Martin H. Greenberg (1941–2011)

The year's best stories, at least as selected here, were dominated by a whole lot of dense info dumping as authors dove heavily into the "science" half of "science fiction."

Whether it's Lester del Rey detailing the medical consequences of a nuclear accident ("Nerves"), Hal Clement describing the lifeforms that might live on the sun ("Proof"), or Anthony Boucher laying out how time travel might work ("Barrier"), authors in 1942 were more interested in proving that their most fantastic ideas show more could be justified than they were in good storytelling.

That's perhaps a little harsh, particularly to del Rey, who does manage in between the long paragraphs of medical and nuclear speculation to build a great deal of tension, and to capture the stress of being a medical team coping with horrific disaster. But there were a lot of "eyes glaze over" moments in this book, and a lot of passages that I sort of skimmed through searching for the spot where the story picked up again.

The stories I liked best were the lighter ones. Fredric Brown's "The Star Mouse" sends a mouse to space and back, a trip that changes him in unexpected ways. "The Twonky" by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym for the married writers Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore) plops a bit of alien technology into the middle of 40s domestic life. And Donald A. Wollheim's "Mimic," though it never quite becomes an actual story, is a striking idea, and at only 6 pages, it doesn't outstay its welcome. show less

I picked this up at the used book store expecting a healthy dose of dated, sexist, adolescent fantasy-fullfillment tales, which would likely be more of historical interest than particularly compelling. I am happy to report that a majority of the ten novella and novelette length stories proved much better than that.

Most of these authors were already familiar to me. Of that group, I enjoyed both A.E. van Vogt's "The Weapon Shop" and A. Bertram Chandler's "Giant Killer" quite a bit more than show more works I read previously from these sources. I thought that, while Isaac Asimov's "The Big and the Little" works reasonably well as a stand alone story, it somehow works better in its more familiar place as a section of Foundation. I can't say that I particularly liked C.L. Moore's "No Woman Born," but it is astonishing to see a story from that era asking such probing questions about gender and identity and how men perceive women; I suspect it is the first feminist science fiction story. While "Killdozer!" may not be among Theodore Sturgeon's most probing stories, I'm not sure that any subsequent entry in the subgenre it spawned has topped it. Of the familiar authors, only Lester Del Rey and Jack Williamson's entries were in line with my fairly low expectations.

Of the Authors that were (more or less) new to me, I thought T.L. Sherred's "E for Effort" was quite good, Ross Rocklynne's "Time Wants a Skeleton" was better than it should have been, and Fredric Brown's "Daymare" was again in line with my low expectations.

So this anthology delivers both as a reminder of where the genre was 70 years ago, and as a source of some pretty darned compelling storytelling.

Sadly the book I purchased had a misprint which ruined two of the stories, but interlibrary loan supplied temporary access to a duplicate copy. Highly recommended. show less

If you've been following my progress through this series of books, you may remember that I generally find the stories by A. E. van Vogt to be the most difficult slogs in each volume. So it is a delightful surprise to report that the stories in the 1944 volume are so good that even the van Vogt story isn't half bad.

It's called "Far Centaurus," and it's the story of three astronauts finishing a 500-year journey to a new world, most of which they've spent in suspended animation. What they find show more there is such a shock (*) that it threatens their mental and emotional stability; van Vogt's solution to that problem is something of an easy copout, perhaps, but at this stage in SF history, having one terrific idea was all a story needed. The ability and desire to follow the consequences of that idea was (mostly) still some years away.

(* -- In another recurring theme of this series, the shock that van Vogt's astronauts face wouldn't be that shocking today, after 80 years of authors riffing on and developing similar ideas. But it was new then.)

This year also gives us the breakthrough of Clifford D. Simak, who published the first four stories in his "City" series, exploring the fallout when humanity largely abandons urban life; three of those stories are included here. The best of them is "Huddling Place," which suggests that such a societal change might change us more deeply than we imagine.

We've also got "When the Bough Breaks" from Lewis Padgett, a pseudonym for married writers Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. It's a nice story, but pales in comparison to their earlier "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," which covers similar territory. Moore is also represented here with her solo story "No Woman Born," in which the brain of a famous actress is returned to life in a robot body; it ends with a welcome touch of ambivalence.

