Anyone who hangs out around here for any length of time and doesn’t know that Lewis Padgett is one the the pen names used by Henry Kuttner and his wife C. L. Moore clearly hasn’t been paying attention.  Written under the Lewis Padgett by-line, “When the Bough Breaks” was first published in the November 1944 issue of Astounding.

The spring before I started high school, my parents gave permission for me to join the Science Fiction Book Club. So I had a source of hardcover science fiction and fantasy to read that summer.  This was in the days before science fiction was regularly published in hardcover. Most books were mass market paperbacks.

At the time, the SFBC offered a number of titles from Ballantine’s Best of series. This was a way I could discover new writers, and I took full advantage of it.  I mean, if these writers weren’t good, why was there a volume entitled The Best of followed by their names? I was making money mowing lawns, so I had the funds to afford to buy some books. I was already familiar with the series because I had found The Best of Jack Williamson at a flea market about eighteen months earlier, and I bought every one the SFBC offered at the time.  (For some reason, they never offered The Best of C. L. Moore while I was a member, although they had published such a volume a year or three earlier.)

I don’t remember if I bought the The Best of Henry Kuttner first or The Best of Frederik Pohl. I think it was Pohl, but it doesn’t really matter. I know I read them both during that long ago summer.

I still remember the impact “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”, the first story in the anthology made on me. For years it was my favorite Kuttner story,or rather my favorite Kuttne & Moore collaboration.

Until I read “When the Bough Breaks”. Why this story wasn’t included in The Best of Henry Kuttner, I’ll never know.  (I can ask that about more than one story, about more than one of  those Best of volumes. Don’t get me started.) It was included in The Best of Kuttner 2, a two volume British collection published in the mid-1960s. I didn’t read it until DAW published Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories Volume 6.

I was blown away. This one had all the Kuttner & Moore trademarks: humor, tragedy, and time travel.  And that ending…. I’m convinced that Kuttner and Moore were at their best when they were writing time travel stories.  (Note to self: that’s an idea for a future post or series of posts.)

I did a post on “When the Bough Breaks” for Kuttner’s birthday a few years ago.  What I’m doing for all these Retro Hugo posts is that I’m reading all the stories, regardless of whether I’ve posted on them before.  I’m (probably) not going to write an entire post about a story if I’ve done so in the past.  Just make a few comments and then link to the previous review.  I reread that post this afternoon, and I think it holds up.  So I’ll let you read it.  I’ll have more to say about where I think this story stands compared to the other finalists in its category.