The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One 1929-1964--The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time Chosen by the Members of the Science Fiction Writers of America Read online

  THE SCIENCE FICTION HALL OF FAME

  Volume One, 1929–1964

  The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time Chosen by the Members of The Science Fiction Writers of America

  Edited by Robert Silverberg

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  INTRODUCTION

  This is as nearly definitive an anthology of modern science fiction stories as is likely to be compiled for quite some time. Its contents were chosen by vote of the membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America, an organization of some three hundred professional writers whose roster includes virtually everyone now living who has ever had science fiction published in the United States. The book you now hold represents the considered verdict of those who themselves have shaped science fiction—a roster of outstanding stories selected by people who know more intimately than any others what the criteria for excellence in science fiction should be.

  SFWA—the Science Fiction Writers of America—was founded in 1965 “to inform science fiction writers on matters of professional interest, to promote their professional welfare, and to help them deal effectively with publishers, agents, editors, and anthologists.” Though other special writers’ organizations, such as the Mystery Writers of America and the Western Writers of America, had come into existence long before, all previous attempts to create a professional science fiction writers’ group had been abortive. However—thanks in large measure to the energy and devotion of the first president of SFWA, Damon Knight, and its first secretary-treasurer, Lloyd Biggie—all but a few writers in this notoriously individualistic field quickly joined. For greater cohesiveness, membership was limited to writers whose work had appeared in the United States, but no restrictions were placed on a writer’s own residence or citizenship. Thus SFWA has a large British contingent as well as members from Australia, Canada, and several other Commonwealth countries.

  In 1966 SFWA held the first of its annual awards banquets, at which handsome trophies nicknamed Nebulas were presented to the authors of 1965’s outstanding science fiction stories, as chosen by vote of the membership. These awards have been presented in each subsequent year in four categories: short story, novelet, novella, and novel.

  During my term of office (1967–68) as SFWA’s second president, it was decided to extend the concept of awards retroactively into the period prior to SFWA’s inception. Members would be asked to nominate and vote for the best science fiction stories of the era ending on December 31, 1964: that is, the period up to the point covered by the Nebula awards. No trophies would be given, but the stories chosen would be republished in a showcase anthology spanning several volumes—the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

  This is the first of those anthologies. It embraces the categories of short story and novelet; arbitrarily, stories over 15,000 words in length were excluded from nomination and reserved for consideration in the volumes to come. Nominations remained open for more than a year, during which time a significant proportion of the membership suggested favorite stories, each writer giving no consideration to his own work. Eventually, 132 stories by seventy-six different writers found places on the final ballot. Then the members of SFWA were asked to choose ten stories from this list. They were limited to the choice of one story by any author, and were asked to keep historical perspective in mind. That is, it was hoped that they would distribute their votes in such a way as to give representation to each of the evolutionary stages of modern science fiction. (The stories on the ballot had originally been published between 1929 and 1964.)

  As editor of the book, I exercised certain limited prerogatives of selection after the counting of the votes. No editorial discretion whatever was invoked upon the fifteen most popular stories as shown by the vote tally; their inclusion in the book was regarded as obligatory. Those fifteen, in order of the number of votes they received, were:

  1. Nightfall, Isaac Asimov

  2. A Martian Odyssey, Stanley G. Weinbaum

  3. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes

  4. Microcosmic God, Theodore Sturgeon

  (tie) First Contact, Murray Leinster

  6. A Rose for Ecclesiastes, Roger Zelazny

  7. The Roads Must Roll, Robert A. Heinlein

  (tie) Mimsy Were the Borogoves, Lewis Padgett

  (tie) Coming Attraction, Fritz Leiber

  (tie) The Cold Equations, Tom Godwin

  11. The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke

  12. Surface Tension, James Blish

  13. The Weapon Shop, A. E. van Vogt

  (tie) Twilight, John W. Campbell

  15. Arena, Fredric Brown

  (Arthur C. Clarke’s The Star would have been the fifteenth story on this list if it had not been disqualified by the presence of another Clarke story in eleventh place. Clarke was the only writer to place two stories in the top fifteen, although both Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury had two stories in the top twenty.)

  Beyond the first fifteen, some selectivity had to be imposed to keep the book from growing to infinite length. As far as possible, I attempted to follow the dictates of the tallied vote, eliminating only those stories whose authors were represented by a story higher on the list. But there were some obvious injustices requiring remedies. One important and highly respected author had had four stories on the original ballot, including two from the same cycle. As a result of this competition with himself, no one of his stories finished within the top twenty, although the aggregate of his vote placed him well up among the leaders. Eliminating a man whose career had been so distinguished from a book of this nature seemed improper; and so I gave preference to one of his four stories over that of another writer whose only nominated piece had finished slightly higher on the list. In this case recognition of an entire body of work was deemed more important than recognition of a single story.

