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The Road to Science Fiction #3
The Road to Science Fiction 3: From Heinlein to Here
Now in Paperback!
Between an ancient Roman's trip to the moon and the fantastic tales of H.G. Wells lies a journey through time and space and an awesome evolution in scientific thinking. From Gilgamesh's search for immortality to Lucian's odyssey on the moon; from Jonathan Swift's hilarious satire on scientists in Gulliver's Travels to Mary Shelley's horrifying description of a scientist who has gone too far in Frankenstein from Edgar Allan Poe's balloon trip in the year 2848 to Jules Verne's prophesies of the impact of scientific inventions on future civilization; from Edward Bellamy's utopian escape from the industrial Revolution to H.G. Wells's magnificent story of Earth threatened by an inescapable menace-here are the chief ancestors of the modern science fiction story. For the first time, these and other key works are gathered together in one anthology, complete with revealing commentary on the authors, their eras, and the role each played in establishing what we today recognize as science fiction.
The Road to Science Fiction is a six-volume anthology of science fiction that covers the development of science fiction from its earliest prototypes in the Sumerian Gilgamesh and the Greek epics to approximately 1990.
Created originally to provide anthologies for use in classes, these volumes have become mass-market sellers as well, since they are not only a source of outstanding stories but also explain what constitutes science fiction, how it developed and the contribution the authors and the stories have made to the evolution of science fiction.
Volume 3, From Heinlein to Here , covers the period from 1940 to 1975, beginning in the Golden Age of Science Fiction and ending at a time when SF book publication was just beginning to explode and SF films ( 2001: A Space Odyssey; Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, E.T. ) would soon dominate box offices.
Cloth edition previously published in 1979.
Between an ancient Roman's trip to the moon and the fantastic tales of H.G. Wells lies a journey through time and space and an awesome evolution in scientific thinking. From Gilgamesh's search for immortality to Lucian's odyssey on the moon; from Jonathan Swift's hilarious satire on scientists in Gulliver's Travels to Mary Shelley's horrifying description of a scientist who has gone too far in Frankenstein from Edgar Allan Poe's balloon trip in the year 2848 to Jules Verne's prophesies of the impact of scientific inventions on future civilization; from Edward Bellamy's utopian escape from the industrial Revolution to H.G. Wells's magnificent story of Earth threatened by an inescapable menace-here are the chief ancestors of the modern science fiction story. For the first time, these and other key works are gathered together in one anthology, complete with revealing commentary on the authors, their eras, and the role each played in establishing what we today recognize as science fiction.
The Road to Science Fiction is a six-volume anthology of science fiction that covers the development of science fiction from its earliest prototypes in the Sumerian Gilgamesh and the Greek epics to approximately 1990.
Created originally to provide anthologies for use in classes, these volumes have become mass-market sellers as well, since they are not only a source of outstanding stories but also explain what constitutes science fiction, how it developed and the contribution the authors and the stories have made to the evolution of science fiction.
Volume 3, From Heinlein to Here , covers the period from 1940 to 1975, beginning in the Golden Age of Science Fiction and ending at a time when SF book publication was just beginning to explode and SF films ( 2001: A Space Odyssey; Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, E.T. ) would soon dominate box offices.
Cloth edition previously published in 1979.
656 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
6 people are currently reading
211 people want to read
About the author
James E. Gunn
267 books117 followersAmerican science fiction author, editor, scholar, and anthologist. His work from the 1960s and 70s is considered his most significant fiction, and his Road to Science Fiction collections are considered his most important scholarly books. He won a Hugo Award for a non-fiction book in 1983 for Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. He was named the 2007 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Gunn served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, after which he attended the University of Kansas, earning a Bachelor of Science in Journalism in 1947 and a Masters of Arts in English in 1951. Gunn went on to become a faculty member of the University of Kansas, where he served as the university's director of public relations and as a professor of English, specializing in science fiction and fiction writing. He is now a professor emeritus and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which awards the annual John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award at the Campbell Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, every July.
He served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1971–72, was President of the Science Fiction Research Association from 1980-82, and currently is Director of The Center for the Study of
Science Fiction. SFWA honored him as a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2007.
Gunn began his career as a science fiction author in 1948. He has had almost 100 stories published in magazines and anthologies and has authored 26 books and edited 10. Many of his stories and books have been reprinted around the world.
In 1996, Gunn wrote a novelization of the unproduced Star Trek episode "The Joy Machine" by Theodore Sturgeon.
His stories also have been adapted into radioplays and teleplays:
* NBC radio's X Minus One
* Desilu Playhouse's 1959 "Man in Orbit", based on Gunn's "The Cave of Night"
* ABC-TV's Movie of the Week "The Immortal" (1969) and an hour-long television series in 1970, based on Gunn's The Immortals
* An episode of the USSR science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, filmed in 1989 and entitled "Psychodynamics of the Witchcraft" was based on James Gunn's 1953 story "Wherever You May Be".
Gunn served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, after which he attended the University of Kansas, earning a Bachelor of Science in Journalism in 1947 and a Masters of Arts in English in 1951. Gunn went on to become a faculty member of the University of Kansas, where he served as the university's director of public relations and as a professor of English, specializing in science fiction and fiction writing. He is now a professor emeritus and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which awards the annual John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award at the Campbell Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, every July.
