Some Thoughts on the 1945 Retro Hugo Awards Finalists

Here is the first of the long awaited post about the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists. Not too long, I hope, but since I'm a Hugo finalist myself this year, I took some time off to celebrate, congratulate fellow finalists and update everything that needed updating. My thoughts about the 2020 Hugo Award finalists may be found here, by the way.

As regular readers of this blog probably know, I started the 1945 Retro Hugo Awards Recommendation Spreadsheet and also reviewed eligible works at this blog to help potential nominators to make more informed choices. And that's why I was extremely interested to see what, if any, impact the spreadsheet and the Retro Reviews project had.

I have also added the tag "1945 Retro Hugo finalist" to every finalist we reviewed to make it easier for Retro Hugo voters to find the relevant reviews.

ETA: Paul Fraser also shares his thoughts on the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists (and the 2020 Hugo finalists).

ETA II: FontFolly shares his thoughts on the 2020 Hugo and 1945 Retro Hugo finalists.

ETA III: Adventures Fantastic shares their thoughts on the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists.

So let's take a look at the individual categories:

 

Best Novel:

Science fiction was a short fiction genre during the golden age and so the best novel category at the Retro Hugos is often fairly weak or full of left-field finalists. 1945 is no exception, though we do have some good finalists. Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord by Olaf Stapledon is probably the most obvious finalist in this category and also a really good novel. Don Briago reviewed it for Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Shadow Over Mars a.k.a. The Nemesis from Terra by Leigh Brackett is another fine novel from one of the greats of the golden age. I reviewed it here.

I didn't review Land of Terror by Edgar Rice Burroughs, largely because my Pellucidar collection only includes the first three novels. But it's not an unexpected finalist, though Edgar Rice Burroughs is somewhat hampered by the fact that he wrote his best works before there even was a Worldcon, let alone Hugos, so he has never really been honoured.

I'm not a huge fan of A.E. van Vogt, so I did not cover The Winged Man by van Vogt and his wife E. Mayne Hull, but it's not an unexpected finalist, since van Vogt is clearly popular with Retro Hugo voters.

The Golden Fleece by Robert Graves is a left-field finalist, but a very deserving work. I didn't review it, but Steve J. Wright did. The other left-field finalist is The Wind on the Moon by Eric Linklater, a beloved children's book, which I have not (yet) read, but look forward to trying.

Finalists covered at Retro Reviews: 2 of 6

Diversity count: 5 men, 2 women, 5 international writers

 

Best Novella:

"Killdozer!" by Theodore Sturgeon is probably the best known finalist in this category and a worthy one, too. Don Briago reviewed it for Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

"The Jewel of Bas" by Leigh Brackett is a great planetary romance novella and probably my favourite of the finalists in this category. I reviewed it here.

"A God Named Kroo" by Henry Kuttner was on my list to review, but I didn't get around to it in time. I didn't review "Trog" by Murray Leinster either, though Steve J. Wright did. Since I'm not a van Vogt fan, I didn't review "The Changeling", though again Steve J. Wright did.

I'm not at all familiar with "Intruders from the Stars" by Ross Rocklynne, though it is listed on the spreadsheet.

Finalists covered at Retro Reviews: 2 of 6

Diversity count: 5 men, 1 woman, 1 international author

 

Best Novelette:

C.L. Moore is represented three times in this category, once with her solo story "No Woman Born" and twice together with her husband Henry Kuttner with "The Children's Hour" and "When the Bough Breaks". All three are excellent stories. I reviewed "No Woman Born" and "When the Bough Breaks", but didn't get around to "The Children's Hour" yet.

I'm not at all surprised that "The Big and the Little" by Isaac Asimov was nominated, since it's a Foundation story. And while it has its share of flaws, it certainly is interesting. I reviewed it here.

"City" by Clifford D. Simak is another finalist that's absolutely no surprise, since it is the title story of a beloved cycle/series and besides, Simak was a very good writer. I reviewed two of the four eligible City stories, but not this one.

"Arena" by Fredric Brown is also no surprise, since it's a classic story that was even adapted as a Star Trek episode.  It was also on my list of stories to review, but I didn't get around to it.

I'm a little sad that the two eligible Leigh Brackett novelettes didn't make it, though Leigh Brackett is well represented elsewhere on this ballot. And while "Iron Mask" by Robert Bloch, "Highwayman of the Void" by Frederik Pohl and "Ride the EL to Doom" by Allison V. Harding were all long shots (and the Retro Hugo administrators might well have killed me, if they had to try to track down Harding's heirs, considering she is an enigma), I would have been thrilled to see them here.

