Book Review

Asimov, Isaac editor. Before the Golden Age: A Science Fiction Anthology Of the 1930s. Doubleday & Company Inc., 1974

     Nerdy, geeky, cheesy, but endlessly fun. These are all words that come to mind when thinking about Isaac Asimov’s Before the Golden Age anthology. In 1974 the famous and prolific science-fiction writer put together this collection of stories from the 1930’s. It is certainly worth a good read for various reasons.

     The stories are framed by an autobiographical narrative by Asimov about his high school years when he worked in his father’s candy store. The store kept a stock of pulp science-fiction magazines which his father thought were trash but they fascinated the young Asimov anyways. In between each story, Asimov gives brief anecdotes about his life along with commentaries and background information about each selection. These were the stories that he found most memorable and influential.

     Common themes emerge throughout the book. One of them is travel. It could be said that most of these stories are actually adventure tales that take place in a science-fiction setting. There is a proliferation of space travel and time travel but a couple stories also deal with the theme of shrinking down to subatomic size and traveling in the smallest regions possible. A lot of stories are claustrophobic as well. Many take place in underground tunnels, domed cities, lonely laboratories and, most of all, a whole host of various space-travel vessels. Isaac Asimov admitted to having a fascination for enclosed spaces so these themes might be less of a particular literary pattern and more of a preference of the editor himself.

     Being a science-fiction anthology, the prevalence of the hard sciences is also a key element in all these stories. Biology, evolution, atomic and mechanical physics, technological warfare, environmentalism, robotics, and relativity all serve as the basis in one place or another. These stories are science-fiction, though, with the emphasis on the fiction. While the physical sciences frame these writings, the plots easily fly off into the wildest realms of fantasy and imagination. Scientific accuracy takes a backseat to wild story telling. One memorable story, “The World Of the Red Sun”, involves two men who travel into the future where a tyrant uses telepathy to plant nightmarish delusions in peoples’ heads, making it easy to control them with fear; the time travelers learn that the despot is motivated by deeply rooted insecurity and narcissism, so they start laughing at him thereby weakening him to the point where he is easy to kill. Here we get a little social commentary on the psychology of bullying, making me wonder if the author had a particular person in mind when writing the story. And wouldn’t it be great if we could destroy Donald Trump simply by laughing him into oblivion? Another story, “Born Of the Sun”, is about how the Earth and moon are actually eggs containing flying green monsters that cause an apocalypse as they start to emerge from the shells; two men and a woman build a space craft so they can leave and begin repopulating the human race in outer space while a doomsday religious cult tries to stop them. Towards the end, another story, “Other Eyes Watching”, possibly a precursor of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, is about two astronauts who show up on Mars where a race of creatures draw data out of their unconscious minds and use it to reproduce twenty clones of themselves. They have to think quickly, using logic and basic scientific knowledge to outsmart the clones and prove which ones are not the real Earth-men. While scientific gadgetry plays a central part in these stories, many of them pose puzzles that need to be solved with a bit of psychology rather than brute force. That brains-over-brawn element is what separates science-fiction in its highest and truest sense from the less exciting pulp stories of people with ray guns fighting bug-eyed monster aliens.

     In addition to the science-based wild imagination of each story, there is also some cultural baggage of the time that finds its way in. The 1930’s saw the last days of the Prohibition era, the onset of the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism in Europe too. It was a bleak time for America. These short stories are undoubtedly escapist but escapism can indicate what it is the authors and readers were escaping from. The idea of all-pervading loneliness, alienation, and mediocrity is mentioned by the narrators. Many of these scientists are lone individuals who work in solitary laboratories while being ignored by the rest of the world. Using a motif rooted in the telling of classic fairy tales, the ordinary man travels to another world and becomes transformed into somebody extraordinary by embarking on colorful adventures that result in heroic status at the end as he saves the lives of space aliens, subatomic humans, or even ordinary humans in some cases. One sad and lonely guy even falls in love with a female fur-ball with purple eyes and giant lips when he travels to the moon which is far more exciting than his life in Texas as a high school math teacher.

     On the downside, the worst cultural baggage in these stories is racism. Many of the monsters and villains are racial caricatures, based on negative and unfair stereotypes. In his commentaries, the ever-Liberal Asimov rightly criticizes this racism which was all too common in that era. But rather than simply dismissing it outright, he uses these stories as examples of how to spot racism in literature, explaining why it is harmful and why it needs to be avoided in future science-fiction writing.

     The stories in this anthology vary in quality but they do not vary greatly. The are easy enough to read but there are a lot of them. Retro junkies and fans of vintage culture will find a lot to like here. Most significantly, you can read this literature as one of the starting points that would eventually lead to comics, tv shows like Star Trek and The Outer Limits, movies like Star Wars and the whole plethora of sci-fi books that have been produced up until now.