LoA's 50s SF Novels

[J-Sun]

I admire their well made book and i have recently bought my first LoA book in Complete Novels by Hammett. Its the best Hardcover i have ever bought. Bit expensive but its worth supporting the quality, a group that puts important books for ever in print.

Thanks, that's good to know. It would take something special but I may get one just to, as you say, support them and have that special book.

They will rob me blind but i look forward to getting their books by Philip K Dick,Poe,Jack London,the other Hammett, Washington Irving, The two American SF volumes.

I don't know Irving and have a Hammett to get to but the rest I know is a good list. (My Hammett is the opposite of an LoA, being a used Avenel I got for a buck.)

 

[barlennan]

I can't help but notice the oversights here. If we're opening the hustings to Euro candidates, there's Clarke and Wyndham to consider; I'd nominate The City and the Stars and The Midwich Cuckoos, respectively.

 

[Sourdust]

If we're opening the hustings to Euro candidates...

That would be irrelevant to this discussion, since the Library of America exists solely to publish the work of American authors. One can quibble about the implied nationalism, but I think it was modelled on the French Bibliotheque de la Pléiade (which sell for absurd sums).

There's really no British equivalent: the physical production values of the LoA volumes blow something like Penguin Classics out of the water. They do have the feel of archival library books, though: rough handling will soon crease the ultra-thin bible paper.

 

[J-Sun]

Another person weighs in on the set in this article. He's way too depressed and undersells the books and eras in the commentary but it's a good alternate list and he amplifies it with a yearly rundown. It amazes me how many of those books I've read - something like 79 to 45 with 7 of the 45 in the pile, even, and at least that many on the "to get" list - when I didn't start reading SF in 1963. I think highly of almost all of the ones on that list that I've read, so it seems like an excellent one to me.

The list cheats in the sense that many of those "50s" books came from the 40s before book publication (and at least one from the 30s) but I'm still amazed when I look at that list and then I look at this year's Locus Poll ballot. I've read precisely none of those books and I'm sure I'll become interested in some of them and some will come to be seen as greats but, right now, there's nothing there I really want to check out - even the Egan is part of his first trilogy and that makes me less interested in it - and it's hard to imagine that list stacking up well with Harris' 1950 list (of which I've read precisely all). Suffice to say, the 50s were a good time in the SF world.

 

[neopeius]

Some notable omissions, though:

Anderson's Brain Wave.

Hear hear.

I was very fond of Tucker's City in the Sea, too.