  In another instance, two of a writer’s stories made the second fifteen, one vote apart; but the story with the higher number of votes was not the story that the writer himself wished to see included in the book. I chose to regard the one-vote differential as statistically insignificant, and reversed the order of finish of that writer’s stories so that I might use the one that he (and I) regarded as superior.

  There were several
other minor modifications of this sort, made necessary by considerations of length, balance, and over-all career contributions. Strictly speaking, then, the table of contents of the present anthology does not reflect a rigid tally of the SFWA vote. Rather, it offers the fifteen stories of the pre-1965 period that were selected as best by the SFWA, plus all but a few of the second fifteen. I regret the necessities of publishing reality that forced me to omit some of the stories in that second fifteen, amounting to over 50,000 words of fiction; but in view of the need to keep the book within manageable size I think it does offer a definitive group of stories by the writers who have done most to give form and substance to modern science fiction—a basic one-volume library of the short science fiction story.

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  THE SCIENCE FICTION HALL OF FAME

  Volume One, 1929–1964

  A MARTIAN ODYSSEY

  by Stanley G. Weinbaum

  First published in 1934

  Jarvis stretched himself as luxuriously as he could in the cramped general quarters of the Ares.

  “Air you can breathe!” he exulted. “It feels as thick as soup after the thin stuff out there!” He nodded at the Martian landscape stretching flat and desolate in the light of the nearer moon, beyond the glass of the port.

  The other three stared at him sympathetically—Putz, the engineer, Leroy, the biologist, and Harrison, the astronomer and captain of the expedition. Dick Jarvis was chemist of the famous crew, the Ares expedition, first human beings to set foot on the mysterious neighbor of the earth, the planet Mars. This, of course, was in the old days, less than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad Cardoza rode on it to the moon. They were true pioneers, these four of the Ares. Except for a half-dozen moon expeditions and the ill-fated de Lancey flight aimed at the seductive orb of Venus, they were the first men to feel other gravity than earth’s, and certainly the first successful crew to leave the earth-moon system. And they deserved that success when one considers the difficulties and discomforts—the months spent in acclimatization chambers back on earth, learning to breathe the air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in the tiny rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the twenty-first century, and mostly the facing of an absolutely unknown world.

  Jarvis stretched and fingered the raw and peeling tip of his frost-bitten nose. He sighed again contentedly.

  “Well,” exploded Harrison abruptly, “are we going to hear what happened? You set out all shipshape in an auxiliary rocket, we don’t get a peep for ten days, and finally Putz here picks you out of a lunatic ant-heap with a freak ostrich as your pal! Spill it, man!”

  “Speel?” queried Leroy perplexedly. “Speel what?”

  “He means ‘spiel’,” explained Putz soberly. “It iss to tell.”

  Jarvis met Harrison’s amused glance without the shadow of a smile. “That’s right, Karl,” he said in grave agreement with Putz. “Ich spiel es!” He grunted comfortably and began.

  “According to orders,” he said, “I watched Karl here take off toward the North, and then I got into my flying sweat-box and headed South. You’ll remember, Cap—we had orders not to land, but just scout about for points of interest. I set the two cameras clicking and buzzed along, riding pretty high—about two thousand feet—for a couple of reasons. First, it gave the cameras a greater field, and second, the under-jets travel so far in this half-vacuum they call air here that they stir up dust if you move low.”

  “We know all that from Putz,” grunted Harrison. “I wish you’d saved the films, though. They’d have paid the cost of this junket; remember how the public mobbed the first moon pictures?”

  “The films are safe,” retorted Jarvis. “Well,” he resumed, “as I said, I buzzed along at a pretty good clip; just as we figured, the wings haven’t much lift in this air at less than a hundred miles per hour, and even then I had to use the under-jets.

  “So, with the speed and the altitude and the blurring caused by the under-jets, the seeing wasn’t any too good. I could see enough, though, to distinguish that what I sailed over was just more of this grey plain that we’d been examining the whole week since our landing—same blobby growths and the same eternal carpet of crawling little plant-animals, or biopods, as Leroy calls them. So I sailed along, calling back my position every hour as instructed, and not knowing whether you heard me.”

  “I did!” snapped Harrison.

  “A hundred and fifty miles south,” continued Jarvis imperturbably, “the surface changed to a sort of low plateau, nothing but desert and orange-tinted sand. I figured that we were right in our guess, then, and this grey plain we dropped on was really the Mare Cimmerium which would make my orange desert the region called Xanthus. If I were right, I ought to hit another grey plain, the Mare Chronium in another couple of hundred miles, and then another orange desert, Thyle I or II. And so I did.”

