Astounding Stories of Super Science

Astounding Stories: The 60th Anniversary Collection; edited by James Gunn (Easton Press, 1990). Three volumes, introductions by Poul Anderson (black cover volume), Stanley Schmidt (red cover volume) and Isaac Asimov (blue cover volume).

Much of my short story reading for the year came from multi-author collections. I also read a number of magazines (which will be mentioned later). Many of these stories I have read previously, but it has been (in some cases) decades, so it was like discovering them for the first time.

The first major collection I read was a trio of books edited by James Gunn, Astounding Stories: The 60th Anniversary Collection (published by Easton Press in 1990). It's a very nice collection (and I recall it was priced pretty nice as well!), gilt edges, ribbon bookmarks, leather or pseudo-leather covers (all the usual Easton Press features).

Even nicer are the introductions (Stanley Schmidt, Isaac Asimov and Poul Anderson) and the artwork. Each story is prefaced by the cover of the issue of Astounding that it originally appeared in. It's a nice way to see how the artwork evolved over the years.

The three volumes were...

Astounding Stories: The 60th Anniversary Collection (Volume I, edited by James Gunn, introduction by Stanley Schmidt, the red cover volume): The Sargasso of Space by Edmond Hamilton (September 1931); The Fifth-Dimension Tube by Murray Leinster (January 1933); The Shadow Out of Time by H.P. Lovecraft (June 1936); The Eternal Wanderer by Nat Schachner (November 1936); Cloak of Aesir by Don A. Stuart (pseudonym for John W. Campbell, Jr.) (March 1939); The Roads Must Roll by Robert A. Heinlein (June 1940); The Stolen Dormouse by L. Sprague de Camp (April 1941); The Changeling by A.E. Van Vogt (April 1944).

Counts as eight stories for the Short Story Project.

This volume, overall, contains the oldest stories in the collection. It also, for the most part, is the weakest of the three volumes for that reason and because several stories are either sequels or part of a series.

The best tales here are The Shadow Out of Time, Cloak of Aesir, The Roads Must Roll and The Stolen Dormouse.

The Shadow Out of Time is part of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, and (along with a few other tales such as At the Mountains of Madness) one of the strongest stories in the cycle. Lovecraft was a wildly variable writer (and, from what I've read, quite a eccentric individual). The story represented something of a triumph for Lovecraft, placing a story in a magazine that had a much greater audience than some of his other outlets (such as various amateur productions or the much revered Weird Tales magazine). He even rated the cover of the June 1936 issue. However, he never really followed up on this success, mostly due to his eccentric nature. There's some really haunting writing here, especially the sequences set underground in Australia. Turn the lights down and light the candles!

Cloak of Aesir was written by Campbell under the Don A. Stuart pseudonym in order to differentiate it from his space opera tales. In this story and others he strove for atmosphere and character more than page-turning adventure. He doesn't quite reach his initial height (found in the story Nightfall) or his eventual height (found in the story Who Goes There?), but it's a solid tale of an Earth dominated by aliens and the revolution that eventually overthrows those aliens. The only weakness is that it is the second of two stories, so it might have been better to have either used the first tale or one of the others I mentioned.

The Stolen Dormouse is an amusing tale by de Camp and it is nice to see one of his science fiction efforts rather than his more well-known fantasy efforts (I do like those tales, though, don't get me wrong!). It seems to me that the story owes something to Heinlein (look for echoes of Heinlein's Beyond the Horizon, which itself is an echo of his recently published lost first novel For Us, The Living). Whether Heinlein suggested the idea to him (and other works, such as Heinlein's own Grumbles from the Grave show that he did share ideas) or it was something that Astounding's editor Campbell suggested to both I don’t know.

The Roads Must Roll is a tale set fairly early on in Heinlein's Future History series (see the book The Past Through Tomorrow, as well as smaller collections as The Man Who Sold the Moon or Revolt in 2100 for the other stories in the series). I've had a love/hate relationship with the tale since I first read it. It is well written, but my liberal leanings (yes, folks, I do have liberal leanings) chafe at Heinlein's treatment of labor. Is this how Heinlein really thought? Was the voice of the character the "true" voice of the author?

The weakness of the volume comes from the other tales. The Sargasso of Space by Hamilton has not stood the test of time (see my notes on Asimov's Before the Golden Age (when I get around to doing a posting on that book) for a similar complaint). Murray Leinster's career stretched from the early days until the 1960's, so surely a better story than The Fifth-Dimension Tube could have been found. Again, it has not really stood the test of time and it is also a sequel (so you are at something of a disadvantage). The Eternal Wanderer was an O.K. story but I can't recall ever reading another tale by Schachner. He appears to be an author who was popular at the time, but who's star has faded. I think that Gunn could have chosen a better tale by Van Vogt than The Changeling, but he might have felt that some of the better tales (the Weapon Shop stories, for example) have been reprinted so many times that they had lost their freshness. I had difficulty finishing this story.