Finalists covered at Retro Reviews: 3 of 6

Diversity count: 5 men (Henry Kuttner twice) and 3 women, all of whom are C.L. Moore.

 

Best Short Story:

"Desertion" and "The Huddling Place" by Clifford D. Simak are both City stories, both excellent and utterly unsurprising finalists. I reviewed them here and here.

"The Wedge" by Isaac Asimov is the other Foundation story of 1944. It's usually considered one of the weaker entries in the series, though I liked it better than "The Big and the Little". I reviewed it here.

Ray Bradbury had twelve eligible stories in 1944 and none of the ones I read were bad. "I, Rocket" was not the Bradbury story I expected to make the ballot, though it is a good choice. But then, there are no bad choices with Ray Bradbury. I reviewed the story here.

I didn't review "Far Centaurus" by A.E. van Vogt, because I just don't care for his work. Though "Far Centaurus" is a famous story and also one of the first generation ship stories.

"And the Gods Laughed" by Fredric Brown is a story that never even appeared on my radar, even though it is listed in the spreadsheet.

Finalists covered at Retro Reviews: 4 of 6

Diversity count: 6 men (Clifford D. Simak twice), 1 international writer

 

Best Series:

This is one category where I really feel that the Retro Hugo spreadsheet made an impact. Because this is the first time ever that we even have this category at the Retro Hugos. And the reason why we never had it before is because people just didn't know what the nominate in this category.

The Shadow and Doc Savage are both pulp stalwarts that had been published for more than ten years by 1944. They may not be as well remembered as they once were, but they were hugely influential and their impact is felt to this day. Doc Savage influenced everything from Superman to The A-Team, while The Shadow was one of the influences on Batman. Both are highly deserving of recognition, even if the glory days of both series are somewhat behind them by 1944.

Captain Future, created by Edmond Hamilton, hasn't really had the same impact on popular culture at large, but it had a huge impact on me, because the 1979 Captain Future anime series was one of my foundational science fiction experiences which made me a fan, so I'm really thrilled to see the good Captain here as well as Otho, Grag, Simon Wright (whose spiritual descendant is helping astronauts aboard the ISS) and Joan Randall.

A collection of the first three Pellucidar books was my first contact with the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and my teenaged self certainly loved it. Also, as I said above, Burroughs has never really been honoured by the Hugos, because he wrote his best works long before there even was a Worldcon.

The Cthulhu Mythos by H.P. Lovecraft and friends, represented in 1944 by two August Derleth stories, is one of the great classics of our genre, no matter how you feel about Lovecraft. It's also still going strong and getting new additions, including many that would horrify Lovecraft, and therefore a highly deserving finalist.

The occult detective Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinn may be somewhat forgotten these days, but he was a mainstay of Weird Tales for more than twenty year. In their time, the Jules de Grandin stories were more popular than Cthulhu or Conan and single-handedly saved Weird Tales from bankruptcy more than once.

No diversity count, because most of these series were written by more than one person. Those persons were generally male, though.

 

Best Related Work:

This is the other category where I feel that the Retro Hugo Spreadsheet really made an impact, because this another category we didn't have at all for the golden age Retro Hugos, because no one knew what to nominate. I also want to thank everybody who helped to hunt down these works, some of which were not easy to find. We also have a nice variety of very different works here.

Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere by Willy Ley and Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom by George Gamow are two good popular science books. The Willy Ley book is apparently so good that the Bremen University library still has several copies (plus two more at the library of the Technical College), even though the book is 75 years old.

42 To ’44: A Contemporary Memoir Upon Human Behavior During the Crisis of the World Revolution by H.G. Wells is a non-fiction book by one of the founding fathers of our genre who has never been recognised by the Hugos either, because like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Wells did his best work well before there were Hugo Awards or even a Worldcon.

Fancyclopedia 1 by Jack Speer is the first attempt to chronicle fandom, while it was still in its very early years and another highly deserving finalist. It's also a project that still exists 75 years later, now as an online Wiki.

Finally, we have two fine essays: “The Science-Fiction Field” by Leigh Brackett is an article from Writers Digest that is remarkably difficult to locate (and we certainly tried). Supposedly, she talks about her experiences as a woman writing science fiction during the golden age, so I hope someone who has a copy will put it up for Retro Hugo voters to read.

