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Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology
An invaluable contribution to the serious study of science fiction as well as a highly entertaining collection, Science Fiction contains 27 chronologically-arranged stories and excerpts, ranging from such early classic works as Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Shelley's Frankenstein to recent stories such as Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and Ursula K. Le Guin's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow." Including brief general essays and a separate introduction to each individual story or excerpt, Rabkin's anthology greatly illuminates the evolution of the genre.
544 pages, Paperback
First published April 7, 1983
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March 24, 2020
Note, March 24, 2020: I edited this just now to correct a typo.
Though I listed this book as "read" since 1999, there were a few stories I'd skipped, and which I just read this past week. I still did not read the numerous novel excerpts (see below)! My rating, of course, is an overall ranking for the anthology as a whole; some stories would get five stars, and some certainly less than three.
Editor Rabkin (English, Univ. of Michigan) is a well-known, longstanding advocate for the academic study of science fiction; this anthology may well have been intended to contribute to that study and even to serve as a textbook, though his Introduction doesn't say so. The content of that Introduction, and the general tenor of his other comments and selections, with their chronological arrangement, certainly suggests a serious, historical-scholarly approach. Ironically, some of his deficiencies as an editor and analyst weaken the collection at that level. His six-page Introduction is erudite, sometimes factually informative and occasionally insightful; but he tries to force the narrative into a grand schema of SF evolving from a separate genre to supposed merger with and transformation of the literary mainstream (the wish was probably father to the thought). And (curiously for a literary scholar), he ignores the role of the Neoclassical, Romantic and Realist movements in the history of the genre, dividing it, in the body of the anthology, into periods without regard for these or for the usual periodization that most students of the field have discerned. His Part 1 roughly corresponds to the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods; but he takes the whole 19th century as Part 2, and the years from 1900-1939 as Part 3, "Early 20th Century." (Very few if any other observers would view 1900 as marking a significant break in the history of the genre, or not recognize that the rise of Realism after 1865 or the 1920s emergence of the SF pulps were significant breaks.) Then he idiosyncratically extends "The Golden Years" to 1965, ignoring the tidal changes after World War II, and begins "The Modern Period" in 1966, 17 years before the book was first published. Moreover, he is at times slipshod in arranging selections even in terms of his own schema: Wells' "The Star" (1899) winds up in the "Early 20th Century," whereas we find London's "A Curious Fragment" (1908) in Part 2, "19th Century;" and Pohl's "Earth Eighteen" was published in 1966, the same year as Zelazny's "For a Breath I Tarry," but the former is in "The Golden Years" and the latter in "The Modern Period." Rabkin's short comments introducing each selection tend to be superficial and not outstandingly useful.
Selection of material could have been improved in many cases, as well. True, part of his purpose is to show the historical development of the genre, so he can't be faulted because Voltaire's "Micromegas" is dry and tedious --Neoclassical SF in general tends to be dry and tedious. And other editors of fiction anthologies also fall into the trap of using out-of-context excerpts from novels, which do not provide the kind of reading experience the authors intended, and which for the reader are something like food dishes with key ingredients missing. Rabkin uses it more than most, though: five of his 26 authors (Poe is represented twice), or nearly 20%, are represented only by excerpts. In most cases, complete stories to represent the period, or even the individual writer, would have been available; Mary Shelley's "The Mortal Immortal," for instance, would have been preferable to an snippit from Frankenstein. Some short story choices are not felicitous, either. For instance, the partly-epistolary "The Sandman," which is verbose, slow-moving and opaque even by Romantic standards isn't Hoffmann's best SF work, and Poe's "A Descent Into the Maelstrom" isn't SF at all, IMO. And the reason Merritt's "The Last Poet and the Robots" is so hard for the reader to understand is that it was (as the editor does NOT explain) the last installment of a "round robin" serial, in which successive writers wrote installments of a continuing narrative without consulting each other. (Merritt deserved better here.)
All that said, though, a number of the stories here are good reading, and some are outstanding. "Flowers for Algernon" and "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" deserve the status of classics. The Wells and London stories mentioned above are excellent (the latter is set in the same milieu as The Iron Heel); and so is the Pohl story, which showcases that writer's rapier wit. The Zelazny selection, for me, has problems of credibility in both premise and message, but it's a very well-written, perfectly crafted, and moving story. Sheckley's "Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?" (despite its initial publication in Playboy) is emphatically NOT an endorsement of egocentric and exploitative autonomy, carried to the point of total alienation from and objectification of others, but rather a critical depiction of it in terms the reader is expected to recognize as highly negative. And one of my personal favorites among the stories here is Jack Finney's little -known but beautiful "The Third Level." And that list by no means exhausts the roster of worthwhile tales here!
