Sunday, January 16, 2011
Before the Golden Age -- a review
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The guiding principle behind BTGA is an interesting one, namely the magazine stories (but not the novels or longer novellas) that most impressed the youthful Asimov when he was an avid reader of SF but not yet published himself. Hence the volume's title. The "Golden Age" of SF is generally said to date from August 1938 (with the publication of John Campbell's 'Who Goes There?' in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction) to the beginning of the "New Wave" in the early 1960s. Asimov was a crucial part of that Golden Age, as were Heinlein, Van Vogt and L. Sprague de Camp. None of those authors will be found in this anthology. In fact, very few pre-Golden Age writers survived into the Golden Age and many of the names in BTGA were unfamiliar to me.
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Although 'The man Who Evolved' is a powerful opener, the story that immediately follows it, 'The Jameson Satellite' by Neil R. Jones, is far more creaky; Asimov regards it as the weakest piece in the book, but in fact the core dilemma at the heart of the plot is very good: a scientist held in suspended animation in a sealed space capsule is awakened in the far future by a race of alien cyborgs. Humanity has ceased to exist: the refugee from the past is offered a choice between living out his natural span as the last relic of his race, dying a natural death and condemning the human race to oblivion, or being converted into a cyborg, losing his humanity but gaining immortality and the opportunity to acquire vast knowledge.
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Another popular theme, possibly even more overused by early pulp SF writers, is the "shrinking man" who has adventures on the surfaces of atoms. Ray Cummings specialised in this kind of story in the 1920s. Another specialist was Captain S.P. Meek, represented in BTGA by two linked novellas, 'Submicroscopic' and 'Awlo of Ulm'. Colourful, vibrant and bigoted, these display all the worst qualities of pulp SF and yet they are not without their redeeming features. Certainly they possess incredible momentum, far more than (for instance) P. Schuyler Miller's 'Tetrahedra of Space', which is reminiscent of the very first Jack Williamson story, 'The Metal Man'. Lush and overwritten, 'Tetrahedra of Space' is followed by the crisp and bitterly ironic 'The World of the Red Sun' by Clifford D. Simak, a time machine exploit with an exceptionally bleak ending.
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Returning to the "shrinking man" theme, two offbeat treatments can be found in BTGA: Henry Hasse's 'He Who Shrank', which takes the concept to an extreme, its unfortunate narrator descending through uncountable submicroscopic universes nested inside each other, with the implication that the loop will eventually be closed; and Donald Wandrei's 'Colossus', which reverses the idea, the main protagonist expanding in size until he grows bigger than our universe, which turns out to be a single atom in a much larger cosmos. Hasse's prose style is dense and overwrought and reminiscent of the Weird Tales standard; Wandrei's is extremely clumsy and awkward and doesn't do justice to his concepts.
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I was less enthralled by Raymond Z. Gallun's 'Old Faithful', which is a sympathetic portrait of an alien being along the lines established by Stanley Weinbaum's justly famous 'A Martian Odyssey' (in the July 1934 issue of Wonder Stories). That particular Weinbaum story doesn't appear in BTGA, as Asimov states that he was unaware of it at the time, but 'The Parasite Planet' does, and it's almost as good, with a traditional "hostile world" scenario rendered more special by a superior writing technique and skilfully timed dynamic. Weinbaum would surely have become a major Golden Age author had he lived long enough, but he died of cancer only eighteen months into his career at the age of 33.
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A quirky story that rises above its numerous defects and becomes almost an example of unintentional surrealism is 'The Human Pets of Mars' by Leslie F. Stone, the only female writer represented in this volume and one of the few women active in the field in the 1930s (of whom the greatest was probably C.L. Moore). Asimov claims that 'The Human Pets of Mars' no longer stands up, and yet I found it thoroughly enjoyable. Owing as much to Swiftian satire as contemporary pulp SF, Stone's parable of a group of humans who are abducted by octopus-like aliens and turned into domestic pets, fed on overich food, pampered and punished, subjected to mystifying training sessions, is amusing. It reads almost like a parody of pulp SF, though almost certainly that wasn't Stone's intention. I found it even more entertaining than the story that immediately follows it, 'The Brain Stealers of Mars' by John W. Campbell.
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The authentic puzzle tale is an abstruse subgenre of its own, known in German as a "gedanken". One of the finest examples of this specialised genre rounds of BTGA in fine style, Ross Rocklynne's 'The Men and the Mirror'. Rocklynne should have been as big as Asimov and Heinlein but for some reason it never quite worked for him, although he was an important part of the Golden Age and a major influence on Asimov. 'The Men and the Mirror' drops its two protagonists into a situation where only a good understanding of the laws of physics, coupled with an accurate mathematical ability, will be able to get them out. It's an ingenious tale. It also happens to be well-written and is undoubtedly the highlight of BTGA.
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BTGA was worth reading, but I feel obliged to stress that it's not really an anthology that can be digested all in one go without extensive pauses between the stories. The quality of the writing is mostly competent but rarely brilliant and although there's a tendency to forgive such clumsy prose by saying "It was only the 1930s" it must be remembered that writers such as Yevgeny Zamyatin, Karel Čapek, Frigyes Karinthy and Olaf Stapledon had already produced immensely more sophisticated SF before this time. Pulp magazine SF was enjoyable and often responsible for some genuinely intriguing and original concepts, but it was still pulp fiction, not highbrow literature.
The full contents list of BTGA can be viewed here.
Comments:
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I have this collection in a couple of paperback volumes. I pretty much agree with you on the stories, and it's nice to see a review of them here. I suspect very few people read the old stuff these days.
Thanks for your comment, Bill! I'm love to read more '30s pulp magazine SF this year, but also stuff from the '20s and earlier as well!
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