jameswharris

Posted on April 27, 2020 by jameswharris

Reading the Best Science Fiction Short Stories 1939-2019

You can view the spreadsheet here. Thank you, Piet!

My friend Piet Nel loves science fiction short stories. He also loves tracking his reading in Excel. Piet also knows I’m working my way through all the anthologies that collected the best science fiction short stories for a given year. I started with The Great SF Stories 1 (1939) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. I just started The Great SF Stories 15 (1953). Things slowed down when I got to 1949 because Everett Bleiler and T. E. Dikty began their anthology series that year. My reading coverage will expand again in 1955 when Judith Merril’s anthologies join the pile. I’ve collected physical copies of most of these anthologies through 1990, and I have many of them from 1990 on in ebook, paper, and audiobook formats.

I didn’t know how big this project was until Piet offered to send me a spreadsheet with all the stories from those anthologies in one long list. There are 4,752 entries, but remember, some year’s stories were anthologized multiple times by different editors for their annual best-of volume. I’ve read at least 1,000 of these stories in recent years.

That’s one humongous pile of short stories to finish. I don’t know if I will live long enough. I will turn 69 this year. I was hoping to keep a year a month pace, but that’s hasn’t worked out. I’d at least like to maintain a decade a year pace. That would mean finishing the 1950s in 2020. After that it would be:

2021 – 1960s (70)
2022 – 1970s (71)
2023 – 1980s (72)
2024 – 1990s (73)
2025 – 2000s (74)
2026 – 2010s (75)
2027 – 2020s (76)

Seen that way, the project actually seems manageable. Of course, I might go raving insane from reading science fiction long before can escape via dying. And that doesn’t consider the number of annual anthologies increases over time. Or that they expanded into giant 250,000-word monsters in the 1990s. But on the other hand, I’ve been keeping up with some of the new annual anthologies as they came out starting in 2017.

At first, my rule was to read every story, and if it was repeated in a second annual, to reread it. I have found some of the stories are worth rereading, but I’ve also discovered a lot of stories I don’t think are worth reading once. I’m not sure why they were collected as one of the bests-of-the-year. Of course, they might have been more relevant when they first were published, but the cruelty of time has made them slight, or silly, if not stupid.

If the project gets too burdensome, I might make a new rule that allows me to abandon any story that I find obviously a waste of time to read. I don’t really like that idea, because I’m anal enough to want to say I read them all. But my real goal is to find all the great stories, so why waste time on boring ones?

What I’ve already learned from this project that I love to find stories I want to reread. Some stories are so delicious they warrant multiple readings. That’s the highest praise I can give a story. And it’s inspiring me to work out a rating system that I might use in an added column on the spreadsheet. Here’s what I’m considering at the moment. I’m still refining it.

5-stars (*****) – Stories I’m anxious to reread
4-stars (****) – Stories I admired highly but once is enough
3-stars (***) – Fun stories I know I’ll forget with hours
2-stars (**) – Stories I had to make myself finish
1-star (*) – Stories I couldn’t finish

I do read other things besides oldie-goldie sci-fi short stories. I’m currently reading/listening to War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and Belgravia by Julian Fellowes. And I’m anxious to find time to read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. I do like to throw in an occasional SF novel, although I’ve reached an age where I just don’t like wasting time on novels. I recently read What Mad Universe and Martians, Go Home by Fredric Brown. I got turned on to Brown by reading his old stories in these anthologies.

This essay might not be wise to post. Other older SF fans are also collecting and reading these old anthologies too. That’s running up the price of these rare books. Paul Fraser and I have a Facebook group devoted to the Best SF/F short stories and it currently has over 130 members. We also have a Groups.io email list that discusses old SF short stories for people who don’t like using Facebook. I’m also a member of Classic Science Fiction & Fantasy Short Stories. Finally, the Facebook group Science Fiction Book Club discusses one SF short story every week. If you love reading SF/F short stories you might check them out.

James Wallace Harris, 4/27/20

Posted on April 22, 2020 by jameswharris · 3 Comments

Has The Pandemic Affected Your Reading?

Back in the 1960s, when I was a clueless teenager reading Martians, Go Home by Fredric Brown, I thought the book was hilarious. My friend George had turned me onto the story by describing the wild antics of the invading Martians. Back then I focused on the comic elements. Fifty years later when rereading the book I identified with the victims of the Martian pranks, the humans, and the disruptions to their everyday life.

True, the book wasn’t funny today, but then neither is Gilligan’s Island. However, the book worked well on this new level because the plague of Martians brought about the same kinds of social disruptions as the coronavirus pandemic. The older me focused on the repercussions of the pandemic of little green men. Brown had extensively dealt with that aspect of the story, but I had missed it as a kid. The Martians put many people out of work and made gathering in large groups impossible. Because of our current situation, those threads in the story were elevated as perceptive writing. I have to wonder, though, if the current pandemic had not happened would rereading Martians, Go Home have impressed me so much?

Doesn’t real-life suffering make fictional suffering so much more vivid? Living through this pandemic has enhanced many of the books I’ve been reading and many of the shows I’m watching. Some of my friends are avoiding stories that remind them of the pandemic and seeking fictional escapes instead, but not me. I recently binge-watched an eight-part version of War and Peace, and the parallels were impressive. And what I really loved was the ending when the remaining characters found a new normal. That felt really good emotionally.

