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Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013

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GUEST EDITORIAL Jamie Todd Rubin<br />

GEM HUNTING<br />

If you have ever read Jack McDevitt’s wonderful<br />

Alex Benedict series, then you<br />

know that Alex is a treasure-hunter. Along<br />

with his companion, Chase Kolpath, he<br />

seeks relics of the distant past (sometimes<br />

thous<strong>and</strong>s of years in the past) for his clients.<br />

His clients pay for these relics, of course, but<br />

I get the idea that Alex is not in it for the<br />

money. He loves unraveling the mysteries<br />

<strong>and</strong> holding these treasures in his h<strong>and</strong>, even<br />

if only for a short time, admiring them for<br />

what they represent.<br />

While I am no Alex Benedict, I feel the<br />

same way about science fiction stories that<br />

Alex feels about the relics he seeks out. Each<br />

time I begin reading a story I’ve never read<br />

before, I get a little bit of a rush. It is similar<br />

to the feeling I get just before the first pitch<br />

of a baseball game, wondering whether or<br />

not I will witness history: a perfect game,<br />

perhaps, or maybe a no-hitter? I do believe<br />

there are “perfect” stories, but unlike the<br />

baseball game, “perfect” in this sense is relative<br />

to the reader’s tastes. Ray Bradbury’s<br />

“The Rocket Man” is one example. Harlan Ellison’s<br />

“The Man Who Rowed Christopher<br />

Columbus Ashore” is another. The newest<br />

member of this short list is Ken Liu’s “The Paper<br />

Menagerie.”<br />

Perfect stories are extremely rare, whatever<br />

your definition of perfection. I don’t expect<br />

to find perfect stories, just like I don’t<br />

expect to see a pitcher throw a perfect game.<br />

Lately, I’ve been actively looking for what I<br />

call “gems.” Gems are those great stories that<br />

aren’t talked about much. If they are older<br />

stories, perhaps they have been forgotten or<br />

overlooked. For the last two years I have<br />

been seeking gems in this magazine, albeit<br />

seventy years in the past. Beginning with the<br />

May 1939 issue of Astounding, I have been<br />

2<br />

reading every word of every issue, cover-tocover,<br />

on a hunt for these lost stories. It takes<br />

me about two weeks to get through an issue,<br />

after which I write a blog post about it. I call<br />

this my “Vacation in the Golden Age.” What<br />

has been truly remarkable about this experience,<br />

much to my surprise, is the number of<br />

gems that I’ve uncovered in the first forty issues<br />

alone.<br />

<strong>Analog</strong>/Astounding (I’ll refer to the magazine<br />

as ASF going forward) has, in its 82 year<br />

history, published thous<strong>and</strong>s of stories. The<br />

magazine, under John W. Campbell, was utterly<br />

dominant in the 1940s. Many of the stories<br />

from that decade <strong>and</strong> since are now classics<br />

in the genre, <strong>and</strong> it would undoubtedly<br />

surprise younger fans to learn that these stories<br />

were first published in ASF. For instance,<br />

there have been two movies called The<br />

Thing, both of which were based on the<br />

1938 ASF story “Who Goes There?” by Don<br />

A. Stuart. Stuart was a pseudonym for Campbell.<br />

Dune was made into a movie <strong>and</strong> a<br />

miniseries <strong>and</strong> was based upon Frank Herbert’s<br />

novel, which was originally a series<br />

that appeared in ASF in the 1960s. There are<br />

many other examples of these ASF classics,<br />

from Isaac Asimov’s Robot <strong>and</strong> Foundation<br />

stories in the 1940s to Anne McCaffrey’s<br />

Hugo Award-winning. “Weyr Search” in<br />

1967.<br />

The gems that I’ve been seeking don’t often<br />

coincide with the classics we know today.<br />

A Venn diagram would certainly show<br />

some small overlap, but it is the gems that<br />

don’t overlap with the classics that I find<br />

most interesting. These stories, one <strong>and</strong> all,<br />

have been remarkable not just because they<br />

are outst<strong>and</strong>ing stories, but because they are<br />

seemingly forgotten. I hear almost no one<br />

talking about them at conventions. I read lit-

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