It's the start of my second full week for this month, and after just doing a Philip K. Dick post, I felt like doing a little more with vintage anthologies. So here's a pair from one of the anthologists you just couldn't avoid, Terry Carr. To kick things off, here's another pic of the anthology that started this, a collection obviously titled Creatures From Beyond.
Before going further, I definitely owe a word on the editor. Terry Carr was a sci fi enthusiast and writer who started editing fanzines in the late 1950s. In the following decade, he tried both writing SF and editing anthologies. By the 1970s, he had shifted to the latter. Starting in 1971, he published the all-original anthology series Orbit. The following year, he published the first volume of the ambitiously titled Best Science Fiction of the Year. On top of that, he edited a number of perfectly good collections of science fiction from the "pulp" era. On the whole, he rivalled Robert Silverberg, Donald Wollheim and Roger Elwood as the most prolific anthologist of the 1970s. He kept up this output until his very untimely death in 1987, a few months after his 50th birthday. In my own further experience and opinion, his anthologies rivalled those of Martin Greenberg for the standards of quality. Thus, I picked up a lot of his collections from an early age, and the only ones I ever got rid of were one or two with freaky/ awkward '70s stuff I just didn't care for. One more item I ran across was The Light At The End Of The Universe, one of only three collections of his own fiction. It's a serviceable collection in itself, generally good with a few that belong among the best of the very best of the genre.
Now to consider the anthology at hand, the most interesting here is "The Worm" by David H. Keller, published in 1929, which came up in my review of Tremors 2. I re-read it after I was done with the movie. I have to say by way of context that I have read a fair number of Keller's stories and found them to be overrated at best, despite being hard to find and usually only mentioned in academic-leaning sources. This story, however, is enough to justify his reputation as a pioneer of fantasy and horror as well as science fiction. It's all centered on a kind of male Scarlet O'Hara analog, a loner living in his family's mill with his dog, still running the machinery as a matter of ritual. He begins to notice disturbances in the basement floor, and soon realizes that something is undermining the building. It is, of course, a huge worm, apparently attracted by decades of noise from the machinery. The subsequent events follow quickly in an already brief tale as the creature literally eats the building out from under the protagonist. What's most impressive is that there's never any doubt that this will end very badly, as evidenced especially by the hero's ludicrously inadequate weaponry. It's all just building up to pre-ordained tragedy, perhaps for the creature as much as the man.
For the rest of this quite slender collection, the most impressive is "The Street That Wasn't There" by none other than Clifford Simak, with Carl Jacobi credited as co-author. Published in 1941, it's really a "cosmic terror" piece rather than a monster story, in which the protagonist sees the world around him literally erased by an unknown force. It presents an early example if not the very first of a concept that would resurface 1949 with "Private- Keep Out" by Philip McDonald and stay alive in pop culture thereafter. One can read it as either an alteration of history or just a representation of insanity or dementia, but there's no internal second-guessing. The result rivals McDonald's tale as among the most terrifying SF/ horror tales ever written. One may certainly wonder further how the division of labor really went in a work that's highly atypical for Simak.
A story that does fall egregiously into the monster genre is "Beauty And The Beast" by Henry Kuttner, associated with an egregious cover of Thrilling Wonder Stories. A gem is recovered from a crashed spaceship returning from Venus, along with the seeds of some very pretty flowers. The gem proves to be the egg of a rapidly growing dinosaurian creature that rampages through Washington, but all is not as it seems... It's most interesting as a preview of 20 Million Miles To Earth. This was undoubtedly one of many cases where a cover was created and then presented to an author as an assignment. Kuttner is makes the best of a bad job with an ironic twist on the usual cliches.
For the rest of this very slender collection, I must admit that there are still at least a couple I haven't read. The most noteworthy are "Mimic" by Donald Wollheim, which I commented on in my Mimic 2 review, and Theodore Sturgeon's "IT", which came up in connection with Swamp Thing. (And don't make talk about Man-Thing...) Another interesting one is "Full Sun" by Brian Aldiss, of all things a werewolf tale, with a big twist. One more I'm sure I've read is "Some Are Born Cats", a collaboration between the editor and his wife Carol Carr. I remember it being vaguely charming, and not much else. Now for a pic of the "B" volume...
Now this is one that I'm sure made a more immediate impression on me, though I may have read even less of it. The centerpiece is "Joy In Mudville", an installment of the Hoka series by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson that didn't make it into Earthman's Burden; if you already know anything about it, set your brain to bonkers. Another interesting entry is "Mr. Meek Plays Polo", about a titular protagonist who keeps getting talked into dangerous tasks, in this case a futuristic sport with rocket ships. It's obviously set up as a series, though ISFDB only shows one other entry. The most intriguing is "The Great Kladnar Race", by Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett, where Earthmen have a race with the local livestock, only to find that the natives are all betting on what seems like the oldest, slowest nag among them. The surprise isn't that things go awry, but that it happens in a way that isn't that obvious. Again, it's all solid.
With that, I'm done for now. I hope for this to be a fitting tribute to a very important figure in science fiction. Without anthologists like Carr, people like me might never have had a shot at many of the best of 1940s, '50s and even '60s science fiction. Even in the age of the internet, you can still find things in these old anthologies that you won't anywhere else. That's all for now, more to come!
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