Tag: Science Fiction

Inside the 50’s science fiction bubble

“American SF by the mid-1950’s was a kind of jazz, stories built by riffing on stories. The conversation they formed might be forbiddingly hermetic, if it hadn’t been quickly incorporated by Rod Sterling and Marvel Comics and Steven Spielberg (among many others) to become one of the prime vocabularies of our age.”

So writes Jonathen Lethem in his introduction to The Selected Stories of Philip K Dick. If you’re looking for that sci-fi conversation at its most hermetic, go read the 1956 celebratory anthology, The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fifth Series. The collection reads like a series of bad inside jokes, although three stories make it worth the $2.50 I paid for it at my favorite source of vintage sci-fi. (Check out the full listing of this anthology at isfdb.org.)

So where did this collection go wrong? Continue reading “Inside the 50’s science fiction bubble”

Apocalypse 1954: Flying Saucers, Vulcanids, and Thorium Bombs

World in Eclipse, William Dexter (1954)

World in Eclipse is a mildly entertaining but second-rate cosy catastrophe story that leaves you with an itch to go read some Day of the Triffids or No Blade of Grass. It’s one of those ‘aliens save a small human remnant from armageddon and return them later to the devastated earth’ stories. (The worst book in this field has got to be A.J. Merak’s abysmal, 1959 The Dark Millennium.) Dexter’s plot could be mistaken for a parody of 50s sci-fi clichés, as you can see from the following brief plot summary (mild spoilers ahead):

The perennially dismissed reports of flying saucers turn out to be accurate accounts of visitors from planet Vulcan, which is undiscovered by humans because it is hidden in the asteroid belt. Continue reading “Apocalypse 1954: Flying Saucers, Vulcanids, and Thorium Bombs”

Best Sci-Fi of the 1950’s

Joachim Boaz has his excellent picks for the best 11 science fiction books of the 1960’s, and he’s looking for more opinions on favorite 60’s sci-fi.

Since I’ve spent the last six months focused almost exclusively on 50’s sci-fi, I’m not prepared to say much about the 60’s (but stay tuned). So here I present my picks for the best 11+ sci-fi novels of the 1950’s, with the caveat that I think most of the very best sci-fi of this decade came in the form of short stories, by Heinlein, C.M. Kornbluth, Robert Sheckley, Theodore Sturgeon, and a bunch of others. This means that when you’re browsing your favorite used book store for vintage sci-fi, don’t neglect the anthology section.

In chronological order: Continue reading “Best Sci-Fi of the 1950’s”

Library of America does vintage science fiction

Hot damn! I can’t wait until September, even though I’ve got some of these:

Plus the collected Sherwood Anderson!

Hunger Games and Teenage Angst in the New Yorker

I read this one when it came out back in 2010, but The New Yorker is highlighting it today to capitalize on the Hunger Games movie release:

“Fresh Hell”, Laura Miller:

…dystopian stories for adults and children have essentially the same purpose—to warn us about the dangers of some current trend. That’s certainly true of books like “1984” and “Brave New World”; they detail the consequences of political authoritarianism and feckless hedonism. This is what will happen if we don’t turn back now, they scold, and scolding makes sense when your readers have a shot at getting their hands on the wheel. Continue reading “Hunger Games and Teenage Angst in the New Yorker”