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krpalmerA while ago now, I was in a small second-hand book store tending towards older books, glancing over the science fiction titles, when I wound up looking at a somewhat garish cover from the 1970s with the awareness I'd come across a second chance. Years before, when I'd been volunteering at a different charity used book store and helping to reorganize its jumbled shelves, I'd noticed "The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus" (in what I believe was a later cover design), but before I could think myself entitled to purchase a bit of the store's stock someone else had bought it. In the time that had passed, I'd picked up different anthologies with a few of the stories I had noticed in the table of contents, but I still took the second chance. Then, though, it did take a while to get around to reading the book.
The paperback was a compilation of three anthologies from the 1960s edited by Brian Aldiss, who used the introduction to develop in brief a theme he'd expanded on in length elsewhere, of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein being a crucial formative work of science fiction, which also let him mention a theme of "nemesis clobbering hubris." As I worked into the volume, I did get a definite feeling Aldiss had tilted towards pessimistic stories, and the impact of them might have been increased by twist endings. With that important caveat, though, the stories were still interesting in their 1950s way, even if the social satire and great big computers were also joined by not a lot of female characters filling any sort of role other than variants on "housewife"...
By now, things were a mix of stories I remembered, stories I realised I'd read before, and some "new" ones, but of those new stories one that caught my attention was "Pyramid" by Robert Abernathy. It had quite a bit of ecological consciousness, and even a female character in a leadership role (although this character was a long-lived alien, the better to observe what was happening). Always checking the list of acknowledgements at the front of the volume, I noticed the story had come from Astounding Science Fiction, and decided I could see how it could be seen as including what I've heard as being one of John W. Campbell's pet themes, that humans are inherently able to outcompete aliens, but just might include a bit of a subversive twist to it. On learning this anthology had recently been used as the base for a new volume including stories from the four decades following, I checked its table of contents and was a little disappointed to see "Pyramid" wasn't included.
The paperback was a compilation of three anthologies from the 1960s edited by Brian Aldiss, who used the introduction to develop in brief a theme he'd expanded on in length elsewhere, of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein being a crucial formative work of science fiction, which also let him mention a theme of "nemesis clobbering hubris." As I worked into the volume, I did get a definite feeling Aldiss had tilted towards pessimistic stories, and the impact of them might have been increased by twist endings. With that important caveat, though, the stories were still interesting in their 1950s way, even if the social satire and great big computers were also joined by not a lot of female characters filling any sort of role other than variants on "housewife"...
By now, things were a mix of stories I remembered, stories I realised I'd read before, and some "new" ones, but of those new stories one that caught my attention was "Pyramid" by Robert Abernathy. It had quite a bit of ecological consciousness, and even a female character in a leadership role (although this character was a long-lived alien, the better to observe what was happening). Always checking the list of acknowledgements at the front of the volume, I noticed the story had come from Astounding Science Fiction, and decided I could see how it could be seen as including what I've heard as being one of John W. Campbell's pet themes, that humans are inherently able to outcompete aliens, but just might include a bit of a subversive twist to it. On learning this anthology had recently been used as the base for a new volume including stories from the four decades following, I checked its table of contents and was a little disappointed to see "Pyramid" wasn't included.