e are meant to like The Good Old Stuff. It may not be easy to. Let us see if it's possible.
After almost 15 years at the helm of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Gardner Dozois has become a famous editor of the good new stuff--indeed, the anthology under review is due to be sequeled in a couple of months by one with that very title: The Good New Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition. In The Good Old Stuff, he gives us an anthology of what he has chosen to call adventure SF originally published between 1948 to 1971 (the sequel will cover 1977 to 1998). Stories from before World War II are (he says in his introduction) almost always too crude for modern readers, and anyway they come from another planet.
Those earlier stories come out of the another-planet years of Hugo Gernsback; they come out of the rag-and-bone shop of American SF as an independent genre. In his magisterial Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years (Kent State University Press, 1998), Everett F. Bleiler makes chillingly clear how utterly strange is the world-view exposed in the years his study covers, 1926 to 1936. The SF published in magazines during that time reflects an astonishingly broad dis-ease about the world, xenophobia, racism, catastrophism, and--most astonishingly of all, perhaps--a pathogenic response to the futures that were barrelling down upon the world then, as the Great Depression bit, and as a new World War gathered its iron skirts to pounce.
World War II, of course, did even more to save SF than John W. Campbell, who began to impose his Golden Age of SF on Astounding just before Hitler took over Poland. World War II gave America the world, and by 1948 America was in full possession of the gift. By the time the first story in The Good Old Stuff--"The Rull" by A.E. Van Vogt--was originally published, in the May 1948 issue of Astounding, adventure SF had become essentially comic.
Adventure SF tells us good news
In other words, until about 1960--slightly more than halfway through The Good Old Stuff, a point marked by the inclusion of Cordwainer Smith's unpleasant and creaky "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons," a tale that does not even remotely justify its brilliant title--adventure SF tells us good news. The aliens we meet--in "The Rull," in James H. Schmitz's "The Second Night of Summer" (1950 Galaxy), in L. Sprague de Camp's "The Galton Whistle" (1951 Future Fiction), in Murray Leinster's "Exploration Team" (1956 Astounding), and in Gordon R. Dickson's "The Man in the Mailbag" (1959 Galaxy)--can be either defeated if they prove intractable, or suborned if there's any chance they might become worthy citizens of the human imperium.
Thick, vicious, or subornable, aliens during this happy time stand in pretty stark contrast to us: humans are wry, resilient, ingenious, tough. We are venture capitalists. We show aliens how to do better. Almost always, in the end, we are good-humoured about it. Aliens gaze upon us in awe.
And every single one of these stories takes place a very long way from Earth. The only societies being judged--very severely at times--are alien societies, usually in situ. Nothing resembling the human world is allowed to intrude.
This is fun, of a sort.
What is less fun--what Dozois had really no choice but to include--is what happens when hindsight forces us, against our better judgment, to glance into the mirror these stories hold up to our human faces.
In several of the stories, nubile human females appear--most conspicuously in "The Galton Whistle"; in Leigh Brackett's "The Last Days of Shandakor," which is set on planetary-romance Mars; in Poul Anderson's "The Sky People," set on a post-catastrophe Earth; and in "The Man in the Mailbag." In each case they are either raped or threatened with rape. In some cases ("The Galton Whistle" in particular is sneeringly unpleasant on this score) they are made fun of for resisting.
Humans always win
Fun is also made of aliens (and bureaucrats), wherever the long mortmain paw of John W. Campbell shadowed the hearts and minds of those who wrote for him. In stories written under the influence of this utterly strange and malign creature, an intolerable fug of smugness (it is excruciatingly thick in C.M. Kornbluth's sole Campbellian tale, "That Share of Glory" (1952) and in "Exploration Team") rots the texture of the narrative. Humans always win. Men always win. Technic is all that counts. Interference with venture capitalists is all that keeps humans from owning the entire universe.
All of this is fun of a different sort.
And I don't think we have much fun having it any more.
After 1960, slowly, it all changes. H. Beam Piper's "Gunpowder God" (1964) may fog over and collapse into sermonizing wheedle like its Astounding predecessors, but Ursula K. Le Guin's "Semley's Necklace" (1964 Amazing)--even though Semley herself is mainly dazzling because she looks a lot more Aryan than anyone else on her planet--is a tragedy whose terms are neatly and poisonously inserted into a tale that seems at first little more than Leigh Brackett juiced. Fritz Leiber's "Moon Duel" (1965 If) savagely repudiates every story in the book written before 1960; Roger Zelazny's "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" (1965 The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) does anything but glamorize the creeps who kill a great sea-beast so they can fuck again; and James Tiptree Jr.'s "Mother in the Sky with Diamonds" (1971 Galaxy), which renders our solar system as an almost infinitely seamy and complex barrio, almost certainly belongs in the next volume. It is very far from being her best story; but it's galaxies remote from almost all of the good old stuff gathered here. John W. Campbell quite rightly rejected it from what had become Analog--one suspects it felt altogether too real for the old guy.
Because, right after Tiptree, comes John Varley.
And some good new stuff.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all three of which earned Hugo Awards. He is also a co-founder of the Hugo-winning British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list.
