At last we've come to the final stories in Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space. Time to wrap up and make a general assessment.
By His Bootstraps, by Anson MacDonald/Robert Heinlein: This is a well-known story, but I hesitate to call it a classic. It has a lot in common with Heinlein's other well-known time-loop story "All You Zombies" — in both stories, sad to say, the difficulty of working out the literally four-dimensional chess game of the plot completely overwhelms any other qualities of the story. They're neat stories in the same way an Agatha Christie mystery or a Baroque automaton is: one admires the workmanship but there's no chance of mistaking it for something alive. I wish the later Heinlein, at his peak around 1965, could have returned to this theme. Three stars.
The Star Mouse, by Fredric Brown: Sigh. I grow weary of wacky inventor stories, especially when the wacky inventor is prone to long paragraphs of exposition in a comical German accent. The anthologist's note for this story suggests it would make a charming cartoon, and I agree. Two stars (it would be three, but comical dialect exposition makes me cranky).
Correspondence Course, by Raymond F. Jones: This is a fun story about a man who signs up for a correspondence course and discovers it's much more advanced than he expected. I thought the "hook" of the otherworldly mail-order course seemed reminiscent of the beginning of the 1955 movie This Island Earth. Which was based on the 1952 novel This Island Earth, written by . . . Raymond F. Jones. No wonder it seemed familiar. Four stars.
Brain, by S. Fowler Wright: This could almost be a deleted scene from C.S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength; it's about the downfall of the Council of Scientists who rule England in the year 1990. From works like this, and Lewis's novels, and some essays by Orwell from the same period, I get the impression that the post-war Labour Party government in Great Britain may have relied a little too much on the "it's SCIENCE so shut up" argument. Still, this one is a little too over-the-top even for satire. One star.
Reviewing my ratings, I find the average rating for stories in this is just above three stars, so we'll take that as the overall rating for the entire collection. There are eleven four-star stories, so about a third of the total are genuinely first-rate work. The number of three-star stories is the same, and some of those are near-great, like "Nightfall" or "The Roads Must Roll."
It's the bottom third which frustrates me. The editors were putting together an all-star anthology — so why waste space on tomfoolery like "Time Travel Happens!" or filler like "Within the Pyramid" when they could have included C.L. Moore's "Shambleau" or Murray Leinster's "First Contact"?
I guess it's not too surprising that a collection published a year after the end of the most devastating conflict in human history would have a somewhat grim tone. Six of the stories are about the end of life and/or civilization, and another four concern either tyrannical future societies or attempts to impose tyranny, and there's even one about thwarting post-war Nazis equipped with "jetpack Hitler" super-tech (a reliable trope which continues to this day in various media).
There are four "wacky inventor" stories. As I mentioned, that's a subgenre which has more or less died out in the past few decades. I think the 1950s were the peak decade for them, in print, anyway (they have lingered on in film and television and show no sign of disappearing). The last new print story about a nutty inventor I can remember reading was "Big Jelly" by Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker, and that was published back in the 1990s.
I suppose wacky inventors have metamorphosed into freaky hackers (like my own "Captain Black the Space Pirate" from Corsair) but they are as much figures of menace (or power fantasies for geeks) as comic. Unlike wacky inventors absent-mindedly causing chaos, hackers in fiction are deliberately disruptive, and are usually very serious about it.
How do the stories in this collection compare to modern short science fiction? Well, the authors are not as concerned with literary quality. Contemporary SF and fantasy stories focus more intently on character and drama; you can't get away with just tossing out Big Ideas any more.
I think part of that is simply due to the greater access modern readers have to good-quality science nonfiction. You can get the sciencey Big Ideas straight now, much more easily than in 1946. Even wild speculative notions get an airing in the popular science media, and the tone is not hostile or mocking. When readers go looking for stories, they want more than fictionalized essays.
Despite the stereotype of the Campbell era as being full of technophilic boosterism, I think it's important to note how many of these stories are dreadful warnings about scientific hubris or possible misuse of new technologies. At least half the stories (not counting the two nonfiction pieces) are cautionary tales.
One interesting feature of this collection is how many of the stories — seven of thirty-three fiction pieces — are set in the reader's present day. That includes two time-travel stories (maybe two and a half, if you count "The Twonky"), three alien-contact stories, and one wacky inventor ("The Star Mouse"). In fact, there are more alien-contact stories set on Earth, in either the present day or "twenty minutes into the future," than there are stories in this volume about space explorers encountering aliens on other worlds.
So: if you come across a copy of Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space, grab it. There are some excellent stories, including a couple which are very hard to find otherwise, and it's a fascinating snapshot of the science fiction genre on the brink of its Golden Age.
For a look at some stories from my own Golden Age, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!
Thank you for doing this. I love this kind of discussion of collected short fiction. I'd also love it if you did something like this for Conklin's "Best of Science Fiction," which came out almost the same time as "Adventures in Time and Space" but was a lot more wide-ranging (IMO).
Posted by: Dan Reid | 05/03/2017 at 01:00 AM
Dan: That's going to happen as soon as I can lay my hands on a copy.
Posted by: Cambias | 05/03/2017 at 08:27 AM
There are wacky inventors in cartoons still, maybe movies too?
Posted by: Chuk Goodin | 05/03/2017 at 04:20 PM