Shoemaker's list

[james_davis_nicoll]

In the course of checking Stephenson's debut in the November 1971 Analog, I came across a discussion of Martin Shoemaker's poll of Analog readers. Shoemaker was asking for recommended stories published prior to 1940.



Votes cast: 33

Who Goes There by John W. Campbell, Jr. (25)
Twilight by John W. Campbell, Jr (25)
A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum (20)
Helen O'Loy by Lester Del Rey (19)
Night by John W. Campbell, (17)
Forgetfulness by John W. Campbell (14)
Black Destroyer by A. E. Van Vogt (13)
The Lost Machine by John Beynon Harris (13)
Marooned Off Vesta by Isaac Asimov (12)
Sands of Time by P. Schuyler Miller (11)
The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (11)
Promixa Centauri by Murray Leinster (10)
The Color Out of Space by H. P. Lovecraft (10)
Armageddon 2419 by Philip Nowlan (9)
Life Line by Robert A. Heinlein (9)
Robot's Return by Robert Moore Williams (8)
The Adaptive Ultimate by Stanley G. Weinbaum (8)
I, Robot by Eando Binder (8)
The Johnny Black Stories by L. Sprague de Camp (8)
The New Accelerator by H. G. Wells (7)
The Country of the Blind by H. G. Wells (7)
He Who Shrank by Henry Hasse (7)
Politics by Murray Leinster (7)
The Blue Giraffe by L. Sprague de Camp (7)
The Faithful by Lester del Rey (7)
The Golden Egg by H. G. Wells (6)
Shambleau by C. L. Moore (6)
Within the Pyramid by R. de Witt Miller (6)
The Shadow Out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft (6)
The Runaway Skyscraper by Murray Leinster (6)
The Girl in the Golden Atom by Ray Cummings (6)
The Mad Planet series by Murray Leinster (6)
Old Faithful by Raymond Z. Gallun (6)
Seeds of the Dusk Raymond Z. Gallun (6)
He Hath Wings by Edmond Hamilton (6)

Comments

[eagle]

I suppose it's unsurprising that 1971 Analog readers like John W. Campbell, but somehow I find it dubious that four of the six best SF stories written prior to 1940 were written by him.

[james_davis_nicoll]

Campbell's placing may be because he died July 1971.

[eagle]

Ah! Thank you, I was being excessively cynical.

[austin_dern]

I'm a little curious what the nomination process was. There's no reason except sentiment for 'Marooned off Vesta' to make any shortlist of great pre-1940 stories, and 'Old Faithful' is kind of a charming idea under a heap of words. Haven't read 'Life-Line' or 'He Who Shrank' or 'He That Hath Wings' recently enough to have a strong opinion but I suspect they're better concepts than stories.

But given that set of stories to pick from yeah, I'd put the Campbells at or near the top.

[austin_dern]

OK, yeah, 'The Runaway Skyscraper' is bad but in a way I could imagine making a decent half-hour episode of an old-time-radio show like Suspense or Escape or something. A little too old-fashioned for X Minus One.

[dragoness_e]

Just because he was a fascist turd politically doesn't mean Campbell didn't write some banger short stories.

"Who Goes There" is a horror classic for a reason.

[(Anonymous)]

I may have read and forgotten some of these. I know I've read:
"Marooned Off Vesta"
"The Machine Stops"
"Proxima Centauri", recently.
"The Color Out of Space"
"Life-Line"
"The New Accelerator"
"Shambleau"

A sort of sign of the tone of "The Machine Stops" is that the daring explorer briefly meets a woman native to the world that he has chosen to visit and they do not fall in love, which with other writers in the list would be inevitable. Also, Forster was gay, but tropes are tropes.

Robert Carnegie

[(Anonymous)]

Ones I can remember reading

Who Goes There by John W. Campbell, Jr. (25)
A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum (20)
Helen O'Loy by Lester Del Rey (19)
Black Destroyer by A. E. Van Vogt (13)
Marooned Off Vesta by Isaac Asimov (12)
The Adaptive Ultimate by Stanley G. Weinbaum (8)
The Country of the Blind by H. G. Wells (7)

[dragoness_e]

I find it interesting that of the ones I can definitely remember reading, at least 5 of them are horror stories, sometimes with SF costumes.

"Who Goes There" by John W. Campbell, Jr. - HORROR!
"A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum
Forgetfulness by John W. Campbell
Black Destroyer by A. E. Van Vogt - horror
The Color Out of Space by H. P. Lovecraft - HORROR!
Armageddon 2419 by Philip Nowlan
Life Line by Robert A. Heinlein
The Country of the Blind by H. G. Wells
Shambleau by C. L. Moore - horror
The Shadow Out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft - horror?
The Girl in the Golden Atom by Ray Cummings

Others on that list I may have read, but don't remember them.

[chrysostom]

Heinlein only wrote two pre-1940 stories...but surely "Misfit" is better than "Life-Line."

[patrick_morris_miller]

That we know of. For Us, the Living should have gone to the bonfire; there may have been short stories that did.

[chrysostom]

Okay, PUBLISHED two stories.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

I'm less interested in what stories the audience has read than I am where they first read them, if for no other reason than that I was an extremely rural reader. Silverberg's Voyagers in Time is where I first read The Sands of Time, for example. Asimov anthologies were huge, Before the Golden Age, Tomorrow's Children, etc. I guess what I'm saying is that I was too young and dumb to realize it at the time, but our tiny little library in Southwest Oregon did yeoman's duty. I'm also guessing that most people here also benefited from dedicated library staff that were perhaps not as appreciated as they should have been.

Of course, we also got a lot of trade paperback recycling like ERB's The Monster Men, etc.

[ffutures]

Good to see A Martian Odyssey there - one of the few stories of that era of the "describe an alien world and keep it alien and mysterious" type, at the end of the story the hero has met at least two sentient species but still has no real understanding of them. Since Weinbaum died really young most of his work is now out of copyright, which let me write them up as Planets of Peril, the last worldbook for my Forgotten Futures RPG. I have most of his fiction on my web site too - the main exceptions are stories that were collaborations, completed posthumously, or first published long after his death.

Can't currently link to my site due to bandwidth apparently being exceeded, but it's Forgottenfutures.co.uk then follow the links to Forgotten Futures then Planets of Peril.

[chrysostom]

Weinbaum is definitely one of the "what might have been" guys from early SF, along with Kornbluth.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

I'm going to piggyback my own comment and wonder how much of 1971's sfnal audience hailed from rural roots vs. now. It's a valid question. For myself, indoor plumbing and electricity for the general populace was sf.