Astounding Stories: The 60th Anniversary Collection (Volume II, edited by James Gunn, introduction by Isaac Asimov, the blue-gray cover volume): Nightfall by Isaac Asimov (September 1941); Bridle and Saddle by Isaac Asimov (June 1942); Sucker Bait by Isaac Asimov (March 1954); Profession by Isaac Asimov (July 1957); Killdozer! by Theodore Sturgeon (November 1944); Cold Front by "Hal Clement" (G. Harry Stubbs) (July 1946); The Equalizer by Jack Williamson (March 1947).

Counts as six stories for the Short Story Project, as I had read Bridle and Saddle as part of the Foundation Trilogy and did not re-read it.

This might be called the Isaac Asimov volume, given his multiple contributions to the volume. I'm sure that Gunn could have found other authors to get multiple entries from (Henry Kuttner and/or C.L. Moore, writing in collaboration or by themselves; Robert A. Heinlein under his own name or his numerous pseudonyms; even John W. Campbell under his name or his Don A. Stuart pseudonym spring to mind). Perhaps Gunn likes Asimov (he did write a book on the Good Doctor) more or there was a rights problem with the other authors (rumor has it, for example, that the estate that controls the works of Kuttner and Moore make unreasonable demands for reprints). Still, other than Bridle and Saddle, Gunn made some excellent choices here.

Nightfall could arguably be Asimov's most famous story. I'm not going to do a rundown on the plot, if you haven't read it, get thee to a collection that has it and read it. If you've only seen the movie, shame, junk the movie and read the story. That movie should never have been made (I'm sure we can say that of many movies!). The first volume of his autobiography (In Memory Yet Green) talks about how the story came to be (and it's a good process of the typical relationship that Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. had with many authors):

He [Campbell] had come across a quotation from an eight-chapter work by Ralph Waldo Emerson, called Nature. In the first chapter, Emerson said: "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God..."

Campbell asked me to read it and said, "What do you think would happen, Asimov, if men were to see the stars for the first time in a thousand years?"

I thought, and drew a blank, "I don't know."

Campbell said, "I think they would go mad. I want you to write a story about that."

We talked about various things, thereafter, with Campbell seeming to circle the idea and occasionally asking me questions such as, "Why should be stars be invisible at other times?" and listened to me as I tried to improvise answers. Finally he shooed me out with, "Go home and write the story."

In my diary for that day I said, "I'll get started on it soon, as I think the idea is swell, and I even envisage making a lead novelette out of it, but I don't delude myself into thinking it will be an easy story to write. It will require hard work."

It is, in my opinion (and as Asimov points out in the autobiography) a good story. Heck, the SF Writers of America voted it as the best, by a healthy margin. At that point in his career, Asimov was still an amateur:

My status on that evening of March 18 was as nothing more than a steady and (perhaps) hopeful third-rater. What's more, that's all that I considered myself to be at that time. Nor did anyone else, as far as I know, seriously consider me, in early 1941, as a potential first-magnitude star in the science-fiction heavens—except, maybe, Campbell. The Golden Age was in full swing and it contained, already, such brilliant stars as Heinlein and Van Vogt and such scarcely lesser names such as Hubbard, de Camp, del Rey, and Sturgeon. Surely no one could possibly have thought I would ever be considered comparable to these—except, maybe, Campbell.

Asimov's output was always more non-fiction than fiction. Much of his output, as much as I love it, was pretty "pulpy". Nightfall, however, is one of the cases where he breaks those bounds.

Sucker Bait and Profession are both good stories. They are also probably not as well known to a more casual fan of science fiction, which is a shame, as they are as strong as any of Asimov's more famous Foundation or Robot tales. In Sucker Bait an expedition is sent to a planet where a previous expedition had failed a hundred years earlier. The ship carries a number of scientists, each working in his (no female characters!) niche. In fact, the scientists are so specialized that they find it difficult to talk to each other. The ship also carries a member of a new profession, the Mnemonics. Members of that profession are encouraged to read anything and everything, and prove their worth by finding obscure links between specialties or dredging up things that may have been forgotten. The main character is a Mnemonic, and manages to save the day (eventually) by jumping across specialties and remembering an obscure fact.

It's an interesting idea. Certainly my own personal experience, in job hunting, has shown me that our society is becoming more and more specialized. While I don't have some of the qualities that Asimov talks about in the profession (a photographic memory is implied), given my reading habits, it's a job that I'd love to have!

