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

Looked for "Piggy Bank" but only found it on one of those dodgy download sites so I declined. Finally read one of his Hogben stories- maybe the first one?- "Exit the Professor." In case you are unfamiliar, they are a bunch of mutant hillbillies, trying to mind there own business and stay out of trouble with the revenuers geneticists that come looking for them. Played for laughs, might be corny for some, worked for me. Like Beverly Hillbillies with more bite. Apparently there is a recent deluxe edition of their tales under the imprimatur of Neil Gaiman, but it's a little rich for me, pricewise.

My inquiries also led me to uncover the origin of one ilxor's screenname

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.C._Fields

He was sometimes billed in England as "Wm. C. Fields", because "W.C." is British slang for a water closet (toilet).

Who Goes There?

"Nightfall" is the first thing I've read by Asimov where I feel like I really *get* his rep. I read the first four Foundation books at least a few times back in my teenage days and while I enjoyed it it never really seemed that earth-shattering or innovative or even really interesting. honestly my memory of it was that a huge portion of it was a slog waiting for the big reveal (the Mule, the second foundation etc), with a lot of the actual action essentially taking place off-page.

But "Nightfall" is great, a relatively novel thought experiment with characters who are at least interesting analogs for real-world counterparts, engagingly written.

Much better than the previous lol Heinlein entry. sheesh that guy.

Haven't read any of his stuff in years, but remember the original robot stuff the most fondly

/Fahrenheit

isn't there some Bradbury story that's like Nightfall, except with the opposite premise (the sun only comes out once in a jillion years and the kid who most wants to see it/believes in it gets locked in a closet? I have a dim memory of this)

"All Summer in a Day." Not to be confused with the similarly set on rainy Venus, looking for the sun or something like it "The Long Rain." Not to be confused with the post-apocalyptic "There Will Come Soft Rains."

I have it in A Medicine for Melancholy which is a pretty good collection, I think, if not a stone classic. Pretty sure it must available in many other books.

And it's seven years, apparently.

Been several years since I read "All Summer in a Day," but it was really startling: the momentum, the anger, even, of the imagery and the plot---some of his stuff seems to get bogged down in atmosphere and obvious points, but this swept all that shit, and usual objections to same, right along. Don't remember the re-workings well enough to compare, but seems like something he cared about enough to revisit (commercial considerations aside).

"Nightfall" is commonly considered one of Asimov's best ever; seems like he's one of those who get better the further back you check.

Yep. Think at some point he lost interest in the fiction and realized his world-class Sitzfleisch was better suited to churning out popular science books, Isaac Asimov's Guide to Atom and such. If any Harry Turtledove had taken the same fork in the road.

I actually read all of the first and a bunch of the second of his two autobiographies, In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt. There is a hilarious interview with IA which mentions those books in particular in Martin Amis's Visiting Mrs. Nabokov if my memory serves me well. I started reading P. G. Wodehouse way back way because IA said he was one of his favorites, I believe, so I guess I got something out of those massive tomes.

wtf is this A.E. Van Vogt story

I see why he gets tagged as a precursor to PKD - the inscrutable Kafkaesque powers at work, characters constantly in a state of psychological/emotional whiplash, weird abrupt shifts in settings - but honestly have no idea what the point of "The Weapon Shop" is.

asimov is definitely at his best in the early days, when he was writing short and snappy stories -- 'i, robot' probably shows him at his best. i still stan for the (original) foundation stories, though the first half of the first book is tough going (asimov wrote the first story when he was 21, which still amazes me). the second and third books actually feature some notably strong female protagonists, which is fairly unusual for this period of SF afaik.

Well?

was weapon shop the one where some guy goes woops and sends his blaster to some noir past and then goes oh woops, flips a switch and it turns into a harmless orange or some other rotting vegetable?

No thats not it. The plot is too random and convoluted for me to briefly summarize.

It's kind of like an idea from RAH made into a story by PKD.

Hey, this looks like an okay collection: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Treasury_of_Science_Fiction

So here is my 60 second precis of the history of the genre

20s: Belgian-born Hugo Gernsback coins the term 'Scientifiction' and creates a genre. The Gernsbackian formulation of 'more scientific' turns out to be kind of a World's Fair of the Future/Popular Electronics product placement. Gernsback almost never pays his writers but despite this thriftiness loses control of his magazines

Late 30s, Early 40s: John Wood Campbell, Jr. takes over the editorship of Astounding from Johnny F. O. Tremaine and is determined to make the genre even more scientific, meaning that he will limit the number of wonders on display in any given story and his heros will tote slide-rules instead of blasters. To aid in his project he enlists the help of two blowhards from the future, Robert Anson Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Known to some as the Golden Age.

At the same time, pulpier, gothic side of the ur-genre that has been deracinated survives in other, lower paying less classy magazines such as Planet Stories and Weird Tales.

Mid 40s: The two guys just mentioned above are involved in WWII so other more interesting writers who were invalided out of service or otherwise available such as Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber get to write for Campbell. Campbell even starts a fantasy magazine, Unknown but this is folded due to wartime paper shortage.

Late 40s-Early 50s: Two other prestigious magazines, Galaxy, edited by H. L. Gold and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Anthony Boucher, compete for the best writers, relaxing the parameters and allowing for, even preferring, a more literary style. In addition there is a raft of secondary magazines- these guys actually start to believe they can make a living writing this stuff! The Real Golden Age.

60s The New Wave!

70s Star Wars: The Return of the Repressed! Now that we can see it, why should we read about it?

