Reviews for Science fiction by gaslight

The average rating for Science fiction by gaslight based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-03-25 00:00:00 Steven Teachout This is another book I read back when I was toying with the idea (which never materialized) of developing a college-level class in science fiction. It provides a pretty good overview of the pulp SF of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both through the representative stories selected and the substantial and detailed 35-page introduction by the editor. The late Sam Moskowitz, as an English teacher at the City College (now City University) of New York, was one of the first academics to take this genre seriously, having been a fan since his boyhood, and he wrote or edited several works covering much of the history of the field. He organizes the 27 stories, each of which gets a short bio-critical introduction to the author and the tale, into thematic categories (some only represented by a couple of stories): Catastrophes; Marvelous Inventions; Monsters and Horrors; Future War; Man-Eating Plants; Far-Out Humor; Scientific Crime and Detection; Medical Miracles; and Adventures in Psychology. The first three groups include 13 of the stories, or nearly half, and the two man-eating plant stories arguably could have just as well been included with Monsters and Horrors. Original publication venue and date is noted for all of the stories, which is helpful. That the stories are representative of their day doesn't always mean that they're gems of literary quality. The writing is often pedestrian and the literary craftsmanship and characterization limited, and a strong emotional impact and/or serious thought content is more of an exception than the rule. Most of the 29 authors represented (two stories were the work of writing teams) are no longer remembered much today, though Moskowitz does include a few big names: Verne, Wells, and William Hope Hodgson. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is an unfortunate omission from the roster, though he's discussed in the introduction. (Ironically, Verne's very short "An Express of the Future" is, IMO, one of the weakest tales in the bunch.) Not very surprisingly, the science is sometimes dated or misunderstood. On a more positive side, though, these pieces were published in venues that were still catering to general readers; the U.S. SF literary ghetto of the next generation was yet to be created, so the peculiarly insular stylistic and thematic perspectives influenced by a handful of editors aren't a literary strait-jacket here. So there's more variety; "hard" SF doesn't dominate to the exclusion of everything else, nor is technophilic optimism necessarily a party line that everybody parrots. Three of the best stories also appear in other anthologies that I've read (I think previously, in each case), and I believe I've commented on them elsewhere on Goodreads: Well's "The Land Ironclads," Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night," and Frank Lillie Pollock's "Finis" --the "science" in the latter is ludicrous, and there's no real possibility for "willing suspension of disbelief," but it still manages to have a poignancy and emotional power that's really touching. Some of the other stories here that I considered standouts included Robert Barr's "The Doom of London," a powerful cautionary tale (the kind of "killer smog" it predicted eventually struck in Donora, PA in the 1940s, though the location was less populous and the death toll much lower); H. G. Bishop's "Congealing the Ice Trust," with its socio-economic commentary on the monopolies of that day, which is appropos again as concentration of monopoly power in our economy again rears its head; Fred M. White's "The Purple Terror," though it's marred by a clearly racist and condescending attitude towards Cubans; and Hugh S. Johnson's "The Dam," which though it posits a near-future (for 1911) war between Japan and the U.S. is actually free of any overt racism or demonizing of the Japanese. Many of the other stories, though, are fairly forgettable and light-weight. I'd include "The Ray of Displacement" by Harriet Prescott Spofford, the only female author represented, in that group; it doesn't demonstrate anything of the literary skill she displays in "The Amber Gods" (see my review of Haunted Women: The Best Supernatural Tales by American Women Writers), and I'd say that SF was NOT her forte.' Overall, I didn't feel that the collection as a whole deserved more than three stars; but on balance, I did like it. There are enough good stories here to justify recommending it to SF fans with a historical bent.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-07-30 00:00:00 Wayne Thomas 3.5 stars I feel like sometimes he didn't really know what the story was talking about in his intro to it, but it was an interesting history of pulp magazines.