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Before the Golden Age
A Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930s
Ed by Isaac Asimov
Proofed By MadMaxAU
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Contents
introduction
part one
1920 to 1930
part two
1931
the man who evolved
by Edmond Hamilton
the jameson satellite
by Neil R. Jones
submicroscopic
by Capt. S. P. Meek
awlo of ulm
by Capt. S. P. Meek
tetrahedra op space
by P. Schuyler Miller
the world of the red sun
by Clifford D. Simak
part three
1932
tumithak of the corridors
by Charles R. Tanner
the moon era
by Jack Williamson
part four
1933
the man who awoke
by Laurence Manning
tumithak in shawm
by Charles R. Tanner
part five
1934
colossus
by Donald Wandrei
born of the sun
by Jack Williamson
sidewise in time
by Murray Leinster
old faithful
by Raymond Z. Gallun
part six
1935
the parasite planet
by Stanley G. Weinbaum
proxima centauri
by Murray Leinster
the accursed galaxy
by Edmond Hamilton
part seven
1936
he who shrank
by Henry Hasse
the human pets of mars
by Leslie Frances Stone
the brain stealers of mars
by John W. Campbell, Jr.
devolution
by Edmond Hamilton
big game
by Isaac Asimov
part eight
1937
other eyes watching
by John W. Campbell, Jr.
minus planet
by John D. Clark
past, present, and future
by Nat Schachner
part nine
1938
the men and the mirror
by Ross Rocklynne
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INTRODUCTION
TO MANY science fiction readers who are now in their middle years, there was a Golden Age of Science Fiction—in capital letters.
That Golden Age began in 1938, when John Campbell became editor of Astounding Stories and remolded it, and the whole field, into something closer to his heart’s desire. During the Golden Age, he and the magazine he edited so dominated science fiction that to read Astounding was to know the field entire.
In that sense, the Golden Age endured till 1950, when other magazines, such as Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, entered the field. The editorial personalities of H. L. Gold and Anthony Boucher were as strong in their ways as Campbell’s, so the field grew wider and more diverse. In many ways, it improved still further as it spilled out of the magazines and into the books, the paperbacks, and the electronic media.
But then the individual could no longer comprehend the field entire. It grew too large for one to do more than sample, and the Golden Age, when all of science fiction could belong to the reader, was over.
I lived through the Golden Age in the best possible way, for I was among the first of the new writers Campbell discovered, and I am sure there was no other in whom he took so personal and paternal an interest. My book The Early Asimov (Doubleday, 1972) is both my memorial to those years and my tribute to John.
But let us forget the capital-letter Golden Age, and let us be more personal. To anyone who has lived a life that has not been utterly disastrous, there is an iridescent aura permeating its second decade. Memories of the first decade, extending back to before the age of ten, are dim, uncertain, and incomplete. Beginning with the third decade, after twenty, life becomes filled with adult responsibility and turns to lead. But that second decade, from ten to twenty, is gold; it is in those years that we remember bliss.
It is the second decade that is the golden age for each individual; it is the memory of life as it was then, that we consider to be life as it ought to be. For any science fiction reader, the gold of the second decade of his life permeates the stories he read at that time, so I frequently hear enthusiasts of thirty speak of “the golden age of the 1950s.” If I live out my normal lifetime, I fully expect to hear some rotten kid talk to me of “the golden age of the 1970s.” (I will rise from my wheel chair and hit him with my cane.)
Well, then, what about me? My own golden age (small letters) lay in the 1930s. It came in the decade just before the Golden Age (capital letters), and it had a glory for me—and a glory for everyone, for it was in my golden age that the personalities that molded the Golden Age, including Campbell himself, were themselves molded.
The science fiction stories I read in the 1930s were in magazines I could not keep. I took each magazine, as it arrived, from my father’s newsstand and then, having read it as quickly as I could, I returned it to my father’s newsstand so that it might be sold. I cultivated a light hand, which left the magazine in its pristine crispness even though I had read, rabidly, every word on every page. (I had to, for if the magazine suffered, my father would have issued a ukase forbidding me to touch any of them, and I don’t know about you, but my father expected, and got, instant obedience.)
So I never reread those science fiction stories of my personal golden age after that first reading. Oh, a very few of them, yes, when they were reprinted. However, very few stories published before the Golden Age have been reprinted. The Coming of Campbell wiped out all that went before.
The science fiction of the thirties seems, to anyone who has experienced the Campbell Revolution, to be clumsy, primitive, and naive. The stories are old-fashioned and unsophisticated.
