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

Still Bester.

van Vogt can still fuck off.

my shortlist would include "fondly fahrenheit", "it's a good life", "quest for saint aquin" and "surface tension". but really, there are SO MANY good stories in this box. when you can scan a list and remember the plot and characters and dialogue and awesome lines and scenes in each story, well, that's a good sign. or a really bad sign that i've read and reread this too many times.

i am voting for "scanners live in vain"

He tried to remember the days before he had gone into the Haberman Device, before he had been cut apart for the Up-and-Out. Had he always been subject to the rush of his emotions from his mind to his body, from his body back to his mind, confounding him so that he couldn't scan? But he hadn't been a Scanner then.
He knew what had hit him. Amid the roar of his own pulse, he knew. In the nightmare of the Up-and-Out, that smell had forced its way through to him, while their ship burned off Venus and the habermans fought the collapsing metal with their bare hands. He had scanned them: all were in Danger. Chestboxes went up to Overload and dropped to Dead all around him as he had moved from man to man, shoving the drifting corpses out of his way as he fought to scan each man in turn, to clamp vises on unnoticed broken legs, to snap the Sleeping Valve on men whose instruments showed that they were hopelessly near Overload. With men trying to work and cursing him for a Scanner while he, professional zeal aroused, fought to do his job and keep them alive in the Great Pain of Space, he had smelled that smell. It had fought its way along his rebuilt nerves, past the Haberman cuts, past all the safeguards of physical and mental discipline. In the wildest hour of tragedy, he had smelled aloud. He remembered it was like a bad cranching, connected with the fury and nightmare all around him. He had even stopped his work to scan himself, fearful that the First Effect might come, breaking past all haberman cuts and ruining him with the Pain of Space. But he had come through. His own instruments stayed and stayed at Danger, without nearing Overload. He had done his job, and won a commendation for it. He had even forgotten the burning ship.
All except the smell.
And here the smell was all over again—the smell of meat-with-fire . . .

"How, O Scanners, are habermans made?"
"They are made with the cuts. The brain is cut from the heart, the lungs. The brain is cut from the ears, the nose. The brain is cut from the mouth, the belly. The brain is cut from desire, and pain. The brain is cut from the world. Save for the eyes. Save for the control of the living flesh."
"And how, O Scanners, is flesh controlled?"
"By the boxes set in the flesh, the controls set in the chest, the signs made to rule the living body, the signs by which the body lives."
"How does a haberman live and live?"
"The haberman lives by control of the boxes."
"Whence come the habermans?"
Martel felt in the coming response a great roar of broken voices echoing through the room as the Scanners, habermans themselves, put sound behind their mouthings:
"Habermans are the scum of Mankind. Habermans are the weak, the cruel, the credulous, and the unfit. Habermans are the sentenced-to-more-than-death. Habermans live in the mind alone. They are killed for Space but they live for Space. They master the ships that connect the Earths. They live in the Great Pain while ordinary men sleep in the cold cold sleep of the transit."
"Brothers and Scanners, I ask you now: are we habermans or are we not?"
"We are habermans in the flesh. We are cut apart, brain and flesh. We are ready to go to the Up-and-Out. All of us have gone through the Haberman Device."
"We are habermans then?" Vomact's eyes flashed and glittered as he asked the ritual question.
Again the chorused answer was accompanied by a roar of voices heard only by Martel: "Habermans we are, and more, and more. We are the Chosen who are habermans by our own free will. We are the Agents of the Instrumentality of Mankind."

i hate the far=right pro-gun libertarian message in that van vogt story but there are so many irresistible parts in it that i still like it a lot. the schlubby narrator, his overbearing wife, the scene w/ the giant computer room, the bucolic setting, etc etc

"Mars is Heaven" is incredibly creepy but I don't really know any of these.

"Scanners" is probably what I'm voting for. I recently reread it and was a little surprised to find that Cordwainer Smith seemed to be out of print except for The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith published by NESFA Press. I borrowed the one copy in the New York Public Library.

Hm, I guess they have two copies and I guess Simon and Schuster put out some stuff recently, including an anthology called When The People Fell.

Thought of Smith in connection with the cat nuns who showed up in Dr. Who a year or so back. Unique writer, deserves a cult following.

The Scanner's Oath reminds me of the "That Is The Law" refrain from "The Island of Dr. Moreau" which wouldn't be the only thing he got from that book, but that's cool with me.

