Best Story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964 (Unabridged Version)

i'm going to rep for this collection over the one in this poll:

http://www.amazon.com/World-Turned-Upside-Down/dp/1416520686

C.L. Moore, "Shambleau" (1933)
John W. Campbell, Jr. (writing as Don A. Stuart), "Who Goes There?" (1938)
A.E. Van Vogt, "Black Destroyer" (1938)
Lee Gregor, "Heavy Planet" (1939)
P. Schuyler Miller, "Spawn" (1939)
Ross Rocklynne, "Quietus" (1940)
Chester S. Geier, "Environment" (1944)
Arthur C. Clarke, "Rescue Party" (1946)
Theodore Sturgeon, "Thunder and Roses" (1947)
C.M. Kornbluth, "The Only Thing We Learn" (1949)
Wyman Guin (writing as Norman Menasco), "Trigger Tide" (1950)
Jack Vance, "Liane the Wayfarer" (1950)
Fritz Leiber, "A Pail of Air" (1951)
Michael Shaara, "All the Way Back" (1952)
Poul Anderson, "Turning Point" (1953)
Robert Ernest Gilbert, "Thy Rocks and Rills" (1953)
Tom Godwin, "The Cold Equations" (1954)
Fredric Brown, "Answer" (1954)
Robert Sheckley, "Hunting Problem" (1955)
L. Sprague de Camp, "A Gun For Dinosaur" (1956)
Isaac Asimov, "The Last Question," (1956)
H. Beam Piper, "Omnilingual" (1957)
Robert A. Heinlein, "The Menace From Earth" (1957)
Gordon R. Dickson, "St. Dragon and the George" (1957)
Christopher Anvil, "The Gentle Earth" (1957)
Murray Leinster, "The Aliens" (1959)
Rick Raphael, "Code Three" (1963)
James H. Schmitz, "Goblin Night" (1965)
Keith Laumer, "The Last Command" (1967)

I'd go for the Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus -
http://www.amazon.com/Penguin-science-fiction-omnibus/dp/0140031456

Sole Solution - Eric Frank Russell
Lot - Ward Moore
The Short-Short Story of Mankind - John Steinbeck
Skirmish - Clifford Simak
Poor Little Warrior! - Brian W. Aldiss
Grandpa - James H. Schmitz
The Half Pair - Bertram Chandler
Command Performance - Walter M. Miller
Nightfall - Isaac Asimov
The Snowball Effect - Katherine MacLean
The End of Summer - Algis Budrys
Track 12 - J. G. Ballard
The Monkey Wrench - Gordon R. Dickson
The First Men - Howard Fast
Counterfeit - Alan E. Nourse
The Greater Thing - Tom Godwin
Built Up Logically - Howard Schoenfeld
The Liberation of Earth - William Tenn
An Alien Agony - Harry Harrison
The Tunnel Under the World - Frederik Pohl
The Store of the Worlds - Robert Sheckley
Jokester - Isaac Asimov
Pyramid - Robert Abernathy
The Forgotten Enemy - Arthur C. Clarke
The Wall Around the World - Theodore R. Cogswell
Protected Species - H. B. Fyfe
Before Eden - Arthur C. Clarke
The Rescuer - Arthur Porges
I Made You - Walter M. MillerJr.
The Country of the Kind - Damon Knight
MS Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie - C. M. Kornbluth
The Cage - Bertram Chandler
Eastward Ho! - William Tenn
The Windows of Heaven - John Brunner
Common Time - James Blish
Fulfillment - A. E. van Vogt

in a penguin vein, the slug lords will be interviewing brian aldiss himself as a one-off special for resonance FM, probably some time in february

Fab!

Have finally sourced myself a full copy of the subject of this poll. Will look for that World Turned Upside Down too (I have a stupid foible of not buying things from Amazon).

it's from baen books which somewhat mysteriously offers the first seven stories free on its website but provides no direct link for ordering the physical object!!

collections like this make is just so painfully obvious that sci-fi as a genre took a wrong-turn sometime in the last 50 years.

In Dreams, a celebration of the 7-inch single in all-original sci fi and horror fiction, is a great modern collection, which should also appeal to ILM nerds.

> I have a stupid foible of not buying things from Amazon

it's not on amazon.uk anyway.