“The Works of H.P. Lovecraft: Suggestions for a Critical Appraisal” by Fritz Leiber, published in the fanzine The Acolyte, does exactly what it says on the tin. I suspect I am at least partly responsible for this nomination, because I stumbled across The Acolyte, when I checked out Fritz Leiber's 1944 publication credits, found the zine online at Fanac.org, liked what I read and entered the essay as well as the fanzine and Fritz Leiber as a fanwriter into the spreadsheet. Since the essay, The Acolyte and Fritz Leiber as fanwriter  all got nominations, I suspect other Retro Hugo nominators must have agreed.

Diversity count: 5 men, 1 woman, 1 international writer (I'm counting immigrants Willy Ley and George Gamow as Americans here)

 

Best Graphic Story/Comic:

Flash Gordon is represented twice in this category with "Battle for Tropica" and "Triumph in Tropica". These are the last Flash Gordon strips drawn and written by Alex Raymond who was about to depart for Rip Kirby, so I really hope that Alex Raymond, who was the best artist drawing for the newspaper strips at the time, will finally get the recognition he deserves.

Buck Rogers is the other newspaper strip on the ballot and was the original science fiction adventure strip, long before Flash Gordon came along. Though I have to admit that I always preferred Flash to Buck.

The Spirit is one of the great classics of the era, even though the nominated story was not drawn by Will Eisner. But it was written by Manly Wade Wellman.

Carl Barks was the most iconic artist ever to draw Donald Duck and pretty much created the world that is known as "Entenhausen" (duckville) in German. His comics are classics and I'm really glad to see him honoured here.

The American superhero comic is represented here by the Superman story “The Mysterious Mr. Mxyztplk” which introduces a classic antagonist.

Good choices all and also a nice look at the variety of comics available during this era from serialised newspaper strips via superheroes to funny animals. Though I'm a bit sad that The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician didn't make the ballot again.

Diversity count: All men, all Americans

 

Best Dramatic Presentation Short:

There is no Best Dramatic Presentation Long category at the Retro Hugos this year, so works like The Uninvited, Between Two Worlds, The Halfway House, the stage production of Huis Clos or The Phantom and Captain America serials sadly don't get a shot at winning a Retro Hugo.

One of the Best Dramatic Presentation Short finalists, The Canterville Ghost, is actually a longform finalist at 95 minutes, though it still falls within the grace range. It's also a nice adaptation of a fantasy classic.

The Curse of the Cat People is a sequel to the 1943 Retro Hugo finalist Cat People and often considered superior to the original. It Happened Tomorrow is a time paradox movie adapted from a story by Lord Dunsany and a minor classic.

House of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man's Revenge are the sort of Universal extruded monster product that was typical for the SFF cinema of the era. Both are also the upteenth inferior sequel to a good original. Sorry to be so direct, but everybody involved with these films is dead anyway and it's unlikely I will insult the ghost of Curt Siodmak or Ford Bebee. The Invisible Man's Revenge is also the only 1945 Retro Hugo finalist that is not listed in the spreadsheet. For some reason, we completely missed this one, though Retro Hugo nominators did not.

Donovan's Brain, finally, is an example of an art form that was enormously popular during this period, but that is rarely represented at the Retro Hugos, namely the radio drama. I'm always happy to see a vintage radio drama on the shortlist, because they are often overlooked compared to movies and are also generally better than the extruded monster product that so often dominates the Dramatic Presentation categories at the Retro Hugos.

No diversity count, too many people are involved in making movies or radio dramas.

 

Best Editor Short:

There are absolutely no surprises in this category. John W. Campbell is the oft nominated and just as often winning editor of Astounding Science Fiction. He will probably not be on top of my ballot, if only because someone else deserves a shot for once, but he definitely deserves to be here.

Dorothy McIllwraith's tenure at Weird Tales may have been overshadowed by Farnsworth Wright's, but I have been very impressed by the output of Weird Tales during the 1940s. A highly deserving finalist I would love to see win for once.

W. Scott Peacock was the editor of Planet Stories, while Oscar J. Friend edited Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Captain Future. Their respective magazines may be overlooked compared to Astounding and Weird Tales, but I found the stories I reviewed from Planet Stories, Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories consistently entertaining. In fact, those lesser mags are probably more consistent with regard to quality than Astounding, for while Astounding published a lot of classics, they also published a lot of dross.

Raymond A. Palmer's time as the editor of Amazing Stories is sadly overshadowed by the Shaver mystery nonsense. But the first Shaver mystery story wasn't even published until the following year and in 1944, Palmer was doing good work. I reviewed fewer stories from Amazing than from Astounding or Planet Stories or Weird Tales, but the ones I reviewed were all good.

I'm a bit surprised to see Mary Gnaedinger, editor of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, on the ballot. Not because she didn't do good work, she did. But Famous Fantastic Mysteries published no new fiction in 1944, only reprints.

