The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949 (The Year's Best SF Stories (Bleiler \u0026 Dikty), #1) by E.F. Bleiler

The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949 (The Year's Best SF Stories (Bleiler \u0026 Dikty), #1) Reviews

• 
  Zach

  This is the first ever year's best anthology of science fiction short stories, published in 1949 to cover those released in 1948. I thought, for some reason, that it would be "fun" to start here and slowly make my way to the present by means of the various annual anthology series that have been published over the years. Turns out, though, is that these are, by and large, not stories worth reading. Forced to sum them up pithily I would probably default to "monumentally boring." Maybe sticking with this project will allow me to pinpoint exactly when the genre became worthwhile - I was struck by the fact that even in 1949 the prefatory comments here harp over and over on the point that, contrary to popular belief, science fiction “often may be a respectable form of literature and of value for four reasons: historical precedent, prediction value, educational value, and insight into one of man’s most pressing problems.” To that end, Bleiler and Dikty selected these stories “first of all by literary craftsmanship and artistic insight, secondly by the desire to make a representative selection of trends and ideas within the modern range of development.” To the first I’ll only say that I would describe the best of these stories (Bradbury’s) as being written competently, and all of them are written in the straightest most unsubtle version of realism possible.
  
  Of the 12 stories, one was written solely by a woman, and one other might have coauthored by a husband and wife team.* Astonishingly, eight of the 12 have no women characters at all, while three others have female love interests for a male character, and In Hiding features the main character’s grandmother. It probably goes without saying that none pass the Bechdel test. All of the authors are white (with the possible exception of Wilmar Shiras, about whom I know nothing), and the only time race is mentioned in the book is when one astronaut in And the Moon Be Still as Bright mentions having Cherokee ancestors. That character’s name is “Cheroke,” by the by.
  
  Eight (and let’s call Thang another half) take place on Earth, two on Mars, and one farther out in the galactic realm.
  
  The stories’ locations in future timelines is the only real point of variance. Three and a half take place in the present, four in the near future, one in a more unclear mid-future period, and three and a half in the far future (Happy Ending, a time travel story, providing the two halves).
  
  
  * Let’s see how confusing we can make this: Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, partners, collaborated on most of their material in the 1940s and 1950s, some of which was published pseudonymously as by Lewis Padgett (a combination of the maiden names of their mothers). The Gallegher stories, though, while published as by Padgett, were written by Kuttner alone, while Happy Ending, published under Kuttner’s name, is generally held to be a collaborative (and, frankly, vastly superior) work.
  
  
  I’m going to discuss these stories without regard for spoilers.
  
  Mars Is Heaven! - Ray Bradbury
  In the year 1960, the first rocket ship to Mars lands in what seems to be a Norman Rockwell painting transposed into real life. The captain and two others leave to explore while ordering the other 14 crewmembers to stay aboard the ship and keep watch (Bradbury’s Mars, it bears mentioning, has a surprisingly breathable atmosphere). Their exploration of the town is mostly an opportunity for Bradbury to harp on nostalgia for the 1920s, which is where this Martian town appears to be stuck. Things get even weirder when they knock on a Martian’s door and she informs them that this is, in fact, a town in Wisconsin and the year is 1926. Throughout this section, the captain and the archaeologist accompanying him put forth a variety of rationalist explanations for what is taking place: this must have been a secret enclave of scientists with secret rocket capabilities who are now suffering from some sort of homesickness-induced madness or some such. Even here, the supernatural is invoked from time to time, as when someone suggests that such cultural convergences on different planets prove the existence of God, or the apropos-of-nothing insistence that this “couldn’t be Heaven.” When the dead relatives of the astronauts start appearing in the town, the attempt at rationalist explanations go out the window. This must be Heaven, the men (and of course they’re all men and, presumably, white men at that) decide, and promptly abandon the ship and their mission in order to enjoy their new lives with their old loved ones. The captain, once he has settled down for the night with his parents and dead brother, has a chance to reflect on their situation:
  
  

  He lay peacefully, letting his thoughts float. For the first time the stress of the day was moved aside, all of the excitement was calmed. He could think logically now. It had all been emotion. The bands playing, the sight of familiar faces, the sick pounding of your heart. But--now... How? He thought? How was all this made? And why? For what purpose? Out of the goodness of some kind God? Was God, then, really that fine and thoughtful of his children? How and why and what for?... Who had lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians? Or had this always been like this? Martians. He repeated the word quietly, inwardly. He laughed out loud, almost. He had the most ridiculous theory, all of a sudden. It gave him a kind of chilled feeling. It was really nothing to think of, of course. Highly improbable. Silly. Forget it. Ridiculous.
  