ONE of those collections must contain a story about an alien behind a two-way mirror. anyone? 8)

The Lost In Space Episode With Michael J Pollard As The Boy Who Lived On The Other Side Of The Mirrors

Don't know if he was technically an alien though, or if that was based on a short story. Was probably original.

this was the first meeting between earth and some other alien race that could provide some technology or medicine or whatever. they would hand it over and help out but only on the condition that the earthlings didn't see the aliens (perhaps they were shy). hence the two way mirror*. only the earthling got curious and wanted to peek and finally managed it by shining a bright light, er, somewhere (alien side?). only the alien was wise to it and all he caught was a glimpse of a tail.

details sketchy, was a book rescued from (and later replaced onto) a pile destined for a jumble sale about 20+ years ago. was another story about a man being kept as a zoo animal. another which rested on you thinking the narrator was human but, surprise, no.

*or is it a one-way mirror, that makes more sense

^ that is exactly childhood's end by arthur c clarke. ** mild spoilers ** it only happens 1/3 of the way through, the aliens really are benign and helpful (well, in the sense that they're guiding humanity to a higher plane of evolution which only the children will reach, everyone else dies and planet destroyed); the reason they don't want to be seen is 'cause they look just like devils (but the reason our image of devils is like that is because of jungian collective unconscious pre-figurative reversal causality racial memory).

actually it was probably the short story which he later extended into childhood's end, called...

... "Guardian Angel", which, I believe, does just deal with the events in your post, none of the higher plane of evolution stuff.

^ only found out about the short story today, coincidentally, or i might have been more helpful earlier.

cheers ledge

a quick google says that it appears in 'the sentinel' which is on the shelf at home, 90 miles away. and a copy of other places. could've sworn it was a multi-author collection though.

"The Sentinel" sounds right. Don't forget that David Bowie wrote the song "Oh! You Pretty Things" based on Childhood's End.

World Turned Upside Down at alibris.co.uk from less than 3 quid:

http://www.alibris.co.uk/booksearch?qwork=8344110&matches=58&wquery=baen&cm_sp=works*listing*title

Brill, I've got it! I normally use abebooks but alibris looks really good, will keep 'em bookmarked.

worst cover ever.

"Arena" and "First Contact" are both just rather pulpy. Obviously influenced by the war, there's just a shred of a "war is stupid" theme in the first which could have been developed much more; but the fatalist xenophobia in the second I just find bizarre.

couldn't disagree more about "first contact"; the whole point of it is a sort of anti-xenophobic humanism, about the difficulty of negotiating co-existence! i mean the whole strand about the crewman who befriends the alien crewman seems almost too blatantly an argument AGAINST xenophobia!

ok, sure, the "lol we spent all the time telling dirty jokes!" payoff. But that only works as a contrast to the background of the whole story, in which apparently "the only safety for either civilisation would lie in the destruction of one of both of the two ships here and now." Maybe not xenophobic as such, but kinda confrontational, and certainly fatalistic. I just didn't buy it - shit was never a problem in star trek!

the whole point of the dilemma is to get AROUND that! it's an interesting logic problem and really, dude beats the "we're all the same thing" almost to death, dwelling on their sense of humour, their sympathetic expressions, how they really WANT to be friends. i can't for the life of me imagine how you'd consider the story's POV to be xenophobic in the slightest. or fatalistic; they do solve the problem in the end!

Yeah they solve it but to me it's a non-problem! I don't get why they are so paranoid - that's the word, of course! - "We can't trust 'em so we'd better kill 'em". I know he argues it well, I just find it hard to imagine that's what it would come down to.

Also the story unwrites itself - if it is a genuine problem and that is the only solution, then, bingo! We have it! Problem will never occur!

well it's not meant to be a treatise on human-alien relations; it's a story with a logic puzzle at the heart of it that gets satisfyingly solved by the end. QED!

man its a good life is such a scary fuckin story

first encountered it thru the twilight zone episode which makes it creepier cuz the kid looks like a normal kid and not some purpley monster like in the story

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/to_the_corn_field.png

eep!

is that billy mumy? ha, it is. later of Lost In Space and Babylon 5.

I read that story for the first time last night btw. Yes it was v. good. I liked the purpleness.

the purpleness is *GOOD*

I think this thread -or rather it's faulty predecessor- got started because of that episode being mentioned on Taking Sides: The Twilight Zone vs. The Outer Limits

Recently got a hold of a copy of some giant anthology called The Space Opera Renaissance. Looks interesting, but so far all I've (re)read is the great three-pager "Zirn Left Unguarded, The Jenghik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerly Dead" by Robert Sheckley, which I understand the Sluglords have done.

