"The Accursed Galaxy" by Edmond Hamilton 1936 "He Who Shrank" by Henry Hasse "The Human Pets of Mars" by Leslie Frances Stone "The Brain Stealers of Mars" by John W. Campbell "Devolution" by Edmond Hamilton "Big Game" by Isaac Asimov (written in 1941) 1937 "Other Eyes Watching" by John W. Campbell "Minus Planet" by John D. Clark "Past, Present, and Future" by Nat Schachner 1938 "The Men and the Mirror" by Ross Rocklynne Reception Theodore Sturgeon praised the anthology as "uniquely and delightfully Asimov," describing it as "a much-wanted aggregate of the long-remembered, mostly long-lost masterpieces of ragged-pulp sf which fired up so many of the writers [from] the Golden Age of John Campbell's Astounding." Alexei and Cory Panshin described Before the Golden Age as "a book that needed doing," saying that Asimov was perhaps the only writer who "could have the clout and the personal investment of love necessary to produce an anthology like this." Gerald Jonas, however, reviewing the anthology and related books for The New York Times, noted that "a little of this looking backward goes a long way," faulting "the defects of style, the prolixities, [and] the flaws of narrative construction" in the stories. (Asimov, in his introduction to the book, had cheerfully conceded these stories to be "clumsy, primitive, and naive", "old-fashioned and unsophisticated".) References 1974 anthologies Books by Isaac Asimov Science fiction anthologies Doubleday (publisher) books