He served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1971–72, was President of the Science Fiction Research Association from 1980-82, and currently is Director of The Center for the Study of
Science Fiction. SFWA honored him as a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2007.
Gunn began his career as a science fiction author in 1948. He has had almost 100 stories published in magazines and anthologies and has authored 26 books and edited 10. Many of his stories and books have been reprinted around the world.
In 1996, Gunn wrote a novelization of the unproduced Star Trek episode "The Joy Machine" by Theodore Sturgeon.
His stories also have been adapted into radioplays and teleplays:
* NBC radio's X Minus One
* Desilu Playhouse's 1959 "Man in Orbit", based on Gunn's "The Cave of Night"
* ABC-TV's Movie of the Week "The Immortal" (1969) and an hour-long television series in 1970, based on Gunn's The Immortals
* An episode of the USSR science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, filmed in 1989 and entitled "Psychodynamics of the Witchcraft" was based on James Gunn's 1953 story "Wherever You May Be".
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
July 5, 2011
There are a lot of problems you encounter if you read science fiction. Here are some of the main ones.
1) Until fairly recently (mid-80s) sf writers with the exception of Ray Bradbury, Brian Aldiss and Theodore Sturgeon couldn't write their way out of a brown paper bag with clear exit directions printed in big letters on the inside. Their prose was stilted, colourless and just lay there pretending to be a plastic tube down which all the great ideas could swill freely.
2) Which means that the characters, famously, were the kind who make cardboard appear to vibrate with Shakespearian complexity. No one used to have sex, or parents, or go to the bathroom. It was perpetually 1955, even in the future.
3) But let us overlook mere style. The point, surely, is the great ideas. Alas, here is another problem. In every other story you get The Science, usually in a dollop like this :
“Thus, for a properly orientated observer, the universe must at all times have a radius equal to tau times the velocity of light,” said Friedmann, by way of conclusion. “Hence, if tau increases uniformly we must of necessity have the expanding universe as shown by the general recession of the extragalactic nebulae. But this increase in tau time is not really uniform but a statistical effect.”
Etc etc. You can find a million paragraphs like this stretching from the 50s to the 80s when the writers got a little more self conscious and stopped doing it. The above quote is actually from a story I really like, called “The Xi Effect”. I like it for its psychedelic effects, even though it was written in 1950. So you might think that to read sf properly you have to a) know the science enough to see if the guy is talking nonsense, AND b) remember what the level of knowledge was when the story was written, because it might be nonsense now but have been accepted then. Well, nobody is going to do this apart from True Geeks. It’s all geek to me. So in a strange way that makes sf a type of fantasy. But it's a type where you take it on trust that the author thought that if this bit of sciencey speculation was roughly correct then this story could happen, more or less. Okay, that's good enough for me - it's not fantasy! (Pretty thin Gandalf-flavoured ice here!)
4) It’s often hard to tell if the author is taking the tropes seriously or not, or if you’re supposed to care. The tropes are the paraphernalia of sf – robots, the future, faster than light drives, time travel, aliens, galactic empires, all that junk. In most cases you have to assume a lot of this stuff to get to the story in question. If you stubbornly refuse to accept there will ever be faster than light travel, then humans will NEVER meet any alien races and all of the interesting possibilities which spring from the notion of contact between us alien humans and those alien aliens is off the menu, pure fantasy, and fantasy is boring, because if anything can happen, nothing is interesting. But anyway, when these writers write about aliens, is this not just a method of discussing the author’s latest musings on human psychology or sexuality? Or maybe his new theory about the real origins of the First World War? Hard to know, hard to know on what level a lot of sf is actually intended. You could say similar things for any fiction, I guess, but in the mainstream there are much fewer shortcuts (“he stepped into the warp”) and less overt game playing. So much sf is a series of riffs on previous sf, like jazz players taking a Charlie Parker tune for a run.
5) The Devil tempts many sf writers with pitifully small amounts of cash - £500 will usually do it – and gets them to write cruddy space opera and/or outright fantasy in big doorstopping series of 800 page novels which clog up all the sf shelves in the shops and makes honest readers think sf is all Gandalf on Mars.
6) The book covers don’t help.
7) The fans are so very geeky they make normal geeks run away in horror.
and
8) The authors have too many beards, Gregory Benford, Alfred Bester, John Brunner, Orson Scott Card, Avram Davidson, Samuel Delaney, Philip Dick… need I go on?
But but but but.... the thing is that sf is like pop music. Somewhere underneath all that humdrum bass'n'drum and wannabe r&b there lurks The Record that Will Change Your Life (if only for five minutes). And this is what keeps us going.
I should add that James Gunn's 5 part Road to Science Fiction is a great series and if you want to see if you like this stuff, start here.
1) Until fairly recently (mid-80s) sf writers with the exception of Ray Bradbury, Brian Aldiss and Theodore Sturgeon couldn't write their way out of a brown paper bag with clear exit directions printed in big letters on the inside. Their prose was stilted, colourless and just lay there pretending to be a plastic tube down which all the great ideas could swill freely.
2) Which means that the characters, famously, were the kind who make cardboard appear to vibrate with Shakespearian complexity. No one used to have sex, or parents, or go to the bathroom. It was perpetually 1955, even in the future.
