{"id":2439,"date":"2020-06-04T07:14:33","date_gmt":"2020-06-04T02:14:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/futurespasteditions.com\/?p=2439"},"modified":"2020-06-04T07:14:33","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T02:14:33","slug":"the-best-of-amazing-stories-the-1931-anthology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futurespasteditions.com\/?p=2439","title":{"rendered":"THE BEST OF AMAZING STORIES: The 1931 Anthology"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\r\n\r\n
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1931 saw the U.S. and the rest of the world sunk low, despairing in the depths of the Great Depression. But there was rejoicing at Amazing Stories<\/em> because all in all, story for story, 1931 was Amazing\u2019s best year ever. Among these stories, the now-classic works we have chosen for this anthology are:<\/p>\n

\u201cPrima Donna 1980,\u201d a dazzling story of art, ambition, tragedy, business, television, and song, filled with very human characters, that inevitably reminds one of C.L. Moore\u2019s \u201cNo Woman Born.\u201d Written by Bernard Brown, a motion picture sound technician, Bleiler rates \u201cPrima Donna 1980,\u201d as \u201cone of the best stories\u201d in the history of Amazing.<\/p>\n

Patrick Dutton's masterpiece of style, \u201cThe Beautiful Bacillus,\u201d a unique work straddling the line between humor and tragedy. Bleiler pronounced Dutton\u2019s story beautifully written in \u201ca complex, tightly organized prose, handled with considerable grace and elegance\u201d\u2026\u201csubtler than Lovecraft\u201d and \u201ccertainly worth rereading, [it is] one of the few stories in early Amazing that deserved to be preserved,\u201d yet has never been reprinted until now.<\/p>\n

A. Hyatt Verrill's \u201cThe Exterminator,\u201d an O.-Henry-ish short story which anthologist and critic Sam Moskowitz reports \u201cimmediately became one of the most popular stories of that length in the history of the magazine.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of David H. Keller MD\u2019s top-notch satires that still remains relevant today, \u201cService First,\u201d proposing an acid-tinged solution to rising rents (a problem even then): an aerial mobile home that only came down for refueling.<\/p>\n

\"The Incredible Formula\u201d by Paul Ernst, a tale of the chemically resurrected dead replacing workers in plants and fields across the U. S., which also aspired to something more than the mere unfolding of a new scientific discovery, with its carefully crafted economic subtheme and \u201cunusually cynical, unexpected end (Bleiler).\u201d<\/p>\n

Raymond Z. Gallun's \u201cThe Lunar Chrysalis,\u201d featuring an intelligent mollusk civilization on the moon, a fleet of spaceships aimed at the Earth, a desperate attempt by two explorers to escape and warn the home world, and a surprise ending few readers of the time could have anticipated\u2014\u201cnicely told\u201d writes Bleiler.<\/p>\n

Paul Bolton's \u201cThe Time Hoaxers,\u201d about which little can be said without giving too much away, except that nothing is what it seems at first or second glance, and the truth is only revealed in a final coda.<\/p>\n

Finally, Murray Leinster, who had been writing science fiction for more than a decade (and under his real name, Will F. Jenkins, had been selling memetic fiction to slicks like The Saturday Evening Post<\/em> and Collier\u2019s<\/em>, where he routinely appeared next to Pulitzer Prize winners), contributes \u201cThe Power Planet,\u201d a story which reached heights that would rarely (if ever) be reached again until Campbell assumed the helm at Astounding,<\/em> and combined politics with \u201ca surprisingly good method for gathering solar power in orbit, then transferring it to Earth\u201d (Technovelgy.com), plus a sophisticated sex triangle integral to the plot, \u201cstrength of characterization, and accuracy of prediction that stand head and shoulders above other\u201d stories (Wollheim).<\/p>\n

As with the earlier volumes in the series, we have included all the original accompanying illustrations for each story we have selected, as well as the original magazine blurbs. 1931: it was a very good year for Amazing Stories,<\/em> we think, and helped us create a very good anthology.<\/p>\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n \t\t\r\n\t\t\r\n

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