(from the archives: reviewed by Bill Crider)
Forgotten Books: My Best Science Fiction Story -- Edited by Leo Margulies & Oscar J. Friend
Is
anyone but old guys like me interested in the history of certain genres
these days? I've seen blog posts from whippersnappers who don't have
any interest at all in reading the older books in their area of
interest. I can understand, however, since I have little interest in
reading the newer ones. But
for somebody who does care about the history of SF, this would seem to
be an essential book. It's fun because of the stories, of course, but
each writer provides a short introduction to explain why a particular
story was picked for the collection. (My favorite line in these is the
final one in Henry Kuttner's intro: "Anyway, my wife wrote it.")
You
have to wonder, considering the date of the collection (1949) if the
writers would have chosen different stories later on in their careers.
Too bad they're not around to ask. Cheap copies abound around the Internet, so why not pick one up an give it a try. See if you agree with the authors' choices.
4 comments:
This appears to be the paperback edition. There is a much larger hardcover edition (25 stories and 556 pages). Postwar science fiction anthologies tended to be huge. I would be surprised if C.L. Moore had actually written Don't Look Now. I have read the great majority of the stories she wrote prior to her marriage and she did not have a funny bone in her entire body. She really had only two themes: vampirism and the fall of empires.
Interestingly, I posted the radio version of the Pratt story on my blog yesterday.
Reductionist take on Moore. And Kuttner and Moore were pretty enmeshed as collaborators after their marriage, so even if this early story was all Kuttner, he could well've been joking.
That is to say, the degree of their collaboration on nearly everything was no secret.
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