Scanners is great, but "Fondly Fahrenheit" is probably one of the dozen best stories ever in any genre. Bester at the top of his game >>> almost anyone.

"The Cold Equations" is a hard science fiction classic, but I've always found it a bit silly myself.

Bester at the top of his game >>> almost anyone.
Yeah, the big two novels and the best short stories are aces. Could never get into the later stuff like The Computer Connection though.

Yeah he wasn't at the top of his game for very long sadly.

"The Cold Equations" is a hard science fiction classic, but I've always found it a bit silly myself.
Yup. I think that point was discussed here
The 1980's science fiction movie poll
and here TS: sci-fi vs. fantasy!

Nonetheless, it still gets to me.

xpost: I'd still like to see the long-mooted Stars My Destination movie, from someone who knows what to do with it.

i might've voted for "st aquin" if i hadn't read "a canticle for leibowitz"

can i also say that i really like "twilight". especially the part where the dude finds the completely abandoned but still functional automated zeppelin hanger and takes a cross-country trip on a zeppelin over a totally depopulated but still immaculate america. it's pathetic and beautiful at the same time, like a lonely sunday afternoon for the entire human race.

I think Morrissey wrote a song about that.

I don't know enough of these to vote, I think. But "Fondly Fahrenheit" would be tough to beat.

My daughter got a college bud (female) to read "The Cold Equations" and it upset the friend so much that they're pretty much not friends anymore.

did she preface it by saying "the girl in the story reminds me of you" or something like that

PILOT = ME, GIRL = YOU, PLS READ LOL

Hahaha

Of the ones I know, and though I find his novels fairly unreadable, I have a soft spot for Asimov's 'Nightfall'.

hahaha, my daughter reminded me of some of the details. The friend read the story and was really upset, and my daughter was kinda "uhhh....it's not really worth getting this wound up over, ok?" And then another friend in the dorm came by and my daughter mentioned the story and the 3rd friend said "Yeah, I read that...really good story." And friend 2 asked friend 3 if he had been really emotionally steamrolled like she had, friend 3 says "no not really," friend 2 is suddenly all "OH MY GOD YOU GUYS HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO HUMAN EMOTIONS BLOOO HOOO HOOO HOO HOW COULD YOU BAWWWWWWWWW" and my daughter and friend 3 just sort of look at each other and back away slowly.

It's a *good* poll.

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.

"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

in a penguin vein, the slug lords will be interviewing brian aldiss himself as a one-off special for resonance FM, probably some time in february

Fab!

Have finally sourced myself a full copy of the subject of this poll. Will look for that World Turned Upside Down too (I have a stupid foible of not buying things from Amazon).

it's from baen books which somewhat mysteriously offers the first seven stories free on its website but provides no direct link for ordering the physical object!!

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

In Dreams, a celebration of the 7-inch single in all-original sci fi and horror fiction, is a great modern collection, which should also appeal to ILM nerds.

> I have a stupid foible of not buying things from Amazon

it's not on amazon.uk anyway.

ONE of those collections must contain a story about an alien behind a two-way mirror. anyone? 8)

The Lost In Space Episode With Michael J Pollard As The Boy Who Lived On The Other Side Of The Mirrors

Don't know if he was technically an alien though, or if that was based on a short story. Was probably original.

this was the first meeting between earth and some other alien race that could provide some technology or medicine or whatever. they would hand it over and help out but only on the condition that the earthlings didn't see the aliens (perhaps they were shy). hence the two way mirror*. only the earthling got curious and wanted to peek and finally managed it by shining a bright light, er, somewhere (alien side?). only the alien was wise to it and all he caught was a glimpse of a tail.

details sketchy, was a book rescued from (and later replaced onto) a pile destined for a jumble sale about 20+ years ago. was another story about a man being kept as a zoo animal. another which rested on you thinking the narrator was human but, surprise, no.

*or is it a one-way mirror, that makes more sense

^ that is exactly childhood's end by arthur c clarke. ** mild spoilers ** it only happens 1/3 of the way through, the aliens really are benign and helpful (well, in the sense that they're guiding humanity to a higher plane of evolution which only the children will reach, everyone else dies and planet destroyed); the reason they don't want to be seen is 'cause they look just like devils (but the reason our image of devils is like that is because of jungian collective unconscious pre-figurative reversal causality racial memory).

actually it was probably the short story which he later extended into childhood's end, called...

