six of the greatest science fiction stories ever written. They represent the considered verdict of the Science Fiction Writers of America, those who have shaped the genre and who know, more intimately than anyone else, what the criteria for excellence in the field should be. The authors chosen for The Science Fiction Hall Fame are the men and women who have shaped the body and heart of modern science fiction; their brilliantly imaginative creations continue to inspire and astound new generations of writers and fans.
Robert Heinlein in "The Roads Must Roll" describes an industrial civilization of the future caught up in the deadly flaws of its own complexity. "Country of the Kind," by Damon Knight, is a frightening portrayal of biological mutation. "Nightfall," by Isaac Asimov, one of the greatest stories in the science fiction field, is the story of a planet where the sun sets only once every millennium and is a chilling study in mass psychology.
Originally published in 1970 to honor those writers and their stories that had come before the institution of the Nebula Awards, The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame, Volume One, was the book that introduced tens of thousands of young readers to the wonders of science fiction. Too long unavailable, this new edition will treasured by all science fiction fans everywhere.
The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame, Volume One, includes the following stories:
Introduction by Robert Silverberg
"A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum
"Twilight" by John W. Campbell
"Helen O'Loy" by Lester del Rey
"The Roads Must Roll" by Robert A. Heinlein
"Microcosmic God" by Theodore Sturgeon
"Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov
"The Weapon Shop" by A. E. van Vogt
"Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett
"Huddling Place" by Clifford D. Simak
"Arena" by Frederic Brown
"First Contact" by Murray Leinster
"That Only a Mother" by Judith Merril
"Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith
"Mars is Heaven!" by Ray Bradbury
"The Little Black Bag" by C. M. Kornbluth
"Born of Man and Woman" by Richard Matheson
"Coming Attraction" by Fritz Leiber
"The Quest for Saint Aquin" by Anthony Boucher
"Surface Tension" by James Blish
"The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke
"It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby
"The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin
"Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester
"The Country of the Kind," Damon Knight
"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes
"A Rose for Ecclesiastes" by Roger Zelazny
"A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum
"Twilight" by John W. Campbell
"Helen O'Loy" by Lester del Rey
"The Roads Must Roll" by Robert A. Heinlein
"Microcosmic God" by Theodore Sturgeon
"Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov
"The Weapon Shop" by A. E. van Vogt
"Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett
"Huddling Place" by Clifford D. Simak
"Arena" by Frederic Brown
"First Contact" by Murray Leinster
"That Only a Mother" by Judith Merril
"Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith
"Mars is Heaven!" by Ray Bradbury
"The Little Black Bag" by C. M. Kornbluth
"Born of Man and Woman" by Richard Matheson
"Coming Attraction" by Fritz Leiber
"The Quest for Saint Aquin" by Anthony Boucher
"Surface Tension" by James Blish
"The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke
"It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby
"The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin
"Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester
"The Country of the Kind," Damon Knight
"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes
"A Rose for Ecclesiastes" by Roger Zelazny
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