Harold W. Kuebler

This is a quirky assemblage of sci-fi stories, of a kind that was popular around the middle of the twentieth century. This one is exceptional for including tales by the likes of Poe and Bierce, as well as Fitzgerald’s “Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which was so improbably worked up into a Hollywood film in 2008. Kuebler’s editing is sometimes rather haphazard, and it’s clear that at least one key passage has been left out of the bizarrely jingoistic “Edison’s Conquest of Mars” — which is an extraordinary period piece. (One suspects that the missing passage in this all-American story had to do with Indo-European racist dogma, which was fashionable in the Woodrow Wilson era but distressingly Hitler-like in the wake of World War II.) Among the items that make this eccentric book worth keeping are a translation of R.U.R., the Czech play that gave us the word “robot,” and the script of the Orson Welles radio play of The War of the Worlds that caused a panic when it aired in 1938.… (meer)