F/SF

I almost wrote "it's hard for me to review this," since this was a treasured volume when I was an sf-devouring teenager, but it really isn't.

In a way, I wish it was. Hard, that is.

The SFWA-generated "Hall of Fame" volumes are good introductions to the whole "Golden Age" (it should really be "Golden Age Plus" since many of the stories post-date the typically-demarcated "Golden Age" of science fiction -- and one, the Wells, significantly pre-dates it) canon of science fiction -- as long as you don't think about it too much.

At this distance, even granting cultural this and historical that, it's hard for me to escape the feeling that the level of writing simply isn't very high. I know, I know: sacrilege! But reading through "Who Goes There?", though it proves anew how much more faithful to the source material John Carpenter was than Hawks, et al, really demonstrates that Campbell was a pretty bad writer. It's often difficult to tell exactly what's happening in "Who Goes There?" and although some of this is due to the attempt on the author's part to replicate a certain slangy way of speaking (as far as I can tell he fails miserably at this), most of it is due to the lumpiness of the prose. Cripes, is "tensity" even a word? Don't you mean "tension," Mr. Campbell? And it doesn't help that the author is predictably mired in a "Big Bronzed Men Doing Man Things in a Manly Way" place: boy does this kind of thing become tiresome after a while. It's not hard to see, reading this, where the obnoxious-ness of later Heinlein came from ... it's all here.

More to come. ( )

One of the best collections of sci-fi I've ever read (focused on those selected by other writers). Novellas, which is a pretty good length for sci-fi (although I'm also very partial to short stories).

I'd only read a few of these before (most notably H.G. Wells The Time Machine, which was written in 1895 and seems like something which could have started the genre any time in the 20th century; truly before his time). A few were ok to good, most were very good to excellent.

Works particularly well as an audiobook. Looking forward to vol 2-B.

The best:
Call Me Joe (Poul Anderson)(1957)
The Marching Morons (C.M. Kornbluth)(1951)
Who Goes There? (John Campbell)(1938)
With Folded Hands (Jack Williamson)
" . . . And Then There Were None," by Eric Frank Russell.


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Title: The Great Novellas
Series: Science Fiction Hall of Fame #2A
Editor : Ben Bova
Rating: 2 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 790
Words: 216K

Synopsis:

Consists of the following novellas by these authors:

Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson
Who Goes There? By John Campbell Jr
Nerves by Lester Del Rey
Universe by Robert Heinlein
The Marching Morons by C.M Kornbluth
Vintage Season by Kuttner and Moore
...And Then There Were None by Eric Russell
The Ballad of Lost C'Mell by Cordwainer Smith
Baby is Three by Theodore Sturgeon
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
With Folded Hands by Jack Williamson

My Thoughts:

The only reason this volume is getting 2stars instead of 1 is because of the story “Who Goes There?”, which has been turned into the various movies “The Thing” and is the basis for one of the X-Files episodes in Season One.

Part of my disappointment with this book was just how good Volume 1 was, which I read back in '18. That collection of short stories was everything I expected from the Golden Age of SF. These novellas on the other hand are boring, plain and simple.

Take “Nerves” for instance. It is about a Doctor working at an Atomic Plant because he used to be a brain surgeon but an operation went wrong years ago. It wasn't his fault and there was nothing he could do about it, but he couldn't face the fact that he wasn't perfect, so he ran away from his profession to become a “simple” general practitioner. Only something goes terribly wrong at the Plant and the only way to save the whole world is for him to do brain surgery on a wounded engineer. The lead up was too long and the tension just wasn't there. Most of these stories I simply found too long. I kept asking myself “when will this story be over already?!?”

On the other hand, you had some horrific ideas. “The Marching Morons” was about a salesman revived hundreds of years later. The world has become populated by morons because all the smart people stopped having kids a long time ago and the remaining thousand or so people with IQ's above X all live in the North Pole at a secret base. They secretly run the world but are tired of it, as the morons keep on multiplying and nothing the Clever People can do stops them. The Clever People tried to take a hands off approach but the war started by the Morons was too much for them to accept and so they stepped back in and began directing things again. The Salesman tells the Clever People to start a rumor of colonies on Mars or Venus or wherever and to hold a lottery for an entire city to go on rocket ships to this new colony. Then another city would be picked, etc, etc. The salesman puts together the ads and campaign and has the Morons clamoring to go to Venus. Of course, the rockets just go into the Sun and kill all the morons. The Salesman became Dictator of the World (that was what he wanted to give the Clever People his help) and the story ends with all the Morons gone and the Clever People throwing the Salesman into the last rocketship and sending it off. Now, whatever the author was trying to say went over my head, because this was just horrible. The Salesman was horrible, the Morons were horrible and the Clever People were horrible.

There is one more volume, Volume 2B (why they simply didn't call them Vol. 1, 2 and 3 is beyond me) and I'm going to read it. I am desperately hoping it is better than this. It is another collection of novellas though, so I am keeping my DNF gun handy and my finger on the trigger. I won't wade through another crapfest like this.

★★☆☆☆ ( )

Another great collection of the best of SF classic stories as chosen by SF authors. These are the stories that would have gotten Nebula awards if the award existed earlier in the 20th century.

Book 1 was limited to short stories. This book, edited by Ben Bova, was a collection of novellas or novelettes. It is called 2A because there were so many they decided it needed to be two books.

I had forgotten how good these stories are.

Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson
Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. (as Don A. Stuart)
Nerves by Lester del Rey
Universe by Robert A. Heinlein
The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth
Vintage Season by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (as Lawrence O'Donnell)
And Then There Were None by Eric Frank Russell
The Ballad of Lost C'Mell by Cordwainer Smith
Baby Is Three by Theodore Sturgeon
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
With Folded Hands by Jack Williamson ( )