Before the Golden Age

[mmcirvin]

One of the very first science-fiction short story collections I ever read, around 1977 or so when I was maybe nine years old, was the first volume of the Isaac Asimov-edited anthology Before the Golden Age. This is a three-volume collection of 1930s stories of varying quality that Asimov enjoyed reading in his youth, with a sort of autobiography of little Isaac in the introductory notes (as usual, it's all about him).


In the 1930s, before Astounding changed all the rules, stories in science-fiction magazines weren't necessarily pitched for adults or possessed of the greatest literary style-- some of them were excellent, but really schlocky stuff could get printed in the leading magazines as well. Since I was a kid, just like thirties-edition Isaac Asimov, they were pitched right at my interest level-- except, of course, for the intense and out-of-date racism and sexism present in some of them, for which Asimov apologized.

I recently got around to reading the second volume. At this rate I expect to read the third volume sometime around 2028. Anyway, all of it that I've read so far is worthwhile for science-fiction fans: some of it is not crap, and the crap is of historical interest.

The Archimedes Plutonium-esque concept of atoms being worlds and vice versa was a really popular one in thirties SF. Two of the stories in the first volume were "Submicroscopic" and "Awlo of Ulm" by S. P. Meek, which used the notion of tiny worlds hidden in grains of sand. Our hero reaches them via a shrinking machine and then has a typical schlocky adventure rescuing a damsel from dark-skinned monster-men.

I think my favorite story in the second volume is "Colossus" by Donald Wandrei, which does it in reverse: the hero has a ship that is capable of traveling a godzillion times the speed of light, which through some nonsensical handwaving about relativity makes it grow to enormous size. A world-smashing war that blows up New York and kills his fiancée drives him to flee to the edge of the universe. Eventually his spaceship bursts out of the atom that is our universe and ends up on a microscope slide being peered at by cold and unfeeling supermen. I'd say it's pretty clearly part inspiration for Philip José Farmer's freakazoidal story "The Shadow of Space," a favorite of mine-- and the ship itself is a dead ringer for a Larry Niven General Products hull! Pretty influential, maybe? Anyway, my favorite thing about it is just the ecstatic description of the hero's flight through the universe at exponentially increasing speed, a notion that Rudy Rucker would later reprise in his bizarre novel White Light. Something tells me that Wandrei would really have liked Celestia.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hey, this says (http://www.pjfarmer.com/ss.htm#shadow) that The Shadow of Space was initially intended as a Star Trek episode! That would have rocked, but the show probably would have gotten yanked off the air immediately as too disturbing.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, "Colossus" wasn't the best-written story in the volume. That would be "Old Faithful" by Raymond Z. Gallun, which Asimov describes as an extremely influential and genre-changing story, in that it depicted a completely non-humanoid and mentally inhuman alien as a sympathetic character, something that was not at all common at the time. I've often heard the effect of Stanley Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" described in similar terms, though Weinbaum's sympathetic Martian was physically more like an Earth vertebrate than Old Faithful, who in appearance is more like a Lovecraftian horror-creature. Both stories appeared in 1934.