Ever see one of those stories that appears in all the anthologies, but you’ve never read it? For me that was “The Green Splotches” by TS Stribling. Originally published in Adventure (January 3, 1920), it was reprinted in Amazing Stories (March 1927), the four editions of Donald A Wolheim’s The Pocket Book of Science Fiction (1943), then in Famous Fantastic Mysteries (August 1952) and finally in Fantastic (September 1967). For forty-seven years this story kept showing up. Why?
The fact that DAW chose it for The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, the very first mass market paperback of SF, is significant. The anthology is roughly divided into three eras: the old classics by Bierce and Wells, a middle period with Stribling and John Collier, and the later pulp era with Weinbaum, Sturgeon, Heinlein, and Campbell. So who was this TS Stribling that DAW thought him important enough to put beside the masters of the Golden Age of Science Fiction? I couldn’t recall any other stories by him from the early days when SF had not been named yet but was known as “Off Trail” fiction. The answer was surprising.
Read the rest:
https://www.michaelmay.online/2015/07/the-green-splotches-guest-post.html
