The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1940 Anthology: [Special Retro-Hugo Edition] (Amazing Stories ClassicsLicensed Edition) By Steve Davidson Kindle Edition The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1940 Anthology: [Special Retro Hugo Edition] (Amazing Stories ClassicsLicensed Edition) “A fairly good time capsule of sf starting to become a genre of its own, and Amazing Stories in particular. ,,, for the pulp fiction fan, this will be an interesting and fun read And all of 1940s covers are reprinted on this anthologys back cover.” – review. 1940 was an important year for Amazing Stories—and for its new editor, Raymond A. Palmer. For Palmer it was the culmination of his dream to create a stable of new science fiction writers for Amazing, the way John W. Campbell Jr. had done two years earlier with such spectacular success at Astounding Stories. Palmer gathered Don Wilcox, Robert Moore Williams, the highly underrated Rog Phillips, David Wright O’Brien, David Vern Reed (of Batman fame), Chester. S. Geier, the Livingston brothers (Herbert and Berkeley), Leroy Yerxa, Frances Deegan, Richard S. Shaver, and others quite popular then but of lesser fame today. He also opened his pages to anything such important authors as Ray Bradbury, Nelson S. Bond, Eando Binder, and Robert Bloch cared to write, 1940 was the year it all came together for Ray Palmer. From then on Amazing Stories’ readership and circulation would continue to grow, even through and after the war, in a triumphal arc.The stories reprinted here, we believe are among the most outstanding Palmer published in Amazing during 1940. Guiding our selections are what we feel are three key signifiers of 1) reader reaction as reflected in the magazine’s letter columns, 2) a story having been deemed worthy of reprint by the field’s most able anthologists, and 3) our own personal reading of all twelve issues published that year. The gem of the year, a novelette which still enjoys classic status today, was undoubtedly “The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years,” the first story ever set on board a ship making a generations long voyage to a distant star. Once again Amazing was in the lead with a cornerstone sf idea that remains a vital part of the field to this day (beating out Robert A. Heinlein’s “Universe,” which is often misremembered as the first use of a generation starship, by a full year). Also included areTruth Is A PlagueDavid Wright O’BrienThe Living MistRalph Milne FarleyPaul Revere And The Time MachineA. W. BernalMonster Out Of SpaceMalcolm JamesonThe Day Time Stopped MovingEd Earl Repp(Writing As Bradner Buckner)The Mathematical KidRoss RocklynneThe Strange Voyage Of Dr. PenwingRichard O. LewisThe Three Wise Men Of SpaceDonald BernSons Of The DelugeNelson S. Bond This special 1940 Retro Hugo edition of The Best of Amazing Stories is not intended to tell World Science Fiction Convention members who or what to vote for (or not to vote for). At the same time it is not possible for most readers to obtain copies of all the science fiction stories and novels published during 1940 or even those classics that might be ranked among the best. Unfortunately, many of the latter are not in print, and those that are are scattered widely among many different anthologies and not easy to assemble. We offer this present book in the hope that it may help contemporary readers become informed about, at least, some of the better science fiction of the year 1940. Contains a special Introduction and survey of the best stories published in every magazine during the year. The Best of Amazing Stories kindle W BernalMonster Out of Space by Malcolm JamesonThe Day Time Stopped Moving by Ed Earl Repp writing as Bradner Buckner The Mathematical Kid by Ross RocklynneThe Strange Voyage of Dr Penwing by Richard O LewisThe Three Wise Men of Space by Donald BernSons of the Deluge by Nelson S Bond The Best of Amazing Stories The 1940 Anthology Special Retro Hugo Edition Amazing Stories ClassicsLicensed Edition There is nothing funnier than old science fiction.

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By a full year Also included areTruth Is A PlagueDavid Wright O BrienThe Living MistRalph Milne FarleyPaul Revere And The Time MachineA W BernalMonster Out Of SpaceMalcolm JamesonThe Day Time Stopped MovingEd Earl Repp Writing As Bradner Buckner The Mathematical KidRoss RocklynneThe Strange Voyage Of Dr PenwingRichard O LewisThe Three Wise Men Of SpaceDonald BernSons Of The DelugeNelson S Bond This special 1940 Retro Hugo edition of The Best of Amazing Stories is not intended to tell World Science Fiction Convention members who or what to vote for or not to vote for At the same time it is not possible for most readers to obtain copies of all the science fiction stories and novels published during 1940 or even those classics that might be ranked among the best Unfortunately.

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I originally ILLed this book to read Sons of the deluge and re read The voyage that lasted 600 years before the final day of nominations for the 1941 RetroHugos on March 31 However reading the other stories in the volume was also fun quality varies but most were entertaining Of course all older sci fic needs to be read in historical context of when it was written so new readers to these older stories must expect differences from some of the modern SF Recommended for true SF readers The Best of Amazing Stories The 1940 Anthology Special Retro Hugo Edition Amazing Stories ClassicsLicensed Edition A lot of the stories in this retrospective don t hold up well with square jawed spacemen solving the galaxy s problems There are also some attempts at humor that were probably funnier 75 years ago Nevertheless there is enough good stuff to justify reading the anthology and it gives us a benchmark for the 1941 Retro Hugo process The first story The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years by Don Wilcox is probably the best of the bunch I also enjoyed Paul Revere and the Time Machine by A. EPub The Best of Amazing stories epub W Bernal and Sons of the Deluge by Nelson S Bond a lost world according to a review I recently discovered of a significant early genre classic The critic went on to smarmily list the many faults in prophecy of the old story under review which is set in a then future time we have now passed He told us all the things the writer got wrong in terms of later real world developments in technology society language gender relations and so on This was typical the reviewer said of vintage SF And although he did not state this directly the overall message of the piece was clear that old science fiction is of necessity hopelessly dated of no possible value except as inadvertent humor To be sure SF ages differently than other forms of fiction I can remember sitting in a theater in Washington DC perhaps 12 or 13 years ago watching a big screen re release of one of my favorite movies 2001 A Space Odyssey 1968 with growing annoyance at some members of the audience who insisted on laughing loudly and raucously whenever the trade name of a now defunct company Pan Am Bell System Telephone came onscreen in Kubrick s bright techno future I suppose those people would find sitting through a film of Orwell s 1984 an absolute laff riot because well we got through the real 1984 and it was nothing like what Orwell wrote Was it The key of course is that to read science fiction as prophecy at all is to completely misread it SF writers engage in thought experiments about possible futures not predictions about the actual future That s why 2001 is still a great film despite our having passed the title s date by fifteen years now with no sign of any manned missions to Jupiter floating monoliths in space or great wide eyed star babies The ideas it presents of space of alien visitations of the nature of time and existence are profound and they don t age at all even if Pan Am went out of business decades ago The same is true of 1984 what that story has to say about totalitarianism the struggle for human freedom and the terrible fragility of the human spirit is timeless The fact that Oceania never went to war with Eurasia in the real world never in fact existed at all is perfectly beside the point Which brings us in a slightly roundabout way to The Best of Amazing Stories The 1940 Anthology edited by Jean Marie Stine Steve Davidson and Raymond A Palmer For those who don t know Amazing Stories founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1926 was the first science fiction magazine in the world and was largely responsible for science fiction becoming recognized as a separate publishing category in itself Previous magazines such as Argosy and All Story had occasionally published science fictional work but were never exclusively devoted to the form In the wake of Amazing Stories came countless imitators with names like Startling Stories Astonishing Stories Fantastic Adventures and so on The most important of these Astounding Science Fiction would eventually supplant Amazing and become under the editorship of John W Campbell the dominant magazine in the field in the later 1930s and throughout the 40s It s still in business today under the name Analog and still publishes what is today labelled hard science fiction the kind Campbell himself published which is to say SF in which the science content is rigorous and if not always realistic at least not completely beyond the realm of possibility Amazing has had a checkered history than Astounding Analog having been in and out of business under many different owners over the past ninety years But its position as the pre eminent science fiction magazine in the world was very short lived Gernsback lost control of Amazing in 1929 as the result of a lawsuit and while he came back quickly enough with magazines Science Wonder Stories Air Wonder Stories his greatest creation Amazing was never the same From then on it was always a second rank publication following on the heels of the big boys Campbell s Astounding most of all and by the 1950s Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy too As a result many years even decades of Amazing are almost totally unknown today Little from these magazines gets reprinted in anthologies as opposed to material from Astounding which is invariably well represented in any collection of the greatest SF of its period Heinlein published much of his best early work in Astounding Asimov too Theodore Sturgeon L Sprague de Camp Clifford D Simak A. PDF The Best of Amazing stories E van Vogt Hal Clement The list goes on and on and includes really pretty much every SF writer of significance at the time Yet The Best of Amazing Stories The 1940 Anthology reveals that under the editorship of Ray Palmer Gernsback s brainchild was still publishing worthy work Palmer according to the editors aimed at publishing a broader faster moving type of story than Campbell was bringing to his readers in Astounding designed to be easily digested and followed with entertainment stressed over the science This iteration of Amazing Stories was based on the evidence of this anthology clearly aimed at a younger less sophisticated audience than Campbell s magazine Whether that means that Palmer s Amazing was juvenile or simply accessible is I suppose a matter of perspective What I can say is that I greatly enjoyed The Best of Amazing Stories The 1940 Anthology The book opens with a novelette The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years by one Don Wilcox a writer heretofore unknown to me but who a quick Internet search reveals published a great deal in the second rank SF magazines of the late 30s and early 40s The editors call this story the gem of the year for Amazing and I m not inclined to disagree This is a wonderful early take on the generation starship theme believed by many to have been invented by Heinlein in his story Universe published in Astounding of course in 1941 but Wilcox s tale predates Heinlein s by a year Heinlein s story is as one would expect much sophisticated both scientifically and literarily But Wilcox s highly entertaining slam bang story has pleasures of its own The narrator is one of the voyagers on the good ship Flashaway Gregory Grimstone the official Keeper of the Traditions whose job is to stay in suspended animation throughout much of the trip waking every hundred years to advise the various generations on earth customs and traditions so that they are not completely forgotten over the six centuries Here s the opening clearly designed to stoke reader anticipation immediately They gave us a gala send off the kind that keeps your heart bobbing up at your tonsils It s a long way to the Milky Way the voices sang out The band thundered the chorus over and over The golden trumpaphones blasted our eardrums wide open Thousands of people clapped their hands in time There were thirty three of us that is there was supposed to be As it turned out there were thirty five Right from the start we re heading somewhere far out in the Milky Way with stowaways it would appear And there are trumpaphones What s not to like There are four novelettes in the book none by writers generally known today Of them David Wright O Brien s Truth is a Plague is an amusing tale of a Professor Merlo who invents a truth gas anyone who inhales it must tell the truth and proceeds to have it dropped via airplanes on the unsuspecting population of a major city apparently unable to envision any moral legal or practical unpleasantness that might ensue from such an action Ensue it does and hundreds of people end up dead Eventually an antidote is devised and distributed happily there is never any serious consideration of legal charges against our friend Dr Merlo Chalk the whole thing up to experience. PDF The Best of Amazing stories full book This is the kind of goofy poorly thought out SF that Campbell stood dead set against in the pages of Astounding but the well truth is that Truth is a Plague is a very engaging story in its silly way It moves quickly the style is simple and clear and reading it is simply fun Literature it ain t but I found it well worth a half hour of my time. The Best of Amazing Stories epub file 1940 by a hapless couple of time machine inventors and interestingly a story called The Living Mist about you got it a living mist But this one can talk Watch out Stephen King. The Best of Amazing Stories ebookee There are also four short stories in the collection of which I found the most memorable to be The Day Time Stopped Moving by Ed Earl Repp another widely published now forgotten pulpster This is the tale of unhappy Dave Miller who decides to commit suicide one fine day only to find himself at the moment he pulls the trigger of his pistol in a strange world which looks exactly like the one he just tried to leave forever except that everything and everybody in it is frozen in place This story doesn t go in the obvious direction he s not in Hell and in fact it s not too hard to imagine this nifty little narrative cropping up with a script by Rod Serling for a middling to good episode of Twilight Zone A confession Although I d been enjoying the book a lot by the time I got to the final tale Sons of the Deluge by Nelson S Bond I was ready to move on This is by far the longest story in the anthology billed as a novella it takes up a full third of the entire volume and I figured that I would just read the first couple of chapters to get the general idea then find something else on which to spend my precious reading hours I wasn t sure that I could see myself reading a near novel length work written in the 1940 Amazing style which I d discovered certainly had its charms but Boy was I wrong Sons of the Deluge turns out to be a sensationally good pulp adventure story a page turner from beginning to end which I read very nearly in a single sitting Hiding out in a remote desert town in Mexico Duke Callion and Joey Cox mercenaries who backed the wrong side of a revolution encounter a mysterious white man who calls himself Quelchal It quickly becomes apparent that not only is Quelchal a time traveler from the past but that his original home is a certain little village that went by the name of Atlantis Shoot outs time travel volcanoes kidnappings beautiful maidens believe me this story has it all In film this was the great era of Flash Gordon Captain Marvel Batman and Robin I suspect that if Sons of the Deluge had been picked up by Republic Studios for retelling in 12 or 15 Saturday afternoon chapters it might have become the greatest movie serial of all time. EBook The Best of Amazing stories A delightful extra feature of this anthology by the way is the inclusion of the black and white illustrations for each story as they originally appeared in Amazing which adds greatly to the nostalgic flavor of the entire enterprise. The Best of Amazing Stories epubor To be sure I wasn t enad of all the pieces in The Best of Amazing Stories In their introduction the editors write that their criteria for story selection were 1 reader reaction as reflected in the magazine s letter columns 2 a story having been deemed worthy of reprint by the field s most able anthologists and 3 our own personal reading of all twelve issues published that year Fair enough But they add we also recognize that one person s best is another s worst As an anthologist myself I know that works one selects a bit reluctantly without much enthusiasm the best available at the time sometimes get the most glowing reviews while the stories one is truly in love with can receive little or no attention at all It s always a puzzle But there are a few tales here especially in the short story section which seem a mite on the feeble side There are also a couple of noticeable errors in the book The copyright is indicated as being 1927 seemingly a leftover reference to one of the editors previous Amazing anthologies More importantly and weirdly the cover of the volume lists the name of a contributor whose work isn t actually in the book Raymond Z Gallun who happens to be one of my favorite SF writers from this era Look up his Old Faithful sometime This is a shockingly sloppy mistake. The Best of Amazing Stories pdfescape However there is no question but that this book is an enormously enjoyable treat one that has opened my eyes to what was happening in the world of science fiction in that period outside the dominant influence of John W Campbell and Astounding The stories most of them are well worth reading. The Best of Amazing Stories ebook free So are they funny in all the wrong ways as that reviewer claimed old science fiction invariably was No not really From the moment they were published in 1940 these tales were designed to be fast moving lightweight fun that s what they were then and that s what they are now To be honest I enjoyed some of them than at least a few of the science heavy classics from Campbell s writers that I ve encountered The Best of Amazing Stories 1940 Edition is hugely entertaining It should be required reading for anyone interested in this era of science fiction The Best of Amazing Stories The 1940 Anthology Special Retro Hugo Edition Amazing Stories ClassicsLicensed Edition

The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1940 Anthology: [Special Retro-Hugo Edition] (Amazing Stories ClassicsLicensed Edition) By Steve Davidson

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A fairly good time capsule of sf starting to become a genre of its own and Amazing Stories in particular for the pulp fiction fan this will be an interesting and fun read And all of 1940 s covers are reprinted on this anthology s back cover review 1940 was an important year for Amazing Stories and for its new editor Raymond A Palmer For Palmer it was the culmination of his dream to create a stable of new science fiction writers for Amazing the way John W Campbell Jr had done two years earlier with such spectacular success at Astounding Stories Palmer gathered Don Wilcox Robert Moore Williams the highly underrated Rog Phillips David Wright O Brien David Vern Reed of Batman fame Chester S Geier the Livingston brothers Herbert and Berkeley Leroy Yerxa Frances Deegan Richard S Shaver and others quite popular then but of lesser fame today He also opened his pages to anything such important authors as Ray Bradbury Nelson S Bond Eando Binder and Robert Bloch cared to write 1940 was the year it all came together for Ray Palmer From then on Amazing Stories readership and circulation would continue to grow even through and after the war in a triumphal arc. The Best of Amazing Stories pdfescape The stories reprinted here we believe are among the most outstanding Palmer published in Amazing during 1940 Guiding our selections are what we feel are three key signifiers of 1 reader reaction as reflected in the magazine s letter columns 2 a story having been deemed worthy of reprint by the field s most able anthologists and 3 our own personal reading of all twelve issues published that year The gem of the year a novelette which still enjoys classic status today was undoubtedly The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years the first story ever set on board a ship making a generations long voyage to a distant star Once again Amazing was in the lead with a cornerstone sf idea that remains a vital part of the field to this day beating out Robert A Heinlein s Universe which is often misremembered as the first use of a generation starship many of the latter are not in print and those that are are scattered widely among many different anthologies and not easy to assemble We offer this present book in the hope that it may help contemporary readers become informed about at least some of the better science fiction of the year 1940 Contains a special Introduction and survey of the best stories published in every magazine during the year The Best of Amazing Stories The 1940 Anthology Special Retro Hugo Edition Amazing Stories ClassicsLicensed Edition.

:The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years by Don WilcoxTruth is a Plague by David Wright O BrienThe Living Mist by Ralph Milne FarleyPaul Revere and the Time Machine by A: The Best of Amazing Stories epubs air Other novelettes include a farce about Paul Revere being brought up to our day i[1]

Time travel adventure.e