Extollager
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2010
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...I should have said that the offshoot guys are about two feet tall, but they weigh so much that they leaves footprints in solid rock.
Two more stories from Monster Museum before the book goes back into storage.
"The Desrick on Yandro" by Manly Wade Wellman was intended, I suppose, to charm with its Appalachian milieu and the simplicity of its tale of a greedy man's fate at the "hands" of the Flat, the Toller, the Bammat, the Behinder, and the Culverin.
"The Homecoming" by Ray Bradbury reminded me of the once well-known cartoons of Charles Addams, with vampires, witches, etc. being the personnel of what were intended to be amusing weird variations of familiar family tensions. If you like the one you should like the other.
Here's another anthologist whose editions you used to see... but I suppose he is forgotten now: Leo Margulies.
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Brian Aldiss, probably from Merril's SF: Best of the Best (1967). It's not quite all the human race, though - there was that unfortunate visit to Hispaniola by Frank II.
Thank you, sir.
Considering that it's been umpty-ump years since I read that story, it's understandable that I had forgotten the Hispaniola incident...
Herewith I invite interested folk to browse around in anthologies that they may have on hand, that were published 40 or more years ago (as of 2015), and edited by someone other than Groff Conklin -- who for many years seems to have been the sf anthology king.
Anthologists who would be appropriate for this new thread include Don Wollheim --
...Damon Knight --
...Judith Merril--
...Robert Silverberg--
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...Arthur C. Clarke--
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... and more.
For our purposes, I suggest we define "anthology" as an assembly of stories by multiple authors (in contrast to single-author "collections"), and that we confine ourselves to books that reprint previously-published stories, i.e. that we not include books that published their contents for the first time.
Purely up to you, but I propose to rate the selected stories 1-5, thus:
5/5: Outstanding stories in one's whole personal experience of reading sf and a cherished classic
4/5: Exceptionally good
3/5: Worth reading
2/5: Perhaps passable entertainment, but eminently skippable
1/5: Not worth reading
Other early anthologists I read besides Groff Conklin, who was indeed the anthology king, were Bleiler and Dikty and Leo Margules. Some strange, far out reading, which I like, in both.