Profession has some similar themes. Technology (in the story) has advanced to the point where education is done electronically through tapes. A person is tested for various qualities, and is programmed into a profession. Yearly Olympics are held, where people compete in their professions. Winners are recruited by various planets for their technical skills, losers got another chance in the next competition.

The main character is placed in a home because he can't be educated using the tapes. There are such homes scattered across the planet, peopled by those who are not up to the tape method. They are given the chance to educate themselves the old fashioned way, through reading and classes.

What the main character eventually learns is that while he initially considers himself to be stupid, as he can't be educated through the tapes, he is actually one of the gifted ones. Once educated by a tape, you are pretty much stuck in that profession. If a newer model of a machine comes out, you (apparently) can't be re-educated with a new tape. And it seems that you either can't learn new skills (or society has changed to the point where people can't grasp the concept). The main character eventually realizes that he and the others in these homes for the "stupid" are actually the ones who do all the innovation in society.

Both Sucker Bait and Profession probably appealed to your fan of the Golden Age for other reasons. Like In Hiding by Wilmar H. Shiras, or Mimsy Were the Borogoves by "Lewis Padgett" (Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore) (both these were read in 2004, and I'll post about them eventually!), you have stories where social outcasts turn out to have the skills needed to save the day. You are outside of society, but you are better than society. Your "typical fan" (and hey, I was one and still am), finding it difficult to fit in, feeling misunderstood, saw themselves in these stories and more.

Theodore Sturgeon's Killdozer! is a nice thriller of a story. You can also tell that Sturgeon was making good use of life experience here; some paragraphs are practically manuals on how to operate power equipment (Hmm...Melville did it for Moby Dick, does this make Sturgeon great literature?). Avoid the horrid television movie of several years ago or Stephen King's hack attempts to re-work the same theme and ideas and read this one with the lights turned low.
Hal Clement (G. Harry Stubbs) was a science teacher and a (not-so) amateur astronomer. He may not have written some of the most interesting characters in the world, but man, could he set up a scientific puzzle. Cold Front is a classic Clement tale of misunderstood aliens and a situation that the main characters must grapple with and understand in order to win through. No guns blaze, nobody dies, but that doesn't make it any less of a conflict. I'm not sure if I would have chosen this story to represent Clement's contribution to Astounding, but hopefully those reading the collection would have been hooked enough to go onto his other contributions, such as novels like Mission of Gravity.

Finally, we have Equalizer by Jack Williamson. It's a solid, early to middle career tale by Williamson, one that I sort of had encountered previously. At one point I remember reading a collection of essays on science fiction that had a quote in it that stuck with me until now. I've finally made the connection between the quote and the source:

Long rows of shops and warehouses stood deserted. Doors yawned open. Neglected roofs were sagging. Ruined walls, here and there, were black from old fire. Every building was hedged with weeds and brush.

Far across the shattered pavements stood the saddest sight of all. A score of tall ships stood scattered across the blast aprons, where they had landed. Though small by comparison with such enormous interstellar cruisers such as the Great Director, some of them towered many hundreds of feet above the broken concrete and the weeds. They stood like strange cenotaphs to the dead Directorate.

Once they had been proud vessels. They had carried the men and the metal to build Fort America. They had transported labor battalions to Mars, dived under the clouds of Venus, explored the cold moons of Jupiter and Saturn. They had been the long arm and the mighty fist of Tyler's Directorate, and the iron heel upon the prostrate race of man.

Now they stood in clumps of weeds, pointing out at the empty sky they once had ruled. Red wounds marred their sleek skins, where here and there some small meteoric particle must have scratched the mirror-bright polish, letting steel go to rust. And the rust, in the rains of many years, had washed in long, ugly, crimson streaks down their shining sides.

One of them, the most distant, had fallen. The great hull was flattened from the impact, broken in two. Steel beams, forced through the red-stained skin, jutted like red broken bones. The apron was shattered beneath it, so that a thick jungle of brush and young trees had grown up all around it.

Interesting how that quote has haunted me for about 30 years!

Astounding Stories: The 60th Anniversary Collection (Volume III, edited by James Gunn, introduction by Poul Anderson, the black cover volume): Private Eye by "Lewis Padgett" (Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore) (January 1949); The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz (December 1949); Bindlestiff by James Blish (December 1950); ...And Then There Were None by Eric Frank Russell (June 1951); Martians, Go Home by Fredric Brown (September 1954); We Have Fed Our Sea by Poul Anderson (August 1958); The Big Front Yard by Clifford D. Simak (October 1958).