... "Guardian Angel", which, I believe, does just deal with the events in your post, none of the higher plane of evolution stuff.

^ only found out about the short story today, coincidentally, or i might have been more helpful earlier.

cheers ledge

a quick google says that it appears in 'the sentinel' which is on the shelf at home, 90 miles away. and a copy of other places. could've sworn it was a multi-author collection though.

"The Sentinel" sounds right. Don't forget that David Bowie wrote the song "Oh! You Pretty Things" based on Childhood's End.

World Turned Upside Down at alibris.co.uk from less than 3 quid:

http://www.alibris.co.uk/booksearch?qwork=8344110&matches=58&wquery=baen&cm_sp=works*listing*title

Brill, I've got it! I normally use abebooks but alibris looks really good, will keep 'em bookmarked.

worst cover ever.

"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.

couldn't disagree more about "first contact"; the whole point of it is a sort of anti-xenophobic humanism, about the difficulty of negotiating co-existence! i mean the whole strand about the crewman who befriends the alien crewman seems almost too blatantly an argument AGAINST xenophobia!

ok, sure, the "lol we spent all the time telling dirty jokes!" payoff. But that only works as a contrast to the background of the whole story, in which apparently "the only safety for either civilisation would lie in the destruction of one of both of the two ships here and now." Maybe not xenophobic as such, but kinda confrontational, and certainly fatalistic. I just didn't buy it - shit was never a problem in star trek!

the whole point of the dilemma is to get AROUND that! it's an interesting logic problem and really, dude beats the "we're all the same thing" almost to death, dwelling on their sense of humour, their sympathetic expressions, how they really WANT to be friends. i can't for the life of me imagine how you'd consider the story's POV to be xenophobic in the slightest. or fatalistic; they do solve the problem in the end!

Yeah they solve it but to me it's a non-problem! I don't get why they are so paranoid - that's the word, of course! - "We can't trust 'em so we'd better kill 'em". I know he argues it well, I just find it hard to imagine that's what it would come down to.

Also the story unwrites itself - if it is a genuine problem and that is the only solution, then, bingo! We have it! Problem will never occur!

well it's not meant to be a treatise on human-alien relations; it's a story with a logic puzzle at the heart of it that gets satisfyingly solved by the end. QED!

man its a good life is such a scary fuckin story

first encountered it thru the twilight zone episode which makes it creepier cuz the kid looks like a normal kid and not some purpley monster like in the story

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/to_the_corn_field.png

eep!

is that billy mumy? ha, it is. later of Lost In Space and Babylon 5.

I read that story for the first time last night btw. Yes it was v. good. I liked the purpleness.

the purpleness is *GOOD*

I think this thread -or rather it's faulty predecessor- got started because of that episode being mentioned on Taking Sides: The Twilight Zone vs. The Outer Limits

Recently got a hold of a copy of some giant anthology called The Space Opera Renaissance. Looks interesting, but so far all I've (re)read is the great three-pager "Zirn Left Unguarded, The Jenghik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerly Dead" by Robert Sheckley, which I understand the Sluglords have done.

Purple monster? The kid was a normal kid in the print story, too! Are there alternate versions of this anthology running around with main characters being replaced by purple monsters? There was a non-descript monstery kid thing in “Born of Man and Woman” but I don't remmber him being purple.

read it again! he's never described, physically, but it's strongly implied that he has a monstrous appearance, and there's lots of mentions of his 'purplish gaze'

Maybe Bixby had a kid with a really big birthmark on his face.

Incidentally s1ocki have you read R.A. Lafferty's "Ginny Wrapped in the Sun"? It's another very good version of the Monstrous Child story, maybe a better story than Bixby's, albeit with a debt to it. In fact everybody should just read as much Lafferty as they can get hold of, dude was fabulous.

o rly!

never heard of it!

any collections you would recommend?

900 Grandmothers has "Ginny" in it and is where I started.

"[Once a] French publisher nervously asked whether Lafferty minded being compared to G. K. Chesterton (another Catholic author), and there was a terrifying silence that went on and on. Was the great man hideously offended? Eventually, very slowly, he said: 'You're on the right track, kid,' and wandered away."

He is like Chesterton, really, especially in the sense that they both come across as guys you'd like to kick it with.

