Among the twenty stories in Popular Library’s 1964 edition of The Saturday Evening Post Reader of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the most significant may be Stephen Vincent Benay’s 1937 “The Place of the Gods”, and Robert Heinlein’s 1947 “The Green Hills of Earth”.
I well remember Benay’s story, for it was deemed significant enough to have been included among works of American short fiction assigned as reading in my high school, some years ago. As to its topicality in 2019, some eighty-two years after its original publication – with all that transpired in the world during those eight decades; with all that may yet transpire in the world – I have no idea.
In any event, the story’s theme of a civilizational collapse quietly and gently yielding to the implied rebirth of culture and technology, comports well with and has anticipated the plot of many a work of science-fiction, let alone contemporary pseudo-science (such as the ancient-astronaut / paleo-contact hypothesis, which actually harks back to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and, the millenarian apocalyptic religious cult – ostensibly in secular garb! – based on the myth of “anthropogenic climate change“), in historical and contemporary cinema and literature.
Though I’ve been generally well-acquainted with Heinlein’s early works (not much at all his later writing!), “The Green Hills of Earth” escaped my attention until I actually read the story, in the pages of this particular book. Entertaining (albeit with the dated implication of a habitable planet Venus, and, discussion of the use of a tape recorder – ? – ! – to preserve the songs of dying protagonist “Noisy” Rhysling), the story was adapted for NBC’s Dimension X radio series, where it was broadcast as episode 10 (of 50 total episodes) on June 10, 1950.
You can listen to The Green Hills of Earth at NewThinkable, or, Vulkan Channel.
Contents
Doctor Hanray’s Second Chance, by Conrad Richter (June 10, 1950)
Fallout Island, by Robert Murphy (March 24, 1962)
The Green Hills of Earth, by Robert A. Heinlein (February 8, 1947)
Doomsday Deferred, by William F. Jenkins (“Murray Leinster”) (September 24, 1949)
Test-Tube Terror, by Robert Standish (September 13, 1958)
Island of Fear, by William Sambrot (June 18, 1958)
Sinister Journey, by Conrad Richter (September 26, 1953)
The Place of the Gods (alternate title “By the Waters of Babylon”), by Stephen Vincent Benet (July 31, 1937)
The Phantom Setter, by Robert Murphy (June 17, 1961)
The Big Wheel, by Fred McMorrow (July 29, 1961)
The Death Dust, by Frank Harvey (August 8, 1959)
The Lost Continent, by Geoffrey Household (September 3, 1960)
The Trap, by Kem Bennett (January 7, 1956)
Space Secret, by Wiliam Sambrot (February 21, 1959)
The Unsafe Deposit Box, by Gerald Kersh (April 14,1962)
The Second Trip to Mars, by Ward Moore (August 28, 1954)
The Voice in the Earphones, by William Schramm (March 29, 1947)
Moon Crazy, by William Roy Shelton (June 25, 1949)
The Little Terror, by William F. Jenkins (“Murray Leinster”) (August 22, 1953)
Novelette
The Answer, by Philip Wylie (May 7, 1955)
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Especially notable is the book’s cover art by Richard Powers, which, though uncredited in the text, bears Powers’ name in the lower left corner. The composition bears two major hallmark’s of Powers’ work: The near-afterthought-like presence of a human figure visible only in silhouette, and, a variety of curved, ovoid, elongated objects rising vertically, or floating in the background. Like many of Powers’ compositions that appeared on the covers of science-fiction anthologies, rather than pertaining to or having elements of a specific story, his art instead sets a mood and feeling.
And, in this it succeeds superbly.