What’s ironic now, are stories about pandemics used to be a favorite theme of mine. I’m not sure I would enjoy them today, or if I did, not in the same way. One of my most loved books is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, and one of my top DVD series is Survivors. In both stories, a pandemic wipes out 99.9% of the human race. Their appeal was starting society over. My younger self found that very exciting. This pandemic is hardly like those pandemics, but real life and fiction produce something in common — the desire for normal. Missing just a little bit of normal has taught me I really would have hated missing most of normal. Even though I thought I wanted to be a Robinson Crusoe rebuilding society, I probably would have gone catatonic losing the old one.

Experience is hard on fiction. Growing up I thought becoming an astronaut would be the pinnacle of all experiences. My junior high self would have sold his soul to fly on a Project Gemini mission. But I didn’t know myself. It took me years to realize I didn’t have the right stuff. My love of normal routines makes it impossible for me to have been an astronaut. Loving science fiction is one thing, being Neil Armstrong is something we’ll never see in any kind of fiction.

My experiences in life have taught me all about which characters I couldn’t have been, and which ones I could. But I didn’t know that in 1965, so I gorged myself on all kinds of books daydreaming I could become someone like the protagonist living their far-out adventures. Now, in 2020 when I read stories, I often see myself as one of the minor characters or identify with the faults of the main character.

Life has always cleared my rose-colored fantasies.

JWH

Posted on April 18, 2020April 18, 2020 by jameswharris · 6 Comments

What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown

In this short 1949 science fiction novel, Keith Winton, the editor of pulp science fiction magazine Surprising Stories is on a weekend retreat at his publisher’s estate in the Catskills. He has fallen for Betty Hadley, the editor of Romantic Stories. Keith woos her to stay, but Betty has to get back to New York City. Keith stays, first going back to his room to edit the letter column for his next issue, but then going out to sit in the garden, hoping to see an experimental rocket hit the moon with flash that can be seen from the Earth. It is 1952, but not our 1952. Instead of impacting the moon, the rocket crashes onto the Catskill estate sending Keith Winton into another universe.

I don’t want to tell you too much about this other universe — there’s too much fun to spoil. Keith’s new reality is much like ours in every way, but their concept of science fiction is quite different. What Mad Universe is a cross between a nail-biting pulp thriller and a wild satire of science fiction and its fans.

If you love pulp fiction, you should love this story, especially if you’re an aficionado of 1950s Sci-Fi, and I am in a big way. This novel has often been reprinted, yet it’s not well known. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Jim Roberts (6 hours 48 minutes). It took me a bit to get used to the style, but I could never tell if the slight oddness was Brown’s or Robert’s. In the end, it didn’t matter, the audiobook made this story even better.

The story prefigures the work of both Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley. And if you know what recursive science fiction is, then that’s another tipple in its favor.

If you need to know more details, there’s an extensive synopsis on Wikipedia, but it’s full of spoilers. If you want to sample the story, you can read the novella version online from the September 1948 issue of Startling Stories (it’s severely cut down). There is a $2.99 Kindle version at Amazon, but if you think you want a whole lot of Fredric Brown What Mad Universe is also available with four other of Brown’s science fiction novels in the NESFA hardback collection Martians and Madness — the other stories are Martians, Go Home (1955), The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953), The Mind Thing (1961) and Rogue in Space (1957).

JWH

Posted on April 11, 2020April 11, 2020 by jameswharris · 5 Comments

A Philosophical Conversation Between Two Short Stories

This week at the Science Fiction Book Club on Facebook, we’re discussing two stories: “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” (1973) by Ursula K. Le Guin and “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” (2018) by N. K. Jemisin. Le Guin’s Hugo award-winning short story is often taught in schools because it presents a brilliant philosophical Zen kōan. Jemisin’s story rejects Le Guin’s implied conclusion and offers an alternative answer by resetting the kōan. Both stories paint a tiny utopia with quick colorful strokes, each with a moral conundrum, and each with a solution to upset their readers.

Every so often in our genre, a science fiction writer will present a story that other writers want to reply to by writing another story. For example, it appears the novels The Forever War by Joe Haldeman and Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card are part of a conversation with Robert A. Heinlein that he started with Starship Troopers. Sarah Pinsker’s story, “The Ones Who Know Where They Are Going” is also part of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” conversation too, but I haven’t read it, and there are no links for it on the web.

If you haven’t read Le Guin’s and Jemison’s stories, I hope you go off and read them now because this essay gives spoilers. Both are very short. The links to each story are above. I recommend listen to each story as you read along with the text. Both text and audio Jemisin’s story are at that link. Here is an audio version of Le Guin’s story.

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin offers an allegorical lesson about the nature of utopias. She intentionally speaks to you the reader, inviting participation in the creation of her utopian city, Omelas, because she wants you to believe it is indeed a perfect society. That’s the first part of the story, and quite lovely. The second part of her parable is when she describes the price of this utopia, which Le Guin later claims she got from William James. Omelas is a beautiful place to live because of the suffering of one child. All citizens know that suffering is part of their social contract. Le Guin describes the suffering child vividly so we feel the horrendous price the citizens of Omelas must accept. The third, and final part of this allegorical tale, is about the people who reject that contract and walk away from Omelas. It’s a powerful story, especially when you actively consider whether or not you the reader would stay or go.

Le Guin sets up her moral problem by presenting an artificial situation, much like the famous trolley problem in psychology. Most readers only consider it a story and a theoretical issue. I don’t. I see the story as a metaphor for our own existence. All the societies on Earth provide happiness to some based on the suffering of others. “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” is a perfect analogy for our own social contracts. Le Guin is telling us any happiness we gain comes at a terrible cost, and we’re complicit with the bargain.

