Customer Reviews

Cloak of Aesir

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John W. Campbell is best known for editing Astounding Stories, generally acknowledged as the best sf pulp magazine of the golden age, later called Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact. In that capacity he shaped mid-20th century science fiction, discovering and cultivating great authors like Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, providing story ideas, and influencing modern works, perhaps indirectly even Star Trek, Star Wars and everything else in the field.
This collection contains stories written by Campbell himself, in the 1930s, before he took on that editorship. The title story is part of a short series, and reading it alone I found it a little slow, though in parts very thoughtul, containing science extrapolation ahead of it's time (i.e. nuclear theory written in the 1930s).
There are seven stories here, including the above and it's companion piece, "Out of Night," plus an introduction written by Campbell in 1951 for this first edition.

What a wonderful collection! It does not even matter that I read all these stories before---that's why I bought the book after massive amounts of searching for it. John Campbell was truly a genious and it's really sad that that depth of amazing simplicity in SF seems to be so missing in today's SF bookstore aisles. I guess the term "oldies but goodies" really does apply here. Like Aimov, Simmak, and Hamilton (to name a bare few) Campbell is, for me, what SF should be...and still is, if you look hard enough for the old stuff, the true and pure stuff that started it all.