william timmins Archives - Galactic Journey

by Brian Collins

Our journey through this long (560 pages, in fact) and ambitious anthology continues. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One is, as Robert Silverberg more or less explains it, a survey of short genre SF from the Gernsback years up to just before the founding of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. These 26 stories are a mix of those the SFWA voted on and those which Silverberg had chosen at his own discretion. The oldest story here, Stanley Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey," was published in 1934, while the newest, Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," appeared relatively recently, in 1963. Most of these stories appeared prior to the Journey's advent.

Last time we read "Mimsey Were the Borogoves," a splendid story by C. L. Moore and the late great Henry Kuttner, under one of their joint pseudonyms. What do the next nine stories have in store for us?

Huddling Place, by Clifford D. Simak

Cover of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine for July, 1944. It announces the story Renaissance by Raymond F. Jones. The illustration shows a cloaked person alone in a huge room of tall columns. The equally huge window shows an urban landscape under a yellow sky. The lower third of the page is torn off. — Cover art by Fred Haucke.

Continue reading [July 4, 1970] Coming Attractions (The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, Part Two) →

by Brian Collins

For those who don’t know, the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) was founded five years ago in what would become the first successful attempt at forming a professional writers’ association for science fiction writers—at least here in the States. With the SFWA came the Nebula, an award made to be on par with the Hugo in terms of prestige, but voted on by SFWA members rather than Worldcon attendees; in other words, an award by authors for authors. SF in the American “pulp” tradition (as differentiated from SF of the H. G. Wells sort) has been around for not quite 40 years, and those of the older generation have clearly taken on a retrospective attitude as of late. If the New Wave asks where SF might be heading, then those who’ve been in charge of the SFWA, including Damon Knight and Robert Silverberg, are now asking where SF has been.

We thus have a massive reprint anthology, published by Doubleday in a rather colorful hardcover edition, called The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One. It is, as far as I can tell, the largest SF anthology since Dangerous Visions, running 560 pages. We don’t often cover reprint anthologies at the Journey, but this one is a huge endeavor, and since most of the stories included predate the Journey it would be negligent to not cover it. It’s also such a long book that we have no choice but to split the review into multiple parts. Now, many of these stories are actually not new to me, although this knowledge does little to help me when it comes to evaluating some three decades of short SF.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, edited by Robert Silverberg