Le Guin was theorizing about the nature of utopias. Even though humans have sought perfect societies since the dawn of time, we’ve come to believe that utopias are impossible. Le Guin knew her fictional problem was limited to her story, but I assume she also knew the guilt we’d feel reading it because it matches real life much too closely.

In the story, Le Guin, and I suppose readers are expected to admire the people who walk away from Omelas. But where do they go? There has been much speculation about that. Le Guin wrote a novel after this, The Dispossessed that explores a place, Anarres, that tries to imagine a place that those leaving places like Omelas might want to go.

Now we come to N. K. Jemisin. She didn’t admire the people who walked away and instead imagine people who stay and fight. Jemisin’s story also paints a picture of a tiny jewel-like utopia, Um-Helat. It’s a whole beautiful world but much like the city of Omelas. The differences are interesting too. We all imagine what we think utopia would be like, and both writers know this, offering their readers a chance to participate — an impressive writing technique.

Um-Helat, unlike Omelas, would be near perfect and without evil if it wasn’t for our world. Um-Helat exists in another dimension, and is our world perfected after much struggle. Unfortunately, some of the citizens of Um-Helat have discovered a way to observe our world, and our hate and beliefs in inequality are corrupting theirs. I wondered if this wasn’t partly a specific metaphor for the internet and wondered if Jemisin isn’t asking what we should do about people who pollute the online world with their evil perspectives.

Some of the citizens of Um-Helat have come up with a solution to this problem. They don’t walk away. They seek out and kill those citizens that are spreading corruption from our world. I doubt Jemisin sees this as a literal solution. Isn’t this the flaw of her stories to inspire readers to think and discuss?

I buy neither solution. We can’t walk away. There’s no place we can go that doesn’t have the same social contract of trading suffering for happiness. Nor can we fight inequality and hatred by killing its perpetrators. And it is impractical to create a whole new society. Neither solution works in the real world, but the real world still demands a solution.

If we only consider these two stories to be about the theoretical problem of creating a fictional utopia then we can talk all we want and then walk away just like the characters who walked away from Omelas. If this is only fiction, we can say, “Kill the bad guys.”

If we consider these stories metaphors for our society, we can’t walk away, and we can’t kill. Yet, we can’t forget these stories because we can’t forget all the real downtrodden or all the real people infecting everyone with hate.

Reading these stories create existential angst. We might have given up on utopias in fiction, but we can’t give up on improving this world. Maybe we can’t reach 100% utopian perfection, but we can achieve a lot more happiness and equality. Studying the past shows us how much worse societies were, so we know we can improve. But what is the maximum utopian efficiency we can achieve? 75%? 90%? 99%

We also have a social contract. Success and happiness in this world come from the failure and suffering of other people. Hatred and misery in this world come from inequality. We’re all like those citizens of Omelas who willingly accept the torture of a child, and we’re like the citizens of Um-Helat who spread inequality. Why? Because we all want to climb the ladder of prosperity and social position. We just tune out all those tortured people and hatred to get what we want.

Yes, these are only stories, but they are revealing stories. If we don’t realize that we’re part of an evil social contract we’re not walking away, but running away.

James Wallace Harris, 4/10/20

Posted on April 3, 2020April 26, 2020 by jameswharris · 7 Comments

Star Trek Lovers Don’t Read This

I’m serious about my trigger warning title. If you love Star Trek don’t read this. It’s not worth the aggravation. I’m aiming this at old farts like me who wish science fiction was more scientific, and there ain’t that many of us. I expect maybe five readers. I finished watching Star Trek: Picard and have some things I want to talk about, but I don’t want to rile any fans. Overall, I thought the show was fun. It was also a pleasant excursion down memory land. However, I have some quibbles, some specifically about the show, and others about science fiction in general. My complaints probably aren’t fair anyway, just my personal pet peeves for things to be different in science fiction.

And maybe I’m being too literal in wanting Star Trek to be more scientifically realistic. Maybe all Kirsten Beyer, Akiva Goldsman, Michael Chabon, and Alex Kurtzman wanted was to present a metaphorical story about how paranoid conservatives (Romulans) are infiltrating all levels of the federal government (Federation) so they can fight illegal immigration (synthetics) and keep America pure (humanoid).

At that level, it makes the show a feel-good experience. Yet, I feel the need to bellyache.

My first quibble with the show deals with superscience. It appears anything that can be imagined is possible within the Star Trek universe. For example, if they can have instantaneous communication with 3D holographic images, why not just teleport everyone anywhere in the universe and forget starships? Wait, they did that. Star Trek allows for any magical wands and fantasy portals. Wasn’t that doohicky given by the synthetics in the last episode really just a magical wand? Are wormholes in Star Trek any different than a magical wardrobe to Naria? Just another fantasy portal to get you to another world?

I’m beginning to wonder if Fredric Wertham wasn’t right the evils of comic books. Doesn’t it feel like all the comic book movies have corrupted science fiction movies with superhero characters and nonsense science? Star Trek: Picard was no more challenging in the understanding of reality than belief in Santa Claus or Superman. Have we all become children again? Picard is always able to find a chimney to descend.

My second main quibble with Star Trek: Picard was the synthetics’ outpost on Coppelius. We had eight episodes building us up to what magnificent creatures these AI beings are, and what a tremendous threat they are to all humanoid life in the galaxy, and what are we given? A society that looked like a small commune of 1960s flower children. In fact, they reminded me mostly of the hapless Eloi in the 1960 film version of The Time Machine. I was expecting a far-out civilization, with imposing architecture and technology. We are eventually thrown one bone, with that ESP-driven multi-tool, but wasn’t it really plot-fixing abracadabra. I hate when science fiction equates advanced beings with ESP magical mumbo-jumbo powers. Psionics ruined 1950s’ Astounding.

