Saturday, August 1, 2009

Isaac Asimov & Martin H Greenberg (Eds)' "Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 19 (1957)" (anthology): Annotated table of contents & review

This is #19 of a series of 25 anthologies by these editors. This book collects stories first published during the year 1957.

Where I'm aware of online copies, I provide download links. My rating is in brackets. Where I've a separate post on a the story, link on story title goes there. Link on author or publisher yields more of stories from the source.

Table of contents (15 stories, best first, unread last).

Among the 7 stories I've read so far, first 3 are very good. And "The Cage" has a cool idea near end.
  1. [novelette] Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe" (A); download audio or comic book adaptation; Astounding, April 1957: Human operator (via directly linked mind-to-mind interface) of an artificial animal adapted to live on Jupiter's "surface" becomes one with him, & would rather live in that healthy body on Jupiter rather than in his own withered human body.
  2. [novelette] H Beam Piper's "Omnilingual" (A); download text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, or Feedbooks, or audio from LibriVox; Astounding, February 1957: A universal rosetta stone to decode the writings of a long dead civilization known to be at about our level of technological ability.
  3. [ss] C M Kornbluth's "The Education of Tigress McCardle" (A); Venture Science Fiction, July 1957; humor: An unusual population control program!
  4. [ss] Isaac Asimov's "Strikebreaker" aka "Male Strikebreaker"; Science Fiction Stories, January 1957: I'd read a long time back. Not sure, but I think it's something about a society treating sanitary workers as untouchables, who've a gone on a strike. A visitor breaks the strike by either talking to untouchables or doing their work, & himself becomes untouchable by doing this act.
  5. [ss] A Bertram Chandler's "The Cage" (A); F&SF, June 1957: A shorter version of Pierre Boulle's "Planet of the Apes".

    The Crotchety Old Fan gives a hint on how to find the audio of an (unofficial) radio adaptation of this story online.
  6. [ss] Brian W Aldiss' "Let's Be Frank" (B); download; Science-Fantasy, #23 (June 1957): How humanity became a hive intelligence.
  7. [ss] C M Kornbluth's The Last Man Left in the Bar (C); Infinity Science Fiction, October 1957: Trivia in a bar.
  8. [ss] Kate Wilhelm's "The Mile-Long Spaceship"; Astounding, April 1957: Not read.
  9. [ss] Theodore R Cogswell's "You Know Willie"; F&SF, May 1957: Not read.
  10. [ss] Carol Emshwiller's "Hunting Machine"; Science Fiction Stories, May 1957: Not read.
  11. [ss] Robert Silverberg's "World of a Thousand Colors"; Super-Science Fiction, June 1957: Not read.
  12. [novella] Lloyd Biggle, Jr's "The Tunesmith"; If, August 1957: Not read.
  13. [ss] Isaac Asimov's "A Loint of Paw"; F&SF, August 1957: Not read.
  14. [ss] Rog Phillips' "Game Preserve"; If, October 1957: Not read.
  15. [novelette] Harlan Ellison's "Soldier" aka "Soldier from Tomorrow"; Fantastic Universe, October 1957: Not read.

Fact sheet.

First published: 1989 (DAW).
Relevant entries have been added to the list of stories from John Campbell's Astounding.
Some of the bibliographical information here comes from ISFDB.
Legend: ss = short story.

1 comments:

Sharon E. Dreyer said...

Thanks for all of this information. Some of these stories I hadn't heard of them so I'll have to check them out.

Check out my first and recently released novel, Long Journey to Rneadal. This exciting story is a romantic action adventure in space.