Why start here? That is the most obvious question prompted by these two handsome volumes from the Library of America. They represent the LoA’s first attempt to argue for a canon of science fiction, but they start in the middle, in the 1950s. American science fiction began — at least as a self-conscious written tradition — when Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories magazine in 1926 and filled it with what we now think of as pulp sf. Starting in 1937, John W. Campbell’s editorship of Astounding brought what he considered a more hardheaded realism to the field. The writers he championed, most obviously Robert A. Heinlein, came to represent a kind of default voice of American sf: savvy, up-to-date, impatient with mundane fools who might not find plausibility in the idea of humans traveling to the moon. But the monolithic influence of Astounding slowly waned. In the following decades, authors such as Alfred Bester and Fritz Leiber came to prominence, writing in metaphorical modes whose lack of focus on scientific certainties Campbell would not have found comfortable. Other magazines, such as Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction, began to flourish. The 1950s were when sf relaxed into pluralism.
It should be said straightaway that Gary K. Wolfe’s selection of these nine novels is very fine both in the quality of the works and their claim to be representative of the field. His editorial notes, too, are extremely thorough. He sticks to original texts, for instance, reserving some cutting words for the 1996 “restored” edition of Bester’s “The Stars My Destination.” And the book jackets and slipcase reproduce some evocative sf art of the era.
(Courtesy of Library of America) - American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe.
The version of science fiction presented by Wolfe is one where new approaches and subjects are being tried out for the first time. Sometimes this experimentation is stylistic, as in Theodore Sturgeon’s “More than Human” (1953). Sturgeon was one of the first sf writers to aspire to something more than “transparent prose,” here centering his narrative around some remarkably intense streams of consciousness. His story of outcast humans building a new identity for themselves still carries an emotional punch. Algis Budrys’s “Who?” (1958) is also experimental, although in a different way. It’s a study in Cold War uncertainties: Is the masked man released by the Soviets the scientist Martino, injured in an accident and surgically rebuilt? In “A Case of Conscience” (1958), James Blish uses sf to create, of all things, a theological debate about innocence and the Fall. And Leigh Brackett’s “The Long Tomorrow” (1955) also tackles the anxieties of the age, in this case nuclear war.
At the same time, some of these authors are plainly intending to entertain. Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Space Merchants” (1953) is a feisty satire of Madison Avenue advertising ethics that cuts even today. Heinlein’s “Double Star” (1956) shows that this author still had chutzpah to burn even after his astonishing emergence in the 1940s. Richard Matheson’s “The Shrinking Man” (1956) has the simplicity and drive of a nightmare. And Bester’s “The Stars My Destination” (1956) remains one of sf’s emblematic works: a gaudy, picaresque tour around the solar system that riffs on “The Count of Monte Cristo” while pushing at the boundaries of how style might embody content.
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