My last quibble, and really the largest, but one that applies to all recent science fiction, both in books and movies, is imagining AI beings that look like us. And especially why do most recent AI beings in science fiction look like beautiful young women? What a pathetic lack of creative thinking. Sure, I know, it’s a great role for young actresses, but can’t they make a decent robot that can act?

Are all those billions we’re pouring into artificial intelligence just a secret tech-race to develop sexbots? Are there guys out there dreaming about becoming the first trillionaire by marketing a Wowza iWoman?

First, we need to do some deep psychoanalysis on why we think AI beings will look like us. Are we so vain to think we have the perfect form? Also, in most science fiction where the story tries to convince AI beings shouldn’t be destroyed as evil threats, making them look human, even beautiful, is a fantastically huge storytelling cheat. It’s too easy to be empathetic to beings that already look like us, especially beautiful young women.

If Dahj and Soji had looked like six-foot-tall metallic spiders, with dozens of eyes that could see into all wavelengths of the EM spectrum, capable of thinking a thousand times faster than human, free from all oppressive programming of biology, who saw us as extremely limited wetware creatures confused by our passions and urges, would we have thought of them as equals to be protected with by our human rights, laws, and our ethical considerations? Would Picard champion their existence? And be honest, would you have feared and hated them?

Science fiction sells both good and evil robots. Isn’t it rather Freudian that good robots are hot babes and bad robots are evil machines? Okay, I admit there are some counterexamples to my claim. We do have Number Five and WALL-E who were good and machines, and Number Six who was evil and a lovely woman in a red dress. Give those story creators an A+.

We confuse the whole problem of machine intelligence by considering synthetic humans. We will never need to create synthetic humans, but we will create AI minds that exist in bodies of fantastic designs of extreme utility.

The whole arc of season one of Star Trek: Picard was about fearing the children of the singularity. But it never dealt with the issue with any intellectual validity. It remained at a level of primitive movie SF philosophy that existed in 1966 when the original Star Trek premiered. Heinlein did a superior job that year with the SF book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

I’ve always loved Star Trek, but it’s not evolving. It’s just becoming more and more recursive nostalgia. And, at that level Star Trek: Picard was satisfying. But thinking about it made me worry that neither Star Trek nor science fiction is ever going to grow up. If fact, it seems to be regressing, at least on television and in the theater. Is that just because it’s trying to reach the lowest common denominator to make the most money?

The trouble is, the original vision of Star Trek was intended to be a positive (liberal) view of the future. Back then we truly hoped the destiny of humanity was so spread across the galaxy. Star Trek made us believe it could happen. We’ve learned a lot in the half-century since then, but it’s not reflected in the newer shows. What we learned is Star Trek/Star Wars visions of interstellar travel is a fantasy no different than the magical make-believe universes of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. At first, science fiction offered realistic possibilities that replaced the old dreams about reality based on God(s), angels, and heaven, but now science fiction is just becoming another fantasy dogma.

What we need is a science fiction television series where interstellar travel is nearly impossible, where we coexist with intelligent machines many times smarter than our IQ, and maybe even communicate with alien species that look nothing like humans, or anything we ever imagined. We need a high frontier that isn’t a substitute for colonialism, yet fulfills our deepest existential needs. Science fiction on the level of comic book superheroes is no more sophisticated than the thinking of 2,500 years ago when the ancient Greeks imagined the shenanigans of their gods and goddesses.

Of course, that might be expecting too much. Humans haven’t changed significantly in their 200,000-year existence, so why expect them to change now? But haven’t we reached a stage in our development where we could see out of the loop we’re trapped in? Is it too much to ask that we cut back on the fantasy and explore the realistic possibilities of existence in a genre with the word science in its label?

James Wallace Harris, 4/3/20

Posted on March 29, 2020March 29, 2020 by jameswharris · 3 Comments

Science Fiction Times They Are a-Changin’

Change 2

I’ve been looking at lists of people’s favorite science fiction stories since I started reading science fiction in the 1960s. Sometimes I agree with their choices, other times I don’t. The interesting thing about these lists is they change over the generations. Just study all the lists we use as our citation sources for the Classics of Science Fiction. The oldest list we use is from a 1949 issue of the Arkham Sampler. (Full article reprinted below or read the entire issue here.) One of the top titles was Out of the Silence (1925) by Earle Cox, a title I haven’t even heard of before, much less seen or read. Of course, people back in 1949 couldn’t have voted for The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin, but if you study the list, they also didn’t vote for very many books recent to 1949 either. Our favorite books tend to be slightly older books.

It’s my theory that each generation bonds with certain science fiction books in the same way people bond with the pop music they grow up with during their teens and early twenties. However, there is a slight time lag for books. We don’t discover books as timely as we do hit songs. We seem to find them by word-of-mouth, awards, film adaptions, etc. So new books can be from this year, this decade, or even a little before that.

