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

The polls must roll (bump)

bleugh, the edition i got was some crappy uk version missing half the stories - vol 1 of vol 1 it would seem. managed to source a 'fair' copy of the second vol from a 3-starred bookseller, fingers xed it arrives and is not too beat up.

i kind of applaud anyone living their convictions enough to stop talking to someone bcz they thought 'the cold equations' wz a good story -- ! joanna russ absolutely detests it as i recall (from 'how to suppress women's writing', maybe): wasn't it one of the spurs to 'we who are about to', which is one of the most devastating things done in SF

is this an american anthology? i think my developmental equivalent to it would be the brian aldiss penguin book of SF, but maybe i'm just a newjack

man, some of these sound familiar but i can't say for sure that i've read any besides asimov and bester.

ive read Asimov, Bradbury, Matheson, Boucher, Clarke, Bester, Keyes and Zelazny. 'nightfall' is the most fun because of the dorky plot twist, but 'fondly fahrenheit' really takes the cake here.

"is this an american anthology?"

Yes.

the moral of fondly fahrenheit is that robots are terrible lyricists

Politics aside, I really like the Van Vogt. What's the deal with "The Cold Equations"?

It's mean.

Turns out the van Vogt I've read was 'The Seesaw', not 'The Weapon Shop'. The latter is even more offensive! The gun-nut philosophy in 'The Seesaw' is just the backdrop for a nice little universe creation story. 'The Weapon Shop' is batshit right-wing libertarianism to its very core, and the whole set-up is so bizarre and fake.

^^^ this is what makes it cool

It's been a long time, but scenes from "Coming Attraction" jumped back into my brain when I read the title -- Fritz Leiber channeling Ballard in 1950?

xpost: I first encountered true batshit right-wing libertarianism through reading SF in the 70's, mostly writers associated with John W. Campbell/Astounding/Analog. Then it took over the world.

Has to be said that some of them, Heinlein and Van Vogt not excluded, could still turn out a decent Space Opera when they weren't doing political rants.

I don't even think Heinlein as being a libertarian. That dude was just a right-wing nutjob.

Plus wrote some very entertaining books. Somehow the sci-fi context makes it much easier for me to tolerate this kind of thinking. Dunno why.

He also wrote for thirty years and changed quite a lot over that time. Towards the end of his career, I remember overhearing older fans seriously speculating that he might have tertiary syphilis.

Xpost: seem to remember that Ballard had quite a lot of time for Leiber. He's certainly one of my all time faves, though more for his horror/fantasy stuff than the pure SF. A true and original stylist.

I have collection of Leiber sci-fi shorts that I've never read. I really should pick it up. I tend to find his novels a bit tedious.

I think "The Green Millennium" is set in pretty much the same world as "Coming Attraction". The sexuality in his fifties' work is astonishingly sophisticated for its time.

Read almost half of these so far and for an all time 'hall of fame' I must say I'm less than impressed. "A Martian Odyssey" is just a mostly unimaginative menagerie story - I don't think it can be excused for its early date, since Wells and Rice-Burroughs had tackled similar ground 20+ years previously. "Helen O'Loy" is more of its time - ie quaintly sexist. "The Weapon Shop" I've blathered on about already. "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.

I see that everyone here's repping for stories in the second half though, so still looking forward to that.

You might have enjoyed those stories more if you had read this book when you were thirteen like the rest of us.

U SAYIN SKIFFY IS FOR KIDS?!1/!?!?!1/1

No, but corny stuff like "Helen O'Loy" might be.

You have to make allowances for stuff from the 30's - 40's pulp era: the prose can be rough'n'ready, and ideas that were new then have been recycled on the hour on Sci-Fi channel for years now.

progris report 1 -janyuarie 13

Man, I can't believe I didn't get a hold of copy of this book again until today. Not going to change my vote though.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

actually, some of those titles do sound familiar, especially with ledge's descriptions. i did read a jumble sale book of science fiction many years ago and wonder if it was this one.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS::::::::::::::::::

does one of them have a person who you'd been assuming was human all the way through suddenly unfurl wings? is there something about a two-way mirror?

Nothing like that in the ones I've read (that's only half of 'em tho). But it does sound quite a bit like a scene in Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke.

I don't think my second vol is going to get here in time for the poll, if at all. In the meantime here is a quality typo from my crappy edition of the first vol:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3429/3196720728_848bf66525.jpg

"the roads must roll" is notable for its villains being EVIL UNION BOSSES

i voted for zelazny

Missed my chance by two hours to say "Sluglords strangely silent."

