What do you think?
Rate this book
Amazing Stories Magazine
The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1940 Anthology: Special Retro-Hugo Edition
"A fairly good time capsule of sf starting to become a genre of its own, and "Amazing Stories" in particular., for the pulp fiction fan, this will be an interesting and fun read And all of 1926's covers are reprinted on this anthology's back cover." -Amazon review. 1940 was an important year for Amazing Stories-and for its new editor, Raymond A. Palmer. For Palmer it was the culmination of his dream to create a stable of new science fiction writers for Amazing, the way John W. Campbell Jr. had done two years earlier with such spectacular success at Astounding Stories. Palmer gathered Don Wilcox, Robert Moore Williams, the highly underrated Rog Phillips, David Wright O'Brien, David Vern Reed (of Batman fame), Chester. S. Geier, the Livingston brothers (Herbert and Berkeley), Leroy Yerxa, Frances Deegan, Richard S. Shaver, and others quite popular then but of lesser fame today. He also opened his pages to anything such important authors as Ray Bradbury, Nelson S. Bond, Eando Binder, and Robert Bloch cared to write, 1940 was the year it all came together for Ray Palmer. From then on Amazing Stories' readership and circulation would continue to grow, even through and after the war, in a triumphal arc. The stories reprinted here, we believe are among the most outstanding Palmer published in Amazing during 1940. Guiding our selections are what we feel are three key signifiers of quality: 1) reader reaction as reflected in the magazine's letter columns, 2) a story having been deemed worthy of reprint by the field's most able anthologists, and 3) our own personal reading of all twelve issues published that year. The gem of the year, a novelette which still enjoys classic status today, was undoubtedly "The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years," the first story ever set on board a ship making a generations-long voyage to a distant star. Once again Amazing was in the lead with a cornerstone sf idea that remains a vital part of the field to this day (beating out Robert A. Heinlein's "Universe," which is often misremembered as the first use of a generation starship, by a full year). Also included are Truth Is A Plague David Wright O'Brien The Living Mist Ralph Milne Farley Paul Revere And The Time Machine A. W. Bernal Monster Out Of Space Malcolm Jameson The Day Time Stopped Moving Ed Earl Repp (Writing As Bradner Buckner) The Mathematical Kid Ross Rocklynne The Strange Voyage Of Dr. Penwing Richard O. Lewis The Three Wise Men Of Space Donald Bern Sons Of The Deluge (complete novel) Nelson S. Bond This special 1940 Retro-Hugo edition of The Best of Amazing Stories is not intended to tell World Science Fiction Convention members who or what to vote for (or not to vote for). At the same time it is not possible for most readers to obtain copies of all the science fiction stories and novels published during 1940 or even those classics that might be ranked among the best. Unfortunately, many of the latter are not in print, and those that are are scattered widely among many different anthologies and not easy to assemble. We offer this present book in the hope that it may help contemporary readers become more informed about, at least, some of the better science fiction of the year 1940. Contains a special Introduction and survey of the best stories published in every magazine during the year.
332 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2015
14 people are currently reading
17 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 3, 2016
“There is nothing funnier than old science fiction,” according to a review I recently discovered of a significant early genre classic. The critic went on to smarmily list the many faults in prophecy of the old story under review, which is set in a then-future time we have now passed. He told us all the things the writer “got wrong” in terms of later real-world developments in technology, society, language, gender relations, and so on. This was typical, the reviewer said, of vintage SF. And although he did not state this directly, the overall message of the piece was clear: that old science fiction is of necessity hopelessly dated, of no possible value except as inadvertent humor.
To be sure, SF ages differently than other forms of fiction. I can remember sitting in a theater in Washington DC perhaps 12 or 13 years ago, watching a big-screen re-release of one of my favorite movies, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), with growing annoyance at some members of the audience who insisted on laughing, loudly and raucously, whenever the trade name of a now-defunct company—Pan Am, Bell System Telephone—came onscreen in Kubrick’s bright techno-future. I suppose those people would find sitting through a film of Orwell’s “1984” an absolute laff-riot, because, well, we got through the real 1984 and it was nothing like what Orwell wrote. (Was it?)
