The last human on Earth, a man millennia old, struggles to complete his legacy before accepting death’s embrace. “ Mana” ( 1937), short story by Eric Frank Russell The downside is that if what you ended up writing is the antithesis of Russell’s fiction, I feel bitterly disappointed and deeply betrayed.
Foster does relay Russell’s explanation for why he stopped submitting stories: Russell stopped getting new ideas and he didn’t want to recapitulate old work.Īdvice to all you authors out there: saying Russell has influenced you automatically gains you some level of credit with me. Unfortunately, not only had Russell pretty much stopped writing when Foster wrote his introduction, Russell died about half a year before the collection was published. It happens that I encountered Russell well after Foster, with this very book but in retrospect it is clear how much Russell influenced the younger writer. Foster is one of the legion of authors who were influenced by Russell. This is the only piece in the collection that is not by Russell.
“ The Symbiote of Hooton,” essay by Alan Dean Foster Although he was definitely aware of humanity’s darker tendencies, he himself appears to have been an essentially humane man who rejected easy, violent solutions to impediments.
Russell’s fiction could be weird in the Unknown manner sometimes it was Fortean sometimes it was superficially conventional pulp SF of the sort that was at home in Astounding and other pulp magazines. Most of Russell’s stories appeared between the late 1930s and the late 1950s only a handful of his works were published after 1959. This Eric Frank Russell collection was one of those books, and one of the better purchases I made in 1978. I very quickly learned to snap up anything from Ballantine (and later, Del Rey) whose title was of the form “The Best of ”. Under various series names, Ballantine’s Classic Library of Science Fiction collected the short works of various pulp-age notables, authors of whom I might otherwise have remained ignorant. This is intended, not just as a tribute to an author whose work I remember fondly, but also as a tribute to a line of single author collections that had a huge impact on me when I was a teenager.
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