Astounding Analog Reader Vol. 2

By Harry Harrison

Book Overview

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 038502732X
• ISBN13: 9780385027328
• Release Date: January 1973
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 458 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The best of the magazine-theme anthologies

The two volumes of this collection constitute one of my favorite science fiction anthologies; a real shame that it's out of print now. It's not that this is a perfect selection of stories (what anthology can boast that?)----rather, it gives a real sense of what it must have been like to be an sf fan back in the late thirties, and grow up reading Astounding, the leading magazine in the field for quite a while. (I realize that nostalgia for a time before I was born could be considered a form of sickness, but let's leave that alone right now.) It starts when John W. Campbell, jr. assumed the editorship, and follows the development of the magazine through the war and up into the early sixties, when Campbell changed its name to Analog. The stories are presented chronologically, 1937-46 in volume one, and 1947-65 in volume two. The intoductory notes steep you in the feel of those days. And aside from the historical and fan/anthropology aspects this is just a damn good anthology. Sure, we've got "Nightfall," "City," "First Contact," "The Little Black Bag," "The Cold Equations," and "Call Me Joe" which have all been anthologized ad infinitum, but there are some rarer gems here as well. "Farewell To the Master" by Harry Bates, which was the basis of the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. "By His Bootstraps" the wickedly clever time-paradox story by Heinlein (under the MacDonald pen name) which is perhaps so hard to find because it doesn't happen to fall within his Future History series. Theodore L. Thomas's masterful "The Weather Man," perhaps the quintessential early-sixties Analog story. I wish that they'd chosen "Basic Right" by Eric Frank Russell rather than "The Waitabits" but you can't have everything. This should be in every science fiction reader's library, whether or not they consider themselves an Astounding/Analog reader.