Influential sci-fi

[thatollie]

Grab those two fifties anthologies and rank the stories from favourite to least favourite. The authors who wrote your favourites are the ones to look into.

 

[Triceratops]

Some totally awesome recommendations here. It was the late, great Dane Poul Anderson that lit the SF writing bug in me, because of his wit, irony, world-building and style. A little later Alan Dean Foster had a tremendous impact on my style and preference of plot and storyline.

 

[dask]

If you can name some anthologies aimed specifically at that era of short stories ('39-'49) that would be found in magazines I'd be happy to look into those. I won't limit myself strictly to novels, I assure you.

Isaac Asimov edited a series of anthologies for DAW Books called SF From The Great Years or something close to that starting with 1939 (I think) and reaching all the way into the sixties (I think). Each volume, obviously, zeroes in on a specific year. Check the second hand shops, they're still floating around and worth having.

 

[J-Sun]

Those are the Asimov/Greenbergs I mentioned - Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories #1 (1939) to #25 (1963). You may also be thinking of Isaac Asimov Presents the Golden Years of SF #1 (1939/40) to #6 (1949/50) which are mostly omnibuses of the first twelve of the main series but, be warned - as I, alas, was not - that two of those volumes are not actually omnibuses as they drop a few stories.

The likely reason that main series exists is that Donald A. Wollheim edited an annual series with Terry Carr for Ace from 1964-1970 and then continued to edit one with Saha for his own company until he died (as did Carr for a variety of publishers) and with the Asimov/Greenberg set, there's an unbroken run of annuals from 1939 to around 1990 when Wollheim died. (The same principle goes with the Nebula anthologies from 1965 and the SFWA Hall of Fame deeming works after 1964 ineligible.) Contrary to that, though, there was one volume edited by Silverberg/Greenberg much later that carried on with 1964 which overlaps the Wollheim/Carr run but that obviously didn't go anywhere - maybe his daughter was trying to make it a complete run solely on DAW.

 

[j d worthington]

Isaac Asimov edited a series of anthologies for DAW Books called SF From The Great Years or something close to that starting with 1939 (I think) and reaching all the way into the sixties (I think). Each volume, obviously, zeroes in on a specific year. Check the second hand shops, they're still floating around and worth having.

The Great Science Fiction Stories, vols. 1 (1939; the beginning of the Campbell era) to 25 (1963), co-edited with Martin Harry Greenberg....

 

[dask]

...then continued to edit one with Saha for his own company until he died (as did Carr for a variety of publishers)...

Terry Carr died for variety of publishers? Cool!

Thanks for the info. I didn't realize the connection between all those series was to have a complete run of annuals but makes sense and sounds like a great idea. Need to keep an extra open eye for the Silverberg, don't believe I ever heard of it.

 

[dask]

Something to tide you over till you can find just the right thing with stories as early as 1913 and as late as 1952.

 

[J-Sun]

Terry Carr died for variety of publishers? Cool!

Oops. That's like this piece of "twisted translations":

From the Soviet Weekly: There will be a Moscow Exhibition of Arts by 15,000 Soviet Republic painters and sculptors. These were executed over the past two years.

Thanks for the info. I didn't realize the connection between all those series was to have a complete run of annuals but makes sense and sounds like a great idea. Need to keep an extra open eye for the Silverberg, don't believe I ever heard of it.

No problem!

I was actually mistaken about one thing regarding the Silverberg, though - and now I know why that "series" died a quick death: it was with Greenberg and had the same title (except it was "Silverberg Presents" rather than "Asimov Presents") but it had nothing to do with DAW - it was a NESFA hardcover for 25 bucks. So DAW apparently didn't want any overlap.

 

[dask]

$25! I'll snoop around google and try to find the table of contents. Might have all the stories anyway.

 

[J-Sun]

Here's the ToC if it'll save you trouble. I've got about 2/3 of it but it does look pretty good. But I don't want to pay five bucks or so a story. Actually, I don't know what a used copy costs - sometimes it costs a fraction but sometimes the price goes up.

 

[dask]

Hey, thanks a bunch. I'm gonna print it out and go do some checking. Some stuff looks familiar and some doesn't. Great website, I added it to favorites.

 

[J-Sun]

Hey, thanks a bunch. I'm gonna print it out and go do some checking. Some stuff looks familiar and some doesn't. Great website, I added it to favorites.

You're very welcome and glad you like the site - it should be a lot more famous than it is.

 

[AE35Unit]

Here's the ToC if it'll save you trouble. I've got about 2/3 of it but it does look pretty good. But I don't want to pay five bucks or so a story. Actually, I don't know what a used copy costs - sometimes it costs a fraction but sometimes the price goes up.

I just added the book to my wishlist on bookmooch. You never know, someone might part with it (hey I got a signed copy of Dangerous Visions from there!)

 

[Yearningmaple]

Definitely: Theodore Sturgeon's "More Than Human"; Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" and Edwin Abbott Abbott's "Flatland" (bit of a well-kept secret, that)

 

[neopeius]

Robert Sheckley is underrated and not well known, but he spins a yarn better than most. He started in the early 50's and produced regularly through the late 60's. His novels are nothing special, but his short story collections, of which there are many, are exquisite.

 

[BAYLOR]

Cordwainer Smith

 

[psikeyhackr]

And there’s a further complication. For the last decade I’ve been rereading many of those Oldie-Goldie science fiction novels from mid-20th century by listening to them on audiobook, and most of them are disappointing to me now, even though I thought they were wonderful back then. Would a 12-year-old today discovering these books find them exciting, or would they seem dumb and quaint compared to all the modern books, television shows and movies of today?

In other words, if we are defining the classic SF novels of the 1950s do they have to succeed for Golden Age readers (age 12, remember) or for people of any age in any reading year? For example, The Foundation Trilogy was mind blowing for me at 13 in 1964, but I found unreadable clunky at 59. Conversely, I thought Asimov’s The Naked Sun was boring back then and page turning fascinating a few years ago.

So I have two views of 1950s science fiction in my mind, 1950s SF Classics from my 10s and 20s, and 1950s SF Classics from my 50s and 60s. If I had been hired by Library of America to collect books that represent American science fiction in the 1950s I’d be torn between collecting those books I nostalgically remembered, and those books I felt held up over time. But I’d also be troubled by collecting books I loved versus books I knew were well loved by others.

http://auxiliarymemory.com/2013/04/04/the-defining-science-fiction-books-of-1950s/

psik

 

[psikeyhackr]

I was wondering what was an appropriate place to put this without starting a new thread.

HG Wells’s prescient visions of the future remain unsurpassed
HG Wells’s prescient visions of the future remain unsurpassed

Today is the 70th anniversary of H. G. Wells' death. He lived one year beyond the dropping of his "atomic bombs" on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The classic case of the relationship between science fiction and the reality of science.

psik

 

[psikeyhackr]

It is really annoying to be inoriginally original. I was recently discussing Ray Bradbury's writing and pointing out that Martian Chronicles was not science fiction and that Bradbury said so himself. I think of Bradbury as separate from the Big Three and never combined all four initials.

So I did that and got BACH as the only meaningful arrangement and so I Googled it with their names and found:

BACH
First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Eight, February 1991.

Only 25 years late.

Heinlein had two reputations. At the height of the golden age when BACH could do no wrong, he was generally regarded as the best writer of the four. He led, others followed. In the 1960s, when his reputation both inside and outside the field was such that anything with his name on it guaranteed a certain minimum number of sales, he grew sloppy and careless and earned another reputation as a once good writer who was no longer capable of producing the good stuff.

I think both reputations were exaggerations of the truth.

The last time Alex (the guy who bullies me into writing these things) visited me, we played a little game. We went through my shelf of Heinlein novels and picked out all the ones we thought were worthy of respect; all the ones we had enjoyed reading. We were not allowed to use our disagreement with the philosophical position espoused by the novel as an indication that the book lacked merit. For example, we both hate Starship Troopers for what it stands for but we’ve both read it many times in the past and will probably do so again in the future. It went on the list as a good book.

Interestingly, there was a surprising degree of agreement in our choices. The only book we disagreed on was The Puppet Masters which I enjoyed but Alex didn’t. The end result of the experiment astonished me—thirty-one out of the forty books on my shelves were judged worthy. That’s a success rate of 77.5%. I think any author in the world would be proud to think that he satisfied his readers 77.5% of the time. There was nowhere near as much trash as I remembered nor as much as the critics seem to think.

I was so intrigued by the result of this experiment that after Alex had gone, I went and tried it on the writer whose name immediately pops into my mind when people ask me who my favourite SF writer is—Philip K. Dick. Again, the results were very surprising. Out of the fifty-four Philip K. Dick books on my shelves I found only thirteen that I could honestly point to and say these are exceptional books. That’s a success rate of 24%. The selection rule I used this time (since I had nobody to discuss things with) was to choose only those Philip K. Dick books that I had read more than once.

I didn’t believe it and so I checked again, but it’s true. Despite the fact that I invariably cite Philip K. Dick as my favourite writer only 24% of his books have inspired me sufficiently to make me want to read them on second or subsequent occasions. But Heinlein, a writer I generally sneer at, managed “successful” books more than three times as often.

BACH


I found this amusing since I do not particularly like PKD and am astounded by the growth of his reputation and number of movies derived from his work.

So has anyone encountered BACH before?

Ray Bradbury, BACH, and Stanislaw Lem

Fiction: Ray Bradbury, an appreciation : Nature : Nature Research

Gregory Benford

La sinfonía BACH de la ciencia ficción

psik

 

[Tom Hering]

Go here for a list of the classics by rank: Classics of Science Fiction The site also has lists by decade, and an explanation of how all the lists were aggregated. When you're ready for New Wave, this blog is devoted to it: Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations