Tag: Asimov, Isaac

“Before the Golden Age 2” ed. Isaac Asimov

This is the middle volume of Isaac Asimov’s autobiographical look at the science fiction stories from the 1930s that influenced him. No absolute shockers here and I enjoyed reading all of the stories – they still suffer from the various -isms of the time but the sins are more of omission than commission which is a step in the right direction. I think my favourite would be “Sidewise in Time”.

1933

“The Man Who Awoke” Laurence Manning

Man invents a method of hibernation and goes to sleep so he can wake up 3000 years in the future & see the wondrous progress. It turns out not to be as simple as that – there’s been progress, but there’s also been a bewildering (to our protagonist) shift in attitudes to consumption. The biology of hibernation is very 1930s, but the future society which now lives in forests using mostly renewable resources, and carefully manages itself not to use up its resources feels a lot more of modern concept. As Asimov says in his afterword this wasn’t yet a fashionable thing to worry about. It’s still a very 1930s story tho, not only in narrative style but also – women, what are they? On the plus side the inhabitants of the future are brown-skinned yet have both good people and bad people and are treated just like people by the narrative.

“Tumithak in Shawm” Charles R. Tanner

Sequel to “Tumithak of the Corridors” which is in the first volume of this anthology. Tumithak now leads an army from his corridors to do battle with the alien shelk – through various twists & turns of the plot they join forces with another subterranean band of people (under Tumithak’s leadership, of course) and win the first real battles against the shelk! I particularly liked the way that Tumithak & co react believably to being out on the surface for the first time (and being the first generation to see the sun in 2000 years), and the way that they aren’t just obviously victorious from the beginning – we know the end because of the framing story of how Tumithak is a legendary hero, but there’s still tension and still mistakes and bad decisions. In looking to see if Tanner wrote any more I’ve discovered that all his published stories are freely available (on what looks like a legitimate website) so at some point I should read a few of the others.

1934

“Colossus” Donald Wandrei

Man travels & grows to burst through to a bigger universe where our whole universe is one of the atoms. This suffers somewhat from poor science even for the time (although as handwaves go, breaking the speed of light by drawing on “intra-spatial emanations and radiations” is right up there with reversing the polarity of the whatever). I think I might’ve preferred this story if it had explored the vaguely dystopian future-on-the-brink-of-war more, rather than had our hero go off on his journey. And if the girl had lived – she had an actual personality, a shame to have her killed off halfway through to make our hero sad & lonely as he travelled. It was nice that the aliens in the larger world actually seemed fairly alien in some of their attitudes & appealing to (effectively) their humanity didn’t work.

“Born of the Sun” Jack Williamson

What if the planets weren’t balls of rock or gas? What if they were actually eggs? A mix of horror (I want to say “Lovecraftian horror” but I haven’t actually read any Lovecraft) and science fiction – our hero learns the Awful Truth just in time and builds himself a spaceship. Reminded me a bit of a (science fiction) book I read several years ago based on Velikovsky‘s ideas, but only in that it takes “completely nutty science fantasy idea” and runs with it in a science fiction type of way. However, I didn’t like the romance subplot here – particularly not the patronising way the protagonist thinks of his fiancée, and could’ve done without the racist elements too (lots of exoticising stuff about the Oriental mind, and evil Chinese antagonists). And to modern eyes the ending looks less hopeful than I think was intended.

“Sidewise in Time” Murray Leinster

Some cosmic event happens & the world becomes a tapestry of scrambled pieces of different alternate histories for a time, before mostly descrambling itself – many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics suddenly made real. One man (Professor Minott) has figured out from the initial harbingers of the event that triggers it what’s about to happen and we get his story as he tries to lead a party of undergraduates to a land where he can rule the world, interspersed with vignettes of other events across the world. It’s also a take on a wish-fulfillment story for Minott, only his wishes don’t end up fulfilled – he’s just a maths lecturer at a tiny university, and he sees his chance to gain power & get the girl of his dreams, but in the end he’s not the swashbuckling hero he thinks he will be. In the hands of Meek (who wrote the dreadfully racist stories in the previous volume) this would’ve turned into White Man Reigns Supreme, but this story is much more nuanced and good – White Man gets his comeuppance and isn’t as clever or superior as he thinks he is. My favourites of the vignettes were where the nasty, mean-minded & abusive farmer gets eaten by a dinosaur & we’re very much expected to cheer as his wife realises that she might have gone mad (she’s not) but she’s free. And the Roman army (from a land where the Romans lasted into the 20th Century & conquered the Americas) descend upon a car and kill it because they think it’s a weapon, efficiently brutal. Oh, and a sad one where three diplodocuses (or some dinosaur of that general sort) get killed when they’ve wandered into a town – they’re just confused, poor things, they didn’t even mean to destroy anything 🙁

This made me think of Fred Hoyle’s “October the First is Too Late”, except there the scrambled Earth is in different time periods rather than different alternate universes. It’s been probably 20 years or more since I last read that book – it’s one that my parents own – and I can’t remember much about it except for the premise and the fact I liked it. Even the title and author took a bit of creative googling to figure out. Now I just need to remember by the next time I’m in Oxford that I want to re-read it! 🙂

“Old Faithful” Raymond Z. Gallun

Intelligent life on Mars communicating with Earth people. Told mostly from the perspective of the Martian – who is convincingly alien. He thinks differently, perceives differently, has a different sort of society, looks different, tolerates different atmospheric conditions. But despite all these differences the alien is a sympathetic character. And after 9 years of communication the understanding on both sides is still pretty fuzzy, it’s built up from the beginnings of the basics of arithmetic but they still don’t truely understand each other. Which is refreshing after all these stories where the aliens or whatever are human-ish and understanding is perfect after some minor stumbles.

< Previous on the Shelf | Next on the Shelf >

“Before the Golden Age 1” ed. Isaac Asimov

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is a phrase that commonly has two definitions – the first of these is the era when Campbell was editing Astounding Stories and the writers included people like Isaac Asimov. The other definition is that the golden age of science fiction is 12. That the stories that you read around that sort of age when you’re just discovering your own tastes in fiction are the ones that stick with you through your life. This anthology is a selection of stories that Isaac Asimov remembers reading in the 1930s – in his own personal golden age – that had an influence on his writing and thus on “The Golden Age”.

As an aside, I’m not sure I quite agree with either definition – both that those 1940s stories of The Golden Age aren’t (in large part because of my own age) going to be the best thing ever for me. And also that I think I’m still discovering new books & stories I think are as good or better than the things I read in my teens.

But still, as a conceit for an anthology it’s a good one, and as well as reprinting the stories Asimov writes about his own life. He comes across as very full of himself, but also aware of that and poking fun at his own ego. I suspect if I’d ever met him I’d’ve found him irritatingly smug, but the tone works OK in an autobiography.

This volume covers the years 1931 & 1932, when Asimov is 11 & 12. I bought it sometime in the mid-80s, about ten years after it was published. Its been years since I last read it, and mostly what I remembered was that the stories seemed dated, a few were still quite good but most were pretty “meh” to my more modern eyes. That’s a fairly accurate summary – with the addition that some are downright bad to my more grown-up modern eyes. The science tends to be wrong (either because we now know more, or because the author didn’t know what was known then), they tend to be full of info-dumps and “As you know, Bob” conversations. Some of them work despite this.

And they all have what one might euphemistically call “the attitudes of their time”. The sexism tends to be in the absence of women, and in the lack of personality for the women in those few stories with any female characters – the sort of thing you can excuse for any one story as being that the author just happened to choose a male protagonist. But when you look at the collection as a whole there’s a pattern – nobody thought a woman to be interesting enough to be the protagonist or even a primary character (with the exception of the alien in the Williamson story at the end). The racism is … mostly of the same sort. I wrote the little notes on the stories before I wrote this intro & you’ll spot the bit where I’m suddenly taken aback. There are three stories in the middle that are appallingly explicitly racist, two of them (a duology by Meek) to a degree where if you took the racism out there’d be no story left. I skim read the second of those, and wouldn’t’ve even done that if I hadn’t been going to write about the book.

I’ll be keeping the book, but boxed up – primarily for the autobiography and for the nostalgia.

1931

“The Man Who Evolved” Edmond Hamilton

Story about the future evolution of humanity, a morality tale of the “meddle not with things you do not understand” type. Also felt like the H. G. Wells story “The Time Machine”, in that it was a scientist building a contraption to find out how the human race developed & demonstrating it to his friends. The science is dreadful (evolution Does. Not. Work. Like. That. and I suspect even a biologist in the 1930s would wince at it) but the story is still compelling.

