Martin H. Greenberg (1941–2011)

First off, if you don’t like the Edna anthologies or deal with the devil stories, this isn’t for you. I happen to love them, they make me think of being a kid watching the twilight zone, specifically the episode where a man (later revealed as the devil) kept captive in a closet, but also the sort of feel of the series overall. And the visceral thrill of trying to get one over on the devil while matching wits with such a crafty opponent has its own perverse appeal. If you don’t mind a show more little kitsch, a little tongue in cheek self awareness and the theme itself, I highly recommend this, as the majority of the authors were and are some of the best in the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror fields. Most of them are multiple Hugo and nebula award winners, with a few relatively new comers sprinkled in for spice.
I read this for the first time many years ago while working at a crappy little independent used bookstore. Most days, we had a dozen curstomers at best, so I had lots of time to read anything I came across that caught my fancy. I remembered one particular story Winter in detail if not in name as a favorite and it haunted me for years as I could not remember where I had read it or who the author was. I was lucky enough to come across that information recently entirely on accident while down another rabbit hole, and immediately ordered myself an old paperback of this collection.
Winter still holds up as a personal favorite, and certainly more serious and dramatic in tone than many of the short stories, though by no means not the only serious one, but there’s a lot of standout work here. Several entries deal with the role of computers and technology in deals with the devil, in an era where the Internet was only really beginning. Others give us an interpretation on what can happen when the devil loses, or maybe when devil was never really the bad guy (or in fact doing God’s work) all along.
I heartily recommend for an easy, fun, and satisfying read. 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

We take a quantum leap forward with this volume in the series. An all-star group of authors make their first appearances: Alfred Bester, James Blish, Anthony Boucher, Frederic Brown, C. M. Kornbluth, and Eric Frank Russell (sadly underrated these days). And we've got at least two all-time classic stories -- Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall."

As with the previous volume in the series, Asimov and Greenberg include their introductions to several Robert A. show more Heinlein stories that are not included because of rights issues. Of the four, I'm especially fond of "And He Built a Crooked House" and the indispensable time-travel story "By His Bootstraps."

Several themes pop up in multiple stories. There are robots from Asimov ("Liar!") and Russell ("Jay Score"), Adam-and-Eve tales from Robert Arthur ("Evolution's End") and Bester ("Adam and No Eve"), mischievious fantasy creatures from Boucher ("Snulbug") and the husband-wife team of Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore ("A Gnome There Was"), and little shops that vanish after selling mysterious artifacts from Sturgeon ("Shottle Bop") and A. E. van Vogt ("The Seesaw"). That last story, by the way, is significantly better than van Vogt's earlier stories in this series; I didn't love it, but it's at least readable, and it's of historical significance as his first working through some of the ideas that will eventually become his novel "The Weapon Makers."

Highlights: "Microcosmic God" and "Nightfall" both hold up beautifully, and deserve their legendary reputations. "Snulbug" rings some clever variations on the idea of using tomorrow's newspaper to get rich. The delayed revelation at the end of "Jay Score" isn't entirely successful, but the main action is a lively disaster-in-space story. Brown's "Armageddon" is a very short tale -- a specialty of his -- that's all about its punchline, but it's a cute joke, and the getting there is nicely done.

On the down side, the general progress seen in most of the book leaves stories by Robert Arthur and Ross Rocklynne feeling even more old-fashioned than those authors felt in earlier volumes. Del Rey's "Hereafter, Inc." is a somewhat muddled "am I in heaven or hell?" story, and Kornbluth's "The Words of Guru" ends beautifully, but getting to those final paragraphs is a bit of a slog.

But the genre is changing quickly, and this is the first volume in the series that I might feel comfortable recommending to the average modern reader of SF. They'd still find it old fashioned, but the quality of the ideas and the writing has improved enough that it no longer feels archaic. show less