All right, grant that they are all those things. Nevertheless, there was a rough-hewn vigor about them that sophistication has, to some extent, lost us.
Besides, I remember them. Some of them, although I read them only once at a very early age, I remember over a space of forty years. Through all that has happened and all that I have read and, for that matter, written, I remember them—and love them still.
Those stories were dear to me because they roused my enthusiasm, gave me the joy of life at a time and in a place and under conditions when not terribly many joys existed. They helped shape me and even educate me, and I am filled with gratitude to those stories and to the men who wrote them.
And aside from my personal involvement, the stories form an essential part of the history of science fiction, a part that has been unfairly neglected and is in danger of being forgotten altogether, since virtually no important anthologies have dealt with pre-1938 science fiction.
You would have thought that a person of my incredible ingenuity would have conceived years ago the notion of repairing this omission and editing an anthology of the great stories of the 1930s. Oddly enough, that is not so. Never once, in my conscious moments, did so obvious a project occur to me.
Fortunately, I am not always conscious.
On the morning of April 3, 1973, I woke and said to my good lady, “Hey, I remember a dream I had.” (I virtually never remember my dreams, so this came under the heading of a stop-the-presses bulletin.)
My good lady is
professionally interested in dreams, so she said, “What was it?”
“I dreamed,” I said, “I had prepared an anthology of all those good old stories I read when I was a kid and I was getting a chance to read them again. There was ‘Tumithak of the Corridors’ and ‘Awlo of Ulm’ and The World of the-’”
I think that’s about as far as I got. I had been chuckling as I talked about the dream, because it seemed like such a ridiculous thing to do. But was it ridiculous?
Simply talking about it filled me, quite suddenly, with a burning urge to do it. I’ve had those burning urges before, and I know it means I will have to do it at once regardless of any commitments I may have. But who would publish such a thing? —A ridiculous question. After all, in a quarter century of association, the good people at Doubleday & Company, Inc., had never once said “No” to me.
It was at 7 a.m. that I told my dream, and I had to wait for the opening of the business day to do something about it. At 9:05 a.m. (I gave them five minutes’ grace) I was on the phone, talking rapidly and earnestly to Lawrence P. Ashmead and to Michele Tempesta, two splendid editorial representatives of that estimable publishing house. They did not say “No” to me.
I then thought about it some more. As I told you, I did not have those old magazines, and it is most difficult to get copies these days. Difficult, but not impossible.
There was always my old friend Sam Moskowitz, who shared my golden age but bought and kept every magazine that was published, memorized them all, and can quote them all word by word at any time of day or night.
He has put his knowledge and expertise to good use by becoming a historian of science fiction, perhaps the only true specialist in this unusual section of human knowledge in the whole world. He has written two volumes of biographies of great science fiction writers, Explorers of the Infinite and Seekers of Tomorrow. (One of these biographies dealt with none other than your un-humble servant, Isaac Asimov. Sam, never one to skimp on hyperbole, called that one Genius in a Candy Store.”)
He also produced Science Fiction by Gaslight, a history and anthology of science fiction in the popular magazines of the period from 1891 to 1911, and Under the Moons of Mars, a history and anthology of science fiction in the Munsey magazines from 1912 to 1929.
Doubleday published his The Crystal Man, dealing with nineteenth-century American science fiction. Sam even wrote an account of the tremendous and earth-shaking feuds among the handful of science fiction fans in the American Northeast, which he very dashingly entitled The Immortal Storm.
It was to Sam Moskowitz that I therefore turned. Swearing him to secrecy, I asked him if he had ever himself done an anthology of this sort and if he was in the process of doing so. He answered, no, he hadn’t and he wasn’t He would like to if he could find a publisher.
“Well, I can,” I said, “and I would make it an autobiographical anthology. Would you object if I moved in on your territory?”
He sighed a little and said that he didn’t.
Then I reached the crucial point. “Would you get me the stories, Sam?” I asked.
And goodhearted Sam said, “Oh, sure!” and in three weeks he had them, every one, with word counts and copyright information and comments on each. (I was only too glad to pay him for the time and trouble he took.)
So now here I am, all set to do the anthology, and, if you don’t mind, I intend to make it more than a mere anthology. I am not going to include the stories bareboned.
With your permission (or without, if necessary), I intend to do as I did in The Early Asimov and place the stories within the context of my life. As I told Larry, Michele, and Sam, I intend the book to be autobiographical.