The key, of course, is that to read science fiction as prophecy at all is to completely misread it. SF writers engage in thought experiments about possible futures, not predictions about the actual future. That’s why “2001” is still a great film, despite our having passed the title’s date by fifteen years now with no sign of any manned missions to Jupiter, floating monoliths in space, or great wide-eyed star-babies. The ideas it presents of space, of alien visitations, of the nature of time and existence, are profound, and they don’t age at all—even if Pan Am went out of business decades ago. The same is true of “1984”—what that story has to say about totalitarianism, the struggle for human freedom, and the terrible fragility of the human spirit is timeless. The fact that Oceania never went to war with Eurasia in the real world—never, in fact, existed at all—is perfectly beside the point.
Which brings us, in a slightly roundabout way, to “The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1940 Anthology,” edited by Jean Marie Stine, Steve Davidson, and Raymond A. Palmer. For those who don’t know, “Amazing Stories,” founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1926, was the first science-fiction magazine in the world, and was largely responsible for science fiction becoming recognized as a separate publishing category in itself. (Previous magazines such as “Argosy” and “All-Story” had occasionally published science-fictional work, but were never exclusively devoted to the form.) In the wake of “Amazing Stories” came countless imitators with names like “Startling Stories,” “Astonishing Stories,” “Fantastic Adventures,” and so on. The most important of these, “Astounding Science Fiction,” would eventually supplant “Amazing” and become, under the editorship of John W. Campbell, the dominant magazine in the field in the later 1930s and throughout the ’40s. It’s still in business today, under the name “Analog,” and still publishes what is today labelled “hard” science fiction (the kind Campbell himself published)—which is to say, SF in which the science content is rigorous and, if not always realistic, at least not completely beyond the realm of possibility.
“Amazing” has had a more checkered history than “Astounding/Analog,” having been in and out of business under many different owners over the past ninety years. But its position as the pre-eminent science fiction magazine in the world was very short-lived—Gernsback lost control of “Amazing” in 1929 as the result of a lawsuit, and while he came back quickly enough with more magazines (“Science Wonder Stories,” “Air Wonder Stories”), his greatest creation, “Amazing,” was never the same. From then on it was always a second-rank publication, following on the heels of the big boys—Campbell’s “Astounding” most of all, and by the 1950s “Fantasy and Science Fiction” and “Galaxy,” too.
As a result many years, even decades, of “Amazing” are almost totally unknown today. Little from these magazines gets reprinted in anthologies—as opposed to material from “Astounding,” which is invariably well-represented in any collection of the greatest SF of its period. Heinlein published much of his best early work in “Astounding”; Asimov, too. Theodore Sturgeon. L. Sprague de Camp. Clifford D. Simak. A.E. van Vogt. Hal Clement. The list goes on and on and includes, really, pretty much every SF writer of significance at the time.
Yet “The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1940 Anthology” reveals that, under the editorship of Ray Palmer, Gernsback’s brainchild was still publishing worthy work. Palmer, according to the editors, “aimed at publishing a broader, faster moving type of story” than Campbell was bringing to his readers in “Astounding,” “designed to be more easily digested and followed, with entertainment stressed over the science.” This iteration of “Amazing Stories” was, based on the evidence of this anthology, clearly aimed at a younger, less sophisticated audience than Campbell’s magazine. Whether that means that Palmer’s “Amazing” was more juvenile or simply more accessible is, I suppose, a matter of perspective.
What I can say is that I greatly enjoyed “The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1940 Anthology.” The book opens with a novelette, “The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years” by one Don Wilcox, a writer heretofore unknown to me but who (a quick Internet search reveals) published a great deal in the second-rank SF magazines of the late ’30s and early ’40s. The editors call this story “the gem of the year” for “Amazing,” and I’m not inclined to disagree. This is a wonderful early take on the generation-starship theme, believed by many to have been invented by Heinlein in his story “Universe” (published in “Astounding,” of course, in 1941), but Wilcox’s tale predates Heinlein’s by a year. Heinlein’s story is, as one would expect, much more sophisticated both scientifically and literarily. But Wilcox’s highly entertaining, slam-bang story has pleasures of its own. The narrator is one of the voyagers on the good ship “Flashaway,” Gregory Grimstone, the official “Keeper of the Traditions” whose job is to stay in suspended animation throughout much of the trip, waking every hundred years to advise the various generations on earth customs and traditions so that they are not completely forgotten over the six centuries. Here’s the opening, clearly designed to stoke reader anticipation immediately:
“They gave us a gala send-off, the kind that keeps your heart bobbing up at your tonsils. ‘It’s a long way to the Milky Way!’ the voices sang out. The band thundered the chorus over and over. The golden trumpaphones blasted our eardrums wide open. Thousands of people clapped their hands in time. There were thirty-three of us—that is, there was supposed to be. As it turned out, there were thirty-five.”