---HERE BE DRAGONS--
Cyberpunk, New Space Opera, New Weird, Steampunk

Star Wars mania didn't really happen until the end of the decade. I'd say the first part was really more about exploring the post-New Ware/post-60s politics. My favorite period of sci-fi actually (at least for full length novels).

Sorry, started running out of time towards the end there.

Weird thing to me is that Van Vogt got his start in Astounding and was at one point considered one of the Big Three instead of Clarke.

Posted something yesterday meant for this thread in this other thread: rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

Got a hold of this:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bwJaSQiUhIo/TO4OhAULwUI/AAAAAAAAAiQ/Qqr9DOw7eZc/s1600/asimov.jpg
First item in it is a Walter M. Miller, Jr. novella called The Darfsteller, which is hard to find otherwise, about a human actor trying to keep up with robots. Title is some sort of German pun, Darsteller means "actor," Darfsteller seems to mean actor who doesn't take direction.

Have a few pages on to go on that story, quite well done. Some of his other novellas are available as ebooks as part of the Galaxy project, with nice intros, biographical material and cover art. And speaking of Galaxy, did you know about the custody battle involving him and Frederik Pohl?

Interesting to me that on that loa site both Silverberg and Malzberg agree more or less on when the real Golden Age was. Last night was looking at Delany essays in Starboard Wine and he also in greatly interested in that period. He has some interesting ideas about how sf should be studied, says it is problematic to try to study it as literature plain and simple ("mundane literature") as it is always going to lose under that formulation, should be studied on it is own terms with its own traditions. Makes sense but good luck with it. Although maybe somebody is already doing that, in Kansas maybe.

Malzberg was such a Kuttner/Moore fan that he took their initials and one of their pseudonyms and created the pen name K. M. O'Donnell for himself.

How many times I use form of "interesting" in that one paragraph. It's like that one Bugs Bunny cartoon.

It's a *good* life

just finished that one, immediately recognized it from the TZ episode but man that is some bleak shit

Always think that phrase at certain times of year.

Anyway, been reading some of the Galaxy Project ebooks and there are these really informative introductions, which is in-line with the tradition noted by Delany of sf history being buried in anthology intros. In one of the Kornbluths, which Horace Gold tacked a happy ending onto, we learn that he wanted to do the same for "Flowers For Algernon"!

Sorry, maybe I should have put *SPOILER* there.

Cherry-picking my way through The Hugo WInners for stuff not easily available elsewhere before I have to return it. Lots of corny stuff from Asimov in the intro but some of it is actually interesting or funny. LIke this:

My winged words cleft the air impassionedly as I delivered an impromptu encomium on the manifold excellence of Daniel Keyes. "How did he do it?" I demanded of the Muses. "How did he do it?"
....
And, from the round and gentle face of Daniel Keyes, issued the immortal words: "Listen, when you find out how I did it, let me know, will you? I want to do it again."

Or, from the intro to Fritz Leiber's "Gonna Roll the Bones"

But what Fritz said to me was, "You have no villains."
I objected at once. "Yes, I do, Fritz," I said. "Every story I write has a villain."
"Oh, you have someone who opposes your hero," he said, "but he's never a villain

Second villain should be in italics - villain

From intro to "Riders of the Purple Wage"

One of the questions was "Tell me, Mr. Farmer, how do you keep up to date in science so that you can write your science fiction stories?"
That was a stunner for me. I had never heard of such a thing. At the time, I was teaching biochemistry at a medical school full time and a textbook I had helped write was going into its second edition, so I had to keep up in biochemistry. But keeping up in science in general? And for science fiction?
Phil took it calmly. He said, "For one thing, I subscribe to Scientific American."
I was staggered. If Phil, who is a lot less "heavy science" than I am, feels it necessary to keep up with science what am I doing just lounging around?
I could hardly wait to get home to send in my subscription to Scientific American, (a subscription I still have) and to begin to work at keeping up. I don't know that it ever affected my science fiction much, but I'll tell you this: since 1954 I have written dozens of non-fiction books covering just about every field of science, and one of the reasons I can do so dates back to that one remark of Phil Farmer.
Thanks, Phil!

OK, read all three Poul Anderson stories in this book of which two were grebt but one was terrible, and it's reasonably clear why.

Feel like this thread should be moved to I Love Books or retired in favor of the other rolling thread, but I still kind of like this thread and feel it has a purpose.

haha i dimly remember reading that asimov anecdote in one of his other books. that guy must have been the most lovable bad public speaker ever.

He basically brags about it in I, Asimov. Well, he describes it differently. How he was a highly paid, much in-demand public speaker who could get the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand in no time flat and was uncannily able to stop on a dime at exactly the appointed hour within reference to a watch or clock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU-QExgydz0

Just reread - okay listened to the audiobook of - the novel version of Flowers of Algernon, and gotta say it still packs a punch, extremely well thought through and executed.

Aargh, sleepy fat fingers onto small screen, I really pulled a Charlie Gordon that time, Flowers for Algernon

How do they do the bit on audio where he goes punctuation berserk? That's my favourite bit.

This poll result surprises and confuses me.

Like is “Flowers for Algernon” something other than an exploitative bit of premise?

It's a well-done tearjerker at least, the more poignant for sure if you know or are someone with cognitive struggles---duh everybody in some way---guess it got some points for novelty when first published (not many stories about "slow" people then) but the deeper or more lingering (than novelty) impression, via unusual aspect of subject (also in there: experimental treatments which work, but only for a while---and it was published after and amid all these well-publicized treatments for "curable" conditions).