3) But let us overlook mere style. The point, surely, is the great ideas. Alas, here is another problem. In every other story you get The Science, usually in a dollop like this :
“Thus, for a properly orientated observer, the universe must at all times have a radius equal to tau times the velocity of light,” said Friedmann, by way of conclusion. “Hence, if tau increases uniformly we must of necessity have the expanding universe as shown by the general recession of the extragalactic nebulae. But this increase in tau time is not really uniform but a statistical effect.”
Etc etc. You can find a million paragraphs like this stretching from the 50s to the 80s when the writers got a little more self conscious and stopped doing it. The above quote is actually from a story I really like, called “The Xi Effect”. I like it for its psychedelic effects, even though it was written in 1950. So you might think that to read sf properly you have to a) know the science enough to see if the guy is talking nonsense, AND b) remember what the level of knowledge was when the story was written, because it might be nonsense now but have been accepted then. Well, nobody is going to do this apart from True Geeks. It’s all geek to me. So in a strange way that makes sf a type of fantasy. But it's a type where you take it on trust that the author thought that if this bit of sciencey speculation was roughly correct then this story could happen, more or less. Okay, that's good enough for me - it's not fantasy! (Pretty thin Gandalf-flavoured ice here!)
4) It’s often hard to tell if the author is taking the tropes seriously or not, or if you’re supposed to care. The tropes are the paraphernalia of sf – robots, the future, faster than light drives, time travel, aliens, galactic empires, all that junk. In most cases you have to assume a lot of this stuff to get to the story in question. If you stubbornly refuse to accept there will ever be faster than light travel, then humans will NEVER meet any alien races and all of the interesting possibilities which spring from the notion of contact between us alien humans and those alien aliens is off the menu, pure fantasy, and fantasy is boring, because if anything can happen, nothing is interesting. But anyway, when these writers write about aliens, is this not just a method of discussing the author’s latest musings on human psychology or sexuality? Or maybe his new theory about the real origins of the First World War? Hard to know, hard to know on what level a lot of sf is actually intended. You could say similar things for any fiction, I guess, but in the mainstream there are much fewer shortcuts (“he stepped into the warp”) and less overt game playing. So much sf is a series of riffs on previous sf, like jazz players taking a Charlie Parker tune for a run.
5) The Devil tempts many sf writers with pitifully small amounts of cash - £500 will usually do it – and gets them to write cruddy space opera and/or outright fantasy in big doorstopping series of 800 page novels which clog up all the sf shelves in the shops and makes honest readers think sf is all Gandalf on Mars.
6) The book covers don’t help.
7) The fans are so very geeky they make normal geeks run away in horror.
and
8) The authors have too many beards, Gregory Benford, Alfred Bester, John Brunner, Orson Scott Card, Avram Davidson, Samuel Delaney, Philip Dick… need I go on?
But but but but.... the thing is that sf is like pop music. Somewhere underneath all that humdrum bass'n'drum and wannabe r&b there lurks The Record that Will Change Your Life (if only for five minutes). And this is what keeps us going.
I should add that James Gunn's 5 part Road to Science Fiction is a great series and if you want to see if you like this stuff, start here.
June 9, 2020
"Reasons," by Isaac Asimov, 12 pg. (1941): 8
- I've learned to more quickly dismiss annoyance at the stylistic quirks of Golden Age sf from my perturbation engines, and a good thing for "Reason", because Asimov traffics in them up and down. One particular to this story: the hot-headed jerk character, who cannot speak a sentence without including some spastic insult ("Now watch out you metal ignoramus!"). Getting beyond this, though, there's -- and, truly, against my better impulses -- a nice metaphorical turn here in the story.
"Desertion," by Clifford Simak, 14 pg. (1944): 9
- The rare GA story whose writing amplifies a rather cut-and-dry story, rather than the other way around.
"The Sentinel," by Arthur C. Clarke (1951): 8.25
- It is, obviously, impossible to read this with fresh eyes, and impossible to read it outside of whatever impression one has of 2001. There is, for starters, the reader’s disconnect between the tone of the story—of a stolid, earnest scientist POV, full of pride, gathering inquisitiveness, and even happiness at the discovery of the object—and that of the film. It is, again obviously, that Penderecki Threnody—not quite the selection to convey the former, even if the sublime scenario sketched in outline at the end hints in the direction of potential hostility. What’s more notable, and welcome, is precisely that digging in, on Clarke’s part, to the prehistorical sublime. He’s awed by the discrepancy between the object’s installation and the void of life on earth, and he works to make the reader likewise. (One could, if you’re feeling less generous, see the massive “guessplanation” at the end as instead a sign of some indecision about conclusion, or sense that the story he’d told left too many gaps between it and the Point he wanted to make and, damnit, I’ll just fill in the gaps and get on out.)
"Mimsy Were the Borogoves," by Lewis Padgett, 32 pg. (1943): 8.25
- Too cute by half, or whatever the 40s equivalent is, to answer the question no one was asking: i.e. what was up with Jabberwocky? Some nice, early Golden Age, smoothly jocular, wink-winky opening lines however (those being, "I'm not gonna describe 1,000,000 AD, cause it's no use").