  “Putz verified our position a week and a half ago!” grumbled the captain. “Let’s get to the point.”

  “Coming!” remarked Jarvis. “Twenty miles into Thyle—believe it or not—I crossed a canal!”

  “Putz photographed a hundred! Let’s hear something new!”

  “And did he also see a city?”

  “Twenty of ’em, if you call those heaps of mud cities!”

  “Well,” observed Jarvis, “from here on I’ll be telling a few things Putz didn’t see!” He rubbed his tingling nose, and continued. “I knew that I had sixteen hours of daylight at this season, so eight hours—eight hundred miles—from here, I decided to turn back. I was still over Thyle, whether I or II I’m not sure, not more than twenty-five miles into it. And right there, Putz’s pet motor quit!”

  “Quit? How?” Putz was solicitous.

  “The atomic blast got weak. I started losing altitude right away, and suddenly there I was with a thump right in the middle of Thyle! Smashed my nose on the window, too!” He rubbed the injured member ruefully.

  “Did you maybe try vashing der combustion chamber mit acid sulphuric?” inquired Putz. “Sometimes der lead giffs a secondary radiation—”

  “Naw!” said Jarvis disgustedly. “I wouldn’t try that, of course—not more than ten times! Besides, the bump flattened the landing gear and busted off the under-jets. Suppose I got the thing working—what then? Ten miles with the blast coming right out of the bottom and I’d have melted the floor from under me!” He rubbed his nose again. “Lucky for me a pound only weighs seven ounces here, or I’d have been mashed flat!”

  “I could have fixed!” ejaculated the engineer. “I bet it vas not serious.”

  “Probably not,” agreed Jarvis sarcastically. “Only it wouldn’t fly. Nothing serious, but I had my choice of waiting to be picked up or trying to walk back—eight hundred miles, and perhaps twenty days before we had to leave! Forty miles a day! Well,” he concluded, “I chose to walk. Just as much chance of being picked up, and it kept me busy.”

  “We’d have found you,” said Harrison.

  “No doubt. Anyway, I rigged up a harness from some seat straps, and put the water tank on my back, took a cartridge belt and revolver, and some iron rations, and started out.”

  “Water tank!” exclaimed the little biologist, Leroy. “She weigh one-quarter ton!”

  “Wasn’t full. Weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds earth-weight, which is eighty-five here. Then, besides, my own personal two hundred and ten pounds is only seventy on Mars, so, tank and all, I grossed a hundred and fifty-five, or fifty-five pounds less than my everyday earth-weight. I figured on that when I undertook the forty-mile daily stroll. Oh—of course I took a thermo-skin sleeping bag for these wintry Martian nights.

  “Off I went, bouncing along pretty quickly. Eight hours of daylight meant twenty miles or more. It got tiresome, of course—plugging along over a soft sand desert with nothing to see, not even Leroy’s crawling biopods. But an hour or so brought me to the c
anal—just a dry ditch about four hundred feet wide, and straight as a railroad on its own company map.

  “There’d been water in it sometime, though. The ditch was covered with what looked like a nice green lawn. Only, as I approached, the lawn moved out of my way!”

  “Eh?” said Leroy.

  “Yeah, it was a relative of your biopods. I caught one—a little grass-like blade about as long as my finger, with two thin, stemmy legs.”

  “He is where?” Leroy was eager.

  “He is let go! I had to move, so I plowed along with the walking grass opening in front and closing behind. And then I was out on the orange desert of Thyle again.

  “I plugged steadily along, cussing the sand that made going so tiresome, and, incidentally, cussing that cranky motor of yours, Karl. It was just before twilight that I reached the edge of Thyle, and looked down over the grey Mare Chronium. And I knew there was seventy-five miles of that to be walked over, and then a couple of hundred miles of that Xanthus desert, and about as much more Mare Cimmerium. Was I pleased? I started cussing you fellows for not picking me up!”

  “We were trying, you sap!” said Harrison.

  “That didn’t help. Well, I figured I might as well use what was left of daylight in getting down the cliff that bounded Thyle. I found an easy place, and down I went. Mare Chronium was just the same sort of place as this—crazy leafless plants and a bunch of crawlers; I gave it a glance and hauled out my sleeping bag. Up to that time, you know, I hadn’t seen anything worth worrying about on this half-dead world—nothing dangerous, that is.”

  “Did you?” queried Harrison.

  “Did I! You’ll hear about it when I come to it. Well, I was just about to turn in when suddenly I heard the wildest sort of shenanigans!”

  “Vot iss shenanigans?” inquired Putz.