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…and <spoiler>the bad guy’s revolutionary lightpeed ship</spoiler>. The dialog is overblown, as is common in stories of this era, and though the science is explained well, the conceits of the story are implausible. There is no explanation even attempted as to <spoiler>how the bad guy’s ship can get to near light speed, nor how everyone aboard is not instantly crushed by acceleration pressure</spoiler>.…

“Lightship, Ho!” is almost pathetically bad. It’s not the worst SF sorry I’ve ever read, by far, but it’s shallow and primitive. It is, however, genuine SF, rather than a super science story or adventure story. It even tries to be hard SF, though it does not succeed.

The title is an attempt at a pun or double entendre; it refers to both the ship the protagonists are in, herding light to melt Pluto…

…full of crazily-mutated, rabid individualists. It was actually kind of gripping, given how overheated the prose was. I found myself wanting to rewrite it with less unintelligent and impatient protagonists.

“City of Cosmic Rays” was clearly an installment in a series, though nothing said so. It was…pretty dumb, adventure scientifiction rather than SF (unsurprising in this first issue of the Golden Age). It’s about three people from various times all in Earth’s future, trying to find the perfect society and running from advanced warrior. In this installment they find a floating crystal city…

Lastly, this was clearly the inspiration for the D&D Displacer Beast; I wonder just how that came about?

stories set in this same universe. I hope he did; it would be a shame to waste the setup he has gone to.

reaction is, “I could have written that, if I had had the central idea,” or even “I could not have written that, because he makes leaps I wouldn’t have (which does not necessarily make it a bad story),” but this one—man, I dunno. The amount of thought that went into this is intense. Yes, even more could have been put in—which is impressive in itself, that he knew when to stop. I’d love to read more

can (as I just said) derive tons of psychological information about someone simply from understanding the sort of historical era he must have come from. I’m not sure it’s plausible that one could figure out that much information from the data they had (and ditto for the destroyer), but it’s certainly an intriguing prospect, to turn history into a rigorous psychological science.

Lots of stories I read, my

(could this be where Asimov got the idea? “Psychohistory” was always sort of inapt as the name of his fictional discipline; it’s much more sociology than psychology, and concerned with predicting the future, not analyzing the past, whereas the historians in this story could derive vast quantities of psychological information about this beast just from figuring things out about the historical era he arose from)

I’ve reviewed “Black Destroyer” before, but as this is only the second time I’ve read it, it was worthwhile to read again. The artistry of this story is truly impressive. Obviously van Vogt has a profound grasp of history, and the way he uses it in this story is fascinating. He outlines—without ever naming it—a sort of psychological science of history, where the—er—psychohistorian

Reading online at https://archive.org/details/astoundin...