Amazing Stories was launched in 1926, marking the birth of genre science fiction; in this year, the genre's 78th, one of its most important bodies, the Science Fiction Writers of America, are in their 39th. The SFWA is exactly half as old as the genre. So it's perhaps no coincidence that Tor have re-issued The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Since 1965, the SFWA has provided a road-map for the genre with the annual Nebula Awards for excellence in speculative fiction. The SFWA's members also decided to retrospectively honour the best stories prior to 1965, collected in this anthology.

Published between 1929 and November 1963, these stories provide a chronological one-stop guide to the evolution of genre SF over forty years.

The opening story, Stanley G. Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey," is the creakiest. The tone is breezy and wise-cracking, the plot thin. A Martian helps a stranded Earthman to return to his ship; en route, they meet a multitude of different Martians, and his companion constantly saves the blundering Earthman from disaster. Unsurprisingly, the story has dated badly, but is partly redeemed by sheer invention.

That invention is present too in John W. Campbell's "Twilight." Campbell's belief in humanity's endless resourcefulness is well-known, but the tone of this story of the far future, when curiosity and invention have withered away, is melancholic, almost lachrymose.

So much so did Campbell shape the field as an editor, that his legacy tends to overshadow Campbell the writer. As editor, Campbell bought the next ten stories in the anthology.

"Helen O'Loy," by Lester del Rey, is about a man creating the perfect artificial woman, or to be precise, the perfect artificial housewife. It's easy to mock previous generations' attitudes; when the story was written, female writers only wrote under (male) pseudonyms; when the anthology was compiled, the award winners were always male. But I still can't believe this story was anything but clumsy and outmoded even in 1968.

Onto better stories: One of the pleasures of old SF is in reading the wrong guesses about the future (that were quite logical and reasonable to the writers concerned). Robert A. Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" is perhaps the most interestingly wrong guess of them all. Set in a late 20th century USA where the automobile has been replaced by five-mile-wide moving beltways, it tells of a coup by a small group of the mechanics who maintain them. Highly entertaining.

Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" is the story of an obsessed inventor who creates a tiny race of creatures to use as guinea pigs for experimentation. For all its focus on character, the story remains as gadget-laden as any other Astounding story of the early 1940s. Recommended.

"Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov, was voted the greatest story of all time, ahead of "A Martian Odyssey" -- both a singular honour, and a curse. How does a writer feel when told by his peers that, at the age of 21, he's written the greatest short fiction of all time, overshadowing all his later work?

When I read "Nightfall" many years ago, I didn't think it was as good as many other stories. I still wouldn't vote it the greatest of all time, but I appreciated it more on this reread. Asimov writes about a society on the verge of breakdown: for the first time in millennia, a planet of eternal daylight is plunged into darkness; by portraying calm, reasoned men losing that reason, he gives "Nightfall" an edge often missing from his stories. This is the work of an eminently reasoning man confronting unreason, with electrifying results.

I'm staggered that "The Weapon Shop" balloted as well as it did. A. E. van Vogt arouses strong emotions; some people loathe his fiction, others think him a genius. I'm quite prepared to concede his genius, but this heavy-handed, dislocated, rough piece left me cold.

I loved Kuttner and Moore's "Mimsy Were The Borogoves." Two small children find educational toys from the distant future, which change their thought patterns so much, they effectively become alien. The dialogue crackles, the characters are rounded, and after well-drawn early domesticity, the tension builds superbly. Toys R Us will never seem quite the same.

"Huddling Place" is one of Clifford D. Simak's City stories, which won the International Fantasy Award. A sad, elegiac tale of comfort becoming so comfortable that it becomes imprisonment, the story meditates on growing old, bravery, and duty. Highly recommended.

Next are two differing stories on the same theme. Frederic Brown's "Arena" ticks all the right boxes: well-plotted, the aliens are truly alien, the hero's plight makes for a tense read. Yet the strident WWII propaganda tone of the story is so blatant, it can be offensive.

In contrast, "First Contact" by Murray Leinster is a thoughtful puzzle; humanity's first encounter with an alien species takes place in the Crab Nebula, and poses a dilemma; each ship must get away, to warn their planet, while neither can let the other get away. Leinster emphasizes the fundamental decency of both sides, and makes the resolution satisfying. Interestingly, Leinster's portrayal of the nebula seems to have influenced many Star Trek episodes!

Judith Merrill is the first woman to appear in the anthology (although C.L. Moore pseudonymously co-wrote the Padgett story). "That Only A Mother" draws heavily on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's also the last of the unbroken run of Astounding stories to appear in the anthology -- never since has a single magazine quite so dominated the genre. Merrill shares with many other women a specific eye for detail that's missing from earlier stories.

Next is "Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith. In the distant future, man can only survive space-flight in stasis -- the Great Pain of Space is fatal to conscious humanity; ships are piloted by the Scanners: men who have volunteered to die, and then be re-animated. They are allowed to briefly regain their humanity through "cranching" but while in machine-state have little connection with ordinary humans. Then news comes of a development that will make the Scanners obsolete. . . . Distinctive, dark, complex, and powerful, this is one of the great SF stories of all time. I could devote an entire essay to Paul Linebarger, the man behind Cordwainer Smith, but I'll simply recommend The Rediscovery of Man.

Ray Bradbury's "Mars is Heaven!" returns to the Red Planet, but instead of Weinbaum's Sense of Wonder, Bradbury is more interested in scaring the reader silly, in a story that's pure Cold-War paranoia. 1920s Ohio has been transplanted, and soon the members of the expedition start to meet long-dead friends and relatives. The plot is clichéd, and in lesser hands the story would be eminently forgettable; Bradbury's language makes it soar.

