This is the story that introduced both Northwest Smith and Moore herself to Weird Tales, her first published story. There are no clunkers whatsoever in here, as we’ll see.
She builds her stories around the characters of her protagonists, even in the science fantasy of her Northwest Smith and Jirel stories. Her characters are fully human, three dimensional in a way that was rare for pulp science fiction. In general the stories here vary from outright fantasy to pure science fiction, but what they have all in common is the human touch. Both of her best known heroes, Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry are represented but do not dominate. The Best of CL Moore is a well balanced collection, with most of the stories from before she met and married Henry Kuttner. It was enough to realise how great a writer she was. For years that was the extent of my CL Moore reading, until I read this collection. I first read it in a Dutch anthology of crime and detective stories written by women, which sort of made sense as it can be read as a detective puzzle story.
The story that first introduced me to CL Moore, ‘Vintage Season’, was however originally published under both her and Kuttner’s names. Now that more than twice as much time has passed, this collection is still a great introduction to what CL Moore had to offer when not collaborating with her husband. By the time The Best of CL Moore was published it had been the better part of two decades that she had written much new science fiction. In the 1940s, after she met and married Henry Kuttner she almost completely stopped writing on her own, instead collaborating with him (often under the Lewis Padgett pseudonym) on a series of classic sf stories, then moving on to writing crime stories and for television, both of which unfortunately paid better, in the late 1950s. One of such authors must have been CL Moore, who had made her reputation writing science fantasy stories for Weird Tales in the 1930s. It offered both a reminder to old fans of what had attracted them to the genre in the first place and to new fans a sampling of authors they may have thought old-fashioned or perhaps never had the chance to read in the first place. The series offered a sense of history to the genre just when science fiction was in danger of losing touch with its roots. Just at a time when science fiction was switching from being a short story, magazine orientated genre to one in which the novel is supreme, here were collections by all the old masters who had made their name in the pulp magazines of the thirties, forties and fifties. In the mid seventies Ballantine Books, just before it renamed itself into Del Rey, launched a “Best of” series of short story collections by classic science fiction and fantasy authors which I personally think is perhaps the best such series ever produced.
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