This post continues my look at the ground-breaking 1946 anthology Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond Healy and John McComas. It's probably going to take at least four entries to cover the whole book. Last time I got through the first seven stories, and so far the collection has been pretty solid. The average rating is more than three stars out of four. Let's see if the rest of the book can maintain that level.
Seeds of the Dusk, by Raymond Z. Gallun: This is barely a story at all, more like a lightly-fictionalized essay about the concept of panspermia. The main character is a spore from Mars which lands on Earth in the distant future. Two stars.
Heavy Planet, by Lee Gregor/Milton Rothman: Natives of a high-gravity world encounter a wrecked spaceship and struggle to gain control of the secret of atomic power. The aliens are so-so, and again we get the near-mystical attitude toward The Atom. Three stars.
Time Locker, by Lewis Padgett/Kuttner and Moore: Another one of their Galloway Gallagher "wacky inventor" series. This one has a somewhat more intriguing scientific premise at the heart of it, but I still don't think the series as a whole is very amusing. Three stars, and that's being generous.
The Link, by Cleve Cartmill: Cartmill's the guy whose story about atomic weapons earned Campbell a visit from the F.B.I. because it was a little too accurate. This is a "dawn of Man" story, with the usual hero who invents tool use despite being an outcast because he's not as apelike as the rest of the tribe. As with the Gallun story mentioned above, this feels more like a fictionalized essay than a work of fiction. Two stars.
Mechanical Mice, by Maurice A. Hugi: This is a story about Von Neumann machines (self-replicating devices) written a good half-decade before Von Neumann came up with the idea. Maybe we should call them Hugi machines, instead. The story itself is a "wacky inventor" tale with a refreshing vein of black humor. Four stars.
V-2 — Rocket Cargo Ship, by Willy Ley: One of the pioneers of German rocketry before World War 2 discusses what his former colleagues got up to after he left. What's interesting, from a modern viewpoint, is how much of this is guesswork on Ley's part. It was written while the war was still going on, and I don't think Ley was privy to all the findings by Allied intelligence-gathering, so he had to work from news reports and basic physics. It's also interesting to see that Ley identifies Hermann Oberth as the mastermind of the German rocket program; though Oberth was employed at Peenemunde it was Von Braun and Dornberger's show. But Ley fled Germany when those two were just starting their work sponsored by the German Army, and may not have known much about the operation. Four stars, as a historical document, if nothing else.
Adam and No Eve, by Alfred Bester: Another classic story, and a very grim one, about a space explorer whose hubris has caused the end of all life on Earth save for himself. Four stars.
Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov: This one is a classic, although it's amusing to me how many readers manage to Not Get It. Throughout the whole story the alien (but entirely human) characters are speculating about what will happen to their civilization on the once-in-a-millennium day when darkness falls on their world, and I think a lot of readers don't realize that all their speculations are supposed to be wrong. It's not the darkness that freaks everyone out so that they destroy their surroundings trying to kindle fires, it's (spoiler alert) the sight of the stars in the sky. The story has a strong central idea (from Emerson via Campbell) but I think it's more wordy than it needs to be. Three stars.
A Matter of Size, by Harry Bates: This is a terrible story, and I have no idea why the editors included it. It's scientifically incoherent — to the point where I wonder if Bates even took a high-school science class or bothered to look in an encyclopedia ever — and it's very slow and talky for an adventure story. The only clever bit comes far too late in the story, as the hero (who has been miniaturized down to insect size) figures out a clever way to cross the city without getting stepped on. One star, and that's being very charitable.
As Never Was, by P. Schuyler Miller: A time travel story about the "Grandfather Paradox," though with an interesting twist. Both of Miller's stories in this book are time travel stories. I don't know if he wrote a lot of them, or just did it well. Three stars.
Q.U.R., by Anthony Boucher: Kind of a "wacky inventor" story, about a future genius with the amazing idea of building robots which aren't shaped like humans. You know, like pretty much all real robots in the modern world. In the past I've written about the disjunction when a science-fictional concept changes from metaphor to real technology, and you can see this story as marking that moment for robots. Since Mary Shelley, if not earlier, writers had been using robots as metaphors; Boucher's story shows the beginning of the change to writing about robots as real-world machines. The story has a lot of drinking in it. Reading about other people getting drunk is even less interesting than reading about other people having sex. Two stars.
Who Goes There? by Don A. Stuart/John W. Campbell: This is a classic, and a top-notch story in every way. It's the origin of the 1951 film The Thing From Another World, and of the very faithful 1982 film The Thing, by John Carpenter. One can also view it as a kind of unauthorized sequel to H.P. Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness, which ran in Astounding just before Campbell took over as editor. Four stars!
The Roads Must Roll, by Robert A. Heinlein: This is a good story with a simply bonkers premise. In the future depicted in the story, transportation isn't by car or rail, it's by giant high-speed conveyor belt roads. If you can manage to swallow that idea, then it's a pretty gripping story about an attempted power-grab by the operators of a vital piece of infrastructure. Tellingly, I don't think Heinlein ever made reference to the conveyor roads in any of his other stories; I don't think he could really swallow the idea himself. Three stars.
The average score for this batch is a little lower than the first set of stories: just under three stars. The Bates story drags down the mean — without it these stories would have the same average rating as the ones I looked at last time.
If you want to see two stories I think deserve four stars, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!
Maurice A. Hugi is really Eric Frank Russell. In his biography, INTO YOUR TENT, As a personal favor, EFR either wrote the story from a Hugi idea or did a major rewrite of Hugi's story.
In another Future History story, METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN, 100+ years up time-line, Heinlein would write–
“The ship passed over a miles-wide scar on the landscape-the ruins of the Okla-Orleans Road City. When Lazarus had last seen it, it had been noisy with life. Of all the mechanical monstrosities the human race had saddled themselves with, he mused, those dinosaurs easily took first prize.”
Posted by: Mark McSherry | 05/16/2017 at 10:39 PM
Mark: thanks for the info!
Posted by: Cambias | 05/17/2017 at 04:19 PM