Skip to main content

Classic Science Fiction Stories - Adam Roberts (Ed.) ***(*)

There are many interpretations of the word 'classic' - in the context of science fiction many would assume this referred to the 'golden age' of the 40s and 50s, but Adam Roberts (who knows his stuff) has plumped for what might otherwise be regarded as proto-SF - science fiction-like stories that predate the concept. The earliest here is Micromégas by Voltaire from 1752 and the latest Stanley Weinbaum's 1934 A Martian Odyssey.

Before we go any further, I ought to mention the physical book itself - when it arrived I felt a bit like someone who buys dolls' house furniture thinking it's the real thing. It looks like a big grown up book in its picture, but in reality it's tiny, less than 16cm in height. Admittedly not doll friendly, but uncomfortably small to hold (though it does fit in most pockets).

I really want to give it both three stars and five stars, so the final outcome is something in between. As someone with an interest in the history of science fiction, it's fascinating to be able to read something like Micromégas, which I have heard of many times but never actually seen. But as a reader of science fiction, practically everything pre-twentieth century in the book is somewhere on the scale between tedious and downright sleep-inducing. I have really enjoyed many of the short stories of H. G. Wells in the past, but the one that opens the book, The Star from 1897, is surely one of his least readable.

Standouts on still being passable stories for the reader include A Martian Odyssey, which portrays impressively alien aliens, while other indigestible yet fascinating contributions include Mary Shelley's The Mortal Immortal from 1833. I enjoyed Poe's 1844 story A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (though it felt more like fantasy than SF to me). Two more I'd pick out are Florence McLandburgh's 1876 The Automaton Ear and H. P. Lovecraft's 1927 The Colour out of Space. Both would have worked a lot better at half the length, but each had interesting ideas, despite stretching the science of the day to its limit. McLandburgh, with the idea that all sounds ever produced could be picked up (rather like an audio version of James Blish's Beep where all instantaneous transmissions throughout time are available in a single burst), seemed unaware of the dispersal of sound energy (and the impossibility of tuning in to a single historical sound).

In Lovecraft's better-known story, the idea of seeing a colour beyond human experience seemed to imply a misunderstanding of what colour is. Of course there can be colours we can't see - so in a sense there are novel colours... but the whole point is we can't see them. It was great to read this story, though, as I'd heard so much about Lovecraft without ever reading any of his work because I'd always mentally classified it as horror rather than SF. My only disappointment was it took 31 pages before we reached his trademark adjective, eldritch.

The inclusion of these stories made me think a little about the borderline between fantasy and science fiction. A story can still be science fiction if it gets the science a bit wrong, but if the scientific content doesn't make any sense at all it becomes fantasy. It's easy to see this distinction in superhero films. For example, while the origin story of Spider-Man is pure fantasy, there is quite a lot of bad science that could still be considered SF in his actions (for example, stopping a train with his web and body). But Superman is pure fantasy, with not a hint of scientific basis. McLandburgh probably slips in with the bad science proviso, but for me, although the Lovecraft story implies aliens, its detail tips it into fantasy.

Whether or not you will enjoy this book depends how important SF history is to you. If you are happy to endure stories with the pace of a snail because they are foundational to the development of the genre, you will definitely want a copy. If you expect the enjoyment you would get from a science fiction short story collection dating from the 1950s or later, you may well be disappointed.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more