Right from the start, we’re heading somewhere far out in the Milky Way—with stowaways, it would appear. And there are trumpaphones! What’s not to like?
There are four more novelettes in the book, none by writers generally known today. Of them, David Wright O’Brien’s “Truth is a Plague” is an amusing tale of a Professor Merlo who invents a “truth gas”—anyone who inhales it must tell the truth—and proceeds to have it dropped via airplanes on the unsuspecting population of a major city, apparently unable to envision any moral, legal, or practical unpleasantness that might ensue from such an action. Ensue it does, and hundreds of people end up dead. Eventually an antidote is devised and distributed; happily, there is never any serious consideration of legal charges against our friend Dr. Merlo. Chalk the whole thing up to experience….
This is the kind of goofy, poorly thought-out SF that Campbell stood dead-set against in the pages of “Astounding”…but the, well, truth is that “Truth is a Plague” is a very engaging story in its silly way. It moves quickly, the style is simple and clear, and reading it is simply fun. Literature it ain’t, but I found it well worth a half-hour of my time.
Other novelettes include a farce about Paul Revere being brought up to our day (i.e., 1940) by a hapless couple of time-machine inventors and, interestingly, a story called “The Living Mist” about…you got it, a living mist. But this one can talk! Watch out, Stephen King….
There are also four short stories in the collection, of which I found the most memorable to be “The Day Time Stopped Moving” by Ed Earl Repp, another widely published, now forgotten pulpster. This is the tale of unhappy Dave Miller, who decides to commit suicide one fine day only to find himself, at the moment he pulls the trigger of his pistol, in a strange world which looks exactly like the one he just tried to leave forever except that everything and everybody in it is frozen in place. This story doesn’t go in the obvious direction (he’s not in Hell), and in fact, it’s not too hard to imagine this nifty little narrative cropping up with a script by Rod Serling for a middling-to-good episode of “Twilight Zone.”
A confession. Although I’d been enjoying the book a lot, by the time I got to the final tale, “Sons of the Deluge” by Nelson S. Bond, I was ready to move on. This is by far the longest story in the anthology—billed as a novella, it takes up a full third of the entire volume—and I figured that I would just read the first couple of chapters to get the general idea, then find something else on which to spend my precious reading hours. I wasn’t sure that I could see myself reading a near-novel length work written in the 1940 “Amazing” style, which I’d discovered certainly had its charms, but…
Boy, was I wrong. “Sons of the Deluge” turns out to be a sensationally good pulp adventure story, a page-turner from beginning to end which I read very nearly in a single sitting. Hiding out in a remote desert town in Mexico, Duke Callion and Joey Cox (mercenaries who backed the wrong side of a revolution) encounter a mysterious white man who calls himself Quelchal. It quickly becomes apparent that not only is Quelchal a time-traveler from the past, but that his original home is a certain little village that went by the name of…Atlantis. Shoot-outs, time travel, volcanoes, kidnappings, beautiful maidens…believe me, this story has it all. In film this was the great era of Flash Gordon, Captain Marvel, Batman and Robin—I suspect that if “Sons of the Deluge” had been picked up by Republic Studios for retelling in 12 or 15 Saturday-afternoon chapters, it might have become the greatest movie serial of all time.
A delightful extra feature of this anthology, by the way, is the inclusion of the black-and-white illustrations for each story as they originally appeared in “Amazing,” which adds greatly to the nostalgic flavor of the entire enterprise.