John R. Pierce's "Invariant" is a classic one-good-idea vignette; not much plot to speak of, but that one idea is a smart one. Leigh Brackett's "The Veil of Astellar" is typical of Brackett's romantic space opera, and doesn't hold up as well as some of her work.

Cleve Cartmill's "Deadline" is of interest these days mostly as an odd historical footnote. It's a rather clunky WWII allegory (the warring sides are the "Seilla" and the "Sixa" -- read those backwards), but Cartmill's speculation on how an atomic bomb might work was so eerily accurate that U. S. intelligence officers visited the offices of Astounding, which had published the story, fearing that someone had been leaking secrets from the Manhattan Project. They warned editor John W. Campbell not to publish any similar stories; sources differ as to how polite Campbell's response to that warning was, but he did convince them that an abrupt stop to such stories might give away more to the enemy than any author's informed speculation could.

We have, I think, reached the point in this series, and in the devlopment of the genre, where we can reasonably expect to find more good stories than clunkers in each volume going forward. show less

A significant upgrade from the 1942 volume in this series, but one that raises an interesting question about the nature of retroactive award-giving.

Some background on the Retro Hugo Awards: The first World Science Fiction Convention was held in 1939, but the first Hugo Awards weren't awarded until 1953. Beginning in 1996, WorldCons that took place 50, 75, or 100 years after one of the non-Hugo WorldCon years were given the option to award Retro Hugos for that missing year. The stories show more published in 1943, which would have been Hugo recipients in 1944, were Retro-ed in 2019.

A 75-year gap means that most of the voters weren't actually around to have read the stories of 1943 when they were published, and they would have found it difficult to read most of what came out that year. Virtually all of it would have been published in the pulps of the era, and good luck finding a copy of the May 1943 Super Science Stories after all these years. The SF anthology wouldn't be a thing for another decade, so you'd have to rely on "best of" single-author collections or reprint anthologies from later decades, and you'd have to wade through a lot of them in search of the 1943 stories.

Or you could just turn to this book, which was published in 1981 and was still pretty easy to find in 2019; it's one-stop shopping for the best stories of that year, or at least for one pair of editors' opinion of the best. So is it a surprise that of the 12 stories in this book, 8 were among the nominees in the three short fiction categories? It certainly seems possible that a lot of voters in 2019 used this book as a recommendation guide when filling out their ballots. It will be interesting to see if that pattern continues in the few Retro Hugo years still to come in this series.

But on to the book at hand! 1943 was, at least in the view of Asimov & Greenberg, the year of married authors C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner. Each was a fine writer on their own, and much of their work after their 1940 marriage was done in collaboration, even when it was published under one of their own names. They also used several pseudonyms, and SF scholars have done a fair amount of detective work trying to figure out who wrote which of the stories published under all of their assorted names.

There are five Moore/Kuttner stories in this volume. "Doorway Into Time" is credited to Moore, and is probably a solo story; it's a so-so adventure tale about a scientist and his girlfriend who are drawn into a portal by an alien hunter in search of prey. "Clash by Night," credited to Lawrence O'Donnell, is of disputed authorship, with some sources claiming it's a Kuttner solo effort and others saying it's a collaboration; it's a fine bit of military SF set among the underwater domes of Venus.

Three stories are credited to Lewis Padgett. "The Proud Robot" is most likely a Kuttner story; it's from a series of comic stories about an inventor who can only do his best work when drunk, then can't remember how his inventions work when he sobers up. "The Iron Standard," a collaboration, finds a group of Earth astronauts stranded on Venus, struggling to get food in a harshly regimented economic system that seems to have no room for them. And "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," a joint effort that is by far the best story in this volume, is about kids in the 1940s suburbs whose minds are rewired by a batch of toys accidentally sent back in time.

Also interesting: Eric Frank Russell's "Symbiotica," a tale of peril in an alien ecosystem that drags on a bit too long, but is filled with novel ideas for the time; Leigh Brackett's "The Halfling," a romantic mystery set among a group of interstellar carnies; Edmond Hamilton's "Exile," a short story that does a nice job of building mood and tension before ending in a crisp punchline; and a pair of stories that I'd already come across elsewhere this year, Anthony Boucher's "Q.U.R." and Fredric Brown's "Daymare."

A couple of the stories haven't held up as well. P. Schuyler Miller's "The Cave" is a bore, and we are still slogging through the inexplicable popularity of the insufferable A. E. van Vogt. show less