The War Years, 1936-1945

by Martin H. Greenberg, Isaac Asimov (Introduction)

Short stories deal with robots, exact duplicates of people, alien contact, a generation starship, an eccentric inventor, and a sentient spaceship

331 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1987

About the author

Martin Harry Greenberg was an American academic and speculative fiction anthologist. In all, he compiled 1,298 anthologies and commissioned over 8,200 original short stories. He founded Tekno Books, a packager of more than 2000 published books. In addition, he was a co-founder of the Sci-Fi Channel.

For the 1950s anthologist and publisher of Gnome Press, see Martin Greenberg.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the middle book of three volumes that Greenberg edited for TSR that presented his selections of the best of the first three decades of Amazing Stories, the first pulp magazine that was devoted exclusively to science fiction. (The first book was called The Wonder Years and covered 1926-1935 and the third was The Wild Years, 1946-1955.) I wonder if the poor man really read all of the stories that Amazing published during that time... they sometimes printed some really awful, juvenile stuff back then! He picked out some good stories for this volume, though, which includes work from Stanley G. Weinbaum, John Wyndham, Ralph Milne Farley, and other early masters of the genre, along with a robot story from Isaac Asimov, I, Rocket by Ray Bradbury, and an Adam Link story by Eando Binder. I especially enjoyed The Four-Sided Triangle by William F. Temple and Devolution by Edmond Hamilton. The book has nice, new interior illustrations from a variety of artists that are done in retro-style, though I didn't care for the cover, which looks like Rockem-Sockem Robots packaging. Some of the stories are obviously quite badly dated, but the three books represent an important part of the history of the field.

[Michael Samerdyke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting anthology. While there were some clinkers, such as the Weinbaum, Sonnemann, and Farley stories, other stories were very interesting and successful.

This book has Asimov's first "Robot" story, but it also has "Adam Link's Vengeance" by Eando Binder, which struck me as a far more powerful (and serious) story. The Binder isn't perfect, but it pulls you along and makes you care about its characters, while the Asimov story felt like more of a game.

"Devolution" by Edmond Hamilton proved fascinating. It started out like it would be one kind of story, perhaps a finding prehistoric life in the modern era, but then zagged into being a completely different (and bleak) story.

"I, Rocket" was like nothing else by Ray Bradbury that I have read. It was actually space opera, told from the perspective of a rocket ship. Besides that, it was very much pro-military, and "military science fiction" is not something that comes to mind when I think of Ray Bradbury.

However, the best story for me was "Phoney Meteor" by John Wyndham. Usually we get the impression that pre-"Day of the Triffids" Wyndham is to be avoided, but "Phoney Meteor" was funny, suspenseful, and thought-provoking. It was worth getting this anthology for this story.

Typically, histories of science fiction direct us to "Astounding" and tell us to give "Amazing" a miss. While there are reasons for that, it is good to have these anthologies that show that "Amazing" did print some worthwhile stories after all.