It’s not that each new generation doesn’t discover the favorite reads from older generations or eventually read books from younger generations, but there’s a time-span lump of books we claim for our generation. The Catcher in the Rye is a good example. Like Baby Boomers favoring Classic Rock, I favor Classic Science Fiction from the 1950s and 1960s. In my generation, Heinlein/Clarke/Asimov were The Beatles of science fiction, but they’re no longer the Big Three for Sci-Fi readers today.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve watched later generations grow up and imprint on different science fiction. Sure, some of their parents might have influenced them to read Classic Science Fiction, but for the most part, each new generation embraces its own books to represent the concept of science fiction. The current generation of science fiction fans seems particularly rebellious against my generation and earlier.

The other day I caught a video on YouTube that made me think it was a Gen-X list of science fiction classics. (If you don’t want to watch the video the list of books is in the comments.)

The creator of this video goes by the handle of Moid Moidelhoff and is 45, making him a Gen-Xer. I’ve read 52 of his Top 100 books, and many of those are my favorites too, and classics to my generation. Moid loves books I haven’t read by authors I haven’t tried – Banks, Reynolds, and Hamilton. I liked his list enough to add it to our citation sources. (By the way, it ended up being only 99 because we list The Foundation Trilogy as a single book and he selected two of the volumes.) His Top 100 list pushed two books onto the Classics of Science Fiction list – Consider Phlebas (1987) by Iain M. Banks and The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003) by Audrey Niffenegger.

It currently takes 12 citations to get on our final classics list, and these two titles only had 11 citations before I added his Top 100. Over time we up the minimum number of citations required to get on the final list, which pushes some books off the list. If you look at this table you’ll see how titles fall out of favor over time.

I can see from this YouTube list a generation shift. If I could find a list by millennials I believe I’d see an even greater shift away from the SF books my generation call classics. From watching this YouTube video I am inspired to catch up. 40 of his books came from the 21st century, and 60 since 1980, but his newest titles stop in 2013. Millennials would pick even newer titles, but I’m not sure they’ve had enough reading time to decide on their classics yet.

In that issue of Arkham Sampler I mentioned above, the feature article was “A Basic Science-Fiction Library.” I feel it was composed by The Greatest Generation SF readers (born before 1924) and maybe some of the older folks from the younger Silent Generation readers (1925-1945). Reading this article will capture a different science fiction generation. Note the stories we still read today as well as the stories that have become forgotten over time. Science fiction generations have changed several times since this 1949 article. In my old age, I love to study the previous generations, but I also marvel at the changes later generations are making. Even though I feel out of touch with the current generation of science fiction fans, I still find the science fiction they love fascinating for how different it is compared to the books I grew up loving.

I feel this article captures a past generation’s science fiction. It’s excellent evidence for my case that science fiction changes with the generations. And I don’t mean just the different book titles, but the focus, feel, and style of science fiction.

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Of the books recommended in the 1949 Arkham Sampler article that I have not read but still sound compelling, I want to read:

The Food of the Gods by H. G. Wells
When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells
The Short Stories of H. G. Wells
The World Below by S. Fowler Wright
The Second Deluge by Garrett P. Service
To Walk the Night by William Sloane
Before the Dawn by John Taine
Gladiator by Philip Wylie
The New Adam by Stanley Weinbaum
The Moon Pool by A. Merritt
The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel
Darkness and Dawn by George Allan England
Out of Space and Time by Clark Ashton Smith

From the YouTube video, these are the books I haven’t read but now feel I should try to read soon.

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton
Wool by Hugh Howey
The Children of Men by P. D. James
Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
World War Z by Max Brooks
Blindsight by Peter Watts

James Wallace Harris, 3/29/20

Posted on March 16, 2020 by jameswharris · 3 Comments

One in Three Hundred by J. T. McIntosh

One in Three Hundred by J. T. McIntosh is a fix-up novel that was published in hardback in 1954 but was first serialized as three stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Feb 1953, Jan 1954, Sep 1954). That was quite common back in the 1950s, to assemble a novel from a series of shorter works written first for the magazines. For example, Foundation, More Than Human, A Case of Conscience, A Canticle for Leibowitz, etc. were all fix-up novels.

I had discovered the novelette “One in Three Hundred,” in The Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1954 edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty. I thought it a ripping tale and immediately looked it up on ISFDB.org. That’s when I found out there was also a novel by the same title, and it was based on three stories:

My first inclination was to order a copy of the novel. I was anxious to keep reading to find out what happens. It is currently in print but sold as three separate ebooks for $3.99 each, reprinting the individual stories. I really wanted a copy of the original Doubleday edition because of its dust jacket. A first edition can run in the hundreds, but book club editions aren’t too expensive. However, I have the magazines and decided to just read the story in its original serial form.

I’m not sure Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas knew what they had with the first story because it wasn’t given cover like parts two and three. “One in Three Hundred” was mentioned on the cover, but it was listed last. However, they introduced the story with:

The story begins with 28-year-old Bill Easson walking around the small town of Simsville, (population 3,261) oddly judging people in his thoughts. What slowly unfolds is the world will end soon and Bill will pilot one of 700,000 cheaply built rockets that can each take ten passengers to Mars. Only 1 in 300 Earthlings will get a chance to survive, and Bill’s job to pick the right people. This story reminds me of a movie I just reviewed, Abandon Ship where Alec Holmes (Tyrone Power) has to choose who lives and dies on a lifeboat.

Bill is very conscientious about his assignment. He doesn’t want the obvious morally best people, but people he thinks are up to the challenge and one who could make something out of their new life on Mars. Of course, most people in this town try to con, barter or force themselves onto his list. It’s a compelling story, and fairly adult for a genre targetted to youths. Most of the story is about Bill’s logic, and how he argues with different people who can’t see his way of thinking.