Diversity count: 4 men, 2 women

 

Best Professional Artist:

Iconic Weird Tales cover artist Margaret Brundage is a frequent finalist in this category, but so far hasn't won. I really hope that this will be her year, if only because she's about to move out of SFF art and we won't have many more chances to recognise her. Besides, her cover and interior artwork for the May 1944 issue of Weird Tales, illustrating "Iron Mask" by Robert Bloch, is lovely and the woman on the cover is even fully dressed for once. Not that I mind the nudes - few people painted better nudes than Margaret Brundage. But it seems to me as if her work is just a little too sexy for modern sensibilities.

Earle Bergey was responsible for the striking and lurid covers of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories and Captain Future, wherein men are manly, women were brass bikinis and monsters are bug-eyed and menace damsels in distress. His work is great fun and few artists were as good at painting bug-eyed monsters and ladies in brass bikinis as Earle Bergey. Who cares that most of the scenes he illustrated never happened that way in the actual story.

Boris Dolgov provided the interior art for many an issue of Weird Tales. His work is always striking and atmospheric, particularly his two page spread for "Ride the EL to Doom" by Allison V. Harding and I'm really happy to see him recognised.

Matt Fox is responsible for the cover of the November 1944 issue of Weird Tales, which depicts Cthulhu in all his terrible glory. I think this is the only time Cthulhu ever appeared on the cover. For some reason, Weird Tales' most famous characters - Conan, Cthulhu, Solomon Kane, Jules de Grandin - hardly ever appeared on the cover of the magazine, probably because Margaret Brundage would rather draw semi-nude women, who also sold better than tentacled monstrosities.

Paul Orban provided the interior art for many an issue of Astounding Science Fiction as well as for The Shadow and Doc Savage. He is not listed in the spreadsheet, so here is another 1945 Retro Hugo finalist we missed.

William Timmins, finally, was the cover artist for Astounding Science Fiction throughout WWII and also provided interior art. I have to admit that prefer the more lurid end of the pulp market, but Timmins did provide some striking covers for Astounding in 1944 such as this one and this one.

Diversity count: 5 men, 1 woman. All American, though Dolgov and Orban are immigrants.

 

Best Fanzine:

Futurian War Digest, Shangri L'Affaires, Voice of the Imagi-Nation and Le Zombie are all repeat finalists in this category and they all did good work. Diablerie is completely new to me, though it is listed on the spreadsheet.

The Acolyte, finally, is a zine focussed on weird fiction and the works of H.P. Lovecraft that I discovered when I checked out the 1944 publication credits for Fritz Leiber and Anthony Boucher. So I checked it out on Fanac.org and was quite impressed with what I found, so I put it on the spreadhseet. Evidently, other Retro Hugo nominators agreed with me, because it made the ballot.

Diversity count: 8 men, 1 woman

 

Best Fan Writer:

Once again, we have several repeat finalists in this category. Jack Speer, Bob Tucker and Harry Warner Jr. have all been nominated in this category before, as was Myrtle R. Douglas a.k.a. Morojo, who invented cosplay and proves that women were always part of our genre. Jack Speer deserves particular recognition here, because he wrote and published the first Fancyclopedia in 1944, a project which still exists, though now online.

J. Michael Rosenblum was the editor of Futurian War Digest, a British fanzine I find consistently impressive. But for some reason, he has never been a Retro Hugo finalist himself, so I'm happy that the nominators rectified that oversight.

Fritz Leiber Jr. really needs no introduction, considering that he published countless of excellent novels and stories over his fifty-year career, won six Hugos, one Retro Hugo and countless other awards and co-created two of the most beloved fantasy characters of all time in Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. So what is he doing on the Best Fanwriter ballot?

Well, I suspect I might have something to do with that. I'm a big Fritz Leiber fan, so I checked ISFDB for eligible 1944 works and came across not only a handful fo stories for Astounding (no Fafhrd and Gray Mouser in 1944, sadly, because the demise of Unknown the year before left them temporarily homeless) but also a story, an essay and a poem, all published in the fanzine The Acolyte. As I said above, I checked out The Acolyte, liked what I saw and put it on the spreadsheet. In addtion to his essay with suggestions for a critical appraisal of Lovecraft's work, which is nominated in the Best Related Work category, Fritz Leiber also contributed a short story entitled "Ervool" and a poem to The Acolyte. The poem, entitled "The Gray Mouser", will probably be familiar to quite a few readers, because it has been reprinted in the various Fafhrd and Gray Mouser collections over the years. So it isn't quite correct that Fafhrd and Gray Mouser were taking an extended break during the  late 1940s and early 1950s, because Gray Mouser at least was still active in a poem first published in a fairly obscure fanzine. Coincidentally, this poem also appears to be the first time that the wizard Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, a recurring character in the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, was mentioned in print, since I don't recall Sheelba appearing in any of the stories published in Unknown. You can find the issue of The Acolyte which contains Fritz Leiber's fan writing output for 1944, online at Fanac.org BTW.

