1939 Retro-Hugos, Thoughts, More of

[chris_gerrib]

Novella

“The Time Trap” by Henry Kuttner - this is another entry in the Square-Jawed White Man Fixes All races. I lost count of the number of exclamation points used, as well as the number of times a nubile young woman lost her clothing in front of our red-blooded hero. Despite all of that, it was reasonably entertaining, but definitely no "Who Goes There" or even "Anthem." This will be my third-place pick.

Novelette

I have no idea what (if anything) I'm voting for here. The stories are all weird to the point of craziness or badly dated.

Short Story

“The Faithful” by Lester del Rey - not bad story about man's best friend the dog.
“Helen O’Loy” by Lester del Rey - geeks make robot, love follows.
“Hollerbochen’s Dilemma” by Ray Bradbury - shockingly amateurish.
“Hyperpilosity” by L. Sprague de Camp - Rather interesting. Basically, a flu epidemic makes all humans furry. de Camp's hero scientists (a Mexican, with the accent to match) discovers that back in the day we all caught a disease that made us non-furry, and that this flu is the "cure." The story ends with humanity deciding to stay furry.

I think I'm going with Hyperpilosity as #1, Helen O'Loy as #2, Faithful as #3 and Bradbury's piece as #4. If I succeed in finding the Clarke piece, this may change.

Comments

Re: Novelette

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

May I suggest that you ignore it being dated - it wasn't when it was written; what matters is, is it well written? Discounting it as “dated” is as fundamentally wrong as discounting a story because the main character is not a black lesbian (it should be illegal!)

- I mean, L Niven's “The Coldest Place” is still a thumping good yarn; so what if we now know that Mercury does rotate?  Ditto S Weinbaum's Parasite Planet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_Planet) or, of course, “A Martian Odyssey” - TOO BAD that Venus and Mars are not actually like this, but the stories are memorable, justly-famed classics.

Now, if it's dated in an embarrassingly stupid fashion that's different: I'm thinking of the 1945 Buck Rogers strip wherein we learn that “after the destruction of Tokio” the Japs (somehow) fled to this other planet (en masse, apparently), where they “reverted to type - they became monkey-men!”  Who are today ruled by a classic “lost civilization” white queen (!) who favors a Veronica Lake hairdo…  This was not one of the high points of the property. (Nor was it a particularly good storyline.)

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As for being both badly dated AND simply a bad story, I'm glad that I don't recall the name of the story that was published around 2000, give or take, where the author, I swear, was simply ticking off all the PC checkboxes - his main character, for no reason inherent to the story, was deliberately non-white, non-European, non-male; her child was fathered literally by a passing stranger, and now - since this woman was of course too busy with her career to bother raising the child, the near-feral dysfunctional teenage girl has a transponder bracelet locked around her wrist so her whereabouts can be constantly tracked.  [“Once upon a time, children were taught through the seat of their britches how to behave, and then as adults were let alone to behave as they'd been taught.  Now neither is true.  The change is not an improvement”]  Her boyfriend picked the lock; the woman found the bracelet in the trash and was upset.  Gosh.

The story was as dated as today's fish; though “progressive education” had left the rising generation of this spaceborne community essentially illiterate, we're told that e-mail is the primary means of communicating with Earth.  (This was in the days of CompuServe and America On Line.)

What the story was actually about, once all this ever-so-Correct hogwash was slathered onto it, I haven't the faintest idea.  I think they were going to Neptune, but why may never have been explained at all.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Don't get your hopes up for the Clarke. This is a fanzine piece from long before he started publishing professional work.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

I actually found it via Google books here (http://books.google.com/books?id=HLz1g95AXDsC&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=clarke+how+we+went+to+mars&source=bl&ots=ARxw9Bn7Yi&sig=T0NsWiZjk20mhPW25M-TSf3_K14&hl=en&sa=X&ei=k3fEU5f0Gsq0yATboICADw&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=clarke%20how%20we%20went%20to%20mars&f=false.).

I'm moving it to #3 and sliding the other two down.

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Comedy was not one of his talents.  I've read other attempts.  I'm not sure why he tried, unless it was a case of, Hey, why not.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Having read half-a-dozen works of the types Clarke was parodying, I found it refreshing.