"The Little Black Bag" by Cyril Kornbluth is another story about a device from the future, but Kornbluth uses the opportunity to take scathing swipes at journalism, quack doctors, and the fate of humanity. Kornbluth depicts a nightmare future where the vast majority of people are morons, catered to by cretin-proof technology, designed by the few intelligent people forced into posing as "ordinary" (i.e., dumb) to survive.

Richard Matheson's "Born of Man and Woman" is the shortest story in the book: another mirror to the nuclear nightmare that ran subliminally (and sometimes obviously) through so much late 1940s and '50s SF. It tells of a captive in a cellar. Matheson never again wrote so well. Horrifying, yet poignant.

"Coming Attraction" by Fritz Leiber was first published in November 1950 but would stand against the very best SF published today. An Englishman in a radiation-scarred post-WWIII New York saves a girl from a hit and run, and comes closer to the dark underside of life there than he likes. From widespread allergic reactions and non-stop televised wrestling to microwaves, Leiber's prescience is both impressive and eerily unsettling.

I was unsure whether I really liked Anthony Boucher's "The Quest for St. Aquin." The story is simple enough: in (yet another!) post-WWIII USA, Christianity has been forced underground; a priest undertakes the quest of the title. I quite liked Boucher's style, but suspect some of his religious references passed me by.

No such problems with "Surface Tension" by James Blish, one of his celebrated "Pantropy" stories, collected in The Seedling Stars. The crew of a crashed spaceship adapt their descendents to live on a world of low-lying water, often barely puddles, in which to survive, the adapted humans can only stand 25 microns high. Blish is superb at outlining the detail of this stunning micro-world, and the two-inch wooden spaceship crawling between puddles, beneath twin moons, was an absolutely stunning image.

Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" is one of two stories by him to be short-listed for the book, this one placing 11th. ("The Star," which placed 15th, was omitted, as there was a limit of one story per author per book.) Both deal with religion and science. Short and sweet, with a memorable ending.

Jerome Bixby's "It's A Good Life" has been adapted for The Twilight Zone so many times that it's in danger of having the impact of the written version diluted, which is a shame, because it's a truly shocking story, mixing SF, fantasy, and horror in a way that's commonplace nowadays, but was rare in 1953. Once again, fear of the holocaust, mutation, and The Other, runs right through what at first appears to be the commonplace.

"The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin is another story that placed high on the final ballot, which completely mystifies me. Its leaden, clunky, patronizing "There-there-little-girl-you're-too-cute-to-understand-physics" attitude, together with its banner flying for the School of Sentimental SF, made it for me one of the weakest stories in the book, marginally ahead of the del Rey for tooth-grinding awfulness. A stowaway on a scout ship has to be ejected, or eight men will die. Who cares?

By contrast, Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit," the story of a psychotic android and his owner, fizzles and spits and crackles like superheated bacon in a pan that's about to catch fire. All the trademark Bester-isms are here; the big idea -- synaesthesia, which featured in his next novel The Stars My Destination; the beat (samba) to which the android capers; the pulsating drive of Bester's beloved chase, across planets, eventually culminating in a grand-stand fight in burning wreckage. All Reet!

"The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight, seems sadly pallid. The story is interesting enough; in a future utopia, the last psychotic roams the world committing petty acts of vandalism because society is unwilling to execute him, instead preferring ostracism. But the story never really seems to ignite, purely because it follows Bester's pyrotechnics.

"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes is another story burdened by over-exposure as a novel, a film, and latterly as a musical. The original story, although slight, is powerful though, precisely because Keyes avoids over-elaboration. A mentally challenged factory worker undergoes an operation that will triple his intelligence. The operation is only temporarily successful and he reverts to his original IQ. By creating fine supporting characters, and through sparse, superficially unemotional prose, Keyes evokes enormous sympathy for his protagonist.

And so to the last story in the book. We end as we began, on Mars, but instead of Weinbaum's Jarvis, a decent everyman, we have Gallinger -- "a walking insult machine," son of a preacher man, Pulitzer-prize winning poet, prodigy. And a race of dying Martians, and the dancer set to snare Gallinger's heart.

Roger Zelazny exploded into the SF world in the early 1960s like a hand-grenade rolled into a confessional box with "A Rose for Ecclesiastes." This is a Mars that was dead and gone to dust, long before Zelazny evoked pulp imagery with a beat sensibility. Those images dance across the page; at times the prose is almost over-lush, but only a reader with a heart of masonry could fail to sympathize with the arrogant poet, who learns how much love can hurt.

This is the last of the 26 stories in the book. I've been particularly dismissive of those that didn't match my taste, but the reality is that even they will have their champions, and most of the stories are absolutely outstanding. At least four of the stories are landmark pieces. It would be interesting to see what post-1964 work would place in a similar poll today.

A lot of thought has gone into how to draw younger readers to the field, competing with TV, games, and other distractions. I'm not convinced that there is any quick, simple solution, but if a teacher wanted to set a single book to exemplify SF, this is the one.

Fiction reflects the time in which it's written, even SF, which tries to hide that fact. These stories utilize most of the genre's staple tropes: first contact, time travel, the end of the world, robots, mutants, space flight, genetic engineering. But yesterday's tomorrows are still as valid today as they were when they were published.

Colin Harvey's latest short story, "Suck Puppet," can be found at Gothic.net; his earlier fiction can be found at his website. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.