“It glittered, it was smooth and shining, its fine, functional lines and perfect proportions made it a thing of unthinkable beauty. But you could not separate what of that Image was human and what was machine. The steel was one part flesh, the flesh six parts steel.”

C.L. Moore was a total unknown to me, and I suspect to a lot of readers—even ardent fans of sci-fi and fantasy. I initially stumbled upon the collection “Judgment Night” years ago, when researching obscure fiction written the year my dad was born: 1952. (Actually, two of the entries, including the title story, were written in the Forties.) To say that these works were ahead of their time is a cliché. The fact that they’re from a woman is even more impressive given the era in which they were published. “Paradise Street” is a strong Western/sci-fi hybrid that would’ve worked equally well if pared down to either genre. “Promised Land” has an autocrat that’s a cross of Baron Harkonnen and a Guild Navigator from “Dune”. “The Code” is a tale of age regeneration and alien possession. The titular novella, while being the weakest story, has moments of technological prescience such as androids and simulated realities, but it is more closely aligned to sword and sorcery. It’s a bit airy and I feel it either needed more grounding, or gone headlong into the floating morass of the pleasure planet (an artificial moon, really—more dashes of science fiction). And this story is also the only one to have a central female character, which shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did given that she was writing for a largely male audience in a masculine-dominated field. Since I’ve got a penchant for writing female characters, I’m no proper judge. Judgment Night! Zing!

And if the spelling of the title doesn’t tip it off, this is all-American fare, with the trappings and foibles of the pre-and post-WW2 eras. Threats aren’t so much stumbled into as sought out. The characters are oftentimes all-too-willing participants in their demise or transmogrification (whichever path is the most expedient). And if those aren’t the hallmarks of the American spirit, then I must be the kind of jerk-off who uses the extra “e” in judgement. (I AM that douche bag.)

“A man cannot blend and merge with machines and remain sane. Nor should the machine look back at its watcher out of human eyes, with rage and terror showing in lines of passionless steel. If it were possible for a machine to be mad from too close a contact with humanity, then these machines were as mad as the man who had forged them into the impossible unity of the Composite Image.”

—“Heir Apparent” by C.L. Moore ( )

This is my first attempt at reading C. L. Moore and wow, am I impressed! In my opinion, she deserves to be considered among the very elite of golden-age sci-fi authors. This collection of five novellas explores some absolutely brilliant concepts. The title novella, 'Judgment Night', was quite good but was my least favorite of the bunch. Highlights for me were 'The Code', 'Promised Land' and 'Heir Apparent'. All very intelligent probes into some incredibly deep subjects. All these stories, written between 1943 and 1950, stand the test of time much better than many other works from the same era.

Highly recommended. ( )

I wanted to like this collection by C L Moore, but while it definitely rises above much of what was published at the time, it also shares too many of the weaknesses of cheap pulp SF of that period. This was a bit surprising to me since these stories appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, between 1943 and 1950, after John W Campbell had been editing the magazine for 7 years. The title short novel, Judgment Night, has all the story elements of classic pulp, made more interesting by having a female main character in a position of command. Unfortunately, our heroine's inner dialog repeatedly dwells on the conflict between being amazonian, and (my words, but her thoughts) melting into the embrace of the strong antagonist from an invading culture. The story wends through many set pieces, including a pleasure space station and an ancient alien stronghold of mystery. It's to the credit of the story that despite succumbing to so many pulp cliches, the actual resolution follows the logic of the situation, not the needs of the pulp idiom. Paradise Street is a western on another planet, so literally so as to be embarrassing, down to the ranchers moving in and the conflict that causes for the pioneer hero. Promised Land and Heir Apparent take place in a future where humans are re-engineered to be able to colonize other planets, but interestingly that premise is only used to provide a backdrop for both stories. Both are full of not very memorable conflict. The Code is the best story of the collection. An Altered States kind of tale where two men try to reverse the aging process of an revered aging relative, and the strange sequence of changes that result. This story is fascinating, in a Lovecraftian way, marred by the classic trope where the most bizarre but true explanation for events is somehow developed with no evidence at all. Overall, interesting but recommended only to historians of SF. ( )

This book includes the short novel Judgment Night, plus several longish short stories, all written in the period 1943-50. Besides putting the novel first, there's no evident rhyme or reason to the sequence of the contents.

The title novel would make a good science fiction movie today. It could indulge CGI scenery creation to an exorbitant level, and it would leverage to much better effect the space opera tropes everyone knows from Star Wars. The protagonist is the butt-kicking amazon daughter of the galactic emperor, and the story is set on and around the imperial capital planet Ericon. Because there are "gods" living on Ericon--i.e. an ancient praeterhuman race--and because there is some significant personal and political intrigue--the story actually reminds me more of Dune than other space empire tales.

"Paradise Street" is a space Western in full form, much like Joss Whedon's Firefly television series, but written fifty years earlier.

"The Code" is the outlier of the volume: not a futuristic science fiction tale at all. It has the sort of psychological conjecture that I would expect from a Ted Sturgeon story, and it also reminded me a little of Machen's The Great God Pan. The central premise is an experimental rejuvenation treatment that has some unexpected side effects.

The remaining two stories are both set in a single future history in which terrestrial humanity has undertaken to deliberately speciate itself, creating "Thresholder" mutants, in order to be able to colonize other planets. I found these to be the least of the volume's contents, but they were still pretty good.

http://www.fireandsword.com/Reviews/judgmentnight.html

From out of the Golden Age of sf comes C.L. Moore’s Judgment Night, a novel and four novelettes. Five stories, complete without an ounce of fat in 344 pages. Nowadays authors are just getting warmed up to drop you off for the second half of volume whatever of the Snoreosphere Quatrology by page 344. Gnome Press could deliver the goods.