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

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.

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

I guess it is a bit -
"Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery."
or
"Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own. "

- http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001628.html

His eyes slid down the front of her dress.

One meter before Crap Nebula getting speed of light vehicle for emergencies (9)

http://www.velvetglove.org/misc/macros/wahmbulance.jpg

Ok then, this one occurred to me earlier:

Cakes (one) and lidless pasties for Zelazny's rose gatherer (12)

We don't have those cakes over here but I gotcha.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Daniel Keyes “Flowers for Algernon” 1959

gtfo

What part of that is boggling your mind?

I'm just surprised it beat Bester in particular, but then I haven't read it since 6th grade

It's a pretty great story, but no it's not better than Bester. It's probably the most widely read thing in there though.

progris riport - wtf?

ok dudes this poll inspired me to get this book... i hadn't read most of these. just read "scanners die in vain"—what a sick story! the imaginary in it is just amazing... the Great Pain... habermanization... the spaceship lined with live oysters (!!)

i was actually kind of into the weapon shop one, mostly because it made such a huge left turn from the whole rural-paradise-spoiled-by-modernity thing i thought it was going for...

so ya this is cool

one thing about "the weapon shop" that deserves credit is the sense of optimism ... compare to the usual misanthropy of libertarian fiction and/or "humanist" sci fi like asimov or bradbury.

politically speaking i think the scariest story in here might actually be "the little black bag". or maybe that's just harmless "nerds take over the world" / "teh stupids are taking over the world" wish-fulfillment for sci-fi readers.

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

i think it was when someone (george lucas? gene roddenberry?) realized that sci-fi + cartoons + tv shows + movies + toy merchandising = big bucks

i don't even bother going into the sci-fi section of chain bookstores anymore since i know that it's going to be 90% licensed crap

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

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