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The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929-1964

Robert Silverberg (Editor),

A.E. van Vogt

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Feb 22, 2008 Werner rated it really liked it

Shelves: short-stories, books-i-own, science-fiction

(Revised, Aug. 5, 2010

Soon after the creation of the Nebula Award in 1965 by the Science Fiction Writers of America, that organization decided to create the "Science Fiction Hall of Fame," a multi-volume anthology to include works published before 1965, which were selected by a poll of the membership as deserving of Nebula Award-class recognition. This first volume contains the short stories chosen (two subsequent volumes recognize the selected novellas). Again, this is a collection I've had on (Revised, Aug. 5, 2010

Soon after the creation of the Nebula Award in 1965 by the Science Fiction Writers of America, that organization decided to create the "Science Fiction Hall of Fame," a multi-volume anthology to include works published before 1965, which were selected by a poll of the membership as deserving of Nebula Award-class recognition. This first volume contains the short stories chosen (two subsequent volumes recognize the selected novellas). Again, this is a collection I've had on my "read" shelf for some time; but I only recently went back to read the last couple of stray stories I hadn't previously read.

The above Goodreads description is actually a review in its own right --and a good one, IMO, though I disagree with the reviewer's laudatory assessment of some stories. That description identifies all of the authors represented and lists all of the stories as well, matching them with the author (and also identifying the publications where they first appeared, which the book does not although it does give the publication dates). There are 26 selections; by design, all are by different writers.

Like the anthology I reviewed yesterday evening, Adventures in Time and Space, this one was hard to rate, and for the same reason. The quality of the stories is uneven --not surprisingly, when one considers the fact that they were selected by a poll of the membership (which also suggested the 132 nominated stories) of a largish organization that undoubtedly embraced many wildly diverging reading tastes. (As editor Silverberg notes, there were also cases where strictly numerical vote tallying wasn't followed; and a criterion for selection was how influential the story was on the genre --which isn't precisely the same question as how good or how well-written it is.) There wasn't any question that I liked the book overall, but as one of my Goodreads friends noted, "there are a lot of clunkers here;" the question was if they should pull the rating down to three stars. But I ultimately decided on four (and perhaps should have done the same for the Adventures collection mentioned at the start of the paragraph!)

Chronologically, the stories span the years 1934-1963; they represent both the pulp tradition and the more polished and consciously literary works of the postwar period that followed it (and fortunately cut off before the pestilential "New Wave" era that followed in its turn). A number of the selections are frequently-anthologized works that I've commented on in reviews of other collections. These include stellar masterpieces like Boucher's "The Quest for Saint Aquin," Van Vogt's "The Weapons Shop," Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey," and Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon;" solid works such as Asimov's "Nightfall," Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven!" and Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes;" and (speaking of clunkers), Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll." The latter case is a good example of an instance where a writer is recognized here for a story vastly inferior to another, or others, that he wrote (the male pronoun reflects the fact that only one woman, Judith Merril, was represented here; the genre in the pre-1965 era was male-dominated, but one can't help but think that C. L. Moore and Zenna Henderson would have won inclusion but for the sexist attitudes of many of those who voted in the poll). Other examples that come to mind are Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Campbell, Alfred Bester, and Arthur C. Clarke.

Of the stories not commented on elsewhere, Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain" (from his Instrumentality of Man corpus) and Fredric Brown's "Arena" are among the best. Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy," a tale of an android who genuinely falls in love with her human creator, is an emotionally compelling work that explores what it means to be human (though a contrast between it and Bradbury's handling of the same question in "I Sing the Body Electric" --not included here-- is perhaps instructive; del Rey seeks to reduce human love to a mechanistically explainable chemical phenomenon, where Bradbury recognizes it as something that transcends the mechanistic and the material). Though they have wildly implausible premises, Kornbluth's "The Little Black Bag" and Blish's "Surface Tension" are well-written and very readable. Indeed, at least as much could be said for most of the stories. My initial reaction to Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life" and Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" --both of which represent the genre's dark, horrific strand (and represent it very effectively!)-- was negative; but my friend Jim convinced me that they have more complex interpretive possibilities that justify more attention and a higher estimation. (From a Christian perspective, though, the Clarke story does point up a sharp contrast between the Eastern and Christian views of the "end of the world" --annihilation of "illusory" matter, including organic life, vs. transformation of the material universe into something better and wonderful. And I still think Clarke's "Second Dawn" would have been a better selection!)

Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" is part of the same dark SF strand, but there the horrific quality is clearly intended to be existential, expressions of a cold and unfeeling universe that's indifferent or hostile to human beings. Since I see that perspective as flawed and barren, it makes it harder to relate to the story. (Of course, one of my favorite writers is Lovecraft, who wrote from the same perspective, but in his work that message usually comes across to me as just a tacked-on "moral," like Aesop's; it isn't something that emerges inescapably from the warp and woof of the story. In this story, it does, and the storytelling and style lack the qualities I personally find congenial in Lovecraft --though the story is effectively designed for its purpose.) Plausibility isn't a long suit here, either. Leiber's "Coming Attraction" is a vivid picture of a highly dystopian, decadent post-nuclear war U.S.; but it lacks any point or narrative resolution that could give the reader any satisfaction with the story. But these, plus the afore-mentioned Heinlein selection, constitute the only stories here that, for me, just don't please at all (though the Godwin story is in a different class in terms of artistic design). ...more

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