Ha at typo.

the selection is strange but that's life in this crazy copyrightin world

my favorite van vogt story is "black destroyer" - it's like the inspiration for both alien AND predator

What selection is strange? The selection of stories for this volume? I believe they were voted on by some sci-fi readers/writers group.

And copy I have has endorsement from Ted Sturgeon on the back. Saying this is from the cream, the top ten percent. From the Crap Nebula none.

look i have no idea what s.f. readers think is canonical and many of these i haven't read, but "the roads must roll" seems like a poor and atypical choice for heinlein, who i think would be better represented by one of his "young adult" stories (though most of these were novels)

and while i love leiber to bits, "coming attraction" is barely s.f. at all

That's because we live in the future now where it came true!

Or at least came true in movies of the past.

Actually it was SF writers - the Science Fiction Writers of America organisation, who nominated and voted for the the best SF stories of the era up to 1965. Agreed, some of the choices are definitely wack though.

fun fact: fritz leiber's name is pronounced "LYE BUR"

I guess he pronounces it the German way as per this discussion

Anyway, I'm glad Tracer is taking this tack because one of the reasons I started this poll- and maybe I should have said something at the top- was that I wanted to find out which of these stories had aged well and which hadn't, which lived on as sentimental favorites despite their flaws, and which should never have been there in the first place, only getting in because, say, Damon Knight pulled some strings.

I think "The Roads Must Roll" may be in there is a stand-in for Heinlein's entire Future History series, but I dunno. Maybe they could have put "The Man Who Sold The Moon" instead.

Roads Must Roll was no. 7 in the poll. First Contact (which is pish) was joint 5th!

Silverberg in the intro says he pulled some strings, e.g. to include a writer who hadn't made it due to multiple stories nominated, and swapping one story buy a guy for another he and the author thought was better. So the top 15 and "all but a few" of the second 15 made it.

That poll in full:

1 Nightfall
2 A Martian Odyssey (no wai this is pish too!)
3 Flowers for Algernon
4 Microcosmic God
= First Contact (oops I meant joint 4th above)
6 A Rose for Ecclesiasties
7 The Roads Must Roll
= Mimsy were the Borogoves
= Coming Attraction
= The Cold Equations
11 The 9000000000 names of G
12 Surface Tension
13 The Weapon Shop (ugh)
= Twilight
15 Arena (pish)

i never understood the love for nightfall - OK so the sun always shone, they'd never known nighttime... but what, they'd never been in a room and closed the blinds before? got their head stuck in their sweater? CLOSED THEIR EYES??

Yes but they wouldn't have seen the stars. "Not Earth's feeble thirty-six hundred stars visble to the naked eye--Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indiference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world."

"'Stars--all the Stars--we didn't know at all. We didn't know anything. We thought six stars is a universe is something the Stars didn't notice is Darkness forever and ever and ever and the walls are breaking in and we didn't know we couldn't know and anything -- '"

(yeah it's a bit daffy)

right, but the great PANIC beforehand isn't about the stars (which they don't know about) it's about THE DARK

I started rereading "Nightfall" last night but couldn't get past the classically clunky expository first sentence.

Ok, well it's not really dark when you close your eyes, and it's probably hard to shut out the light from six suns with just blinds. And there are bits in the story where it suggests they're psychologically predisposed to fear darkness - one of them says he got terrified when he tried to go into a cave, and a bunch of them do get panicky when they just draw the curtains. So I'd imagine their society is pretty much set up to avoid darkness. xp.

"Aton 77, director of Saro University, thrust out a belligerent lower lip and glared at the young newspaperman in a hot fury." ?!

When I say I couldn't get past it, I meant I had to stop and admire it as an exemplar of a certain kind of sentence.

Re: People Afraid Of The Dark: I always thought he was evoking all those stories of Columbus and Cortez dazzling the natives by predicting an eclipse of the sun- taking that and putting it in some kind of more advanced civilization.

Someone with musical skills should sample that to make the next Avalanches single.

Indeed.

Linking this for the images, which you need to scroll down to see:
https://auxiliarymemory.com/2017/12/19/science-fiction-hall-of-fame-volume-one/

How do you think that punctuation hiccuping Charlie does compares with the chanting of the Scientific People in The Stars My Destination, James?