“Sail On! Sail On!” by Philip Jose Farmer (1952): 8.5
- There’s a story I read growing up that’s stuck with me. It’s from the Wayside School books, one of a type of children’s literature that seems to have dissipated in influence—the sneering, surreal, slightly malevolent fantasia (Phantom Tollbooth, z.B.) but I find preferable to the juvenalized speculation popular today (ie, take an “adult” genre novel and sand it’s rougher edges and ta-daa, YA). Anyway, the little fable goes: there’s a boy in math class who gets all problems right, but comes at each one incorrectly. For example: 2+2? “Well, 2x5=23, 23-4=3, so 3+23=4. The answer is 4.” This frustrates his teacher to no end. Here, Farmer uses alternate history as a means of illustrating the same principle. Namely, Catholicism embracing, rather than persecuting (as it does in pop understandings of the period) science leads to an early technological revolution, albeit one in which the laws undergirding such inventions are fully misunderstood and theologically framed. Fun take, even if the corresponding “story” exists only insofar as a talky delineation of said differences (ie, radio works as a relay of microscopically small angels connected between distant points). Still, a nice revision of the more staid alt history trope of Catholic dominance / no Protestant Reformation = retarded “progress”, or no industrial revolution and such. A cart-before-the-horse history, I’d say, and one which ignores broader material structures and developments within which I have largely no problem imagining the capitalist prima facie realities-on-the-ground that pave the way for technology developing, albeit conceding that they might now just have a different social valence, having been sprung within the religio-political atmosphere they did. Oh, and the falling off the edge of the world was a nice re-re-orientation. Fun.
"Brooklyn Project," by William Tenn (1948): 9.5
- For a story doing this, at this time, hard to see it being better.
"The Million-Year Picnic," by Ray Bradbury (1946): 8
- A story built around a punchline, as much early sf. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
"Coming Attraction," by Fritz Leiber (1950): 7.5
- Benefits from post-read reflection, as the themes emerge a bit more clarly from the morass of stop-go plotting and blundered dialoging. STORY: future America, bit dystopian and post-WWIII, in which women now wear masks,and man falls into boring sex game between professional wrestler and his sub. Yes, that's what happens.
"All You Zombies," by Robert Heinlein (1958): 7.75
- I’d need some graphs to lay out all the time-jump contortions on display here. Largely a story in two parts: one, an exposition-heavy [in the way these period genre stories love] recounting of one intersex person's life; and another, a sped-up series of time-traveling manipulations by the main character, during which we find out he was the interlocutee the whole time [i.e. all of the characters, in other words: the barkeep, the ‘unmarried mother,’ the seducer, the girl, and the baby (if I’m getting it right)]. That’s all well and good, and might reward some chart-making scrutiny, in that you could appreciate the convolutions therein. I’m more interested in the intersex story, though. Not because it’s “problematic” or anything like that. But more because it serves as an interesting illustration of precisely an historical occurrence I’ve read often about: the very conscious intercession on the part of physicians when encountering intersex individuals regarding the ‘gender’ of the individual. Here, it’s [par for the time] presented as matter of fact: the doctor saw this ganglial ‘confusion’ while the patient was out and, without consent or consultation, made his own decisions about what this person’s gendered external expression would/should be from then on. Interestingly, the ‘patient’ is presented in this story as not at all reacting negatively to this, likely because it’s not coming from Heinlein’s own experience and he’s extrapolating outwards from some simultaneously unsympathetic, sexist, and essentializing positions. Again, none of this is ‘bad.’ It’s just interesting to see history in action. Apart from this, the writing is okay, although it picks up towards the end in intriguingly strange perspectival shifts. Replete, then, with the quite wonderful line, admittedly: “I know where I came from--but where did all you zombies come from?” Good stuff.
"Thunder and Roses," by Theodore Sturgeon (1947): 8.75
- A drippy little meditation on loss, redemption, and loneliness -- shot through with a maudlin overcurrent potentially off-putting if it wasn't so well-matched to the beats themselves. One of the rare GA sf stories in which the writing outpaces the story [see the steady infusion of bits of information bespeaking the varying degrees of crazy our protagonists are going].
"The Big Flash," by Norman Spinrad (1969): 7.25
- Credit, at least, for being written during the period it's embodying, as opposed to all those genre works embarassingly doing the same about a nostalgically imagined past. The piece: in order to win a vague 'war in Asia' -- very clearly a Vietnam stand-in -- the government coordinates public approval of the use of nuclear weapons through the manufactured success of a moderately hypnotic psychedelic rock band. Here we have an exemplar of New Wave sf "progressivism" (anti-consumerism, anti-interventionism, and suspicion of coordinated gubmint/advertising/big business collusion). Whether the story moves beyond the sum of its ideological parts, is a different question.
“Critical Factor,” by Hal Clement (1953): 7.75
- Clement is often held up as an exemplar of hard sf style, for good and ill. Not unduly premature, but the assessment stands. Here concept so outpaces literary execution that any sort of comparison between the two seems less than fruitless; it seems unnecessary. And that style: clunky, yes, but not in a common bad sf way, in which strain and drag are felt in each sentence. Instead, the deficiencies of the prose are clearly a relative of the rigors of the scientification, ie blocky physical descriptions, interlaid with technical terms and precise nomenclature. Organizationally, it’s a mess; the second half ditches our erstwhile protagonist without so much as a send off, before we’re whisked a new character, with little concern for the gap between them. He’s least up to the literary parameters when it comes to doing the work necessary to fully inhabit the truly alien xenobiological world he’s created — starts with the classic pick-it-up-as-you-go-along cold open, but immediately includes human terms and points of reference, before flat out telling is what these creatures are, and concluding by finally breaking cover completely (also, maybe the best part??) and just laying out the case for us, human to human, what are these things up to? The concept though. That’s the crux, that’s what we’re all wading through the muck for and it better be a doozy. Quite the pressure on the hard sf writer, then. The hardest part needs to be your best—and most consistently so, otherwise it’s real easy for the audience to look elsewhere. And, to his credit, it largely stands here. These things, though, are always paper tigers. They’re not built to move, to develop; and this hardly does. We’re left then with a limp, Sopranos-in-the-diner ending, a call to do an experiment — a fitting end for the story in that case.
- I've learned to more quickly dismiss annoyance at the stylistic quirks of Golden Age sf from my perturbation engines, and a good thing for "Reason", because Asimov traffics in them up and down. One particular to this story: the hot-headed jerk character, who cannot speak a sentence without including some spastic insult ("Now watch out you metal ignoramus!"). Getting beyond this, though, there's -- and, truly, against my better impulses -- a nice metaphorical turn here in the story.
"Desertion," by Clifford Simak, 14 pg. (1944): 9
- The rare GA story whose writing amplifies a rather cut-and-dry story, rather than the other way around.
"The Sentinel," by Arthur C. Clarke (1951): 8.25
- It is, obviously, impossible to read this with fresh eyes, and impossible to read it outside of whatever impression one has of 2001. There is, for starters, the reader’s disconnect between the tone of the story—of a stolid, earnest scientist POV, full of pride, gathering inquisitiveness, and even happiness at the discovery of the object—and that of the film. It is, again obviously, that Penderecki Threnody—not quite the selection to convey the former, even if the sublime scenario sketched in outline at the end hints in the direction of potential hostility. What’s more notable, and welcome, is precisely that digging in, on Clarke’s part, to the prehistorical sublime. He’s awed by the discrepancy between the object’s installation and the void of life on earth, and he works to make the reader likewise. (One could, if you’re feeling less generous, see the massive “guessplanation” at the end as instead a sign of some indecision about conclusion, or sense that the story he’d told left too many gaps between it and the Point he wanted to make and, damnit, I’ll just fill in the gaps and get on out.)
"Mimsy Were the Borogoves," by Lewis Padgett, 32 pg. (1943): 8.25
- Too cute by half, or whatever the 40s equivalent is, to answer the question no one was asking: i.e. what was up with Jabberwocky? Some nice, early Golden Age, smoothly jocular, wink-winky opening lines however (those being, "I'm not gonna describe 1,000,000 AD, cause it's no use").
“Sail On! Sail On!” by Philip Jose Farmer (1952): 8.5
- There’s a story I read growing up that’s stuck with me. It’s from the Wayside School books, one of a type of children’s literature that seems to have dissipated in influence—the sneering, surreal, slightly malevolent fantasia (Phantom Tollbooth, z.B.) but I find preferable to the juvenalized speculation popular today (ie, take an “adult” genre novel and sand it’s rougher edges and ta-daa, YA). Anyway, the little fable goes: there’s a boy in math class who gets all problems right, but comes at each one incorrectly. For example: 2+2? “Well, 2x5=23, 23-4=3, so 3+23=4. The answer is 4.” This frustrates his teacher to no end. Here, Farmer uses alternate history as a means of illustrating the same principle. Namely, Catholicism embracing, rather than persecuting (as it does in pop understandings of the period) science leads to an early technological revolution, albeit one in which the laws undergirding such inventions are fully misunderstood and theologically framed. Fun take, even if the corresponding “story” exists only insofar as a talky delineation of said differences (ie, radio works as a relay of microscopically small angels connected between distant points). Still, a nice revision of the more staid alt history trope of Catholic dominance / no Protestant Reformation = retarded “progress”, or no industrial revolution and such. A cart-before-the-horse history, I’d say, and one which ignores broader material structures and developments within which I have largely no problem imagining the capitalist prima facie realities-on-the-ground that pave the way for technology developing, albeit conceding that they might now just have a different social valence, having been sprung within the religio-political atmosphere they did. Oh, and the falling off the edge of the world was a nice re-re-orientation. Fun.
"Brooklyn Project," by William Tenn (1948): 9.5
- For a story doing this, at this time, hard to see it being better.
"The Million-Year Picnic," by Ray Bradbury (1946): 8
- A story built around a punchline, as much early sf. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
"Coming Attraction," by Fritz Leiber (1950): 7.5
- Benefits from post-read reflection, as the themes emerge a bit more clarly from the morass of stop-go plotting and blundered dialoging. STORY: future America, bit dystopian and post-WWIII, in which women now wear masks,and man falls into boring sex game between professional wrestler and his sub. Yes, that's what happens.
"All You Zombies," by Robert Heinlein (1958): 7.75
- I’d need some graphs to lay out all the time-jump contortions on display here. Largely a story in two parts: one, an exposition-heavy [in the way these period genre stories love] recounting of one intersex person's life; and another, a sped-up series of time-traveling manipulations by the main character, during which we find out he was the interlocutee the whole time [i.e. all of the characters, in other words: the barkeep, the ‘unmarried mother,’ the seducer, the girl, and the baby (if I’m getting it right)]. That’s all well and good, and might reward some chart-making scrutiny, in that you could appreciate the convolutions therein. I’m more interested in the intersex story, though. Not because it’s “problematic” or anything like that. But more because it serves as an interesting illustration of precisely an historical occurrence I’ve read often about: the very conscious intercession on the part of physicians when encountering intersex individuals regarding the ‘gender’ of the individual. Here, it’s [par for the time] presented as matter of fact: the doctor saw this ganglial ‘confusion’ while the patient was out and, without consent or consultation, made his own decisions about what this person’s gendered external expression would/should be from then on. Interestingly, the ‘patient’ is presented in this story as not at all reacting negatively to this, likely because it’s not coming from Heinlein’s own experience and he’s extrapolating outwards from some simultaneously unsympathetic, sexist, and essentializing positions. Again, none of this is ‘bad.’ It’s just interesting to see history in action. Apart from this, the writing is okay, although it picks up towards the end in intriguingly strange perspectival shifts. Replete, then, with the quite wonderful line, admittedly: “I know where I came from--but where did all you zombies come from?” Good stuff.
"Thunder and Roses," by Theodore Sturgeon (1947): 8.75
- A drippy little meditation on loss, redemption, and loneliness -- shot through with a maudlin overcurrent potentially off-putting if it wasn't so well-matched to the beats themselves. One of the rare GA sf stories in which the writing outpaces the story [see the steady infusion of bits of information bespeaking the varying degrees of crazy our protagonists are going].
"The Big Flash," by Norman Spinrad (1969): 7.25
- Credit, at least, for being written during the period it's embodying, as opposed to all those genre works embarassingly doing the same about a nostalgically imagined past. The piece: in order to win a vague 'war in Asia' -- very clearly a Vietnam stand-in -- the government coordinates public approval of the use of nuclear weapons through the manufactured success of a moderately hypnotic psychedelic rock band. Here we have an exemplar of New Wave sf "progressivism" (anti-consumerism, anti-interventionism, and suspicion of coordinated gubmint/advertising/big business collusion). Whether the story moves beyond the sum of its ideological parts, is a different question.
“Critical Factor,” by Hal Clement (1953): 7.75
- Clement is often held up as an exemplar of hard sf style, for good and ill. Not unduly premature, but the assessment stands. Here concept so outpaces literary execution that any sort of comparison between the two seems less than fruitless; it seems unnecessary. And that style: clunky, yes, but not in a common bad sf way, in which strain and drag are felt in each sentence. Instead, the deficiencies of the prose are clearly a relative of the rigors of the scientification, ie blocky physical descriptions, interlaid with technical terms and precise nomenclature. Organizationally, it’s a mess; the second half ditches our erstwhile protagonist without so much as a send off, before we’re whisked a new character, with little concern for the gap between them. He’s least up to the literary parameters when it comes to doing the work necessary to fully inhabit the truly alien xenobiological world he’s created — starts with the classic pick-it-up-as-you-go-along cold open, but immediately includes human terms and points of reference, before flat out telling is what these creatures are, and concluding by finally breaking cover completely (also, maybe the best part??) and just laying out the case for us, human to human, what are these things up to? The concept though. That’s the crux, that’s what we’re all wading through the muck for and it better be a doozy. Quite the pressure on the hard sf writer, then. The hardest part needs to be your best—and most consistently so, otherwise it’s real easy for the audience to look elsewhere. And, to his credit, it largely stands here. These things, though, are always paper tigers. They’re not built to move, to develop; and this hardly does. We’re left then with a limp, Sopranos-in-the-diner ending, a call to do an experiment — a fitting end for the story in that case.
August 29, 2019
Truly awesome collection of mid-to-late 20th century science fiction classic short stories contextualized by short introductory notes by scifi Grand-master, James Gunn. Mean as a college text book to study the short story form in modern science fiction, it can't help but appeal to fans of the genre as a collection that rivals the Science Fiction Hall of Fame series in the late 1960s!
A mind-boggling, consciousness-expanding must read!
A mind-boggling, consciousness-expanding must read!
May 25, 2017
Gunn’s Road leads out of the mainstream into genre; almost all the selections in this third volume come from magazines or books specifically marketed as science fiction. The only exceptions are two stories from men’s magazines, Playboy (Sheckley’s “Pilgrimage to Earth”) and Rogue (Pohl’s “Day Million”), which probably represented a negligible expansion of the predominantly male sf audience. In the text, Gunn mentions a few authors outside of the genre, such as Barth and Burgess, who use sf concepts in their work, but the texts chosen only show the influence of the mainstream on sf (such as Brunner’s adaptation of techniques from John Dos Passos) and not the way that, by the 1960s if not earlier, sf had started to be a means of expression available to the non-sf novelist. I think of the opening of Anthony Burgess’ Enderby as an example: the introductory chapter casually introduces an sf element to provide a setting for the mainstream novel that follows.
In contrast to earlier volumes, the stories here have fewer common threads to them; authors seem to be seeking not only individual styles, but also less well-trodden areas of science and speculation. Most of the stories are by established sf masters (from Asimov to Zelazny as marketers like to say) and are worth reading. There are several classics such as Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” and “That Only a Mother” by Judith Merril; these are good and perhaps essential choices, but create some inevitable overlap with Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Hugo Winner, and Nebula Winner collections. Gunn’s introductions are again very informative, giving short biographies of each author and providing the publishing and historical context for most of the stories.
In contrast to earlier volumes, the stories here have fewer common threads to them; authors seem to be seeking not only individual styles, but also less well-trodden areas of science and speculation. Most of the stories are by established sf masters (from Asimov to Zelazny as marketers like to say) and are worth reading. There are several classics such as Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” and “That Only a Mother” by Judith Merril; these are good and perhaps essential choices, but create some inevitable overlap with Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Hugo Winner, and Nebula Winner collections. Gunn’s introductions are again very informative, giving short biographies of each author and providing the publishing and historical context for most of the stories.
October 31, 2018
A collection of classic science fiction short stories, in the era ranging from Heinlein (as you might guess, from the title) to when the book was initially published, in 1979.
This is one of those books that, if you've read a lot of short science fiction, you've probably encountered many of the stories before... it's specifically trying to pick out classics or super-influential stories and authors. If you haven't, it's a good base grounding. As it turns out, I first read this something like 20 years ago, when I was still fairly new to SF (although I'd still already read a few of the short stories chosen), and decided to try it again now.
Many of the stories hold up quite well. Technology changed, which renders some of them quaint, and certain social mores changed, which render a few of them somewhat offensive (even if accidentally, such as the one that was probably intended as progressive and takes place in such a distant future that gender is often changed but, it makes pains to inform the reader, that even though the 'love story' is between two people who were born as men, "don't worry" it's not gay at all (because perish the thought if it were!) as one of them is in every detectable way a woman), but for the most part, they could be read in the modern day and still pack the same punch. Some, of course, may not have quite the same impact with modern readers simply because they initiated twists that have been riffed on a million times, but for me, even these stories (ones I've reread) still worked well. The later stories tend to be less memorable (which stands to reason, it's easy to pick out classics that have already stood the test of time, but when it's stories that are only a few years old to the selector, you're doing a lot more guesswork), though usually the authors they pick are still among the more well-known and influential even if the particular stories aren't.
The introduction to the stories, although certainly a bit dryer and not to everyone's tastes, are also well-worth reading to people who have an interest in the history of science fiction, describing broad trends and cultural context and giving pointers to other important stories that couldn't fit in the collection.
All in all, because of the high proportion of classic stories and somewhat-less-classic stories by some of the giants in the field, I'd rate this as one of the better anthologies out there, albeit one that might not be worth as much to someone who already has many of the stories elsewhere.
This is one of those books that, if you've read a lot of short science fiction, you've probably encountered many of the stories before... it's specifically trying to pick out classics or super-influential stories and authors. If you haven't, it's a good base grounding. As it turns out, I first read this something like 20 years ago, when I was still fairly new to SF (although I'd still already read a few of the short stories chosen), and decided to try it again now.
Many of the stories hold up quite well. Technology changed, which renders some of them quaint, and certain social mores changed, which render a few of them somewhat offensive (even if accidentally, such as the one that was probably intended as progressive and takes place in such a distant future that gender is often changed but, it makes pains to inform the reader, that even though the 'love story' is between two people who were born as men, "don't worry" it's not gay at all (because perish the thought if it were!) as one of them is in every detectable way a woman), but for the most part, they could be read in the modern day and still pack the same punch. Some, of course, may not have quite the same impact with modern readers simply because they initiated twists that have been riffed on a million times, but for me, even these stories (ones I've reread) still worked well. The later stories tend to be less memorable (which stands to reason, it's easy to pick out classics that have already stood the test of time, but when it's stories that are only a few years old to the selector, you're doing a lot more guesswork), though usually the authors they pick are still among the more well-known and influential even if the particular stories aren't.
The introduction to the stories, although certainly a bit dryer and not to everyone's tastes, are also well-worth reading to people who have an interest in the history of science fiction, describing broad trends and cultural context and giving pointers to other important stories that couldn't fit in the collection.
All in all, because of the high proportion of classic stories and somewhat-less-classic stories by some of the giants in the field, I'd rate this as one of the better anthologies out there, albeit one that might not be worth as much to someone who already has many of the stories elsewhere.
January 23, 2021
Chronologically, "here" is 1974, so not /here/ here, but nonetheless a truly excellent anthology.
I have a lot of anthologies, but this one is still pretty indispensable.
I first read it in a class, and I lost my copy years ago. It was only recently that I was able to find it for less than textbook prices*, and I still considered it. Fortunately, you can now find a copy (presumably a trade paperback) for about $20-$30, and I recommend doing so. I did.
*for some reason (presumably the textbook price phenomenon), the prices for mass market paperback printings of this book are exorbitant.
I have a lot of anthologies, but this one is still pretty indispensable.
I first read it in a class, and I lost my copy years ago. It was only recently that I was able to find it for less than textbook prices*, and I still considered it. Fortunately, you can now find a copy (presumably a trade paperback) for about $20-$30, and I recommend doing so. I did.
*for some reason (presumably the textbook price phenomenon), the prices for mass market paperback printings of this book are exorbitant.
April 14, 2020
Good old sci fi. And I mean old, from the 1940’s to the 1970’s. Some outdated, some relevant, some still being made into movies (the last mimsy, for one).
One story stood out in the collection as I had a teacher relate it to us as a parallel that everything has a price to be paid. He used it in religious context, how the savior will pay that price for us.
Others were fun, others rather boring.
I guess I will keep it on the shelf instead of recycling it. At least for now.
One story stood out in the collection as I had a teacher relate it to us as a parallel that everything has a price to be paid. He used it in religious context, how the savior will pay that price for us.
Others were fun, others rather boring.
I guess I will keep it on the shelf instead of recycling it. At least for now.
August 15, 2025
I took a science fiction class with James Gunn at the University of Kansas around 1980. Great class, great guy. I love the older science fiction, but the newer stuff in this third volume isn't my cup of tea.
March 18, 2019
Excellent anthology of science fiction from it's middle years, with great commentary by Gunn that helps put each story in its place and helps explain the genre overall.
August 24, 2008
I never finished the book before it had to go back to the library. I'm a little sad about that because I was enjoying the short stories compiled within this lovely anthology. Part of my problem was I was reading straight through the book and got hung up on the "hard" science fiction stories. I really should have just skipped around and read some of the other stories farther along in the book. I picked it up for the story "All Mimsy Were The Borogroves", which is the basis for the recent movie "The Last Mimsy". There are definite differences between movie and story, especially since the story was written in the late 1930's, I believe. However, I loved the concept found in both, and really liked the story itself. The whole anthology is a great introduction to various science fiction writers, most of whom are kind of obscure to today's readers. The Heinlein and Asimov contributions were both fun, and there were a lot of strange and lovely stories throughout. I really wish I could have finished it, and I may borrow it again some day, soon. Life just got in the way of my reading time. Oh, well. It was a good jumping off point, and it's made me curious about the other stories written by some of the amazing authors represented in the volume.
December 20, 2015
W Polsce wydana w 1987, jeszcze za czasów PRL. Przeczytałem ją w 2015 i powiem, że mimo prawie 30 lat od wydania nic nie straciła ze swojej świeżości. Antologia prawie idealna poza paroma drobnostkami typu, że komuś może być za długa i co prawda było trochę naleciałości z tamtego okresu czyli wstawki prl-owskie, ale na szczescie ich było mało. Chyba bez tego ciężko byłoby ją wydać w Polsce. Co do samej lektury to znajdujemy w niej prawie same rodzynki począwszy od lat 40tych a kończąc na latach 70-tych. Jest to zręcznie poukładane. Każde opowiadanie jest poprzedzone krótkim wstępem, i tego mi brakuje w obecnych antologiach, chociaż tak było w "Rakietowe szlaki". Mimo, że część opowiadań już kiedyś przeczytałem, wspominam tą lekturę bardzo dobrze.
March 25, 2013
The short stories for the most part are pretty good. It is an interesting original conclusion to a historic look at science fiction. There are many authors represented here which people love and enjoy - Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Dick, etc. A few of my favorite stories were "The Sentinel", "The Cold Equations", "Who Can Replace a Man?" and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale". Unfortunately there are too many New Wave/Speculative Fiction which are artsy, over stylish and have very bad plots.
July 16, 2011
Świetny zbiór opowiadać science fiction. Masa znanych i mniej znanych autorów. Po niemal każdym opowiadaniu czułem jak paruje mi głowa od myślenia. Niesamowite pomysły, niekiedy prorocze (opowiadania pochodzą głównie z lat 50 i 60-tych). Szkoda, że ta seria nie była od tylu lat wznawiana. Pod wrażeniem tego zbioru sam napisałem trzy opowiadania science-fiction :)
November 29, 2015
Being what it is, not all of the stories were to my taste, but this was a really useful historical overview of short-form science fiction between the 40s and 70s and has given me a lot of writers to keep an eye out for in the future.
September 26, 2009
A solid collection of the various and quirky.
Read
February 3, 201910/30/18: "Reason" (1941) by Isaac Asimov
11/4/18: "Desertion" (1944) by Clifford D. Simak
11/10/18: "The Million Year Picnic" (1946) by Ray Bradbury
11/23/18: "Thunder and Roses" (1947) by Theodore Sturgeon
12/3/18: "That Only a Mother" (1948) by Judith Merril
12/8/18: "Brooklyn Project" (1948) by William Tenn
12/15/18: "Coming Attraction (1950) by Fritz Leiber
12/27/18: "Critical Factor" (1953) by Hal Clement
1/4/19: "The Cold Equations (1954) by Tom Godwin
1/13/19: "The Game of Rat and Dragon" (1955) by Cordwainer Smith
1/21/19: "Pilgrimage to Earth" (1956) by Robert Sheckley
11/4/18: "Desertion" (1944) by Clifford D. Simak
11/10/18: "The Million Year Picnic" (1946) by Ray Bradbury
11/23/18: "Thunder and Roses" (1947) by Theodore Sturgeon
12/3/18: "That Only a Mother" (1948) by Judith Merril
12/8/18: "Brooklyn Project" (1948) by William Tenn
12/15/18: "Coming Attraction (1950) by Fritz Leiber
12/27/18: "Critical Factor" (1953) by Hal Clement
1/4/19: "The Cold Equations (1954) by Tom Godwin
1/13/19: "The Game of Rat and Dragon" (1955) by Cordwainer Smith
1/21/19: "Pilgrimage to Earth" (1956) by Robert Sheckley
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews