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I have just finished leading and listening to The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol One edited by Robert Silverberg.
The Nebula awards for outstanding science fiction by the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) were first awarded in 1966. This book is the first of a set of volumes meant to select the twenty-five best short stories and novelettes written before that date as selected by the SFWA membership. In the introduction the editor Robert Silverberg elaborates the voting procedures. He admits that in some cases he used his own judgement to include some stories over others. Further, there must be some doubt about whether the use of a vote by the SFWA really did provide a reliable guide to quality writing during the period from 1929 to 1964. Certainly there is at least one astonishing omissions and some unusual selections.
There are some genuine gems in this volume. “A Martian Odyssey,” “Nightfall,” “Mimsy Were the Borogroves,” “Mars Is Heaven,” Surface Tension,” “The Cold Equations, ”“Fondly Fahrenheit”, and “Flowers for Algernon” are all quite brilliant stories. Note, though, that “Mars In Heaven” is in its original form with a different conclusion than when it appeared in The Martian Chronicles.“Surface Tension” and “Flowers for Algernon” were both expanded later by their respective writers.
Cordwainer Smith is represented by “Scanners Live in Vain”. While it is an interesting tale one wonders why the writers chose it over the even finer “The Game of Rat and Dragon” which appeared in T. E. Dikty”s The Best Science Fiction and Novels: 1956.
Perhaps the two most questionable selections were “First Contact”: by Murray Leinster and “Helen O’Loy” by Lester del Ray.
Leinster’s story is simply adequate pulp and is marred by a very lame ending. “Helen O’Loy”—ostensibly a robot story—is actually a dreadful stereotyped infantilised portrait of what is evidently supposed to be a perfect woman.
That these two stories could be awarded a retroactive Nebula prize is beyond absurdity when one sees that one of the most significant science fiction writers of the period is not even represented. I refer to William Tenn (pseudonym of Philip Klass {1910-1920}) not to be confused with Philip J. Klass {1919-2005} an electrical engineer and UFO debunker). A quotation from the “Encyclopedia of Science Fiction will make clear his standing.
“From the first, Tenn was one of the genre’s very few genuinely comic, genuinely incisive writers of short fiction, sharper and more mature than Fredric Brown and less self-indulgent in satirical take on the modern world than Robert Sheckley. . . .Despite his cheerful surface and the occasional zany Humour of his stories, Tenn, like most real satirists, was fundamentally a pessimist, a writer who persisted in describing the bars of the prison; when the comic disguise was whipped off, as happened with some frequency, the result was salutary. . . .
“The sf community gratned Tenn no awards until—three
decades after he had effectively retired—he was given the 1999 science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Author emeritus award.”
Bearing the limitations of the selection and the material chosen, this is a reasonable anthology which has some quite excellent stories among some quite forgettable works.
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