Those Idiots from Earth

by Richard Wilson

Ballantine PB#237, New York, 1957. Richard M. Powers cover art (illustrator). 1st Edition Paperback Original.

Contents:
Those Idiots from Earth (1957)
The Inhabited (1953)
The Hoaxters (1952)
Lonely Road (1956)
Love (1952)
Honor (1956)
88 Beats 266 (1957) (a.k.a. "Succes Story")
Don't Fence Me In (1956)
Press Conference (1953) (a.k.a. "Visitor from the Void")
It's Cold Outside (1956)

Genres: Science Fiction, Anthologies, Short Stories, Collections

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Richard Wilson (1920–1987) was a Nebula Award winning American science fiction writer and fan. He was a member of the Futurians, and was married at one time to Leslie Perri.

His books included the novels The Girls from Planet 5 (1955); 30-Day Wonder (1960); and And Then the Town Took Off (1960); and the collections Those Idiots from Earth (1957) and Time Out for Tomorrow (1962). His short stories included "The Eight Billion" (nominated for a Nebula Award as Best Short Story in 1965); "Mother to the World" (nominated for the Hugo for Best Novelette in 1969 and winner of the Nebula in 1968); and "The Story Writer" (nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1979).
(source: Wikipedia:)

Reviews

[Steve Rainwater · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of enjoyable stories from a lesser known author

Richard Wilson was a member of the Futurians club and had several stories nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards. Strangely, he's relatively unknown today. If you can find this or any collection of his works, it's worth a read. There are several funny stories, a spooky story, even a dystopian story in this book. Recommended.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was all set to dislike this book on encountering the twee misspelling of “I” in the first story, from which the title comes. But the stories progress rapidly from there, with strange Twilight Zone-like encounters with the unexplainable while driving down a lonely road to the light-hearted spoof of White House journalists finding an impossible entry on the President’s schedule to the boys who cry wolf on a lonely asteroid.

This was a fun glimpse at the future as seen from 1957.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Richard Wilson was a member of the famous sci-fi fan and writer club, The Futurians. I wonder if they had T-shirts printed up, with Futurian on the front and their names on the back ? They should have added an exclamation mark at the end; The Futurians! They could have walked around NYC like a street gang. "Yeah, We're the Futurians! We're taking these copies of Thrilling Wonder Stories and we're leaving this book store right now... right after we pay for them.

Seriously though, it must have been exciting to be in a club with the likes of Asimov, Pohl, and James Blish, among many other well known sci-fi greats. Wilson is a lesser known member of the club, at least lesser known to me since I'd not heard of him until I read this collection. A very much out of date collection of short stories from the early to mid 50's. The emphasis is on humor and satire which adds to the dated feeling since so much humor is topical. They vary from the shaggy dog story to the Twilight Zone type story to a couple that could have been inspired by O Henry. And a couple stories that are just plain bad. Wooden characters and stilted dialogue all leading up to the 'surprise' ending to each story.

The old sci-fi pulps must have been filled with stories like this. They had to come up with a lot of content month after month. These are just ok stories, if I were an editor of one of the old pulps I'd just consider them to be filler between any stories I could get from Heinlein, Asimov, Pohl, and any other of the classic authors of this time.

I'd consider this to be somthing of a cultural artifact, though it does have an awesome cover designed by Richard Powers.