To be sure, I wasn’t enamored of all the pieces in “The Best of Amazing Stories.” In their introduction the editors write that their criteria for story selection were: “1) reader reaction as reflected in the magazine’s letter columns, 2) a story having been deemed worthy of reprint by the field’s most able anthologists…and 3) our own personal reading of all twelve issues published that year.” Fair enough. But, they add, “we also recognize that one person’s ‘best’ is another’s ‘worst.’” As an anthologist myself, I know that works one selects a bit reluctantly, without much enthusiasm—the best available at the time—sometimes get the most glowing reviews, while the stories one is truly in love with can receive little or no attention at all. It’s always a puzzle. But there are a few tales here, especially in the short story section, which seem a mite on the feeble side. There are also a couple of noticeable errors in the book. The copyright is indicated as being “1927,” seemingly a leftover reference to one of the editors’ previous “Amazing” anthologies. More importantly, and weirdly, the cover of the volume lists the name of a contributor whose work isn’t actually in the book—Raymond Z. Gallun, who happens to be one of my favorite SF writers from this era. (Look up his “Old Faithful” sometime.) This is a shockingly sloppy mistake.
However, there is no question but that this book is an enormously enjoyable treat, one that has opened my eyes to what was happening in the world of science fiction in that period outside the dominant influence of John W. Campbell and “Astounding.” The stories, most of them, are well worth reading.
So are they “funny” in all the wrong ways, as that reviewer claimed “old science fiction” invariably was? No, not really. From the moment they were published in 1940 these tales were designed to be fast-moving, lightweight fun—that’s what they were then, and that’s what they are now. To be honest, I enjoyed some of them more than at least a few of the science-heavy classics from Campbell’s writers that I’ve encountered.
“The Best of Amazing Stories: 1940 Edition” is hugely entertaining. It should be required reading for anyone interested in this era of science fiction.
To be sure, SF ages differently than other forms of fiction. I can remember sitting in a theater in Washington DC perhaps 12 or 13 years ago, watching a big-screen re-release of one of my favorite movies, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), with growing annoyance at some members of the audience who insisted on laughing, loudly and raucously, whenever the trade name of a now-defunct company—Pan Am, Bell System Telephone—came onscreen in Kubrick’s bright techno-future. I suppose those people would find sitting through a film of Orwell’s “1984” an absolute laff-riot, because, well, we got through the real 1984 and it was nothing like what Orwell wrote. (Was it?)
The key, of course, is that to read science fiction as prophecy at all is to completely misread it. SF writers engage in thought experiments about possible futures, not predictions about the actual future. That’s why “2001” is still a great film, despite our having passed the title’s date by fifteen years now with no sign of any manned missions to Jupiter, floating monoliths in space, or great wide-eyed star-babies. The ideas it presents of space, of alien visitations, of the nature of time and existence, are profound, and they don’t age at all—even if Pan Am went out of business decades ago. The same is true of “1984”—what that story has to say about totalitarianism, the struggle for human freedom, and the terrible fragility of the human spirit is timeless. The fact that Oceania never went to war with Eurasia in the real world—never, in fact, existed at all—is perfectly beside the point.
Which brings us, in a slightly roundabout way, to “The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1940 Anthology,” edited by Jean Marie Stine, Steve Davidson, and Raymond A. Palmer. For those who don’t know, “Amazing Stories,” founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1926, was the first science-fiction magazine in the world, and was largely responsible for science fiction becoming recognized as a separate publishing category in itself. (Previous magazines such as “Argosy” and “All-Story” had occasionally published science-fictional work, but were never exclusively devoted to the form.) In the wake of “Amazing Stories” came countless imitators with names like “Startling Stories,” “Astonishing Stories,” “Fantastic Adventures,” and so on. The most important of these, “Astounding Science Fiction,” would eventually supplant “Amazing” and become, under the editorship of John W. Campbell, the dominant magazine in the field in the later 1930s and throughout the ’40s. It’s still in business today, under the name “Analog,” and still publishes what is today labelled “hard” science fiction (the kind Campbell himself published)—which is to say, SF in which the science content is rigorous and, if not always realistic, at least not completely beyond the realm of possibility.
“Amazing” has had a more checkered history than “Astounding/Analog,” having been in and out of business under many different owners over the past ninety years. But its position as the pre-eminent science fiction magazine in the world was very short-lived—Gernsback lost control of “Amazing” in 1929 as the result of a lawsuit, and while he came back quickly enough with more magazines (“Science Wonder Stories,” “Air Wonder Stories”), his greatest creation, “Amazing,” was never the same. From then on it was always a second-rank publication, following on the heels of the big boys—Campbell’s “Astounding” most of all, and by the 1950s “Fantasy and Science Fiction” and “Galaxy,” too.
As a result many years, even decades, of “Amazing” are almost totally unknown today. Little from these magazines gets reprinted in anthologies—as opposed to material from “Astounding,” which is invariably well-represented in any collection of the greatest SF of its period. Heinlein published much of his best early work in “Astounding”; Asimov, too. Theodore Sturgeon. L. Sprague de Camp. Clifford D. Simak. A.E. van Vogt. Hal Clement. The list goes on and on and includes, really, pretty much every SF writer of significance at the time.
Yet “The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1940 Anthology” reveals that, under the editorship of Ray Palmer, Gernsback’s brainchild was still publishing worthy work. Palmer, according to the editors, “aimed at publishing a broader, faster moving type of story” than Campbell was bringing to his readers in “Astounding,” “designed to be more easily digested and followed, with entertainment stressed over the science.” This iteration of “Amazing Stories” was, based on the evidence of this anthology, clearly aimed at a younger, less sophisticated audience than Campbell’s magazine. Whether that means that Palmer’s “Amazing” was more juvenile or simply more accessible is, I suppose, a matter of perspective.
What I can say is that I greatly enjoyed “The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1940 Anthology.” The book opens with a novelette, “The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years” by one Don Wilcox, a writer heretofore unknown to me but who (a quick Internet search reveals) published a great deal in the second-rank SF magazines of the late ’30s and early ’40s. The editors call this story “the gem of the year” for “Amazing,” and I’m not inclined to disagree. This is a wonderful early take on the generation-starship theme, believed by many to have been invented by Heinlein in his story “Universe” (published in “Astounding,” of course, in 1941), but Wilcox’s tale predates Heinlein’s by a year. Heinlein’s story is, as one would expect, much more sophisticated both scientifically and literarily. But Wilcox’s highly entertaining, slam-bang story has pleasures of its own. The narrator is one of the voyagers on the good ship “Flashaway,” Gregory Grimstone, the official “Keeper of the Traditions” whose job is to stay in suspended animation throughout much of the trip, waking every hundred years to advise the various generations on earth customs and traditions so that they are not completely forgotten over the six centuries. Here’s the opening, clearly designed to stoke reader anticipation immediately:
“They gave us a gala send-off, the kind that keeps your heart bobbing up at your tonsils. ‘It’s a long way to the Milky Way!’ the voices sang out. The band thundered the chorus over and over. The golden trumpaphones blasted our eardrums wide open. Thousands of people clapped their hands in time. There were thirty-three of us—that is, there was supposed to be. As it turned out, there were thirty-five.”
Right from the start, we’re heading somewhere far out in the Milky Way—with stowaways, it would appear. And there are trumpaphones! What’s not to like?
There are four more novelettes in the book, none by writers generally known today. Of them, David Wright O’Brien’s “Truth is a Plague” is an amusing tale of a Professor Merlo who invents a “truth gas”—anyone who inhales it must tell the truth—and proceeds to have it dropped via airplanes on the unsuspecting population of a major city, apparently unable to envision any moral, legal, or practical unpleasantness that might ensue from such an action. Ensue it does, and hundreds of people end up dead. Eventually an antidote is devised and distributed; happily, there is never any serious consideration of legal charges against our friend Dr. Merlo. Chalk the whole thing up to experience….
This is the kind of goofy, poorly thought-out SF that Campbell stood dead-set against in the pages of “Astounding”…but the, well, truth is that “Truth is a Plague” is a very engaging story in its silly way. It moves quickly, the style is simple and clear, and reading it is simply fun. Literature it ain’t, but I found it well worth a half-hour of my time.
Other novelettes include a farce about Paul Revere being brought up to our day (i.e., 1940) by a hapless couple of time-machine inventors and, interestingly, a story called “The Living Mist” about…you got it, a living mist. But this one can talk! Watch out, Stephen King….