Counts as seven stories for the Short Story Project.

This volume highlights authors who would carry Astounding (later, Analog) into a new level of maturity. Look at the contributions by Russell, Anderson or Simak. Are these space operas? Are these pulp writings?

Private Eye is probably the weakest tale in the volume. There's a nifty idea (if police have the ability to watch a person through time in order to determine a crime, how can somebody get around that in order to commit a crime?), but Padgett, or rather, Kuttner and/or Moore, have done better. See some of the entries from the Science Fiction Hall of Fame (posting is coming!), for examples.

The Witches of Karres is a fun tale by Schmitz. As with H. Beam Piper and a few others, Schmitz was a popular author in Astounding who fell into obscurity when his various books went out of print. Luckily, Baen Books has republished his tales, including this one. I urge you to pick up a few (and if you'd like to read the electronically, the so-called Websubscriptions site associated with Baen Books has several volumes available free).

Bindlestiff is part of the overall Cities in Flight sequence by Blish. These were first written as individual tales and then stitched together into a series of four books. You can generally find the four books collected in a single hardcover or paperback volume called Cities in Flight. The sequence runs from the early days of exploring the solar system to the (literally) end of the universe and the start of the next. Bindlestiff is in the approximate middle of the series, and concerns the airborne (I kid you not) city of New York and a fight against another city that has turned bindlestiff (or criminal). Despite being the middle story of a long sequence, it stands on its own better than some of the stories from the first volume of this book trio (e.g., the Murray Leinster contribution).

...And Then There Were None by Russell and Martians, Go Home by Brown are both funny and thought-provoking. Given the usual uneducated view of Campbell, you might be surprised that such a subversive tale as ...And Then There Were None would appear in the pages of Astounding. Heck, given the view that most people have of "pulp", you'd be surprised that such a thoughtful story appeared there. Haven’t read it? Look it up, either in a collection, or in a book called The Great Explosion. Martians, Go Home is a hoot. What if there really were Little Green Men on Mars. What if they invaded Earth. Brown manages both, but also manages to avoid all the clichés you might expect. Excellent pair of tales.

We Have Fed Our Sea is one of my favorite stories by Anderson. I'm more familiar with the novel version, called The Enemy Stars (and it's been so long since I've read that one, that I'm not sure how different the story is from the book). Man explores the stars by sending ships traveling slower than the speed of light out to a destination, and then hopping to them via a faster-than-light matter transmitter. The story concerns The Southern Cross, diverted to explore a dead star, and what happens to the crew when something goes horribly wrong. Is this pulp fiction?

A bell buzzed.

His heart sprang. He crawled back, feeling dimly that there were tears on his own face now, and stared into the screen.

A being stood in the receiving chamber. It wore some kind of armor, so he could not make out the shape very well, but though it stood on two legs the shape was not a man's. Through a transparent bubble of a helmet, where the air within bore a yellowish tinge, Maclaren saw its face. Not fish, nor frog, nor mammal, it was so other a face that his mind would not wholly register it. Afterward he recalled only blurred features, there were tendrils and great red eyes.

Strangely, beyond reason, even in that first look he read compassion on the face.

The creature bore David Ryerson's body in its arms.

Anderson was one of our finest practioners of the craft of science fiction writing. He knew how to tell a fine tale (probably learned from his love of Norse and other epics). He wrote many fine characters. His planets were realistic, given his own grounding in science and his work with people such as Hal Clement. He was well read, and wove the works of others into his tales, such as this quote from Kipling found in this story:

We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead:
We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest
To the shark and the sheering gull,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid it in full!

The field of science fiction is all that much poorer for our loss of this talent.

I have written elsewhere of how much I enjoy the works of Clifford D. Simak. I have also written elsewhere of my belief that his inherent optimism and his so-called pastoral science fiction helped me back from the brink. The Big Back Yard is one of his best, and contains seeds that fed into other works, such as his novel Mastodonia. You've got a lot of classic Simak touches: the faithful dog (inevitably named Bowser or Towser), the shrewd main character who takes advantage of a strange situation, a secondary character with a needed skill or talent.

Hiram Taine, a Yankee Trader (do we still have those?) wakes up one day with his dog (Towser in this case) barking. It appears that he has mice or rats in his house. Or does he? Later, upon going into his basement, he finds a new ceiling. Then there's that big cylinder in the woods that appeared over night...

Things get really interesting when he opens his front door and finds a desert where none was before!

Great stuff. I'm glad to see Old Earth Books bringing out two of Simak's classics and an effort underway to bring all of his short works back into print.

Counts as 21 stories (between the three volumes) for the 2004 Short Story Project.