Purple monster? The kid was a normal kid in the print story, too! Are there alternate versions of this anthology running around with main characters being replaced by purple monsters? There was a non-descript monstery kid thing in “Born of Man and Woman” but I don't remmber him being purple.

read it again! he's never described, physically, but it's strongly implied that he has a monstrous appearance, and there's lots of mentions of his 'purplish gaze'

Maybe Bixby had a kid with a really big birthmark on his face.

Incidentally s1ocki have you read R.A. Lafferty's "Ginny Wrapped in the Sun"? It's another very good version of the Monstrous Child story, maybe a better story than Bixby's, albeit with a debt to it. In fact everybody should just read as much Lafferty as they can get hold of, dude was fabulous.

o rly!

never heard of it!

any collections you would recommend?

900 Grandmothers has "Ginny" in it and is where I started.

"[Once a] French publisher nervously asked whether Lafferty minded being compared to G. K. Chesterton (another Catholic author), and there was a terrifying silence that went on and on. Was the great man hideously offended? Eventually, very slowly, he said: 'You're on the right track, kid,' and wandered away."

He is like Chesterton, really, especially in the sense that they both come across as guys you'd like to kick it with.

It reads like the purple refers to his CYCLOPS OPTIC BLAST but he is not himself a PURPLE HULK:
http://nickelkid.net/docs/greats/its_a_good_life.html

Do you mean this line?: "It was wherever it had been since that day three years ago when Anthony had crept from her womb and old Doc Bates--God rest him--had screamed and dropped him and tried to kill him, and Anthony had whined and done the thing."

here is born of man & woman:
http://journal.pcvsconsole.com/?thread=16346
The kid here definitely has GREEN HULKism.

There's a few sentences in the story that imply Anthony is not regular human-shaped. Especially the pictures he produces on the TV, which is the creepiest notion in the story, to me. Also the recurrence of the purple gaze is used in a way that makes me think it's not a death-ray effect.

that line and lines like this:

"Anthony looked across the lawn at the grocery man--a bright, wet, purple gaze."

xxp

also i guess i assumed that any sort of newborn that would make a doctor immediately try and kill it would be kinda freaky looking.

and ya the tv thing is rrrrrrr.

Anthony came around the corner of the house...and went smoothly over the fence and out into the cornfield.

Choice of "came", "went" and v.especially "smoothly" are important clues there.

He's a purple horse?

If he didn't have teleport-god powers, I might picture a horse, but he's got them so I'm thinking normal kid arms folded levitating Magneto style.

Do you guys have mental pictures of Anthony when reading this -- can you draw them and post them here? I would like to see.

I don't have a mental picture because I don't think the story wants to give you that, the whole point is a steady drip of suggestions of "wrongness". To flip the question, if the Twilight Zone ep didn't exist would you automatically picture Anthony as a regular-looking little boy? Who incidentally is younger in the story than the TV version, too.

I haven't thought about Lafferty in 25 years, but I remember him being witty and funny in kind of a Robert Sheckley mode.

Here is what I thought (the kid is not supposed to look monstery & no mouth-- that is just my poor drawing skills):
http://canvaspaint.org/5c66.png
I don't think I saw the Tzone ep until years after reading the story, but I might have seen the TZone: The Movie version -- which explains away the weird shapes on the TV as being Tex Avery? cartoons.

That's a sweet drawing.

I'm obviously not insisting on a "correct" reading, here. I think the story is obviously in part about the "monstrousness" of infancy, the disruptive ego of the new baby in the home. Beyond that I think it examines human revulsion at deformity or disability but I wouldn't play that up: it seems to me that the child (children I mean, not specifically Anthony) in and of itself is monstrous enough. And I do get a Cthullu-ish unspeakable wrongness/body that writhes and mutates vibe from the story - the TV images particularly, like I said, hint at that - but I don't think it needs to be crucial to why the boy is a Horror.

And yeah I saw the movie version of the story long before the TV verzh, too. In fact we went to see it at the pictures at the time. It was scary.

Why is "The Ballad Lost C'Mell" in Volume Two, amongst the novellas? It's only twenty pages long, shorter than many of the stories in Volume One, certainly shorter than "Scanners Live In Vain."