We eventually learn what the editors thought of the story in their introduction to the second part, “One in a Thousand.”

I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to learn that Bill and the ten do make it off Earth because the second episode is about surviving the journey in space. And the editor’s lets you know about as much as you need to know. I like the second part, but it wasn’t as original as the first story. However, McIntosh does provide some very realistic problems for his characters so solve, much more real than most space adventures of the time. 1954 was pre-NASA and although McIntosh doesn’t lay a bunch of technical jargon on us, he does cover all the scientific basics for traveling to Mars. Most science fiction at the time, or even later, seldom bother with these kinds of details.

Again, this might be a spoiler, but it’s probably obvious that in the third installment, they do make it to Mars but face a whole host of new survival problems colonizing Mars. By now the editors know how big of a hit they have.

One in Three Hundred is a forgotten novel of science fiction. It appears to have made a minor splash at the time. Groff Conklin said it was “A distinguished tale” in his January 1955 review in Galaxy. But it was the last book he reviewed in that column and didn’t say much other than describing the three parts like I have above.

P. Schuyler Miller in the February 1955 “Reference Library” damns the story with faint praise.

On the other hand, Damon Knight savages the story in the February 1955 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly. Who is right, Boucher and McComas and the readers of F&SF, or Damon Knight, who became one of the first literary critics of the genre? Knight makes me feel stupid for liking the story.

And Henry Hull in his review from Imagination April 1955 makes me wonder how could have I liked the story at all:

Galaxy reviews the One in a Hundred again when it was republished as an Ace Double. This time Floyd C. Gale calls it excellent and compares it to When Worlds Collide.

Finally, we have Leslie Flood’s review from New Worlds #47. His 1956 take is closer to my 2020 opinion.

I have to admit that One in Three Hundred isn’t a great book, but I find it fun reading. But then, I love discovering old forgotten science fiction worth remembering. I’m mining the past for the kind of science fiction I enjoy — the ones I missed the first time around. Of course, that means anything I like and recommend must be taken with a grain of salt if you’re only used to reading modern science fiction.

I recently read The Death of Grass by John Christopher from the same time period and will say it is a classic, a true novel of artistic quality, one a modern reader should admire. McIntosh doesn’t come close to Christopher’s writing skills. However, does that mean I shouldn’t recommend One in Three Hundred? Damon Knight was famous for vivisecting SF novels, and he does make this novel seem silly — but I could do that to all my favorite books. Sure, it is unrealistic to believe that we’d ever build 700,000 cheap spaceships. I doubt McIntosh believed it either. McIntosh sat down to write about one man picking ten people to survive the apocalypse. That’s the primary hook. The second and third parts are about how well he chose.

Of course, McIntosh gets everything wrong about Mars, but then so does all the other science fiction writers of that time, including Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov. I remember seeing the name J. T. McIntosh on books when I was growing up, but they never appealed enough to me to buy and read them. Now I wish I had. I assumed he was among the countless hack writers of genre and that might be what he eventually became. However, it appears his early books from the 1950s were more promising. Some of his books are in print today as ebooks, but I don’t know if they are his best work or hack work. If we have any J. T. McIntosh fans out there who can vouch for his better novels, leave a comment.

James Wallace Harris, 3/16/20

Posted on March 9, 2020March 9, 2020 by jameswharris · 4 Comments

The Year’s Best Short Science Fiction: 1952

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

Posted on March 6, 2020 by jameswharris · 8 Comments

Why Review A Book You Can’t Buy?

Years Best Science-Fiction Novels 1953

Not only is there little chance of finding a copy of Bleiler and Dikty’s Year’s Best Science-Fiction Novels 1953, but the title is completely deceptive. It contains five novelettes and novellas, not novels, and they were first published in 1952. So why review such a book? Well, the internet will allow fans of old science fiction to still read these stories if they want. The ISFDB link will tell you if you already own an anthology with the story. Or you can read it in the original magazine at the Internet Archive or from Project Gutenberg.

“Firewater” by William Tenn – 4 stars
Businessman, Algernon Hebster, barters for alien technology from humans driven insane by contact with strange Earth invaders. Aliens occupy our planet but merely observe us. We can’t communicate with them, and the people who try, become mystical idiots. Algernon Hebster wants to wheel and deal but if he gets too close could lose his mind too. Internet Archive. ISFDB.

“Category Phoenix” by Boyd Ellanby – 3 stars
Dr. David Wong lives in an oppressive society where privacy is illegal. Wong has developed a medical treatment that could give the dictator overwhelming power, so he works to secretly create a revolution. Internet Archive. ISFDB. Project Gutenberg.

“Surface Tension” by James Blish – 5 stars
Humans crash land on planet Hydrot with no chance of surviving, so they genetically engineer microscopic lifeforms that they hope will have ancestral memory. Wonderfully imaginative. This story has become a classic and is anthologized in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One. Internet Archive. ISFDB.

“The Gadget Had a Ghost” by Murray Leinster – 4 stars
David Coghlan, a physics professor at the American College, is visited by Lieutenant Ghalil of the Istanbul Police and M. Duval, a French scholar. They ask David if he’s been to the 13th century? It turns out the M. Duval has found a 700-year-old book printed in Byzantine Greek with an ancient annotation handwritten in English with Coghlan’s name and address. It also has inky fingerprints. They test them against Coghlan’s and the fingerprints match. So how did David get to the 13th-century to inscribe the book? A different kind of time travel tale. Internet Archive. ISFDB.