It reads like the purple refers to his CYCLOPS OPTIC BLAST but he is not himself a PURPLE HULK:
http://nickelkid.net/docs/greats/its_a_good_life.html

Do you mean this line?: "It was wherever it had been since that day three years ago when Anthony had crept from her womb and old Doc Bates--God rest him--had screamed and dropped him and tried to kill him, and Anthony had whined and done the thing."

here is born of man & woman:
http://journal.pcvsconsole.com/?thread=16346
The kid here definitely has GREEN HULKism.

There's a few sentences in the story that imply Anthony is not regular human-shaped. Especially the pictures he produces on the TV, which is the creepiest notion in the story, to me. Also the recurrence of the purple gaze is used in a way that makes me think it's not a death-ray effect.

that line and lines like this:

"Anthony looked across the lawn at the grocery man--a bright, wet, purple gaze."

xxp

also i guess i assumed that any sort of newborn that would make a doctor immediately try and kill it would be kinda freaky looking.

and ya the tv thing is rrrrrrr.

Anthony came around the corner of the house...and went smoothly over the fence and out into the cornfield.

Choice of "came", "went" and v.especially "smoothly" are important clues there.

He's a purple horse?

If he didn't have teleport-god powers, I might picture a horse, but he's got them so I'm thinking normal kid arms folded levitating Magneto style.

Do you guys have mental pictures of Anthony when reading this -- can you draw them and post them here? I would like to see.

I don't have a mental picture because I don't think the story wants to give you that, the whole point is a steady drip of suggestions of "wrongness". To flip the question, if the Twilight Zone ep didn't exist would you automatically picture Anthony as a regular-looking little boy? Who incidentally is younger in the story than the TV version, too.

I haven't thought about Lafferty in 25 years, but I remember him being witty and funny in kind of a Robert Sheckley mode.

Here is what I thought (the kid is not supposed to look monstery & no mouth-- that is just my poor drawing skills):
http://canvaspaint.org/5c66.png
I don't think I saw the Tzone ep until years after reading the story, but I might have seen the TZone: The Movie version -- which explains away the weird shapes on the TV as being Tex Avery? cartoons.

That's a sweet drawing.

I'm obviously not insisting on a "correct" reading, here. I think the story is obviously in part about the "monstrousness" of infancy, the disruptive ego of the new baby in the home. Beyond that I think it examines human revulsion at deformity or disability but I wouldn't play that up: it seems to me that the child (children I mean, not specifically Anthony) in and of itself is monstrous enough. And I do get a Cthullu-ish unspeakable wrongness/body that writhes and mutates vibe from the story - the TV images particularly, like I said, hint at that - but I don't think it needs to be crucial to why the boy is a Horror.

And yeah I saw the movie version of the story long before the TV verzh, too. In fact we went to see it at the pictures at the time. It was scary.

Why is "The Ballad Lost C'Mell" in Volume Two, amongst the novellas? It's only twenty pages long, shorter than many of the stories in Volume One, certainly shorter than "Scanners Live In Vain."

Ballad of

Huh, I bought the (wrong - UK) edition of this when the poll was active and still haven't read it.

(hangs head in shame)

c'mell does give the impression of being a way compressed longer story in a way that the other one doesn't. not a great reason, though.

maybe they wanted 'the dead lady of clown town' but for licensing/space reasons swapped it out.

Lewis Padgett “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” 1943

I thought this was by Henry Kuttner! wow.

I am shocked by no one voting for Jerome Bixby's "It's a *good* life".

Looks like Daniel Keyes has a new book out after what, 30 or 40 years? Or has he been writing all along?

“The Country of the Kind” is in both this and Aldiss's Penguin Omnibus. It's a fine story, but is it really a Hall Of Fame Omnibus passenger?

(Just gonna keep adding questions to the end of this thread in tribute to Sorrentino's Gold Fools and the new Padgett Powell novel)

Interesting that "Flowers for Algernon" co-won this poll but there doesn't seem to be much discussion of it in thread. Unless I missed a part.

I had a chance to interview Daniel Keyes back in the late '70s at a college SF convention. He seemed quite bemused about it all. I got the very strong feeling that he never thought of "Algernon" as a science fiction story. His other books tend to be psychology-based, as I recall. I'm too lazy to Amazon him up.

Interesting dude, though. I had him and Walter Tevis, of "The Man Who Fell to Earth," and neither of them considered himself an SF writer, which made for awkward interviewing. Fun days.

