So I’ve conned… err, convinced my book group to read some Golden Age SF short stories. I’d like to get about 15. Here’s what I’ll suggest so far:
The Sound of Thunder
To Serve Man
Little Black Bag
The Marching Morons
Who Goes There?
Flowers For Algernon
The Cold Equations
Farewell to the Master
I realize Kornbluth is over represented, but he’s worth it. I’m also considering
Nightfall by Asimov and History Lesson by Arthur C. Clarke, but I’m not sure these are the best choices for those respective authors. Also, I gotta have a Heinlein but I’m not sure which one. What others would you recommend and why? Please be sure to include the author’s name in your recommendation (if you can)
Thanks
Scanners Live in Vain - by Cordwainer Smith (ya need some CSmith in there - great stuff)
by Heinlein The Roads Must Roll
Or another one, can’t remember the name, about a common space army soldier stopping a renegade general from using atomics launched from a moon base. Man, I love that story…
the first thing that popped into my mind was Roger Zelazny’s “for a breath I tarry,” not only the best sci-fi short story I’ve ever read, but one of my top-5 short stories of all time- and I’m a huge literature snob.
I’ll leave the rest open to others, although I’m a bigger-than-average golden age sci-fi buff.
One-stop shopping: Just get The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, vol. 1 edited by Robert Silverberg.
It’s 26 stories include: Flowers For Algernon; The Cold Equations; The Little Black Bag; Nightfall and also Scanners Live in Vain and The Roads Must Roll. And there are alternate stories by several of the writers mentioned here, including Clarke, Bradbury, Zelazny, Campbell, and Kornbuth.
The full table of contents is on Amazon. The other link on Amazon gives lots of really, really cheap used copies.
**Land of the Great Horses ** by R. A. Lafferty (originally printed in the first Dangerous Visions, I believe). Any good SF selection needs a Lafferty tale, because nobody else writes like him.
Awhile back I read Is That What People Do?, a collection of short stories by Robert Sheckley. I picked it up after I started a thread here asking for retro sci-fi reccommendations and someone suggested it (thanks to whoever that was, by the way.)
Really great one by Philip K Dick: The Father Thing.
I found out it used to be required reading, and I’m wondering why it’s been removed from reading lists…too interesting?
Hasn’t Asimov edited anthologies specifically of the best Golden Age SF stories? You might try there. Also valuable would be the various anthologies of Hugo winners (also edited by Dr. A., incidentally): The Hugo is after what I would call the Golden Age, but it’s in line with the stories you mention.
Some of these references are distinctly post-Golden Age (Robert Sheckley, the Dangerous Visions anthologies).
Try the anthology ** Adentures in Time and Space** , which contains several of the above, and, as it appeared in the Golden Age itself, all the stories are “Golden Age”. Look in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, volumes I, IIA, and IIB . Not all Golden Age, but all good, and many of them GA.
Asimov, by the way, edited a couple of anthologies entitled Before the Golden Age, so I think that’s a bit far back for your definitoion.
Moved and seconded. Probably, if I had to pick, it’s the single best SF anthology ever. Plus, IIRC it has two of the Gallagher stories by “Lewis Padgett” (AKA Kuttner and Moore), so how can you go wrong? It also has a story by “Anson McDonald” (aka Heinlein) “By His Bootstraps” and one or two by Heinlein as Heinlein.
And this set would be a close second choice. BTW: “Flowers For Algernon” is, IIRC, post-Golden Age. Still great, but not the right era.
Asimov’s “Golden Age of Science Fiction” lasted 24 (?) volumes (and did one good sized paperback covering each year’s stories starting with 1938), and was a wonderful balance of the classics (except Heinlein–Heinlein rarely shows up in modern anthologies*) and forgotten gems. Great, great stuff but some of the middle volumes are hard to find.
You also want to find a short story by Murray Leinster called “A Logic Named Joe” which is the only SF story during the Golden Age to successfully even come close to predicting home PCs, the Internet, spam, porn-filters, etc.
Fenris
*Probably for the same reason the Beatles don’t show up on K-Tel albums!
Let me make a third. “Adventures in Time and Space” had a formative influence on my childhood and my taste in science fiction (I like my futures old-fashioned). My copy was swiped around thirty years ago, and I couldn’t find another until recently; it was great rereading the old stories, because in a way I was revisiting my childhood self.
The Gallagher stories are all collected in “Robots Have no Tails”; good fun.
Just a note on Golden Age. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame series was put together by the Science Fiction Writers of America to recognize stories that had been published before the group organized and handed out its first Nebula Awards in 1965.
But only two of the stories in the book - “Flowers for Algernon,” from 1959 and “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” from 1963 - were published after 1955. And 1955 is a pretty good year to take as the end of the Golden Age.
Until the early 1950s there was virtually no such thing as a market for original science fiction novels. A few tiny specialty presses began to appear after World War II but even the titles they published as “novels” tended to be, like Asimov’s Foundation series, collections of magazine stories patched together. Heinlein was published by Scribner’s in 1948, but the main hardback line, Doubleday, didn’t do much sf until the 50s and it wasn’t until a year after the Ballantines started the paperback company bearing their name in 1952 that there was a ready home for sf. Once they proved successful, however, every company jumped on the bandwagon. The result was that the first choice of market for every author went from the magazines to novels. That’s where the money was.
And then in 1957 the other shoe dropped. The major magazine distributor in the U.S. went out of business and took 80+% of all professional science fiction magazines with it. There had been 40-50 different titles published every year; now it was down under 10.
So after 1955 there was a period of confusion, transition, and mediocrity. Looking at, say, the Judith Merrill best of the year anthologies from those years, I’m hard pressed to recognize more than a few titles off the top of my head.
It wasn’t until a whole new generation came along after 1960 that the picture changed. The little-remembered Cele Goldsmith at Amazing and Fantastic started printing the first (or very early) stories by people like Roger Zelazny, Thomas Disch, and Ursula LeGuin. And then the deluge. (Very similar to what happened to comic books between the imposition of the Comics Code and Stan Lee reviving Marvel.)
When the Golden Age starts is a whole 'nother essay.
Specifying that the stories come from “the Golden Age” is pretty ridiculous. There’s no general agreement as to what that means. (There’s a joke that the Age is the time that you were 12.) In any case, here are my 20 favorite science fiction stories:
Isaac Asimov “The Last Question”
J. G. Ballard “The Subliminal Man”
Alfred Bester “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed”
F. M. Busby “If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy”
A. J. Deutsch “A Subway Named Mobius”
Philip K. Dick “Faith of Our Fathers”
George Alec Effinger “The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything”
Harlan Ellison “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”
Philip Jose Farmer “Towards the Beloved City”
Charles Harness “The New Reality”
Robert Heinlein “All You Zombies”
Norman Kagan “The Mathenauts”
Daniel Keyes “Flowers for Algernon”
C. M. Kornbluth “The Little Black Bag”
David I. Masson “Traveler’s Rest”
Lewis Padgett “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”
Robert Sheckley “Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay”
T. L. Sherred “E for Effort”
Howard Waldrop “The Ugly Chickens”
Roger Zelazny “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”
Buz and I were at the same Clarion Science Fiction Workshop. He was twice my age and had this amazing background of interesting jobs. He was well-liked and a real good sport about the game we played in which we posted a sheet of paper and invited people to try to guess what “F. M.” stood for. (The guesses started at Ferdinand Magellan and Frequency Modulation and rapidly went south from there. ) He even workshopped a version of that story there.
So I know Buz and I mean no disrespect when I say, Are you nuts putting that story on a 20-best list? There are 80,000 stories with that theme and it doesn’t rate among the top half of them.
Ah well, de gustibus and all that.
I might as well add that the same volume of Universe that Buz’s story appeared in also has a story by Mildred Downey “Bubbles” Broxon, who was also at the same Clarion. We had a wonderful party on her houseboat that almost removed an entire generation from science fiction when the poor boat couldn’t handle two dozen people all on the same side and started to list…
