Potential Hugo nominees from 1947 (1946 Worldcon)
For Chicon 8, the 2022 Worldcon, I participated in a panel on potential Hugo nominees for the 1947 Worldcon, from 75 years previously. Chicon 8 decided not to have Retro Hugos -- a good decision, I believe -- but instead hosted a series of panels on SF in 1946, including this one. The best thing about Retro Hugos is that they can spur discussion and rereading of stories from the past -- and a panel like this is doing exactly that!
Thanks to Cora Buhlert, David Ritter, Dave Hook, Trish Matson, Michael Haynes, and others who made suggestions!
One category that fans back then might have wanted to vote for that really isn't considered much by Hugo voters today is anthologies, and there is little doubt that Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond Healy and J. Francis McComas; as well as The Best of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin, each landmark anthologies of short fiction, were the favorite SF books of that year. In addition, 1946 marked the first book publication of two exceptionally popular novels (neither of which have really retained their reputation at this late date): Slan, by A. E. van Vogt; and The Skylark of Space, by Edward E. Smith and Mrs. Lee Hawkins Garby. I should also mention that there were some significant SF movies that year, the best of them likely A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and starring David Niven and Kim Hunter.
Novels:
Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
The Unfortunate Fursey, by Mervyn Wall
Mistress Masham's Repose, by T. H. White
The Angelic Avengers, by "Pierre Andrezel" (Karen Blixen)
The Murder of the U. S. A., by Will F. Jenkins (better known to SF fans as "Murray Leinster")
It seems clear to me that Titus Groan is the major work here, the one best known these days. The Unfortunate Fursey is an interesting alternate choice, I think. Very darkly funny, a satirical look at Irish life and the church in particular, set in the 9th century. Mistress Masham's Repose is a very fun "YA" book. The Angelic Avengers is a curious possibility -- it reads to me like historical fiction, but there are some strange happenings that you can squint at and call fantastical.
Note that I list nothing from within the genre. (Even the Jenkins novel was marketed as a mystery, and first published in Argosy (hence the use of his real name.)) None of the novel length things from the magazines are familiar to me, to be honest. Does anyone know enough about, say, "Slaves of the Lamp" by Arthur Leo Zagat? Or "Pattern for Conquest", by George O. Smith? Or "The Fairy Chessmen", by Kuttner and Moore? (The latter is a long novella but would be eligible as a novel.)
Novellas:
"The Chromium Helmet", by Theodore Sturgeon (Astounding, June)
"The Last Objective", by Paul A. Carter (Astounding, August)
"Special Knowledge", by A. Bertram Chandler (Astounding, February)
"Lorelei of the Red Mist", by Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury (Planet Stories, Summer)
"The Blast", by Stuart Cloete (Collier's, April)
"Metamorphosite", by Eric Frank Russell (Astounding, December)
I'm not sure which of these to choose. My real preference would be to reclassify "Vintage Season" here! "The Chromium Helmet" is an intriguing piece about technological pyschological changes with a strong human story at its center -- but it leans too heavily into meaningless tech jargon. Had Sturgeon written it a decade later it would have been half the length and twice as good. The Brackett/Bradbury story (finished by Bradbury after Brackett left for Hollywood) is actually rather disappointing. This is, really, a set of good but not great stories.
Novelettes:
"Evidence", by Isaac Asimov (Astounding, September)
"Rescue Party", by Arthur C. Clarke (Astounding, May)
"A Logic Named Joe", by "Murray Leinster" (Will F. Jenkins) (Astounding, March)
"Daemon", by C. L. Moore (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October)
"Vintage Season", by "Lawrence O'Donnell" (C. L. Moore) (Astounding, September)
Other possibilities:
"This is the House", by "Lawrence O'Donnell" (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore) (Astounding, February)
"Dead City", by "Murray Leinster" (Will F. Jenkins) (Thrilling Wonder, Summer)
"The Toymaker", by Raymond F. Jones (Astounding, September)
"Hobbies", by Clifford D. Simak (Astounding, November)
"Vintage Season" is the runaway winner here. One of the greatest SF stories of all time -- a beautifully written and quite powerful story about a man who lets his house to a group of strange people -- learning eventually that they are time travel tourists, and that they are fascinated by disasters. It is usually regarded as primarily a C. L. Moore story -- and I agree with primarily -- but it does seem to me that Kuttner also likely had a hand in it. If we move that to novella (at about 17,300 words, it would be eligible) my somewhat sentimental vote would go to "Rescue Party". "A Logic Named Joe" is famous for "predicting the Internet" but people don't quite realize how well Leinster did predict it, from someone looking up how to kill your wife to kids finding porn ... it's a damn good story. "Daemon" is an effective fantasy about a simple man who can see the "souls" of other people (so he thinks). "Evidence" is one of the later stories in I, Robot; a good story if not one of Asimov's best.
Short Stories:
"The Million-Year Picnic", by Ray Bradbury (Saturday Evening Post, September 23)
"Placet is a Crazy Place", by Fredric Brown (Astounding, May)
"The Last Generation", by Miriam Allen de Ford (Harper's, November)
"Absalom", by Henry Kuttner (with C. L. Moore) (Startling, Fall)
"Alexander the Bait", by "William Tenn" (Philip Klass) (Astounding, May)
Other possibilities:
"The Machine", by "Allison V. Harding" (Jean Milligan) (Weird Tales, September)
"Rain Check", by "Lewis Padgett" (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore) (Astounding, July)
"Memorial", by Theodore Sturgeon (Astounding, April)
"The Million-Year Picnic" is Ray Bradbury's first great story, the final story in The Martian Chronicles, truly outstanding. A personal favorite. "Alexander the Bait" was Tenn's first sale, and it's good if not great. "Absalom" is a pretty powerful Kuttner story (probably in collaboration with Moore.) "The Last Generation" was presumably not widely noticed in the SF field until its reprint in F&SF in 1950, but it's an impressive piece, more a philosophical meditation than much of a story. "Placet is a Crazy Place" is a well-known story about a very strange planet, and "Absalom" is a powerful story about successive generations of "supermen".
I thank Michael Haynes for uncovering "The Machine". The story of "Allison V. Harding" is interesting in itself: Jean Milligan married Lamont Buchanan, who became an Associate Editor at Weird Tales under Dorothy McIlwraith, and all her stories were sold to either Weird Tales or another McIlwraith magazine, Short Stories. Her reputation is uneven. Some have suggested that the stories were actually written by her husband, who published several nonfiction books -- I find the evidence for that unconvincing though it's not impossible. The two lived frugally and rather reclusively, Jean dying in 2004 at 85, and Lamont living until 2015. At his death he left a fortune of some $15,000,000. (Both the Milligan family and the Buchanan family were wealthy -- it wasn't the Allison Harding stories and the Lamont Buchanan books that made their money!) Buchanan was also one of the few people to interview J. D. Salinger, though his interview was in 1940, long before Salinger's success.
Ray Bradbury's "The Creatures That Time Forgot" (later better known as "Frost and Fire") deserves at least a mention in the novelette category. The opening pages are wonderful, and even though it becomes a standard pulp adventure towards the end, the gimmick of people who live for only eight days is unforgettable. Oddly enough it seems to be something of a forgotten story, but I still love it much more than his work in "Lorelei", however impressive it was to match Brackett's work so well.
ReplyDeleteI did a whole series on my personal 'blog about the McComas-Healy anthology. It starts here: https://www.jamescambias.com/blog/2017/04/retro-review-famous-science-fiction-stories-part-1.html
ReplyDeleteThanks -- that was excellent! I agree with you pretty much up and down the line except maybe I don't like van Vogt quite as much. And I now realize that for a very long time I have replaced "Time Travel Happens!" in my head with H. Beam Piper's "He Walked Around the Horses". (Which came out slightly later, but does have a similar sort of idea.)
DeleteRich, thanks for the great post and for your more terse and coherent summation. I need to read the Allison V. Harding story now. I'm glad you talked about anthologies. Did you skip the collections on purpose? "Skull-Face and Others" is worth discussing. The only other story I would mention as deserving of thinking about would be the novella length book published in 1946 by Stanislaw Len, "Man From Mars". I know it's never been translated, but the excerpt translated by Peter Swirski was definitely better than either "Slaves of the Lamp" or "Pattern for Conquest".
ReplyDeleteI've read THE FAIRY CHESSMEN (aka CHESSBOARD PLANET) by Kuttner & Moore in its original book publication, as Galaxy Novel #26 with an Emshwiller cover in the 1950s. And yeah, it could pass as a short novel, because in the 1950s it did.
ReplyDeletehttps://d3525k1ryd2155.cloudfront.net/h/763/001/1408001763.0.x.jpg
As for substance, it's Kuttner & Moore doing their version of a Van Vogt 'recomplicated reality' novel --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._E._van_Vogt#Method_and_themes
"Van Vogt systematized his writing method, using scenes of 800 words or so where a new complication was added or something resolved. Several of his stories hinge on temporal conundra, a favorite theme."
-- Same thing with THE FAIRY CHESSMEN, but with more professional pacing and standard Kuttner-Moore characterization.
Quality-wise, as it's doing the Van Vogt thing it has a little of the shambolic, rushed feel of the likes of EARTH'S LAST CITADEL, THE TIME AXIS and those other long serials/novellas that Moore and Kuttner used to turn out for ARGOSY, STARTLING, AMAZING or whatever in the very late 1930s-mid 1940s. But it's really a lot better than those (hey, it was in Campbell's ASF during its golden age, right?) and near enough to being up there with FURY, which was Kuttner & Moore's Venusian Keeps novel from 1947, the following year, and which had this classic cover --
https://www.booksfromthecrypt.com/PP411.jpg
FAIRY CHESSMEN also has a setting that's a little similar to FURY since, IIRC, there's a global Cold War going on and most people live in subterranean shelter cities. The ideas in it are crazy, including a doozy of a temporal conundrum that leaves Van Vogt cold and which is basically the one used by C. Nolan's recent movie TENET. It's a little too crazy and headlong to be serious lit like 'Vintage Season' and I'm not sure it's exactly 'great' enough to deserve a Hugo. Still, it's fairly clear that in the 1950s Philip K Dick's primary SF influences would be Van Vogt and the Kuttners. Well, in FAIRY CHESSMEN you've got the Kuttners doing Van Vogt and the end result is close to a 1950s-era Philip K Dick novel in quality and feel (and substantially better than the lesser 1950s-era Dicks like VULCAN'S HAMMER, etc).
As for Lem's THE MAN FROM MARS, Lem hated it and, I think, did his best to suppress it.
I thoroughly enjoyed Sturgeon's "Memorial" so that might be my choice for the short story category. I've read and reviewed the De Ford story but found it one of her lesser early efforts.
ReplyDeleteBut yes, TITUS GROAN is the obvious and only choice in my view.
As for "Slaves of the Lamp" by Arthur Leo Zagat -- all I know is that it contains some for of union. While tracking down stories for The Unofficial Hugo Book Club's resource on unions in SF I came across the Zagat tale... Did not read it.
Wait! I went back and looked at my review of deFord's collection Xenogenesis (1969) in which "The Last Generation" (1946) appeared. I wrote the following:
Delete“The Last Generation?” (1946) 3.5/5 (Good): Way before Brian Aldiss’ Greybeard (1964) or P. D. James’ The Children of Men (1992), deFord speculated along similar lines about the effects of mass sterility. An accident, presumably nuclear in nature, in New Mexico results in the inability for almost all of humanity to have children. First there’s panic and massive global searches for anyone who might be able to produce children and quacks take advantage and hawk “remedies.” Soon massive quantities of money is poured into the IARC (Ingrid Anderson Research Commissions), named after the youngest person on Earth, in order to find a cure. Even in this 40s vision, African Americans are scientists, and women are in positions of power… But, is it too late? Is this The Last Generation? But, we are left waiting, even the narrator does not know."
I liked it far more than I remember... so it might be up there in my ranking for 1946.
I don't know about reputation, but I still find Slan oddly (because everything van Vogt was feakin' odd) compelling.
ReplyDeleteEverything he WROTE - 5:17 in the morning...
DeleteQuite possibly it is fair to say "everything van Vogt was freakin' odd" anyway! :) I admit that I am a van Vogt skeptic -- I didn't read much beside "The Weapon Shop" when I was young, and by the time I read THE WORLD OF NULL-A I was firmly in the Damon Knight camp. I have actually read several of his novels since then and I can perceive, I think, what intrigues readers, without quite being capture by it myself.
Delete