Issue 04 # Aug 1951 by Fantasy; Science Fiction

Author:Fantasy; Science Fiction
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-05-16T05:42:51+00:00

Our friend Herman Mudgett is a collector and composer of that noble and neglected form of verse, the science fiction limerick. If you like this sample, we’ll use others occasionally.

There was a young man of Cape Horn Who held his grandparents in scorn; Time-travel adventury, He killed them last century — And found he had never been born!

Recommended Reading

by THE EDITORS

All of us enthusiasts have for so long hailed science fiction as a typically American form that it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit that the two best science fiction novels of 1951 to date (this column is being written in late March) are both imports from England.

John Wyndham’s the day of the triffids (Doubleday) may remind you of many other novels describing the collapse of contemporary civilization; but rarely have the details of that collapse been treated with such detailed plausibility and human immediacy, and never has the collapse been attributed to such an unusual and terrifying source. You‘ll find a high quality of novel-writing here; and those tripodal walking plants known as triffids will, we guarantee, haunt your nightmares for years to come.

There’s no new and startling concept in Arthur C. Clarke’s prelude to space (Galaxy); the book is merely the description of the day-by-day preparation for the launching of the first moon rocket. But Mr. Clarke knows his scientific details so well, projects them so clearly, and manages miraculously to infuse them with so sensitive a poetic understanding that this simple factual narrative is more absorbing than the most elaborately plotted intergalactic epic. And it’s further distinguished by the moving theme: “We will take no frontiers into space” —a refreshing change from the narrow “practical” chauvinism of so many of our writers.

Such books as these make one remember the history of the detective story, another distinctively American form to which the British contributed a new polish and literacy — which tended in turn to raise the level of the American product. And we’re certainly not going to deny that the level ot book-form American science fiction could stand some raising.

A few recent items, however, are well worth reading. John W. Campbell Jr.‘s the moon is hell! (Fantasy Press) is an extraordinary short novel: the diary of a stranded lunar expedition which creates its own living conditions out of that barren satellite — a narrative with much of the fascination of a swiss family robinson or a Robinson crusoe, and with Defoe’s own dry convincing factuality. Edmond Hamilton’s city at world’s end (Fell) is a surprising departure for the creator of Captain Future: the warm and

intimate story of a small mid-western town blasted into the remote future and adjusting itself to an uninhabited earth and a vastly inhabited galaxy.

If you like space opera — and very possibly even if you don’t — you’ll revel in Jack Williamson’s the cometeers (Fantasy Press): two full- length novels (1936 and 1939) of broad swashbuckling romantic adventure by the Legion of Space, which make more recent imitators look pallid indeed. And there’s more romantic

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