There are also four short stories in the collection, of which I found the most memorable to be “The Day Time Stopped Moving” by Ed Earl Repp, another widely published, now forgotten pulpster. This is the tale of unhappy Dave Miller, who decides to commit suicide one fine day only to find himself, at the moment he pulls the trigger of his pistol, in a strange world which looks exactly like the one he just tried to leave forever except that everything and everybody in it is frozen in place. This story doesn’t go in the obvious direction (he’s not in Hell), and in fact, it’s not too hard to imagine this nifty little narrative cropping up with a script by Rod Serling for a middling-to-good episode of “Twilight Zone.”
A confession. Although I’d been enjoying the book a lot, by the time I got to the final tale, “Sons of the Deluge” by Nelson S. Bond, I was ready to move on. This is by far the longest story in the anthology—billed as a novella, it takes up a full third of the entire volume—and I figured that I would just read the first couple of chapters to get the general idea, then find something else on which to spend my precious reading hours. I wasn’t sure that I could see myself reading a near-novel length work written in the 1940 “Amazing” style, which I’d discovered certainly had its charms, but…
Boy, was I wrong. “Sons of the Deluge” turns out to be a sensationally good pulp adventure story, a page-turner from beginning to end which I read very nearly in a single sitting. Hiding out in a remote desert town in Mexico, Duke Callion and Joey Cox (mercenaries who backed the wrong side of a revolution) encounter a mysterious white man who calls himself Quelchal. It quickly becomes apparent that not only is Quelchal a time-traveler from the past, but that his original home is a certain little village that went by the name of…Atlantis. Shoot-outs, time travel, volcanoes, kidnappings, beautiful maidens…believe me, this story has it all. In film this was the great era of Flash Gordon, Captain Marvel, Batman and Robin—I suspect that if “Sons of the Deluge” had been picked up by Republic Studios for retelling in 12 or 15 Saturday-afternoon chapters, it might have become the greatest movie serial of all time.
A delightful extra feature of this anthology, by the way, is the inclusion of the black-and-white illustrations for each story as they originally appeared in “Amazing,” which adds greatly to the nostalgic flavor of the entire enterprise.
To be sure, I wasn’t enamored of all the pieces in “The Best of Amazing Stories.” In their introduction the editors write that their criteria for story selection were: “1) reader reaction as reflected in the magazine’s letter columns, 2) a story having been deemed worthy of reprint by the field’s most able anthologists…and 3) our own personal reading of all twelve issues published that year.” Fair enough. But, they add, “we also recognize that one person’s ‘best’ is another’s ‘worst.’” As an anthologist myself, I know that works one selects a bit reluctantly, without much enthusiasm—the best available at the time—sometimes get the most glowing reviews, while the stories one is truly in love with can receive little or no attention at all. It’s always a puzzle. But there are a few tales here, especially in the short story section, which seem a mite on the feeble side. There are also a couple of noticeable errors in the book. The copyright is indicated as being “1927,” seemingly a leftover reference to one of the editors’ previous “Amazing” anthologies. More importantly, and weirdly, the cover of the volume lists the name of a contributor whose work isn’t actually in the book—Raymond Z. Gallun, who happens to be one of my favorite SF writers from this era. (Look up his “Old Faithful” sometime.) This is a shockingly sloppy mistake.
However, there is no question but that this book is an enormously enjoyable treat, one that has opened my eyes to what was happening in the world of science fiction in that period outside the dominant influence of John W. Campbell and “Astounding.” The stories, most of them, are well worth reading.
So are they “funny” in all the wrong ways, as that reviewer claimed “old science fiction” invariably was? No, not really. From the moment they were published in 1940 these tales were designed to be fast-moving, lightweight fun—that’s what they were then, and that’s what they are now. To be honest, I enjoyed some of them more than at least a few of the science-heavy classics from Campbell’s writers that I’ve encountered.
“The Best of Amazing Stories: 1940 Edition” is hugely entertaining. It should be required reading for anyone interested in this era of science fiction.
August 16, 2024
This was a very fun volume.
The best story was "The Mathematical Kid" by Ross Rocklynne, which was funny but satisfying. I really wish I had encountered this story earlier.
Next came "The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years" by Don Wilcox, which was also good and surprisingly racy.