I am doing this partly because one pronounced facet of my personality is a kind of cheerful self-appreciation (“a monster of vanity and arrogance” is what my good friends call me) but also, believe it or not, as a matter of self-protection and as almost a kind of public service.
My numerous readers (bless them, one and all) never tire of writing letters in which they ask eagerly after all the most intimate statistics of my early life, and it has long since passed the point where I can possibly satisfy them, one by one, and still find time to do anything else. The Early Asimov has already performed miracles in that respect, since I can send back post cards saying, “Please read The Early Asimov for the information you request.”
And now I will be able to add, “Also read Before the Golden Age.”
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Part One
1920 TO 1930
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I HAVE always wanted to start a book in the fashion of a nineteenth-century novelist. You know: “I was born in the little town of P---------- in the year 19--.” Here’s my chance:
I was born in the little town of Petrovichi (accent on the second syllable, I believe), in the U.S.S.R. I say the U.S.S.R. and not Russia, because I was born two years after the Russian Revolution.
More than once, I have been asked where Petrovichi is relative to some place that might be considered reasonably familiar. It is thirty-five miles due west of Roslavl and fifty-five miles due south of Smolensk (where a great battle was fought during Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, and another during Hitler’s invasion of 1941), but that doesn’t seem to help any. I had better say, then, that Petrovichi is 240 miles southwest of Moscow and fifteen miles east of the White Russian S.S.R., so I was born on the soil of Holy Russia itself, for what that’s worth.
The date of my birth is January 2, 1920. For those of you who are interested in casting horoscopes, forget it! I am not only unaware of the exact hour and minute of my birth but even, actually, of the exact day. January 2 is the official day and that’s what I celebrate, but at the time of my birth the Soviet Union was on the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind our Gregorian, and my parents in those days didn’t even pay much attention to the Julian. They dated things according to the holy days of the Jewish calendar.
Under the Tsars, Russia had never indulged in careful statistical accounting of its less important subjects, and during World War I and the hectic years immediately following, things were more slovenly than ever. So when a birth certificate finally had to be drawn up for me, my parents had to rely on memory, and that worked out to January 2.
And that’s good enough. Anyway, it’s official.
I remained in the Soviet Union for less than three years and remember nothing of those days except for a few vague impressions, some of which my mother claims she can date back to the time I was two years old.
About the only event of personal note worth mentioning from those years is the fact that sometime in 1921 I fell ill of double pneumonia at a time when antibiotics were non-existent and such medical care as did exist was extremely primitive. My mother tells me (though I never know how much to allow for her innate sense of the dramatic) that seventeen children came down with it in our village at that time and that sixteen died. Apparently, I was the sole survivor.
In 1922, after my sister, Marcia, was born, my father decided to emigrate to the United States. My mother had a half brother living in New York who was willing to guarantee that we would not become a charge on the country; that, plus permission from the Soviet Government, was all we needed.
I am sometimes asked to give the details of how we left the Soviet Union, and I get the distinct feeling that the questioners will be satisfied with nothing less than having my mother jumping from ice floe to ice floe across the Dnieper River with myself in her arms and the entire Red Army hot on our heels.
Sorry! Nothing like that at all! My father applied for an exit visa, or whatever it’s called, got it, and off we went by commercial transportation. While we were getting the visa, the family had to go to Moscow, so in the year 1922 I was actually there. My mother says the temperature was forty below and she had to keep me inside her coat lest I freeze solid, but she may be exaggerating.
Needless to say, I am not sorry we left. I dare say that if my fa
mily had remained in the Soviet Union, I would have received an education similar to the one I actually did get, that I might well have become a chemist and might even have become a science fiction writer. On the other hand, there is a very good chance that I would then have been killed in the course of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 to 1945, and while I hope I would have done my bit first, I am glad I didn’t have to. I am prejudiced in favor of life.
The four of us—my father Judah, my mother Anna, my sister Marcia, and myself—traveled by way of Danzig, Liverpool, and the good ship Baltic, and arrived at Ellis Island in February 1923. It was the last year in which immigration was relatively open and in which Ellis Island was working full steam. In 1924, the quota system was established and the United States began to welcome only sharply limited amounts of the tired, the poor, and the wretched refuse of Europe’s teeming shores.
One more year, then, and we wouldn’t have made it. Even if we could have come in at some later time, it wouldn’t have been the same. Arriving at the age of three, I was, of course, already speaking (Yiddish), but I was still young enough to learn English as a native language and not as an acquired one (which is never the same).
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