Minireview: The Great SF Stories 9 (1947), edited by Isaac Asimov & Martin Greenberg
The last book I read in this series (#5, 1943) wasn’t too good, to be honest. I’m sure the editors did their best, but apparently the state of the art was pretty poor that year – possibly due to that “war” thingy that was grinding down around that time. Who knows. In any case, Great SF Stories 9 is much better. Much better.
This series is edited by Isaac Asimov (who gets star billing) and Martin Greenberg (who actually seems to do the work). Asimov mainly provides extremely annoying and self-centered intros to stories, most of which are along the vein of “this story reminds me of my own story Y, which of course is more famous…”. Well, not always, but he does come off (again) as a bit of a pompous jerk. Greenberg actually talks about the stories in question and provides some small amount of background. In any case, the editorializing doesn’t matter all that much, it’s the stories that carry the weight (or don’t). Here, they do.
Lots of stories here that I remember reading when I was younger, I think this is starting to be representative of the SF short stories I read a lot when growing up. Clarke, Sturgeon, Tenn, etc. I practically grew up reading Clarke and Heinlein. Explains a lot, I suppose. Almost too many standout stories here to mention, but let’s see… especially memorable were Thodore Sturgeon’s “Tiny and the Monster”, Ray Bradbury’s “Zero Hour” and Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Fires Within”, but all of the stories here were at the very least in the “good” category.
Nice compilation of classic science fiction stories. Some are a bit dated, of course, but they still work very well.
Fri, 08 May 2009 11:07 Posted in Books
Tags isaacasimov, martingreenberg