The mind boggles.

I know there's at least one UK edition of 'The Stars My Destination' that helpfully deformatted all the weird typography, putting it into regular paragraphs and ruining the effect.

Recently there have also been audiobooks of Volume IIA and now Volume IIB. Also found this review by Theodore Sturgeon:
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/22/archives/if.html

Finally, came across some interesting comments out there by James Gunn, in which he references Volume II, about why the novelette is the ideal length for sf, but they are buried in google books links so am not going to link.

Not the screenwriter, James Gunn, but the sf writer and academic.

Curious about his anthology series, The Road To Science Fiction, but seems hard to get a hold of.

It seems like at least half of these have been adapted into TV/movies. Weird that Mimsy would be the most recent one.

I only have volume three of the Gunn series, 'From Heinlein to Here', covering the period 1940 to 1977. Good selection of stories, lots of crossover with other the Hall of Fame anthologies as you might expect; don't remember the surrounding editorial matter being that compelling, but would need to revisit to confirm.

Have recently worked my way through a couple of volumes of Hugo Award winning stories edited by Asimov, covering the periods 1955 to 1967. Again, some crossover with these anthologies. With your indulgence (or without), here are my rankings:

The Darfstellar - Walter M Miller 6/10
Allamagoosa - Eric Frank Russell 7/10
Exploration Team - Murray Leinster 7/10 (not the best story in these collections, but the one that most seemed like it would most make a great movie - giant mutated bears! hordes of horrible alien creatures!)
The Star - Arthur C Clarke 8/10
Or All the Seas With Oysters - Avram Davidson 6/10
The Big Front Yard - Clifford D Simak 7/10
The Hell-Bound Train - Robert Bloch 5/10
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes 8/10 (the ideas about intelligence and stupidity expressed here are obviously much more problematic nowadays, but as a piece of storytelling this is still pretty fine)
The Longest Voyage - Poul Anderson 5/10
The Dragon Masters - Jack Vance 7/10
No Truce With Kings - Poul Anderson 2/10 (an unbelievably tedious sci-fi retelling of the American Civil War. Kinda hate Poul Anderson now.)
Soldier, Ask Not - Gordon R Dickson 6/10
'Repent Harlequin', said the Ticktockman - Harlan Ellison 7/10 (yes the author is a terrible arse, and the hepcat writing style has dated badly, but after the stodge of Anderson this definitely felt like a leap into modernity and you can still see why it had such an impact at the time)
The Last Castle - Jack Vance 9/10 (Vance at his best - a baroque melding of fantasy, historical and classic SF ficion tropes)
Neutron Star - Larry Niven 6/10 (reminded me a little of Delany's Nova, which is less hard science than the Niven, and therefore much more to my taste)

The Big Front Yard - Clifford D Simak

this is the one where the hoverbike riding aliens are impressed by paint, yeah?

oh look there they are:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3c/The_Big_Front_Yard.jpg/220px-The_Big_Front_Yard.jpg

LOL yep, that's a fantastically literal cover painting that gives away the ending. There's a lot of folksy yarn-spinning before that.

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novelette, 1959

Thanks, Ward. I remember reading those two Poul Anderson stories in that book, liking the first one well enough and hating the other one, so much I did not finish it

Simak? Folksy yarn-spinning? No way.

Never happened

This anthology series I have never seen or heard of until today, edited by guess-who, looks pretty interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(anthology_series)?wprov=sfti1

Amazing looking stuff.

For real! A bunch of great stuff i know plus a bunch of stuff I’ve been looking for, like Wilhelm’s “Baby, You Were Great”

'Baby, You Were Great' also included in Pamela Sargent's first Women of Wonder anthology.

At the same time as the Alpha series, Silverbob was also editing the all-original New Dimensions series too. Dude was just insanely productive in the late 60s/early 70s.

Yeah, edited a lot of one-off anthologies as well, I think

Of course, those Alphas are not originals, like the New Dimensions were, I think, but still. “Baby, You Were Great” is from Orbit, for instance.

And can also be found in The Best From Orbit.

I have this nice UK paperback edition of Orbit 2, where the Wilhelm made its first appearance:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/413FfkCenfL.SX316.SY316.jpg

I only have a battered copy of the UK Orbit 1 paperback, but I love the cover:

https://pictures.abebooks.com/ELLEPOTTER/md/md20882515571.jpg