“Conditionally Human” by Walter M. Miller, Jr. – 5 stars
A disturbing story about a future overpopulated Earth where there’s strict control over who can have children. As a substitute people have turned to genetically engineered exotic pets, some of which have been designed to have human-like traits that trigger strong maternalistic and paternalistic emotions in their owners. Terry Norris has been ordered to repossess some of these beloved creatures because they might have unwanted mutations. Internet Archive. ISFDB. Project Gutenberg.

Without the internet, these stories would be completely forgotten. Even with the internet, I wonder just how many of these stories will find new readers?

James Wallace Harris, 3/6/20

Posted on February 25, 2020 by jameswharris · 23 Comments

What Happened to Science Fiction?

Disclaimer: My definition of science fiction is not how others define it. Nor is my approach to Star Trek. I’m just psychoanalyzing myself to understand my emotional reaction to the new Star Trek: Picard. It has given me insight into how science fiction is changing.

Is science fiction always science fiction? The label is so broadly used that it’s almost meaningless. Hasn’t science fiction changed from generation to generation? Wasn’t science fiction different before Star Trek in 1966? And didn’t it change again in 1977 with Star Wars? Before 1966 the audience for science fiction was mainly readers of books and magazines. Star Trek brought in millions of new fans. Star Wars brought in tens of millions of new fans. Didn’t each new wave of fans redefine the genre?

Hasn’t every new decade starting in the 1930s, attract new writers that changed the genre? Wasn’t science fiction before NASA different than after NASA? Didn’t the influx of women writers change science fiction? Hasn’t the success of fantasy influence science fiction? Don’t you think the shift to writing long book series changes things again?

I felt Star Trek: Picard in 2020 works to do something very different than Star Trek in 1966. Can we still call it science fiction? Should a label be changed when the object it points to changes? Language has always been fluid, so we tend to recycle words, which can be confusing. I believe if we study all the different incarnations of Star Trek we’ll see that what we point to with the label science fiction has regularly changed.

Early science fiction was about real things we might invent or discover. Writers said someday we’ll go to the Moon and we did. Someday we’ll invent robots and we’re doing it. Then other writers came along and used those ideas to make up fun stories indifferent to what might happen in the future. They didn’t care what was really possible or not, they just loved the stories. Writers who were idea lovers wanting to speculate found it harder and harder to come up with new possible realist concepts so they switched speculating about fantastic possibilities. And the story lovers embraced those ideas too.

The original Star Trek had many episodes written by idea lovers. With each new Star Trek series the science fiction shifted more to the story lovers. Star Trek: Picard has no speculation at all. In fact, it seems primarily nostalgic and recursive. It even seems to suggest a new phase, character lovers. All the enchantment in this new series seems to come from connecting with old friends, old enemies, and old conflicts. Is that really science fiction?

Everyone has a different definition or concept to explain their love of science fiction. I’m enjoying the new Star Trek: Picard but I feel something is missing, and it’s taken me a while to figure out what. For me, science fiction is that sense-of-wonder rush I get when I encounter a new far-out speculative idea. Plenty of stories are called science fiction, but for me, the real McCoy always comes with a sense-of-wonder epiphany. What I’m realizing is earlier Star Trek series were different from recent series, and something has changed. I’m wondering if this new approach to Star Trek isn’t also a trend with other forms of science fiction. The nostalgic recursion is certainly true of Star Wars and the Marvel Universe.

The Star Trek universe is huge. It’s hundreds and hundreds of hours of television episodes and movies, plus a zillion pages of books and fan fiction. Sure, Star Trek is set in a science fictional framework, but 99.98% of Star Trek is mythos and not science fiction — not by my definition. After the original series, Star Trek is an ever-expanding mythology that seldom adds new science-fictional ideas. Star Trek is mainly Star Trek.

Star Trek: Picard is a chimera. Our senses are dazzled by its special effects while our heart melts with nostalgia, yet something is missing. During the summer of 1966, I began seeing commercials for a TV show aimed directly at me. I actually looked forward to going back to school that year because it meant Star Trek would premiere. That summer was a transition time for me because I was about to begin high school. I had spent my junior high years gorging on science fiction books and short stories, and I was full of sense of wonder and a true believer in science fiction.

There was little serious science fiction on television before Star Trek, notably The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. So it was with great anticipation and excitement that I tuned into to see the first episode of Star Trek, “The Man Trap” shown on September 8, 1966. Maybe I had too much hope because a story about a shape-shifting alien seemed old hat. I may or may not have read Campbell’s classic story “Who Goes There?” by then, but I had read other SF stories about beings that could fool us into thinking they were human.

Yet, I was still excited about Star Trek. The concept of a five-year mission of a scientific vessel exploring the galaxy did instill a lot of hope. Knowing that every week Star Trek would present a new science fiction idea completely sold me on the show. Back then I and my buddies would always discuss a science fiction story by the ideas that wowed us. Good stories, no matter the genre, always have good characters, plots, dialogue, standard storytelling structure, but what made science fiction unique was its mind-blowing ideas.

The following week’s episode, “Charlie X” did generate a better sense of wonder high — the idea of a human kid being raised by aliens was far out to ponder on my own and discuss with friends at school. Sure, Heinlein had done a spectacular job with Stranger in a Strange Land, and “Charlie X” felt like a rip-off, but it still was cool — it was on television to see.

The following week’s show, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was even more sense of wonder provoking — what if we meet aliens with godlike powers? Unfortunately, not all 79 episodes of Star Trek pushed my sense of wonder button. Many episodes were groan-worthy, especially after the first season. Remember the incredibly painful “Spock’s Brain?” Gosh-doggie, it was bad. There were many reasons to cancel that show in the third season despite fan rapture. Evidently, science fiction’s repertoire of far-out concepts is smaller than 79.

When Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered it brought both hope and nostalgia. By then the writers had figured out they needed relationship stories within the crew, and outside threats to generate enough weekly plots to keep the series going. The series began to shift, aiming at story lovers over idea lovers. I followed the show for its entire first run. The original series was more like an anthology of short stories. For the most part, the Next Generation had self-contained episodes, but there was more continuity. I liked it for the mythos it was building more than its infrequent science fiction episodes.

Over the years, I’ve tried to rewatch Star Trek: The Next Generation and I’ve always failed. I like Picard better than Kirk, and even though I liked Spock better than Data, Data’s character actually provided a greater range of interesting stories. Star Trek: The Next Generation had 178 episodes. Very few of those episodes are memorable to me now. However, collectively the storytelling, the mythos, of the Next Generation was more memorable than the story arc of the original series. And I believe that’s why Star Trek: Picard is so compelling. Picard has no science fiction or sense-of-wonder that I can recall from the first five episodes. And it’s not really generating new content for story lovers — the series is aimed at character lovers.

Of course, people are going to scream at me. What about the spaceships, the androids, the holographic characters, the aliens, teleporters — those elements brand it as science fiction! Star Trek has been using those elements for so long that they have zip sense-of-wonder. We take them for granted. They are part of the mythos. My definition of science fiction, and it might be only mine, requires science fiction to be inventive, to speculate, extrapolate, to come up with something new, or at least, a neat twist on something old. Star Trek has stopped trying, and I don’t think Star Wars ever tried. Only stand-alone movies like Her or Gattaca or Moon even try to come up with a different take anymore. Ditto for books. Series, by their very nature target story lovers, and most of them run out of steam generating new stories and switch to character love.

I’m sure some new science fiction writers try hard to come up with new science-fictional concepts, but the genre has mostly switched to chewing on the old bones.

The reason we have more and more book series in science fiction is that fans have mutated from wanting ideas to stories to characters. Science fiction has become character and plot-driven, and for the most part, have given up being sense-of-wonder idea-driven. The standard set of mind-blowing elements of science fiction — space travel, aliens, robots, AI, end-of-the-world, time travel, are so common in society that most children accept them as dogma well before they even start school.

I think I was in the 5th or 6th grade before I encountered the idea of time travel by watching the 1960 version of The Time Machine. I was old enough for it to be a shocking concept — one that I relished. What a powerful sense-of-wonder rush. I then went and read the H. G. Wells original story. It’s jammed packed with science fictional ideas. But it doesn’t take reading too many time travel tales to get jaded.

Science fiction has a big problem with staleness. Which is probably why so many fans have switched to nostalgia.

In 1966, Star Trek still had a chance to present sense-of-wonder ideas to most viewers. By 1977, Star Wars was so cliche that it was big fun. Sure, little kids probably didn’t feel that way, but for most viewers, George Lucas was paying homage to a lot of old science fiction. Lucas and Spielberg repackaged science fiction for the masses, but it was about the story, the characters, the plot, and the special effects. It didn’t speculate.

I now have to read a ton of SF short stories to find a single one that surprises me with something new. Quite often now when I read Analog or Asimov’s I find stories that use science-fictional ideas I’ve seen time and time again. Some of the episodes of Black Mirror surprised me. The kind of idea-driven stories I love is usually found in magazines or anthologies, and not novels. You don’t often see a story like Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, or The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Modern television shows have a story arc. The best ones feel like watching a long novel. Star Trek: Picard season one is one long story so that each individual episode adds to the overall story. The plot is a thriller, not science fiction, although the setting is science fiction. We will not get a “City on the Edge of Forever” or “The Inner Light.” And after seeing five episodes of season one of Star Trek: Picard, I’m pretty sure its ten episodes will not equal the sense-of-wonder impact of either of those two individual episodes.

I’m enjoying Star Trek: Picard, but it’s definitely missing something, and to me, what it’s missing is science fiction. We have so much science fiction in the 21st-century that we’ve forgotten the essential nature of science fiction. Well, at least the kind of science fiction I grew up reading and watching in the 20th-century.

Action-oriented thrillers set in space may give the illusion of being science fiction, but they are not. I can understand why some fans claim Star Trek: Picard feels too much like Star Wars. Plots centered around political intrigue, crime, war, kidnapping, revenge, terrorism are about those topics. To be real science fiction the plot has to center around a novel science-fictional concept. All the best episodes in the Star Trek franchise derive their sense of wonder from a science fictional concept. And those standout episodes have become very infrequent.

I’m afraid in future years I won’t spend much time remembering Star Trek: Picard because there’s no cool idea to remember. I can remember more episodes from Star Trek than I can Star Trek: Next Generation even though the later show had more than twice as many episodes. That’s because the original Star Trek was like a collection of science fiction short stories, and Next Generation was more of an ensemble of characters in soap opera set in the future. Even more so for Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise.

Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Sulu, were all very memorable but if you really examine the episodes, they had very little true characterization. They were caricatures where the writers constantly reinforced the same cliche traits. The focus of each episode was a science-fictional idea, sometimes good, often bad. There will be no “The Trouble With Tribbles” or “Shore Leave” episode in Picard. Fans will remember it as season one. And to me, reuniting old friends with old enemies is not science fiction no matter how many space ships you see.

James Wallace Harris, 2/25/20