Diversity count: 5 men, 1 woman, 1 international writer

ETA: The good folks of Fanac.org has put together a list with links to samples of all nominated fanzines and fan writers to make voting easier.

It seems to me as if all the hard work I (and many others) put into the 1945 Retro Hugo Recommendation spreadsheet and Retro Science Fiction Reviews did make an impact, the spreadsheet probably more so than Retro Science Fiction Reviews. Cause I don't think that we would have had the Best Series and Best Related Work categories at all without the spreadsheet and the three nominations linked to The Acolyte can probably also be attributed to the spreadsheet.

I will be reviewing the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists that I missed the first time around and I'll definitely do a recommendation spreadsheet and Retro Reviews for the 1947 Retro Hugos, because the 1946 Retro Hugos were already awarded in 1996.

And that's it for the analysis of the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists.

Retro Reviews: A Preliminary Post-Mortem

In keeping with the post-mortem theme, I will be illustrating this post with pulp covers featuring skulls, skeletons and corpses

On Friday, March 13, nominations closed for the 2020 Hugo and 1945 Retro Hugo Awards. It will be a few weeks until we know who the finalists are, so it's time for a preliminary post-mortem of the Retro Science Fiction Reviews project. 
 

As I wrote in my introductory post, the aim of Retro Science Fiction Reviews and the 1945 Retro Hugo Recommendation Spreadsheet was to aid nominators for the 1945 Retro Hugo Awards, to crowdsource recommendations and offer reviews to allow nominators to make more informed decisions rather than defaulting to the most famous names.

Did the project succeed? Well, we won't know for sure until the finalists are announced. But the Retro Hugo Recommendation Spreadsheet quickly filled up with recommendations I hadn't entered.

As for Retro Science Fiction Reviews, all in all I posted twenty-nine reviews of works eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos on this blog in two and a half months. Twenty-six of those were my own reviews, three were guest reviews by Don Briago. Steve J.Wright also jumped in and reviewed a whole lot of eligible works on his blog. Many thanks to Steve and Don, by the way. You're both awesome.

Did we manage to cover everything? Of course not. And considering the sheer amount of material that was published in the American science fiction magazines and beyond in 1944, that would have been impossible. 

So let's take a look at what we covered at Retro Science Fiction Reviews:

Including the guest reviews, we covered three novels, two novellas, eight novelettes and sixteen short stories.

Regarding magazines, Astounding Science Fiction and Weird Tales tie for the top spot with eight stories reviewed each. Planet Stories follows with six stories reviewed, then Amazing Stories with three and finally Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories with one story each. Two of the three novels reviewed were not published in a magazine. I did not get around to reviewing any stories published in Captain Future, Fantastic Adventures, Doc Savage, G-8 and His Battle Aces, The Shadow or the Canadian edition of Super Science Stories nor in the general interest pulps such as Argosy. Meanwhile, Famous Fantastic Mysteries only published reprints in 1944, so they were out anyway.

So let's take a look at the authors: Ten of the works reviewed were written by women, seventeen by men, one was a collaboration between a male and a female author. So a little over a third of the stories reviewed Retro Science Fiction Reviews were written by women, which is quite high for the golden age. 

Breaking it down by author, Ray Bradbury leads with five stories reviewed, followed by Leigh Brackett with four. Isaac Asimov is in third place with three stories reviewed. For Leigh Brackett and Isaac Asimov, I reviewed their entire SFF output in 1944. C.L. Moore, Allison V. Harding, Frederik Pohl and Clifford D. Simak had two stories reviewed each. Edmond Hamilton, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Manly Wade Wellman, Henry Kuttner, Olaf Stapledon, Dorothy Quick, Dorothy B. Hughes, Alice-Mary Schnirring and Stanton A. Coblentz had one story reviewed each. 

So what did I learn from the Retro Reviews project? For starters, that there were a lot of really good stories published in 1944 and not just the enduring classics either. No, a lot of little to unknown stories that have rarely to never been reprinted turned out to be very good as well. Even the weaker stories were entertaining at the very least. However, I have to admit that I abandoned some stories that failed to grip me after a few pages, because I have only so much time and didn't want to waste it on a story that bored me. That said, I only abandoned two or three stories. 

Meanwhile, guest reviewer Don Briago got unlucky with the near future thriller The Delicate Ape byacclaimed crime and noir author Dorothy B. Hughes, a novel neither he (nor anybody else, it seems) likes. However, they can't all be winners. 

According to received wisdom, Astounding Science Fiction was the best of the golden age science fiction magazines due to the high number of classic stories John W. Campbell published. Weird Tales is held in high regard, while Farnsworth Wright was editor, but is less well regarded after Dorothy McIllwraith took over in 1940. Meanwhile, magazines like Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories or Startling Stories are usually considered lesser venues, the contents as lurid as the covers with the occasional good story. 

As so often with received wisdom about past periods of science fiction, this does not match what you find when you actually read the magazines in question. True, Astounding Science Fiction published a lot of classic stories during 1944 and the entire golden age. They also published a lot of not so great stories, only that those have been largely forgotten. 

However, I also noticed that while the good Astounding stories, such as "No Woman Born" by C.L. Moore or the City cycle by Clifford D. Simak or the Foundation stories by Isaac Asimov (though the two 1944 Foundation stories were lesser entries in the series), were very good indeed, the gap between the good and the not-so-good stories was larger in Astounding than in the other magazines. Because the lesser stories in Weird Tales or Planet Stories or Amazing Stories (and Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, I assume, even though the sample size is too small) were always at the very least entertaining. And some little known stories from those magazines turned out to be very good indeed, such as "Morgue Ship" by RayBradbury or "Iron Mask" by Robert Bloch. Meanwhile, the lesser known Astounding stories were inevitably little known for a very good reason, namely because they had aged badly or just weren't very good to begin with. It's probably telling that all of the stories I abandoned were from Astounding.

I suspect the reason for this discrepancy is Astounding's focus on idea stories and hard science fiction. Because idea stories and hard science fiction tend to age badly, once the ideas and the science are obsolete. For quite often, the central idea is all those stories have. Without the idea, there really is no story. And the stories that endure either have a central idea that still appeals (this applies to the Foundation and City stories and also to "No Woman Born") or have something going for them beside the central idea ("Catch That Rabbit"by Isaac Asimov). 

Meanwhile, the various adventure stories set in what I've called the pulp science fiction shared universe are still entertaining as spy thrillers or crime stories or adventure stories, even if you know that science is nonsense and that the solar system doesn't actually look like that. And Weird Tales doesn't give a damn about scientific accuracy anyway, even though they did publish science fiction on occasion. But the focus of the magazine is on entertaining horror and fantasy stories and Weird Tales was very good indeed at what it did. In fact, I prefer Weird Tales under Dorothy McIllwraith to Weird Tales under Farnsworth Wright, for even though Wright published many classic stories, I can only tolerate the often overblown purple prose of Weird Tales in the 1930s in small doses. 

It's not exactly news that genre distinctions were more fluid during the pulp era. And the reason I haven't done a genre or subgenre breakdown of the stories reviewed is because it's impossible. In some cases it's obvious, e.g. "Desertion" by Clifford D. Simak or "Catch That Rabbit" by Isaac Asimov are unambiguously science fiction, while "Hoofs" by Manly Wade Wellman or "The Dear Departed" by Alice-Mary Schnirring are unambiguously fantasy. With horror, it gets more difficult, because a lot of the stories I reviewed were also horror and not just the ones published in Weird Tales either. 

However, what makes "Killdozer!" by Theodore Sturgeon, a story about a possessed and murderous bulldozer, science fiction and "Ride the El to Doom" by Allison V. Harding, a story about a possessed and murderous elevated train, fantasy? The fact that "Killdozer!" was published in Astounding and "Ride the El to Doom" in Weird Tales? That fact that Sturgeon offers a pseudoscientific explanation why bulldozer Daisy starts killing people, while Harding doesn't offer one? And then you have stories like "The Veil of Astellar" by Leigh Brackett about a guilt-ridden space vampire or "Iron Mask" by Robert Bloch about a rabidly francophobic medieval robot attempting to influence the outcome of WWII, which are nigh impossible to classify.

However, the stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project also draw on influences from beyond the three speculative sister genres science fiction, fantasy and horror. And so a lot of those stories also contained elements from other genres. Oddly enough, the western was not one of them, in spite of all the complaints about science fiction stories that were just westerns in space during the 1940s and 1950s. But while I don't doubt that stories like those about Bat Durston whose adventures would never be found in Galaxy were published somewhere in 1944, not one of the twenty-nine stories reviewed for the Retro Reviews project matches that description.