Country of the Kind better than Arena, First Contact, Helen O'Loy, The Cold Equations (the cold challops), others that i don't even remember.

Algernon was turned into a novel weren't it? Seems fine as a short story, wonder how it was filled out.

Oh I'm such a terrible cynic for suggesting this, but is it faintly possible that a lot of people just vote for the only story they've heard of? Algernon was turned into a novel, and then a Hollywood movie ("Charlie").

Could be. Could also be comments backlash against it because Keyes was an "outsider."

Outside (hard) Science Fiction? Could be. But I was taking an even lower road than that. Heh heh.

Bwana, that could be. On the other hand, that movie was, what?, 40 years ago? And the movie's title was "Charly," so it's not an obvious connection. Still, you could have something there.

I remember reading the short story in that book and then reading the novel (and maybe watching the movie!) in school. There was something in that story that struck a chord in the heart of every nerdy little kid and every schoolmarm what educated them.

A twin hammer, I think. We COULD become smart like the smartypants.... but are they really any happier? No.

Soothes the beating anti-intellectual beast, methinks. And I love the story. And the movie. *grin*

Interesting that Keyes' only other two books that got any sort of play were both about Multiple Personality Disorder. That would be "The Minds of Billy Milligan" and "The Fifth Sally." I've never read "Sally," but "Billy Milligan" is a fascinating read.

I remember reading the short story in that book and then reading the novel (and maybe watching the movie!) in school. There was something in that story that struck a chord in the heart of every nerdy little kid and every schoolmarm what educated them.

― Bloggers Might Ride (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, November 12, 2009 10:49 AM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this.

wasn't it one of the spurs to 'we who are about to', which is one of the most devastating things done in SF

Guess I was hoping for some James Tiptree, Jr.-style bio-deterministic weirdness instead of what I got.
Also in the intro, Samuel R. Delany refers to "The Cold Equations" as a classic.

And in a footnote, he mentions that Kathryn Cramer points out that the men could have each had a leg amputated to get the payload down and that would have saved the girl. Then if you go to Cramer's sight, she mentions a six year debate over the story.

!

"that the men could have each had a leg amputated"

Uh there is only one dude on the ship? How exactly is he going to operate on himself?

The debate is pretty famous though, def. split the hard sci-fi vs. soft sci-fi camp very dramatically (of course the story is completely silly so anyone taking the science of it seriously is definitely suspect in my eyes.)

That's what I thought, one man, but I guess the others are offstage.

No, you are definitely right, one guy on the ship. They may have been counting the people who were supposed to be rescued, but by then it would have been too late. But search for: "the cold equations" amputated delany

and you will see what I read.

Looks like there was also an answer story, "The Cold Solution."

There's been several, IIRC.

he could have cut out his heart

o wait, that's "scanners live in vain"

;-)

ha

It's a *good* life

tempted to do this for the aldiss/penguin one

Please go ahead

done

i'm sorry you didn't like 'we who are about to', by the way! i think it is just the kind of thing i am v susceptible to

I must not ever have seen this poll, because Flowers for freaking Algernon winning while Cyril Kornbluth gets 0 votes is grrrrrr-inducing.

Convenience link to the penguin omnibus thread: best story in the penguin science fiction omnibus, 1973

Volume Two B is really good. Finally read "The Moon Moth" and "Rogue Moon" this past week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvrGUnIFuRs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M04y8yVylNA

just got this

Cool, looking forward to see what you think.

/Lewis Padgett “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” 1943 /

I thought this was by Henry Kuttner

I am shocked by no one voting for Jerome Bixby's "It's a *good* life".

cosign

Speaking of Kuttner, this volume looks interesting http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1352594822l/223274.jpg but right now I'm going to work my way through library copies of their respective Best-Ofs, his being retitled The Last Mimzy.

Believe in the UK there are some sf gateway omnibuses.

at the time i first read it (early 20s) "it's a good life" was the scariest story i'd read since encountering "the lottery" way back in middle school. doesn't quite have the same effect on me anymore but a lot of the small details (like the hints of the kid's horrific appearance) are still pretty chilling.

Bixby was apparently an editor as well, at Galaxy, under Horace Gold. Came across something called Transformations: The Story of the Science-fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970 by Michael Ashley, which seems to be one of several volumes, which has a lot of info on this. Think print copies are expensive and hard to get but meanwhile can look through google books or even access at NYPL, apparently.

Reading a Kuttner story, "The Voice of the Lobster," which is another one that gets its title from Lewis Carroll. Gradually dawned on me that the peculiarly named scam artist protagonist Terence Lao-T'se Macduff was basically a W. C. Fields character. Which actor Kuttner protagonist Ray Bradbury loved to imitate apparently, as was mentioned in some obits and also in this fanzine, Fantasy Review from 1949, which is fascinating to read for all kinds of other reasons: http://efanzines.com/FR/fr15.htm.

Weird: Google seems to think Betty Ballantine was once married to Melvin Belli.

Time passed, both Bergsonian and Newtonian.

Oh, I might well have voted for the Bixby if I'd seen this time. It's a masterpiece, even better than the Twilight Zone adaptation. Science Fiction Encyclopedia's site says he was always an idea man---also wrote the genesis of Fantastic Voyage, about adventures in the bloodstream---but tended to fumble, writing so much in haste, like so many back then.
I read a good Kuttner this morning, though orig. credited to Padgett, so maybe Moore's in there too, but this seems a little thinner than the ones with her obvious input. It's "Piggy Bank," about a beautiful golden (gold-plated) robot, encrusted with (synthetic, but don't tell) diamonds. He's a piggy bank, designed to run away from robbers, but dammit he also runs away from his suddenly strapped robber baron master---oh, there's a code to make him stop, but he's not responding. The robot's also designed to do *anything* to get away, but this was published on 1942, so things don't get as wild as they might have in later decades (maybe that's all I meant by "thinner," just unreasonable expectations). It's still clever and entertaining and the culture of big-bucks opportunism gets the kind of sardonicus more associated with 50s s.f.

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).

So exploitation is also part of its subject---is he in some way better off for this experience, at least in terms of a few, increasingly and perhaps mercifully dimming memories---?

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

There is one plausible interpretation in which one could think of it as a story that is relevant to anyone who has not necessarily been surgically altered but whose intellectual development has outstripped their emotional -and also, Keyes/smart Charlie states, spiritual- development.

Okay, the narrator pauses for every comma in the first and last sentence of that Progress Report.

xpost yeah was thinking along those lines and others re someone with cognitive struggles---duh everybody in some way-

Yeah, I probably should have said I was agreeing with what you were saying.

The movie was okay, wasn't it? Been a long tyme since I've seen it, but Cliff Robertson was prob okay, and it had Charlie going to a go-go, strobe lights, girls in white boots---tryin' to get those crazy kids back in the seats, but then why wouldn't he, go Charlie go! (Soundtrack by Ravi Shankar, for Charlie's messed-with karma.)

Dunno, haven't seen since we watched in ninth grade English class, although I did just read Daniel Keyes impression of it in his memoir Algernon, Charlie and I: A Writer's Journey. But hey, I see that somebody put Charly on youtube for the nonce.

Robert Silverberg edited a collection including several of these, with essays of analysis and appreciation for each - a book I loved, and thoroughly recommend.
https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Silverbergs-Worlds-Wonder-Exploring/dp/0446513695

Yeah that book is great. I have an ebook of it under an alternate title, Science Fiction 101: The Craft of Science Fiction.

Which reminds me that another audiobook I recently enjoyed was Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop. (The first chapter of “Hothouse” is in that Silverberg collection)

Prior to World of Wonder, Silverberg also edited the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthologies that this poll is based on. IIRC, Silverbob massaged the poll results a bit to get a good overall spread of authors, types of story, eras, etc. His choices are generally excellent, tho' I can't quite understand his enthusiasm for Blish's 'Surface Tension', which I find pretty dull (might well have been more remarkable in 1952 of course).

I have these British editions:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51uqgQy-FPL._SX303_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51o%2BZk-ARSL._SX296_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

"Surface Tension" amazes me now, or not too long ago when I finally read it in the VanderMeers' accurately titled The Big Book of Science Fiction. Entirely possible that I'm at 1952 levels of appreciation, not to mention comprehension (I was an All-American tot then, bred on U-235-fortified mother's milk). Great cover pix, thanks! Also thanks to yall for mention and endorsements of those Silverb essays.

You know, James M, it seems that there is also a recent audiobook of the very book that is the subject of this poll, and in that case the reader of the shorter version of “Flowers for Algernon” really goes to town delivering each and every inflection in the section in which Charlie is infected with punctuation intoxication.

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