Though I listed this book as "read" since 1999, there were a few stories I'd skipped, and which I just read this past week. I still did not read the numerous novel excerpts (see below)! My rating, of course, is an overall ranking for the anthology as a whole; some stories would get five stars, and some certainly less than three.
Editor Rabkin (English, Univ. of Michigan) is a well-known, longstanding advocate for the academic study of science fiction; this anthology may well have been intended to contribute to that study and even to serve as a textbook, though his Introduction doesn't say so. The content of that Introduction, and the general tenor of his other comments and selections, with their chronological arrangement, certainly suggests a serious, historical-scholarly approach. Ironically, some of his deficiencies as an editor and analyst weaken the collection at that level. His six-page Introduction is erudite, sometimes factually informative and occasionally insightful; but he tries to force the narrative into a grand schema of SF evolving from a separate genre to supposed merger with and transformation of the literary mainstream (the wish was probably father to the thought). And (curiously for a literary scholar), he ignores the role of the Neoclassical, Romantic and Realist movements in the history of the genre, dividing it, in the body of the anthology, into periods without regard for these or for the usual periodization that most students of the field have discerned. His Part 1 roughly corresponds to the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods; but he takes the whole 19th century as Part 2, and the years from 1900-1939 as Part 3, "Early 20th Century." (Very few if any other observers would view 1900 as marking a significant break in the history of the genre, or not recognize that the rise of Realism after 1865 or the 1920s emergence of the SF pulps were significant breaks.) Then he idiosyncratically extends "The Golden Years" to 1965, ignoring the tidal changes after World War II, and begins "The Modern Period" in 1966, 17 years before the book was first published. Moreover, he is at times slipshod in arranging selections even in terms of his own schema: Wells' "The Star" (1899) winds up in the "Early 20th Century," whereas we find London's "A Curious Fragment" (1908) in Part 2, "19th Century;" and Pohl's "Earth Eighteen" was published in 1966, the same year as Zelazny's "For a Breath I Tarry," but the former is in "The Golden Years" and the latter in "The Modern Period." Rabkin's short comments introducing each selection tend to be superficial and not outstandingly useful.
Selection of material could have been improved in many cases, as well. True, part of his purpose is to show the historical development of the genre, so he can't be faulted because Voltaire's "Micromegas" is dry and tedious --Neoclassical SF in general tends to be dry and tedious. And other editors of fiction anthologies also fall into the trap of using out-of-context excerpts from novels, which do not provide the kind of reading experience the authors intended, and which for the reader are something like food dishes with key ingredients missing. Rabkin uses it more than most, though: five of his 26 authors (Poe is represented twice), or nearly 20%, are represented only by excerpts. In most cases, complete stories to represent the period, or even the individual writer, would have been available; Mary Shelley's "The Mortal Immortal," for instance, would have been preferable to an snippit from Frankenstein. Some short story choices are not felicitous, either. For instance, the partly-epistolary "The Sandman," which is verbose, slow-moving and opaque even by Romantic standards isn't Hoffmann's best SF work, and Poe's "A Descent Into the Maelstrom" isn't SF at all, IMO. And the reason Merritt's "The Last Poet and the Robots" is so hard for the reader to understand is that it was (as the editor does NOT explain) the last installment of a "round robin" serial, in which successive writers wrote installments of a continuing narrative without consulting each other. (Merritt deserved better here.)
All that said, though, a number of the stories here are good reading, and some are outstanding. "Flowers for Algernon" and "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" deserve the status of classics. The Wells and London stories mentioned above are excellent (the latter is set in the same milieu as The Iron Heel); and so is the Pohl story, which showcases that writer's rapier wit. The Zelazny selection, for me, has problems of credibility in both premise and message, but it's a very well-written, perfectly crafted, and moving story. Sheckley's "Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?" (despite its initial publication in Playboy) is emphatically NOT an endorsement of egocentric and exploitative autonomy, carried to the point of total alienation from and objectification of others, but rather a critical depiction of it in terms the reader is expected to recognize as highly negative. And one of my personal favorites among the stories here is Jack Finney's little -known but beautiful "The Third Level." And that list by no means exhausts the roster of worthwhile tales here!
August 17, 2012
The editor, Eric Rabkin, has collected a variety of short stories and excerpts from longer tales for this book. In the preface, he states that "This anthology is intended to make available a full spectrum of science fiction materials and to place them in both a literary and a cultural context." Thus, this is not a collection of "greatest" stories, but rather a selection of representative stories from different time periods. As Rabkin is a Professor of English at the University of Michigan, it seems likely that he assembled these stories to serve as a textbook for a course on science fiction as a literary form.
To this end, he has collected stories and excerpts from as early as the 17th century. Cyrano de Bergerac, Jonathan Swift, and Voltaire do not immediately spring to mind as authors of science fiction, but Rabkin has selected tales that do demonstrate some reliance on science as it was conceived of in the era that Rabkin labels "The Emergence of Modern Science." Likewise, though "Frankenstein" and Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward" (excerpts from both are included here) are recognized as early examples of the genre, Rabkin has also chosen stories from E.T.A. Hoffman, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Jack London that demonstrate emergent themes of science fiction in the 19th century.
Moving into the early 20th century, Rabkin gives us samples from recognizable science fiction authors like John W. Campbell and H.G. Wells, as well as others better known within the S.F. community than without: Hugo Gernsback, Abraham Merritt, and Olaf Stapledon. Moving into "the Golden Years" (with acknowledgement of how difficult it is to define their start and end, assuming the period actually existed), the names become more recognizable to the general reader: Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frederick Pohl, Clifford D. Simak, Jack Finney, and Daniel Keyes. Keyes' contribution is the short story "Flowers for Algernon," which he later expanded into a novel of the same name. When I read the novel in high school, it was never identified as "science fiction," despite the obvious reliance on science for its narrative.
Rabkin's "Modern Period" is fairly limited in time, going only from Roger Zelazny's 1966 story "For a Breath I Tarry" to Ursula K. Leguin's 1971 "Vaster than Empires and More Slow." Between are contributions from Harlan Ellison and Robert Sheckley.
Though there are several good stories in this anthology, Rabkin's intention is clearly to show different developments of S.F. storytelling over time, rather than provide a good read. For example: Hugo Gernsback (for whom S.F.'s "Hugo Award" is named) was the first of the "pulp" S.F. magazine editors. He included stories of his own in his publications as well as featuring stories from other authors, making him a pioneer writer as well as editor. Perhaps his most famous story is titled "Ralph 124C 41+." Rabkin has excerpted it here, which is a mercy. I had never read any of the story before encountering it in this volume, but Rabkin gives us enough of the story to see Gernsback's "prediction" of radar in this 1911 tale while sparing us most of the melodramatic, purple prose that undoubtedly gave science fiction such a bad reputation among my high school English teachers and, probably, the parents of those kids reading such magazines as "Astounding" and "Amazing Stories" in the 1950's and 60's. But Rabkin's purpose is to give a sense of how S.F. as a genre has developed, and in this sense, "Ralph 124C 41+" is an important tale. For a similar reason (as Rabkin explains in the preface to the story), Pohl's contribution here is chosen not because it is the best short story he wrote (it is not), but because it illustrates something about the emergent community of "outsiders" (i.e., outside of mainstream society) that formed the core of S.F. fans during the "golden years."
That said, the stories from many of the "big names" (Wells, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Ellison, LeGuin) ARE also good stories in and of themselves. They are, happily, well-salted throughout the book to help keep you reading after some of the flatter tales. This may be intentional or it may be mere coincidence, since the tales are all ordered by year of publication. In either case, this distribution keeps the volume from becoming too dry/pedantic/academic.
Do not buy this book simply to read for the stories. If you are looking only for entertainment, there are better anthologies out there. But this IS a valuable book if you seek to understand the development of science fiction writing. Rabkin, as he promised, does place each story in its literary and cultural contexts, which makes even the flatter stories more interesting to the reader wishing to understand more of the history of S.F. than if the stories had stood on their own.
To this end, he has collected stories and excerpts from as early as the 17th century. Cyrano de Bergerac, Jonathan Swift, and Voltaire do not immediately spring to mind as authors of science fiction, but Rabkin has selected tales that do demonstrate some reliance on science as it was conceived of in the era that Rabkin labels "The Emergence of Modern Science." Likewise, though "Frankenstein" and Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward" (excerpts from both are included here) are recognized as early examples of the genre, Rabkin has also chosen stories from E.T.A. Hoffman, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Jack London that demonstrate emergent themes of science fiction in the 19th century.
Moving into the early 20th century, Rabkin gives us samples from recognizable science fiction authors like John W. Campbell and H.G. Wells, as well as others better known within the S.F. community than without: Hugo Gernsback, Abraham Merritt, and Olaf Stapledon. Moving into "the Golden Years" (with acknowledgement of how difficult it is to define their start and end, assuming the period actually existed), the names become more recognizable to the general reader: Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frederick Pohl, Clifford D. Simak, Jack Finney, and Daniel Keyes. Keyes' contribution is the short story "Flowers for Algernon," which he later expanded into a novel of the same name. When I read the novel in high school, it was never identified as "science fiction," despite the obvious reliance on science for its narrative.
Rabkin's "Modern Period" is fairly limited in time, going only from Roger Zelazny's 1966 story "For a Breath I Tarry" to Ursula K. Leguin's 1971 "Vaster than Empires and More Slow." Between are contributions from Harlan Ellison and Robert Sheckley.
Though there are several good stories in this anthology, Rabkin's intention is clearly to show different developments of S.F. storytelling over time, rather than provide a good read. For example: Hugo Gernsback (for whom S.F.'s "Hugo Award" is named) was the first of the "pulp" S.F. magazine editors. He included stories of his own in his publications as well as featuring stories from other authors, making him a pioneer writer as well as editor. Perhaps his most famous story is titled "Ralph 124C 41+." Rabkin has excerpted it here, which is a mercy. I had never read any of the story before encountering it in this volume, but Rabkin gives us enough of the story to see Gernsback's "prediction" of radar in this 1911 tale while sparing us most of the melodramatic, purple prose that undoubtedly gave science fiction such a bad reputation among my high school English teachers and, probably, the parents of those kids reading such magazines as "Astounding" and "Amazing Stories" in the 1950's and 60's. But Rabkin's purpose is to give a sense of how S.F. as a genre has developed, and in this sense, "Ralph 124C 41+" is an important tale. For a similar reason (as Rabkin explains in the preface to the story), Pohl's contribution here is chosen not because it is the best short story he wrote (it is not), but because it illustrates something about the emergent community of "outsiders" (i.e., outside of mainstream society) that formed the core of S.F. fans during the "golden years."
That said, the stories from many of the "big names" (Wells, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Ellison, LeGuin) ARE also good stories in and of themselves. They are, happily, well-salted throughout the book to help keep you reading after some of the flatter tales. This may be intentional or it may be mere coincidence, since the tales are all ordered by year of publication. In either case, this distribution keeps the volume from becoming too dry/pedantic/academic.
Do not buy this book simply to read for the stories. If you are looking only for entertainment, there are better anthologies out there. But this IS a valuable book if you seek to understand the development of science fiction writing. Rabkin, as he promised, does place each story in its literary and cultural contexts, which makes even the flatter stories more interesting to the reader wishing to understand more of the history of S.F. than if the stories had stood on their own.
December 12, 2014
Robert A. Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” is the best ;)
December 27, 2018
This anthology is an excellent collection of short stories spanning the decades of science fiction writing. It spans early selections from authors such as Cyrano de Bergerac, Jonathan Swift, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar A. Poe, to authors more commonly thought of as science fiction writers such as H. G. Well, Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein. The textbook is divided into 5 parts: The Emergence of Modern Science, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, The Golden Years (1940-1965), and The Modern Period. Each part has a concise and well-written scholarly introduction and explanation. Each short story is placed in the historical context of the development of science fiction as a genre. The four authors featured in Part 5: The Modern Period are Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, Robert Sheckley, and Ursula K. Le Guin. For this anthology published in 1983, Ursula K. Le Guin would have been "modern". I purchased my copy as a college student and it was used as one of my textbooks in a course entitled "The Literature of Science Fiction". Rating 5 stars.
September 7, 2016
I've read pages 1-313
Old school Sci-fi is definitly not my thing.
Everything is very sensational.
The science in here is more often than not wrong and it's hardly even the focus of the story.
Everything is very uniform. Almost all of these older stories are written in first person, and it's someone just telling and telling either what they've lived through or what a scociety is like. It's fairly boring and does not conform to the modern concept of what a story should be like with an introduction, a rising climax and a ressolution to a central conflict. It just - is. It feels like history writing in style, more than fiction.
Also - didn't people in the eighteenth and nineteenth century believe in having dialouge in prose fiction? These texts make it seem like they didn't.
Old school Sci-fi is definitly not my thing.
Everything is very sensational.
The science in here is more often than not wrong and it's hardly even the focus of the story.
Everything is very uniform. Almost all of these older stories are written in first person, and it's someone just telling and telling either what they've lived through or what a scociety is like. It's fairly boring and does not conform to the modern concept of what a story should be like with an introduction, a rising climax and a ressolution to a central conflict. It just - is. It feels like history writing in style, more than fiction.
Also - didn't people in the eighteenth and nineteenth century believe in having dialouge in prose fiction? These texts make it seem like they didn't.
March 29, 2011
By far, the best collection on the market before the millennials appeared on the shelves. If you are looking for a good starter reader begin here and then move into either Bradbury, Heinlein, or Asimov next. They are all in the anthology with good core pieces to read. This was the core text of my SciFi lit class at Marshall. Really opened me view up beyond the 1990s pulp SciFi that I had been reading.
January 20, 2011
Solid collection of stories with good introductions to each era by the editor.
August 30, 2011
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (finished 3/8/2011): I bought this anthology so I could read this short story. It was worth it.
September 1, 2025
Decent assortment! Highlights for me were both of "The Star"(s) and the neat earlier utopian stuff from Bellamy, whom I'd heard about but not read and Jack London whom I'd read but didn't realize was a marxist (because mostly he just writes about wolves and dogs). Reading this alongside People's History of the US gave me a few cool moments of confluence. "For a Breath I Tarry" I think was my favorite and the last story by Ursula Le Guin was a nice dessert.
I think the flaw of this as a collection is that it's sort of front-heavy, artificially extending the definition of Sci-Fi in some cases and just lending too much of its page count to the stuff that, while arguably is Science Fiction in its fledgling state, isn't really necessary to such an extent in order to establish a cannon of inspirations for a genre that didn't really reach full maturity until the 20th century. I certainly see no value in having 2 kind of unremarkable chapters of Frankenstein thrown in; I'd rather just read that in its entirety. And if we really want to talk about progenitors, where is Jules Verne?
By the time we get to the "Golden Years" on page 315 I think another 400 pages would be required to cover the breadth and depth of the last 100 years of Sci-Fi and properly explore some of its more unsavory tendencies towards sexism, racism, colonialism etc (speaking of Jules Verne). Instead we have a smattering of randomly picked stuff, some of which does exhibit those issues and a few that don't/actively discourse with them. Unfortunately this isn't accompanied by sufficient analysis in the introductions to each piece provided and it all feels rushed.
I think the flaw of this as a collection is that it's sort of front-heavy, artificially extending the definition of Sci-Fi in some cases and just lending too much of its page count to the stuff that, while arguably is Science Fiction in its fledgling state, isn't really necessary to such an extent in order to establish a cannon of inspirations for a genre that didn't really reach full maturity until the 20th century. I certainly see no value in having 2 kind of unremarkable chapters of Frankenstein thrown in; I'd rather just read that in its entirety. And if we really want to talk about progenitors, where is Jules Verne?
By the time we get to the "Golden Years" on page 315 I think another 400 pages would be required to cover the breadth and depth of the last 100 years of Sci-Fi and properly explore some of its more unsavory tendencies towards sexism, racism, colonialism etc (speaking of Jules Verne). Instead we have a smattering of randomly picked stuff, some of which does exhibit those issues and a few that don't/actively discourse with them. Unfortunately this isn't accompanied by sufficient analysis in the introductions to each piece provided and it all feels rushed.
May 20, 2024
I liked the selection in this anthology, it introduced me to works I never would’ve otherwise read. My standout favorites, which I would highly recommend, are as follows:
- Twilight (John W. Campbell, 1934)
- For a Breath I Tarry (Roger Zelazny, 1966)
- The Star (H. G. Wells, 1899)
- The City (Ray Bradbury, 1950)
- A Curious Fragment (Jack London, 1908)
- Reason (Isaac Asimov, 1941)
Now for some minor drawbacks. Although this book takes you through the lore of sci-fi from its apparent beginnings, this collection is a bit dated as it was published in 1983 and thus doesn’t include any works today we would consider contemporary (don’t be surprised that it omits any mention of Ender’s Game— it came out in 1985).
It also, to my knowledge, includes only Western authors with a Western perspective, as it was ostensibly written for a Western audience. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it is important to keep in mind that this anthology is but a brief snapshot in time, in specific parts of the world. I would love to read more collections exploring further!
- Twilight (John W. Campbell, 1934)
- For a Breath I Tarry (Roger Zelazny, 1966)
- The Star (H. G. Wells, 1899)
- The City (Ray Bradbury, 1950)
- A Curious Fragment (Jack London, 1908)
- Reason (Isaac Asimov, 1941)
Now for some minor drawbacks. Although this book takes you through the lore of sci-fi from its apparent beginnings, this collection is a bit dated as it was published in 1983 and thus doesn’t include any works today we would consider contemporary (don’t be surprised that it omits any mention of Ender’s Game— it came out in 1985).
It also, to my knowledge, includes only Western authors with a Western perspective, as it was ostensibly written for a Western audience. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it is important to keep in mind that this anthology is but a brief snapshot in time, in specific parts of the world. I would love to read more collections exploring further!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews