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Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology (Galaxy Books)

Eric S. Rabkin (Editor)

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Feb 22, 2008 Werner rated it liked it

Shelves: short-stories, science-fiction, books-i-own

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 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! ...more

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