Reading Around in Groff Conklin's Anthologies

Lobolover, if you were rating it on a 0-5 scale with 5/5 being superlatively good, about how would you rate the Walter Owen story? And what drew your attention to it years ago? It sounds like that could be a bit of a story in itself.
 
Extollager said:
Lobolover, if you were rating it on a 0-5 scale with 5/5 being superlatively good, about how would you rate the Walter Owen story? And what drew your attention to it years ago? It sounds like that could be a bit of a story in itself.
Click to expand...

Well first time I heard about it was when I was going through Tartarus' Supernatural Fiction Database.

The cover also caught my eye

http://freepages.pavilion.net/tartarus/o24.htm

Finaly, if memory serves, I found it compared to Leonid Andreyev's The Red Laugh which is one of the most insane experiences I have ever had in supernatural fiction. So naturaly I was interested.

Conklin does note in the introduction how the book failed to attract a large enough audience as it deserved when it first came out due to it being marketed as an anti-war tractate rather then a tale of supernatural fiction.

As for rating, I don't realy find numerical ratings, at least within the ranges of 5s and 10s to realy express something meaningfull to me, but I do fully recommend it, as it is a very unusual story.
 
My 18th story in this series of comments is Chad Oliver's "Blood's a Rover," which won the cover spot on its magazine appearance:
astounding_uk_195210.jpg

It appears here --
51F2lQDiF6L._SY320_.jpg


I give it 3/5. It has what seems to me to be an Asimov-style ambitious scenario of centuries and galaxies, engineering of planetary cultures, a threat foreseen by a super-computer, etc. It might well have "convinced" me if I'd read it in my teens. As it is, I was glad that it's told in 52 readable pages rather than being the basis for some sprawling multi-volume series, with hordes of unnecessary characters and endless swatches of dialogue, as it would be if written today.
 
AnthConklin13AboveNt69P9.jpg

I've written a couple of postings about finding this book (the above image isn't of my copy, though) with 15 other sf-fantasy books in a recycle bin yesterday, and of the peculiar odor that came with them.

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/6197-book-hauls-470.html#post1717052

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/6197-book-hauls-471.html#post1717078

I read "Prone" by Mack Reynolds, my first Conklin story for May. A cadet is accident-prone. Earth's war with Mars drags on. Neither side can quite tip the balance. A commander puts 2+2 together.

2/5

I thought about starting to rate my books themselves for their olfactory quality. Well, why not? Kindles and Nooks don't have that dimension.

So:

5/5: book genuinely has a pleasant scent to it [this will be awarded rarely]
4/5: the book is agreeable to smell because of some association evoked by its smell, e.g. maybe it reminds one of prowling the sf sections of used book stores years ago; the smell itself might not be all that appealing, but the associations are
3/5: neutral
2/5: the book smells unpleasant without the smell being a real issue, e.g. maybe it has a slight scent of cigarette smoke
1/5: the book truly has a horrid smell

I guess this copy would be 1.5/5.

I have a Coleridge book that would rate 2/5, his Constitution of the Church and the State. It smells like patchouli, at least I think that's what it is, & I wish it didn't, but I have no doubt about keeping the book.
 
My 20th story in this series of comments is Malcom Jameson's 1944 story "Tricky Tonnage," in The Best of Science Fiction. If you don't make allowances of one sort or another, the story would rate at 1/5 -- clumsy exposition, dubious-at-best science, virtually no characterization, etc. Well, it's an example of that old "fiction for engineers" variety of sf. As such, for its time, it might have been worthy indeed of appearing in a Conklin anthology! Guess I'll give it 3/5. It starts out as a light-hearted thing so that you don't see the rather horrible consequences of the "graviton" discovery as being as inevitable as they are.
Astounding-1944-12.jpg

That's the issue of Astounding in which it was first published. You can read it here:

http://freeread.com.au/@RGLibrary/MalcolmJameson/TrickyTonnage.html
 
My 21st and 22nd stories in this series of readings come from Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales. H. B. Hickey's "Hilda" is a story of a man who seduces women for their wealth and is served at home by a robot that misunderstands what it has overheard about being held tightly. It's one of the innumerable stories of (in this case sardonic) poetic justice that were ubiquitous in sf and supernatural fiction, both pro and fan. Somebody ought to do an anthology on that theme. It would not be one to read straight through. a 2/5 for this story. Arthur Feldman's contrived short "The Mathematicians" travels in a well-worn groove straight to a cornball "surprise" ending that wasn't surprising. A father tells his little daughter about the winged invaders that conquered earth and what happened afterwards. Key persons of the story are Zizzo and Zizza, by the way. Unless Feldman wrote under pseudonyms, this would appear to be his sole sf story (at least, that was anthologized -- twice!). 1/5

At midpoint in my proposed year of two Conklin-anthologized stories a month, I'm struck by the unsatisfactory quality of many of them. I don't think the outdated quality of the "science" is the main cause; I don't suppose the stories mentioned above were praised when they first appeared in print. Editors had to print what they got. One does shudder to think what the slush piles must have been like. Of course, today's slush piles must also be dreary.

It would be interesting to know about the stories that did make it into print but that were not anthologized. I suppose you'd find many more such stories in Amazing than in Astounding. But even The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, regarded by some as the most literate of the magazines (I believe), printed lots of stories that bring me, at least, no joy.

A reminder: this thread is for anybody who wants to comment on Conklin, his anthologies, and any particular stories printed therein.
 
Thanks Extollager - an interesting perspective on the quality of many of the stories. Of course, many (if not most) of these anthologies and stories are no longer in print, and perhaps that's why. I enjoy the idea of searching through these old anthologies to find the occasional gem, however - unfortunately, I still haven't come across any good Conklin collections to get hold of myself. (Must try harder... on ebay perhaps).
 
Two more poor selections from 13 Above the Night: J. Lincoln Paine's "The Dreistein Case," and Fritz Leiber's "Nice Girl with Five Husbands." 1/5 and 2/5 respectively. It seems Conklin -- and the editors of the magazines from which he drew many of his stories -- liked sophomoric little satires of Cold War-era bureaucracy and manners that wind up into a little "gotcha." This aren't-I-amusing style is about as far as can be from the sf that I care about, but apparently some people like(d) it.
 
Not having read the stories in question, I can't address them specifically, but I've read a fair number of other such. I think these may well have been a salutary response to the sort of insane thinking we saw during this era... particularly of the McCarthy mindset and its congeners, where the country was so often reacting like children frightened of their own shadows -- which, of course, only fed the paranoia on all sides even more, continuing to escalate the situation out of all reason.

We're seeing something of that sort now, with the extremes that the U.S. government has undertaken when it comes to spying in the name of fighting terrorism, to the point of concretizing an "us-vs.-them" mindset between the people and their (supposed) representatives, which is resulting in an approval rating for Congress, for instance, which is the lowest in history... lower, in fact, than the roughly 33% which, at the time of the American Revolution, were in favor of remaining British subjects. I've seen one rather humorous report which has Congress coming in as less popular than either root canal surgery or lice.....

Such stories may not be as "relevant" now as they were then, but on the other hand, we do seem to be repeating certain patterns in bureaucratic thinking which might well change that....
 
#26 is Murray Leinster's "The Ethical Equations," also from the Treasury. This is my first 4/5 since Katherine Maclean's "Contagion" in early April. The Leinster is a good first contact story, originally published in Astounding for June 1945. An enormous, seemingly derelict alien spacecraft is not abandoned after all, and a junior officer has to decide what to do.
astounding_1945_06.jpg
 
#27 is Paul Carter's "The Last Objective," in the Treasury. The author must have been 19 or 20 when it was published in Astounding. A war between the Combined Western Powers and "Asiatics" has gone on for years, apparently leaving the Surface uninhabitable. Food is synthetic and war machines burrow through rock to engage with one another. The object of the war is revenge. Commander Sanderson and his crew encounter an enemy craft and destroy the enemy, only to find themselves overtaken by the enemy's out-of-control biological weapon, proving culminating horror for a pretty gruesome story. 3/5 As in other stories of subterranean burrowers, I wondered where all the debris created by the stone-tunneling blades was supposed to go. (I'm a great admirer of The Lord of the Rings, but where did the rubble from the Moria-Dwarves' delving go?)
 
A lazy Sunday afternoon: so #28: Will H. Gray's "The Bees from Borneo," reprinted, according to Contento,* from the Feb. 1931 Amazing, in Conklin's Omnibuzz of Science Fiction. Bee-keeper crosses nice honey-gatherers with alien stock to get savage killers that wreak havoc across the nation. (The national capitol relocates to a then-safe place in Arizona.) For the time being this suits the bee-keeper fine, since he is vengeful for some reason that I forget already. Oh, and he's confined in an asylum for a while. Thanks to the chaos, he gets free and goes home. Feeling compunction because of his own boy's death, the bee-keeper takes a few days to develop another new and beneficial strain, which quickly displaces the killers. 3/5
3605447448_443c834c92_z.jpg


*"The Bees" is the only story by this author recorded by Contento, though for all I know the author wrote other stories under other names.
 
Last edited:
PS Thirty-three years later, this was the cover (Feb. '64) for Amazing.
amazing_stories_196402.jpg
 
#29 -- "Cure for a Ylith" by Murray Leinster in Operation Future. Contento shows only this book appearance for this story. Deprived of his family by a tyrant, a scholar of psychosomatics finds a way to destroy the arbitrary king of Loren despite his fantastic layers of protection. It involves a device that will make the king the victim of his own fear. It seemed to me a pretty silly story. I guess 2/5. I've been forgetting to check my own explanation of the significance of these numbers as I award points. This story is pretty skippable.
 
#30 and my first for August is Budrys's "The War Is Over," originally in the Feb. 1957 Astounding -- 4/5. Frank Simpson (or "Frank Simpson") must complete a mission from Castle, a forsaken planet. More than one irony will be revealed.
61tMlvTF29L.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Thread starter Similar threads Forum Replies Date
Extollager Hawking's Brief History of Time 1990 -- still worth reading? Book Discussion 4
Extollager Reading Around in the Penguin Travel Library (and Other Travel Books) Book Discussion 6
Extollager Reading Around in Astounding's Jan. 1953 Basic Science Fiction Library Classic SF&F 6
Bick Reading Around in Old SF Magazines Magazines 425
Extollager Reading Around in Robert Arthur's Anthologies Classic SF&F 13

Similar threads


Back
Top