Isaac Asimov Presents : The Great SF Stories 4 (1942)

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 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 show more 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 enjoyed "The Twonky" and "Mimic" the most. The rest I found either tolerable or excruciating. Generally, pretty awful prose, including some cringe-inducing dialect. One entry was practically a shaggy dog story.