![]() ![]() Gallegher is brilliant when blackout drunk. It’s possible that that the wife-stealing fan is Forest J. Ackerman. This goes exactly to plan, but the results are unpleasant. Henry Kuttner and Virgil Finley are drafted by a powerful but careless superhuman to help the superman recover his wife from an SF fan. As does “time travel: threat or menace?”Ĭonfronted with a time traveller and a time portal, it’s only natural to investigate the other end of the portal. The theme of “children: half-human and mostly mad” comes up a lot in this book. ![]() The hook is the novel way that just desserts are served.Ī relic of the future educates children to levels their parents can only dream of. ![]() There were 1940s authors who might have had the bad guy get away with it, but none of them were named Kuttner or Moore. The excessively optimistic killer is tempted by the book’s promise to grant him immunity to fate. In possession of what they believe is a fancy new radio - which is, in fact, a behavior-modifying robot from the future - a couple is transformed beyond their wildest expectations.Ī slain magician is survived by his grimoire. Transformed into a gnome, a labor organizer puts his unionizing skills to work to help escape his situation. Because I know that Smith will never ever learn from experience, I found this a bit funny.Ī caretaker/grave robber sets out to deal with the graveyard rats, in the process finding a solution for all his cares. This story was probably intended as gothic space horror. Northwest Smith, an attractive but genre-blind knucklehead, offers a monster-in-woman-form refuge from a lynch mob, only to discover she is a monster-in-human form. I enjoyed this essay and really wish that it had been longer … even though this is a massive book already. Most of the stories were collaborations, with the exceptions of Moore’s Shambleau tales and Kuttner’s Graveyard Rats. Both are very much out of print - maybe I should have got around to reviewing this seventeen years earlier - but used copies seem to be easy to come by.Ī very short introduction explaining: who Kuttner and Moore were and why these particular stores were collected. Happily, the SFBC edition was a lot more affordable (Granted, without Centipede’s production standards). My only quibble might have been the cost for the Centipede Press edition: at $ 225. (I hasten to add that I myself am not - though my editor is :/) For me, the standouts were Daemon, Mimsey Were the Borogoves, “The Twonky,” No Woman Born, and “Year Day.” I recognized about two thirds from their titles alone, even though some of them are seventy years old. There are one or two duds in here, a few stories that look like they were rushed through to fill a hole in a pulp magazine issue, but on the whole, this is a very solid collection. Yet the subjects of the stories often seem quite modern: there’s something like a singularity in here (although not one that kills stories) and the authors seem to have hit on the concept of memewar decades before anyone else. The writing is very 1940s 1 (the prose styles of the 1930s and 1950s stories aren’t that much different). My recent reread had to be spaced out over a month, but the tome lived up to my fond memories. I have fond memories of sitting down with the manuscript early one morning and reading straight through to midnight. Indeed, I read thousands of books sent me by the SFBC over the decade and a half that I worked for them as a reader and of all of them, this 910-page deluxe anthology may well have been my favourite. Some stories were by Kuttner or Moore solo most were collaborations.Įveryone has their favourite Kuttner and Moore collection. ![]() They were collected and published in 2004 by Centipede Press. The stories were written in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Two-Handed Engine is a collection of vintage science fiction and fantasy by Henry Kuttner and C. ![]()
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