  But, he thought, just suppose. Just suppose now, that there were Martians living on Mars and they saw our ship coming and saw us inside our ship and hated us. Suppose, now, just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us, as invaders, as unwanted ones, and they wanted to do it in a very clever way, so that we would be taken off guard. Well, what would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against Earthmen with atom weapons? The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory and imagination.... Suppose these houses are really some other shape, a Martian shape, but, by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions? What better way to fool a man, by his own emotions.

  
  
  
  After this realization the phantoms promptly reveal their true, awful Martian shapes and slaughter the interlopers.
  
  This story has some great things to say about nostalgia and the inhospitable universe and human attempts to understand it by means of either faith or reason, but too much of the text boils down to lengthy descriptions of life in an idealized version of 1920s America.
  
  What to make of the fact that the forlorn Martians (partially) maintain their human shapes the next day and weep at the funerals for their victims?
  
  
  Ex Machina - Henry Kuttner [as by Lewis Padgett ]
  Galloway Gallegher is one of the world’s great inventors - but only when drunk. Once he sobers up, he is considerably duller and unable to remember the specifics of his previous problem-solving - focused, in this instance, on a contract for a company that sponsors hunting trips. The problem is that in the course of fixing this problem on the night before the story opens, Gallegher somehow vanished both his grandfather and the hunting company’s representative, and wakes up the next morning with a mysterious rock-like “dynamo” in his workshop, and some sort of small, brownish creature that moves too fast for the eye to see and drinks all of his liquor before he has a chance to enjoy it himself - leaving him to solve this problem while sober, you see. This unlikely setup (apparently one in a series of shorts about the character) is abetted by a series of similarly unlikely contrivances (ie a camera covered up at an inopportune moment, a robot shut down for being too sassy, etc). Said robot peppers the text with philosophical ruminations on epistemology and the nature of the human mind, and also proves to have had the answer to the mystery all along - Gallegher just never asked the right questions.
  
  In addition to the robot, features such science-fictional commonplaces as “credits” as currency (which allows the quip “When I see the color of your credits”), an aircab, and viewscreens for telecommunications (built into a visor, no less).
  
  The Strange Case of John Kingman - Murray Leinster
  A contemporary story set in an insane asylum, where a doctor discovers that patient John Kingman, a mute man with a perpetually feverish temperature and six fingers on each hand, has been living there since he was first admitted in 1786. His royal surname, moreover, was given to him on account of his being “aloofly amused at the impertinence of a mere human being addressing [him], who was so much greater than a mere human being that he was not even annoyed at human impertinence.” Much of the narrative is given over to solving the mystery of his age, and it eventually comes to light that he was confined after he mysteriously appeared following the fall of a swarm of shooting stars. His identity revealed to the authorities, Kingman (who draws, from time to time, technical blueprints that no one had been able to decipher before) is about to be turned into a fount of new weapons technologies when he is instead accidentally poisoned and reduced to the mental capacity of a mere human.
  
  Oddly, even after Kingman is revealed to be an immortal alien from another planet, everyone continues to blindly accept the fact that he is an insane immortal alien from another planet who escaped from an asylum on his home planet only to be land up in one on Earth. This point is hammered home when the alien, in order to teach the humans a lesson, provides a “sketch of a certain reaction which such inferior minds could not possibly understand... When they tried that reaction and square miles turned to incandescent vapor, the survivors would realize that they could not trick or force him into giving them the riches of his godlike mind.” Fortunately Braden, the doctor, reminds everyone that the patient “is a paranoiac. Suspicion and trickiness are inherent in his mental processes. At any moment, to demonstrate his greatness, he may try to produce unholy destruction. You absolutely cannot trust him! Be careful!”
  
  This is in service to Leinster’s larger point about the insanity of science being hitched to weapons research, but it is still rather lacking in any kind of internal logic.
  
  Doughnut Jockey - Erik Fennel
  The least interesting kind of science fiction - basically a technical manual for a “booster ship” that helps lunar- or Mars-bound rockets escape Earth’s atmosphere. I think this sort of thing has mostly died off (or maybe I am just completely out of touch with where it’s being produced now?). The plot, such as it is, is this: the titular jockey, known derogatively as “Doughnut Merrill” is finally given a chance to pilot an actual rocket instead of the booster because the Martian colony desperately needs influenza medicine. He succeeds after a series of mishaps and bureaucratic finaglings (it isn’t entirely clear if the space program here is public or privatized), and wins the heart of the nurse at the launching base, a woman whose “starched nurse’s uniform could not hide the fact she carried de luxe equipment throughout.” The story closes with the two of them discussing Mars as a potential honeymoon spot.
  
  Thang - Martin Gardner
  A page-and-a-half vignette in which Thang, a sort of Lovecraftian evil entity big enough to pick Earth up like an orange, does exactly that and is about to devour it when he is, in turn, picked up by the scruff of the neck and devoured by an even larger monster. This is, I suppose, intended to illustrate relativity outside of the human scale, but there really isn’t enough here to make much of a point.
  