Instead, the biggest influence comes from the crime, mystery and thriller meta-genre and its many subgenres. And so there were a lot of stories that were also spy thrillers, mysteries or noir tales. War fiction, whether directly about WWII or indirectly about some other war in the far future, was also a big influence as well, but then military science fiction was a thing long before Robert A. Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers. But I also came across elements borrowed from gothic romance or contemporary literary fiction. The pulps were one huge genre mash-up petri dish and this extended also beyond the pages of the magazines, as e.g. The Delicate Ape by Dorothy B. Hughes, a WWII influenced near future spy thriller shows.

Last year, I wrote a series of blogposts inspired by the finalists for the 1944 Retro Hugos, in which I noted that a lot of the common assumptions about the golden age of science fiction simply aren't true or apply only to a minority of stories. Let's have a quote:

Now we all have an idea of Golden Age science fiction in our heads. Hard science fiction with fairly rigorous science, at least by the standards of the time, the unquestioning belief in science and progress, the unquestioning acceptance of colonialism and imperialism, future histories dominated by great men (and of course, they’re always men), square-jawed space heroes and brilliant scientists, competent characters – white, male and American, of course – using their brains and occasionally, their rayguns, too, to solve problems, women – if present at all – as damsels in distress to be groped by bug-eyed monsters and rescued by the competent man, people of colour and LGBT people absent altogether, aliens as the other to be either fought and destroyed or at best patronised, humanity inevitably triumphant.

For starters, hard science fiction stories, while certainly present, were actually a minority among the stories I reviewed. And even the supposedly hard science fiction stories contain a lot of handwavium or meaningless technobabble. Psychohistory and positronic brains are just scientific sounding terms Isaac Asimov made up. The descriptions of the surface of Jupiter in Clifford D. Simak's "Desertion" may be as accurate as possible by the standards of the day, but the machine that transforms humans (and dogs) into Jovian lifeforms is pure magic science.  

As for the competent man who triumph due to their superior brains, characters like Limmar Ponyets or Hober Mallow (who is neither white nor straight) from Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories certainly match that description, as do Rake Allan from Edmond Hamilton's "The Free-Lance of Space" or Click Hathaway and Sam Burnett from Ray Bradbury's "The Monster Maker" and "Morgue Ship" respectively. But while robot troubleshooters Mike Donovan and Gregory Powell from Isaac Asimov's "Catch That Rabbit" do solve the problem at hand, I wouldn't call them competent – instead, they're very much idiots who get lucky. Jerome Webster from Clifford D. Simak's "TheHuddling Place" may be a brilliant xenobiologist and doctor, but he is also afflicted by crippling agoraphobia. Maltzer, the scientist from "No Woman Born" by C.L. Moore, is a depressed wreck and the only competent person (in the loosest sense of the word) in the story is Deirdre, the brain in a robot body. Meanwhile, Rick Urquart, the drifter turned unlikely saviour of Mars in Leigh Brackett's Shadow Over Mars is mainly competent at getting himself into trouble and Ciaran, wandering balladeer and petty criminal from Leigh Brackett's "The Jewel of Bas", is no one's idea of a competent hero either. And let's not forget Svan, the Venusian terrorist so incompetent that he blew up himself and his resistance cell, because he was too stupid to turn over a piece of paper in Frederik Pohl's "Double-Cross". So in short, competent men (and women) exist in golden age science fiction, but are far from universal.

As for the gender distribution, six of the twenty-nine stories reviewed, including one written by a female author, contained no female characters at all. Four more stories only feature female characters as walk-ons. Often, the women don't even get a name. Only four stories have female protagonists, while only three pass the Bechdel test. That's rather depressing, especially considering that a third of the stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project were written or co-written by women. And at least according to the letter columns in magazines, many of the readers were women as well. Of course, there were also stories with memorable female characters such as Deirdre from "No Woman Born", Mayo McCall from Shadow Over Mars, Mouse from "The Jewel of Bas" or Sharon Countess Monteseco from "Hoofs". Nonetheless, there is room for improvement on the gender front.

On the other hand, the Retro Reviews project has also proven once again that while the science fiction of the golden age was very straight and white, it was not nearly as straight and white as received wisdom would have you believe. Six stories featured characters of colour, in five of those six the character of colour was a main character. Oddly enough, one character I had always assumed was a person of colour, Gregory Powell from Isaac Asimov's "Catch That Rabbit" and the other Powell and Donovan stories, never has his skin colour mentioned anywhere. The only description of him that we get is that he wears a moustache. I suspect I pictured him as black, because there was a popular actor at the time I first read the story who was named Gregory, had a moustache and was black, so the name and the scant description brought to mind that actor.

