1953 - short science fiction

Here are the stories Bleiler and Dikty picked in 1953 for the best of 1952:

  • “Ararat” by Zenna Henderson *****
  • “Category Phoenix” by Boyd Ellanby ***
  • “Command Performance” by Walter M. Miller, Jr. ****
  • “Conditionally Human” by Walter M. Miller, Jr. *****
  • “The Conqueror” by Mark Clifton ***
  • “Counter Transference by William F. Temple ***
  • “The Dreamer” by Alfred Coppel **
  • “Fast Falls the Eventide” by Eric Frank Russell *****
  • “Firewater” by William Tenn ****
  • “The Fly” by Arthur Porges ***
  • “The Gadget Had a Ghost” by Murray Leinster ****
  • “Game for Blondes” by John D. MacDonald ***
  • “The Girls From Earth” by Frank M. Robinson ****
  • “I Am Nothing” by Eric Frank Russell ****
  • “Lover, When You’re Near Me” by Richard Matheson ****
  • “Machine” by John W. Jakes **
  • “The Middle of the Week After Next” by Murray Leinster ***
  • “The Moon is Green” by Fritz Leiber ****
  • “Surface Tension” by James Blish *****
  • “Survival” by John Wyndham ****

Then in 1986 Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg picked these stories as the best short SF of 1952 (overlapping stories are in bold):

  • “The Altair at Midnight” by C. M. Kornbluth ***
  • “The Business, As Usual” by Mack Reynolds **
  • “Command Performance” by Walter M. Miller, Jr. ****
  • “Cost of Living” by Robert Sheckley ***
  • “Delay in Transit” by F. L. Wallace *****
  • “Fast Falls the Eventide” by Eric Frank Russell *****
  • “Game for Blondes” by John D. MacDonald ***
  • “Hobson’s Choice” by Alfred Bester ***
  • “The Impacted Man” by Robert Sheckley ***
  • “Lost Memory” by Peter Phillips ***
  • “The Martian Way” by Isaac Asimov ****
  • “The Moon is Green” by Fritz Leiber ****
  • “The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury ***
  • “Sail On! Sail On!” by Philip Jose Farmer ****
  • “The Snowball Effect” by Katherine MacLean **
  • “The Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury ****
  • “What Have I Done?” by Mark Clifton ****
  • “What’s It Like Out There?” by Edmond Hamilton *****
  • “Yesterday’s House” by Fritz Leiber ****

I’m always amazed at the different lineups between Bleiler/Dikty and Asimov/Greenberg. For 1951 they only have one story in common, so having four in 1952 is rather interesting. Using our 2020 CSFquery tool here are the most cited stories in our database for 1952:

1953 best SF stories csfquery

Remember, the Bleiler/Dikty and Asimov/Greenberg anthologies are three of the citations used in our database. For example, here are the citations for “Surface Tension,” the most cited SF short story of 1952. Why didn’t Asimov/Greenberg include it in their collection?

Surface Tension citations

I’m extremely fond of “Surface Tension” but my very favorite short read for 1952 was “Fast Falls the Eventide” by Eric Frank Russell, and it only received two citations. That implies citations are not the best way to recognize a good story. Who knows, there might be several stories from 1952 that never got any recognition after their first publication that I would enjoy reading today. There were dozens of magazines back in 1952 publishing science fiction.

“The Year of the Jackpot” is one of my top favorite Heinlein short stories, but it wasn’t picked for either anthology. “Baby is Three” by Theodore Sturgeon is a tremendous tale. I wonder why Bleiler/Dikty didn’t pick it for Year’s Best Short Novels 1953 (it was too long for the other two anthologies). I guess it was already being recognized as being part of More Than Human. I wished both Bleiler/Dikty and Asimov/Greenberg would list the stories they wanted to anthologize but couldn’t. For a while, they left a blank page for the Heinlein stories, but they soon stopped that.

The two Ray Bradbury stories, “Sound of Thunder” and “The Pedestrian” are often taught in schools, well, at least when I was going to school. However, they didn’t impress me as much as when I first read them over a half-century ago when I had to read them in school. Still good stories, but their fame has dimmed their brightness.

I thought “Delay in Transit” by F. L. Wallace was an exceptional story, but it seems to have been forgotten. Ditto for “Ararat” by Zenna Henderson. It’s a shame that her stories of The People are fading away from the genre’s memory.

I got a big kick out of reading these 1952 stories. When I started this project, beginning with the SF stories of 1939, I expected the famous Golden Age SF stories of the 1940s to be the outstanding stories of the past. But I was disappointed. Overall, the 1940s weren’t particularly golden for me. Things started picking up in the late 1940s, and the 1950s are now producing the kind of stories I’d call a Golden Age. I’m sure it’s a matter of generational perspective. There is also the possibility that each decade will be better than the one before it. In that case, I’m really looking forward to the 1960s.

Thrilling Wonder

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JWH

4 thoughts on “The Year’s Best Short Science Fiction: 1952”

  1. The last bit of Eric Frank Russell’s “I Am Nothing” can still make my eyes go misty. But then I’m an inveterate cat lover. And finding a new Zenna Henderson story was always a treat. I wish I could remember the title or author of a certain novel from the 50s or 60s that had quite the creepy impact on me. It had a premise reminiscent of “Surface Tension” with a race of miniature humans. Their nemesis was a giant (to them) venomous spider (no relation to “The Incredible Shrinking Man”). In fact the title of the novel might have been “The Spider”. Ring a bell with anyone?

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    1. PJ, are you thinking about Hothouse by Brian Aldiss? Called The Long Afternoon of Earth when first published in the U.S. There’s also The Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster. Both of these stories had people fighting spiders if I remember. However, they were only small in the Aldiss story. In Leinster, they were on a planet where the insects were big.

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      1. Hothouse I’ve avoided up to now as I’m not a fan of the New Wave, but it does sound interesting. The Leinster book is more probable although something is telling me that the author I’m thinking of wasn’t a major SF name.

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        1. I believe Hothouse is before the New Wave. It’s a rather fantastic adventure story, a Dying Earth tale, that’s rather beautiful. It would make a wonderful animated film. It feels more like a cross of Wells, Stapledon, Burroughs, and Leinster.

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