Decade, the 1950s Book

In the future there are NO WOMEN!!!! I kinda couldn't believe that in this whole book there wasn't a female character in any of the stories! I do enjoy quite a bit of pulp from this period and that definitely contains female characters, I didn't think the scifi would be that much worse! I don't know whether to play the writers or the editors, but it was quite dissapointing.

The first story by A.E. Van Vogt starts with what the introduction calls the classic scifi cliche of a professor with a gun and and alien (which immediately made me think of River Song) the story was ok, Alien who was quite alien and human have to try and get along and there's lots of jungle adventure while also considering the pros and cons of colonialism. Then there was a really nice Asmiov story about a robot who thinks and decides that the humans can't possibly be his creator and comes up with his own religion to explain his existance. In Battlestar Galactica it never made sense to me why the robots had religion (except to make it awkward for the viewers) but Asimov, of course, did it in a way that made sense and still pointed out how absurd it was. In the end the humans decided the robots should keep their religion as it made them incredibly efficient workers. It was a great story and is the only reason I'm holding onto this book. Fredric Brown's story Arena was basically the same story later used in the Star Trek episode where Kirk goes and fights the lizard on the planet. Here however the humans were fighitng odd aliens that were balls with pods. And in the end the human figured out a way to kill his opponent and subsequently wipe out his species. Hal Clement's Fireproof about sabateours on a space station didn't so much seem a story but an attempt to get kids interested in chemistry.Carter's The Last objective should have been a fairly grim post-apocalyptic story of war in quite a distopian setting, but the basic presmise of building machines to go burrowing through the earth to come out on the other side to fight just made the whole thing seem a bit silly. Huddling place almost had a woman in it, the main characters mother appeared at the funeral but didn't say or do anything. It was one of the better stories, dealing with agoraphobia in a futuristic society, much like Asimov did in his second robot detective novel. Hobbyist had a female character but it was a chimp named Laura who was capable of speech but had very low intelligence and I gave up on it pretty quickly as I did with the last story in the book, the Xi effect. I realy can't recommend this one at all, and definitely won't be looking for any more in this series. Though if you find the Asimov story in another collection it's definitely worth reading!