"The Day Time Stopped Moving," "Three Wise Men of Space," and "The Strange Voyage of Dr. Penwing" all felt like Twilight Zone episodes.
"Sons of the Deluge" by Nelson S. Bond was fun. Felt like a cross between Robert E. Howard and Indiana Jones. Not great, not "Conan" level, but fun.
Also fun was "Paul Revere and the Time Machine," which built to a terrific conclusion.
"Truth Is a Plague" and "The Living Mist" were interesting in that the first reminded me of Robert Bloch's "Word of Honor," and "The Living Mist" seemed like a prototype of "The Blob." However, these stories were more interesting than good.
The only story that totally laid an egg for me was the Malcolm Jameson one.
Still, this was a very enjoyable anthology, with a higher "batting average" than the earlier volumes. I look forward to the 1943 anthology and wish there were more books in this series.
The best story was "The Mathematical Kid" by Ross Rocklynne, which was funny but satisfying. I really wish I had encountered this story earlier.
Next came "The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years" by Don Wilcox, which was also good and surprisingly racy.
"The Day Time Stopped Moving," "Three Wise Men of Space," and "The Strange Voyage of Dr. Penwing" all felt like Twilight Zone episodes.
"Sons of the Deluge" by Nelson S. Bond was fun. Felt like a cross between Robert E. Howard and Indiana Jones. Not great, not "Conan" level, but fun.
Also fun was "Paul Revere and the Time Machine," which built to a terrific conclusion.
"Truth Is a Plague" and "The Living Mist" were interesting in that the first reminded me of Robert Bloch's "Word of Honor," and "The Living Mist" seemed like a prototype of "The Blob." However, these stories were more interesting than good.
The only story that totally laid an egg for me was the Malcolm Jameson one.
Still, this was a very enjoyable anthology, with a higher "batting average" than the earlier volumes. I look forward to the 1943 anthology and wish there were more books in this series.
December 3, 2023
Charming retrospective
Lots of good Tails time travel Space Opera a bit overall on entertaining read. And an excellent retrospective of Pulp sci-fi
Lots of good Tails time travel Space Opera a bit overall on entertaining read. And an excellent retrospective of Pulp sci-fi
April 10, 2016
A lot of the stories in this retrospective don't hold up well, with square-jawed spacemen solving the galaxy's problems. There are also some attempts at humor that were probably funnier 75 years ago. Nevertheless, there is enough good stuff to justify reading the anthology, and it gives us a benchmark for the 1941 Retro Hugo process. The first story, The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years by Don Wilcox, is probably the best of the bunch. I also enjoyed Paul Revere and the Time Machine by A.W. Bernal and Sons of the Deluge by Nelson S. Bond, a lost-world, time travel adventure.
The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years by Don Wilcox
Truth is a Plague by David Wright O'Brien
The Living Mist by Ralph Milne Farley
Paul Revere and the Time Machine by A.W. Bernal
Monster Out of Space by Malcolm Jameson
The Day Time Stopped Moving by Ed Earl Repp (writing as Bradner Buckner)
The Mathematical Kid by Ross Rocklynne
The Strange Voyage of Dr. Penwing by Richard O. Lewis
The Three Wise Men of Space by Donald Bern
Sons of the Deluge by Nelson S. Bond
The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years by Don Wilcox
Truth is a Plague by David Wright O'Brien
The Living Mist by Ralph Milne Farley
Paul Revere and the Time Machine by A.W. Bernal
Monster Out of Space by Malcolm Jameson
The Day Time Stopped Moving by Ed Earl Repp (writing as Bradner Buckner)
The Mathematical Kid by Ross Rocklynne
The Strange Voyage of Dr. Penwing by Richard O. Lewis
The Three Wise Men of Space by Donald Bern
Sons of the Deluge by Nelson S. Bond
April 3, 2016
I originally ILLed this book to read Sons of the deluge and re-read "The voyage that lasted 600 years" before the final day of nominations for the 1941 RetroHugos on March 31. However, reading the other stories in the volume was also fun; quality varies, but most were entertaining. (Of course, all older sci fic needs to be read in historical context of when it was written, so new readers to these older stories must expect differences from some of the modern SF!). Recommended for true SF readers.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews