The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two A: The Greatest Science Fiction Novellas of All Time Chosen by the Members of The Science Fiction Writers of America [Paperback]

You'd never guess from looking at the bookstore shelves today, but collections of short works like these used to be the mainstay of science fiction. Tor Books deserves kudos for bringing this collection of classic novellas from sf's Golden Age back into print, and in hardcover, too, with Volume 2B presumably still to come.

The novella, longer than a short story, shorter than a full novel, is the ideal length for science fiction, providing enough room for an author to present an idea and work through all its implications, without the padding that often seems obligatory for marketing purposes today.

This book includes key works by some of the field's biggest names from the 1940s and 50s. Most will probably be new to anyone who started reading science fiction after the 1980s, including Campbell's "Who Goes There", filmed twice as "The Thing" but much creepier in print, and Lester del Rey's "Nerves", which pre-dated Three Mile Island and Chernobyl by decades.

While the science may have dated, these are still terrific stories.

I first picked up the original printing of the first volume of thisanthology when I was a small child, around ten years old, and the first story in it ("A Martian Oddyssey") was so good that I put the book back down and didn't read the rest of it for another year because I was afraid none of the other stories in there could possibly be as good.

The second two volumes took me years to track down; II B I managed to find in a sale of discards from my school library; II A I didn't find at all until Amazon came along.

The conceit of this series is that the Science Fiction Writers of America picked the best short stories, novellas, and novels from before the Nebula Awards were commenced in 1965, and published them as a hall-of-fame anthology. Volume 1 collected the short stories and volume II (A and B) collected the novellas -- essentially, one stop volumes of all the "Nebula Emeritus" books, the sci-fi that professional SF writers of the sixties felt had most influenced and impacted them up to that point.

As such, this series is perfect for two groups of people: people who are completely ignorant of sci fi, and people who want to gain a better critical understanding of sci fi and its history as a genre. You can't find a better starting place, because these are the stories that the great modern SF writers started on, so by reading these, you'll understand more about what modern writers are doing, and you'll have the opportunity to experience the tropes first hand, from the stories that coined them, not in later knockoffs.

This volume (II A) I prefer slightly less than I and II B, if only because by the time I'd found it, I was older and had read some of the stories elsewhere and seen the tropes before, so it didn't have quite the same glow to it as the other two did, read in childhood; I also feel a couple of the stories in here aren't quite up to the same level as the rest. Still, there are some definite essentials -- "Universe" was the first generation-ship story, "Who Goes There?" is the source story for John Carpenter's film _The Thing_, The Marching Morons is an early version of the conceit in Idiocracy, etc.

Probably the best benefit of these volumes is that they'll give you a general familiarity with the big names of Golden Age SF, so that you'll know who you like and don't and whose works you want to find more of. If you're looking to expand your knowledge of Golden Age era SF, this series is an excellent place to start, and you'll probably find yourself tracking down most of the other works by most of these authors. I would, however, point you to Volume 1 first, especially if you're new to the genre.

This volume contains:

Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson
Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr.
Nerves by Lester Del Rey
Universe by Robert A. Heinlein
The Marching Morons by C.M. Kornbluth
Vintage Season by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore
. . . And Then There Were None by Eric Frank Russell
The Ballad of Lost C'Mell by Cordwainer Smith
Baby is Three by Theodore Sturgeon
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
With Folded Hands by Jack Williamson

This anthology includes my personal favorites: The tale of a dumbed down society in "The Marching Morons" by C.M. Kornbluth, and "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, Jr. "Who Goes There" is beyond excellent ~ I still get nightmares ~ and was the basis for both films titled "The Thing." Isaac Asimov opines in his biography "I, Asimov" that "Who Goes There?" is the finest science fiction story ever written. I tend to agree.

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