  Also I lied up there about Cheroke being the only mention of race in the book because this story notes at the beginning that the “East had experienced a record breaking crop of yellow rice and yellow children.”
  
  Period Piece - John R. Pierce [as by J. J. Coupling ]
  Probably the best work here aside from the two by Bradbury, this is a proto-Dickian questioning of life and reality wherein a man who believes himself to be a time traveler from the modern day to the 31st century slowly comes to the realization that he is actually an automaton created as a kind of in-person history channel special. His own awakening, caused by a flaw in his programming, leads his creator to question his own reality - echoing, Bleiler and Dikty point out, the Gnostic heresies, another trait Pierce shares here with Dick’s work.
  
  Knock - Fredric Brown
  A sort-of metafictional work that starts
  
  

  There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long:
  The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door...”
  Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn’t in the two sentences at all; it’s in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door? Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible.
  But it wasn’t horrible, really.

  
  
  Brown then goes on to flesh this story out in such a way that we can see how not-horrible it is: the last man is Walter Phelan, forty-year-old widower/dweeb/Henry Bemis-type, and he is locked in a room aboard the spaceship of the alien Zan (who “look like nothing on Earth” - Brown regretfully notes of one individual that it “would be interesting to describe him to you, but there aren’t words”), who have depopulated the Earth by means of some sort of killer vibrations, leaving only two of a random variety of species, including humans. Walter’s counterpart is Grace, who is “tall” and “well-proportioned” and bears a striking resemblance to Walter’s dead wife (this is mentioned repeatedly for some reason). Walter thinks the thing to do is to let the human race end with them, while Grace points out that if he was a man he would be thinking of a way to fight back. Walter listens to this reasonable point and the two of them begin to conspire. Stupid machismo aside, this is the closest thing to a realistic scene involving a woman character in the whole book, and Grace actually has some degree of agency and personality of her own.
  
  Now, the thing about the Zan is that they are so alien that they don’t understand the concepts of death or breeding, which causes a variety of mishaps mostly played for laughs (“Two of the o-ther a-ni-mals sleep and do not wake? They are cold.”). Like Kingman in the Leinster story, despite the fact that readers are told that the Zan are supremely alien beings, the protagonist quickly understands and outwits them, in this case by telling them that animals need physical affection to survive. He demonstrates on a duck but tells them to practice on a rattlesnake, and when they begin to sicken and die “mysteriously,” they decide to depart this “pla-net of death,” releasing Walter and Grace to repopulate the world. She is offended at this impropriety and leaves, but moments later ”The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door...”
  
  Now, I don’t know about you, but when the narrator says “See? It wasn’t horrible, really” about a story regarding the wholesale destruction of all life on Earth (except for two middle class white people), I am not entirely sure that I agree, but this is an oddly common silver-lining theme in post-apocalyptic works. Walter, for example, points that no one has to worry about housing shortages or nuclear war anymore, and Grace agrees that this is “another case where the operation was successful, but the patient died. Things were in an awful mess.” This is up there with Alas, Babylon’s “at least I don’t have to pay alimony anymore” scene in terms of head-scratching optimism.
  
  Genius - Poul Anderson
  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: There’s an interstellar human empire, and it’s kind of ossifying slowly in deliberate echoes of the Roman empire, and there is a “Psychotechnic Foundation” devoted to using “psychotechniques” to guide the historical phases of this empire in order to forestall the inevitable decline to which the current inertia is leading. To that end, the psychotechnicians have seeded a number of planets with various human genetypes, the most prominent of which is Station Seventeen, a planet of super geniuses. The conflict here lies in a seemingly endless discussion (on a ship en route to Station Seventeen) between Heym, the psychotechnician in charge of this project, and Goram, an atavistic ape of a military man who has been sent to investigate the possible dangers posed to the empire by these super-duper-geniuses. The meat of this story is a paean to said super-duper-geniuses, who are superior to common meat-and-potatoes humans in every conceivable way (a point also made earlier about the alien Kingman, whose advanced intellect made him “as convinced of his superiority to us as--say--Napoleon or Edison would have been dumped down among a tribe of Australian bushmen”), delivered via endless debate between Heym and the ape-like Goram, who wants to wipe out the life on the planet. Did I mention that Goram is kind of atavistic or brutish, even?
  
  The pages and pages of argument here boil down to:
  
  1. “All progress is due to gifted individuals”
  2. “The ordinary man is just plain stupid. Perhaps proper mind training could lift him above himself, but it’s never been tried. Meanwhile he remains immensely conservative, only occasional outbreaks of mindless hysteria engineered by some special group stirring him out of his routine. He follows, or rather he accepts what the creative or dominant minority does, but it is haltingly and unwillingly.”
  
  Eventually Heym and Goram go down to the planet incognito to observe more, and Heym, despairing of his ability to reason with the atavistic, brutish Goram, attempts to murder him. There is then the big reveal (not that Station Seventeen was Earth, as I was half expecting) that the geniuses were even more intelligent and advanced than Heym realized, Goram is a native of the planet and a spy in their employ, and they are covertly taking over the universe. “After all, Homo intelligens can no more be expected to serve Homo sapiens than early man to serve the apes.”
  
  Like Foundation (which began in 1942), this was published in Astounding under the supervision of John Campbell, so I have no idea if this was originally supposed to be tied in to Asimov’s work or published in dialogue with it or just if no one cared that they were recycling premises.
  
  The utopia of Station Seventeen, by the way, is the only non-warlike society the Empire has ever seen, post-scarcity and non-materialistic (largely because “few if any geniuses could stand to work on an assembly line all day”), physically spread out (in contrast to the world-city sprawls of the Empire), and had “casually accepted equality of the sexes even at this primitive level of technology.” Not a single woman appears in the story, though.
  
  ---
  
  Continued in the comments.
• 
  Wreade1872

  Not much to say here just a really solid collection. Very few of them show their age.
  Only slight qualm is that quality has been prioritized over consistency of length. So quite long to quite short and its never pleasant to hit the end of a tale when your not expecting it.
  
  Normally only short stories with a twist ending or an otherwise punchy ending appeal to me, but very few of these rely on that and they're still good. You might like to know what happens next in some cases but the story or part of the story your given, still works.
• 
  Francisco

  This collection of stories has the distinction of being the first of all the "Best of the Year" genre short story collections. Basically the editors went around all the Science Fiction Magazines and a couple of general interest ones and selected the best of the year in their opinion. Actually it is a pretty good collection.
  
  There are a couple of surprises here but a lot is as expected, there are some name that you know will give you good stories, and this is particularly true with 2 entries by Ray Bradbury which are actually two of the stories of what would eventually become The Martian Chronicles. Both of the stories are a truly great mix of horror and science fiction with a deep concern with colonization making a clear parallel with the extermination of native americans by europeans. You also get a great story by Isaac Asimov, again concerned with problems of colonization much as Poul Anderson is in the amazing short story called Genius. If there's a theme is really a meditation of processes of colonization and destruction of native cultures in about half the stories in this collection. It was clearly in the air.
  
  The real surprises come, for me. with Wilmar House Shiras' story "In Hiding". Clearly a precursor to the X-Men, it's a story about a psychiatrist discovering the powers of a child who is a genius level Mutant but has tried to keep his powers hidden from the world due to fear of being seen as different. Really a pretty great collection, with only a couple of duds and a handful of truly great stories.
• 
  TrumanCoyote

  Kind of lame story by (unfortunately) Poul Anderson--"Genius"--too many fatuous generalized assumptions (also ripped off Asimov amazingly--even used the Foundation at one point). Anthology basically journeyman mainstream SF--unlike Judith Merril's (increasingly) artsy offerings. Sort of like Wollheim back then (had he been older than 10). "Mars Is Heaven" hokey and annoying--except the last few pages are good. And all the theories they come up with are fun...but why he suddenly thinks/realizes his last one is it is (as often with Bradbury stories) unmotivated. "And the Moon Be Still As Bright" has the same problem--and a classic silly babbling Bradbury sentence: "It was a morning that might have been a Monday or a Tuesday or any day on Mars." Has "In Hiding": pretty much a classic re conformity (although the dialogue seemed a little pat in places).
• 
  Jeff Greason

  I got this primarily as a time capsule; it was billed as one of the first collections of SF stories, and I was curious how tastes had changed. Most of the stories I had seen in other collections, but they were all good ones. I was surprised to see three Bradbury stories; I did not realize Bradbury had been big so early (I thought of him as a 1950's author).
  
  Worth note was "In Hiding" by 'Wilmar Shiras'. I hadn't realized that was a pen name, though I'd read and enjoyed it before. I may go read the collected 'Children of the Atom' which expands the concept in to a novel.
• 
  Rena Sherwood

  Wonderful! The two and not just one stories by Bradbury were a special treat. Could've done without the TWO introductions, though. After reading a few poor modern SF anthologies, this was a great tonic (even if some of the predictions from 1949 are laughable today.)
  
  And is it just me or does the guy on the cover look like Peter Gabriel?
• 
  Rob Roy

  This volume is from the golden age of science fiction and contains short stories by some of the best. Alas, that does not mean the stories are the best. Some good ones here, but there are a lot of also rans as well. Wouldn’t recommend this one.