Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013
Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013
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-