With LGBTQ characters, the pickings are even slimmer. For starters, there are no openly LGBTQ characters in those stories at all. However, there are two stories, Isaac Asimov's"The Big and the Little" and Ray Bradbury's "The Monster Maker", where it is implied that the main character is not straight. If I'd gotten around to reviewing "The Devil's Book Keeper", the 1944 entry in Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin occult detective series, we would probably have had three instances, because several people have remarked on the homoerotic vibes between de Grandin and his mystery-solving partner Dr. Trowbridge. In the case of Asimov' Hober Mallow (who is also one of the six characters of colour mentioned above, since his skin is explicitly described as brown), the homoerotic implications are also pretty blatant, because Mallow spends his free time hanging out nude in the solarium of his new home with his friend/sounding board Ankor Twael, talking politics, while Twael puts a cigar in Mallow's mouth. And yes, I know that sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, but come on.

So in short, yes, golden age speculative fiction was pretty straight, white and male, but there were exceptions in all the magazines and sometimes, a writer even managed to sneak in a character of colour who is implied to be gay right underneath John W. Campbell's nose. 

 

So what about the unquestioning belief in science and progress and the unquestioning acceptance of colonialism and imperialism? Again, such stories exist, but they're far from universal. The Foundation stories are probably the worst culprits, because the Foundation uses their superior knowledge to bully and steamroller everybody else into submission. But that's okay, because they're the good guys, they're really smart and they're trying to stave off the Dark Ages. It also helps that the "collapse of galactic civilisation" bits in the Foundation stories are fairly dark and depressing, so you never even question the Foundation's goals, because the alternative looks so much worse. And indeed, this may be why the Foundation stories have been such a strong influence on so many intelligent kids, some of whom went on to draw all the wrong conclusions from those stories and also never revisited them as adults able to realise, "Uhm, actually the Foundation are arseholes, even if they may be right." And there is really no reason to believe that Hari Seldon or rather his hologram is right about anything except that Asimov tells us that Seldon is right.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Clifford D. Simak's City cycle, where humanity manages to isolate itself into eventual extinction, as dogs and ants take over. Or "No Woman Born", where a scientist is in such despair over having engaged in Frankensteinian research that he tries to kill himself (and fails, because his creation saves him). Or the dying worlds and weary immortals of Leigh Brackett's stories, who also gave us those champions of truth in advertising, the Terran Exploitations Company, who are trying to bleed dry what's left of a dying Mars. So no, golden age science fiction was not always optimistic about science and progress either. 

Nor did golden age science fiction accept colonialism and imperialism without questions. Particularly Leigh Brackett's protagonists often side with oppressed natives against the expansionism and colonialism of Terran empire. Frederik Pohl also addressed the subject in "Double-Cross", though in Pohl is more cynical and portrays the rebelling natives and the Terran colonisers as equally bad. Considering the two Frederik Pohl stories I reviewed for this project, it's notable that in both stories, the interplanetary rebels are not the good guys. For someone like me who grew up on Star Wars, that was a huge surprise, because I automatically equal rebels in science fiction with the good guys. I also can't help but wonder whether Pohl's disenchantment with the Communist groups of which he was a member contributed to his rather cynical view of would-be rebels and revolutionaries.

Not a skeleton or skull, but a prime example of the bug-eyed monster menacing a young lady.

As for the infamous bug-eyed monsters, several 1944 magazine covers feature monsters, bug-eyed or otherwise, menacing scantily clad heroines. However, of the twenty-nine stories reviewed for this project, not a single one featured a bug-eyed monster. Even if there was a bug-eyed monster on the cover, there often wasn't one in the story itself. The closest any of the reviewed stories came to a bug-eyed monster was the apelike anthropoids from Leigh Brackett's Shadow Over Mars and those are far more interested in able-bodied men to enslave than in damsels in distress to grope. There is also the alien femme fatale creature in Brackett's"Terror Out of Space", but that creature is never seen in its original form, nor is she remotely interested in females of any species. In fact, I suspect that the bug-eyed monster is more of a cover art cliché than something that actually appeared in any golden age science fiction stories.

So what happens next? I will definitely keep Retro Science Fiction Reviews open. For starters, the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists will be announced soon. And since I doubt that I caught all of the finalists, I will review the ones I missed. Furthermore, there will also be future years of Retro Hugos to cover. Finally, I can also review older SFF works independent of the Retro Hugos.

I'm also always happy about guest reviews. So if there's a vintage speculative fiction work you always wanted to review, let me know.