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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing Years,
By
This review is from: Amazing Stories: 60 Years of the Best Science Fiction (Paperback)
I always had a fondness for _Amazing Stories_. It never had the prestige of the Big Three: _Astounding/ Analog_, _Galaxy_, or _Fantasy and Science Fiction_. But it was frequently great fun; and under its better editors (Cele Goldsmith, Ted White, George Scithers, and Patrick Lucien Price), there were frequently surprises in the number of quality stories that it published.
Some critics have argued that _Amazing_ made no real contributions to the development of science fiction. This is patently untrue. While it is true that the magazine published its share of pretty awful stories over the years, there were notable novels as well: E.E. Smith's _Skylark Three_, John W. Campbell, Jr.'s _Uncertainty_, Fritz Leiber's _The Night of the Long Knives_, James Blish's _And All the Stars a Stage_, Keith Laumer's _A Trace of Memory_, Roger Zelazny's _He Who Shapes_, Phyllis Gotlieb's _Sunburst_, Robert Silverberg's _Up the Line_, Frank Herbert's _The Santaroga Barrier_, Piers Anthony's _Orn_, Ursula K. Le Guin's _The Lathe of Heaven_, and Jack Vance's _Emphyrio_. Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg's _Amazing Stories: 60 Years of the Best Science Fiction_ (1985) is a selectin of nineteen of the better stories from _Amazing_. They range from the late 1920s to the mid 1980s. Eight sories come from the 1960s and none come from the 1940s, indicating that the editors know their oats about the strong and weak periods of the magazine. The stories are: David H. Keller's "The Revolt of the Pedestrians" (1928), Miles J. Breuer's "The Gostak and the Doshes" (1930), Nelson Bond's "Pilgrimage" (aka, "The Priestess Who Rebelled" (1939), Eando Binder's "I, Robot" (1939), Robert Bloch's "The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton" (1939), Robert Sheckley's "The Perfect Woman,"(1954), Walter M. Miller,Jr.'s "Memento Homo" (1954), Isaac Asimov's "What Is This Thing Called Love?" (aka, "Playboy and the Slime God," 1961), Edmond Hamilton's "Requiem" (1962), Mark Clifton's "Hang Head, Vandal!" (1962), Cordwainer Smith's "Drunkboat" (1963), Philip K. Dick's "The Days of Perky Pat" (1963), Ursula K. Le Guin's "Semley's Necklace" (aka, "Dowry of the Angyar"), Ron Goulart's "Calling Dr. Clockwork" (1965), John Jakes's "There's No Vinism Like Chauvinism" (1965), Philip Jose Farmer's "The Oogenisis of Bird City" (1970), John Varley's "Manikins" (1976) and Pat Murphy's "In the Islands" (1983). The first five stories are old-fashioned and oft-reprinted pieces. I suppose that they will not be to the taste of many modern readers. But they are good stories-- especially the Keller, with its biting satire of man's inhumanity to man; the Breuer, with its comical treatment of mathematics, nonsense words, and dimension; and the Bond, a smooth reworking of Stephen Vincent Binet. The stories from the fifties by Sheckley and Miller are pieces that are well-crafted but ultimately minor, though for different reasons. The Sheckley is a tight, polished, one-punch piece about an ailing wife. The Miller is a nicely done character study of a dying spaceman. But it could have just as easily been a story about a railroad man, or a sailor, or a soldier. The science fiction is minimal. The Stories from the sixties range from good to excellent. The four best are the Hamilton, the Smith, the Dick, and the Le Guin. The Hamilton never fails to bring tears to my eyes each time that I reread it. I suppose that there are readers with iron constitutions and steely intellects who wil curl their lips at such critical judgement. But dammit, there are some stories that are _supposed_ to grab you this way. "Requiem" does. The Smith is a wild and wooly reworking of Arthur Rambeau's "Le Batteau Ivre". It's the one about the man who was driven through space three, and it is the most unusual story in the collection. The Dick is about the games that people of the future play to escape their social reality. Before you laugh too hard, look around you today at our world of television reality shows. The Le Guin is about love, relativity, and tragedy on a distant planet. The Dick and the Le Guin pieces were incorporated into novel length works by their authors. The Asimov is a response to a spoof of science fiction that appeared in _Playboy_ (which I have not read). It is an amusing (but lightweight) account of how prudery can save the Earth. The Clifton was that author's last published story before his death in 1963. It is a pointed-- though somewhat predictable-- satire on human folly and blindness. The Goulart is one of his dark portraits of machines who act like people and people who act like machines. It reminded me a bit of Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman". A late friend of mine used to _love_ John Jakes stories and would roar with laughter over them. I find most of his writing to be pretty awful. But this story of a war between the forces of butterfat and margerine that spins out of control has a manic inventiveness about it that won me over. The last four stories in the anthology are studies in contrast with the first five. They are modern, complex, and literate. They intend to be something more than good tales well-told. We often associate the older tales with _Amazing_. We forget that for much of _Amazing_'s lifetime, it was characterized more by stories of the modern kind. The Farmer is a companion piece to his Hugo-winning novella, "Riders of the Purple Wage". It is a story about politics and a proposed ghetto-- er, urban development. Orson Scott Card once complained that most science fiction writers did not write convincingly about politics and politicians. This is certainly not the case in Farmer's tale. We don't quite trust the President. But is he an inspired genious or a deluded idealist? The Farmer story has womblike houses. The Varley deals with wombs of a very different kind which turn out to be a source of salvation. The Tiptree deals with the archtypical search for home, but it is coupled with a great cataclysm. (Like John Taine, Tiptree seemed to delight in cooking up massive ways to threaten civilization.) The Murphy is one of her early stories, the one about the teenager turning into a merperson. It has a very concrete sense of setting, and it reminds me a bit of Gordon R. Dickson's "Home From the Shore" (_Galaxy_, 1963). There is a good introduction by Isaac Asimov, and there are sixteen lovely full-color prints of _Amazing_ covers over the years. The table of contents credits the "Dr. Clockwork" story to "Robert" rathen than Ron Goulart, though the mistake is not made elsewhere. On the balance, this is an excellent introduction to a magazine that was sometimes venerable, sometimes juvenile, sometimes literate, and often lively.
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