“The Jameson Satellite” Neil R. Jones

Another “what will it be like in the far future” tale. In this one a man works out how to perfectly preserve his body after he dies, by shooting it into space in a rocket to orbit the Earth. Much much later he’s discovered by aliens, who are metal men (Zoromes from the planet Zor, I kid you not) who were once biological but have transplanted their brains into metal bodies and now live forever. The science is equally as wince-making as the last one but I have a higher tolerance for bad orbital mechanics etc than I do for bad biology 😉 The “radium repulsion rays” to prevent meteors hitting the rocket were a bit much tho … It was still a fun story to read, I keep wanting to use the word “charming”.

“Submicroscopic”, “Awlo of Ulm” Capt. S. P. Meek

Woah, these two were very much a “product of their time” to an extent that they didn’t have anything to recommend them today. Man builds machine to shrink himself, finds submicroscopic land inhabited by beautiful white people who are being attacked by brutish black savages who want to eat them. The sequel introduces scientifically advanced cruel yellow people with slanty eyes who’d like to enslave them. The hero wins the day because he’s the WASPiest WASP that ever WASPed, and also has guns but if he hadn’t he’d still’ve won. Asimov notes in his afterword that he was uncomfortable with the “touches of racism” he noticed in his re-read, but I’d say that “touches” is inadequate to even begin to describe the level of racism. Oh, and sexist too – these are the first stories in the book to have a woman mentioned at all, but she’s not a person she’s a plot coupon. Save the princess, marry the princess, save the princess (again), duel someone to the death for the princess, duel someone (else) to the death for the princess, reflect on how you didn’t kill them brutally enough because of what they threatened to do to the princess… So I think that’s actually a step back from the woman-free state.

“Tetrahedra of Space” P. Schulyer Miller

A story in the tradition of Wells’ “War of the Worlds” – aliens land, some plucky earth men persuade them to move on when something common on Earth turns out to be poison to them. Astonishingly purple prose, which made me giggle out loud at times because it was so overwrought. Here’s a sample:

It was beyond all reason — all possibility! And yet — it was! Now I could see them clearly, rank on rank of them in orderly file, some hundred of them, strewn in great concentric rings about the softly glowing spheres — harsh as the black rock itself, hard, and glittering, and angular — a man’s height and more from summit to base — great, glittering tetrahedra — tetrahedra of terror!

Unfortunately, also a very racist story 🙁 I kept trying to give it a pass coz I was enjoying the main plot, but it kept getting worse – there’s a nasty subplot to do with a South American native/Portuguese “breed” on the “wrong side” (i.e. his mother was white). However, in contrast to Meek’s stories I feel that it could be edited to remove the racist attitudes & the racist subplot and at the end you’d have a story where the essential plot was the same, just stripped of the 1930’s unpleasantness. (The science would still mark it out as from that time period, mind you …).

“The World of the Red Sun” Clifford D. Simak

Time travel in the style of H. G. Wells – with a well thought out machine that has believable flaws. Plucky 20th Century men save the world of the far future! Given how thought through the time machine was it was startling that the men of the far future still spoke English. An enjoyable story.

1932

“Tumithak of the Corridors” Charles R. Tanner

Far future Earth, long post-invasion by Venusians & the start of the story of how people won back their planet. The framing story is that this is a reconstruction of “how it must’ve been” told from even further in the future. This is one of the stories that had stuck in my mind from reading this book when I was a teenager and I think I like it just as much as an adult – caveats about 1930s story telling styles still apply, tho, and I can’t exactly call it non-sexist or non-racist. It does actually have a couple of women with speaking parts who have about as much personality as the male secondary characters – but that means pretty much none. No overt racism & even an explicit statement that people come in many sorts, good & bad, regardless of nation or era – but everyone’s white except the savages who live in the dark (who are slate-coloured) which is somewhat problematic. Well thought through consequences of the living arrangements of the people, tho the science/arts divide made me roll my eyes a little. My favourite of this volume.

“The Moon Era” Jack Williamson

Another man in a machine goes on an adventure story – this time the machine is invented by an old wealthy childless man who summons his never met before impoverished nephew and announces that if he takes the trip in the machine he will inherit the fortune. The trip is supposed to be to the Moon & back, and indeed he goes to the Moon but the time he arrives is not the time he left the Earth. The alien he meets is female – has to be for the plot to work, but she’s no plot coupon she has a personality of her own. A melancholy story, which I liked although I didn’t quite buy the ending.

< Last on the Shelf | Next on the Shelf >