Black Gate

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. First Edition: J.B. Lippincott, 1959.
Cover by Milton Glaser (click to enlarge)

A Canticle for Leibowtiz
by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
J.B. Lippincott (320 pages, $4.95 in hardcover, 1959)

This 1959 novel is one of the most popular and celebrated science fiction novels of all time. It won a Hugo Award and has a long list of critical citations. It’s set in the years following an atomic war, it portrays religion in a relatively favorable way (in contrast to the dismissive attitude of much other SF), and it dwells on the theme of man’s destiny, and its possibly inevitable fate in cycles of building and self-destruction. It’s sober and deadly-serious in parts, and it’s also quite funny in parts, which I hadn’t remembered since reading it decades ago. Something else I discovered when rereading recently: it doesn’t end the way I remembered that it did.

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Collision Course by Robert Silverberg. First Edition: Avalon Books, 1961.
Jacket design by Ed Emshwiller (click to enlarge)

Collision Course
by Robert Silverberg
Avalon Books (224 pages, $2.95 in hardcover, 1961)

Robert Silverberg needs no introduction to readers of Black Gate, I should think — author, over six or seven decades, of dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, editor of rows of reprint and original anthologies, winner of four Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, and numerous career awards including induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, an SFWA Grand Master, and the First Fandom Hall of Fame — yet it’s easy to come across unfamiliar titles from along the twists and turns of his long and varied career. He began in the 1950s, a prolific author of short stories and of standard genre SF novels that he was able to write and sell quickly, and while some of them have been reprinted several times in decades since, this early body of work has been eclipse by the high quality work of the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, for which he won many of those awards, and by later popular works such as his Majipoor novels and stories.

The novel at hand is one of those earlier works, and it’s interesting precisely because it’s not a major work of science fiction in any way.

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City by Clifford D. Simak. First Edition: Gnome Books, 1952.
Cover by Frank Kelly Freas (click to enlarge)

City
by Clifford D. Simak
Gnome Press (224 pages, $2.75 in hardcover, May 1952)

Clifford D. Simak was a Midwestern US newspaperman who wrote science fiction on the side, and published stories beginning in the 1930s in magazines like Wonder Stories until finding a home in John W. Campbell’s Astounding in the 1940s (and later Galaxy in the 1950s). City was his earliest significant work, published in 1952 but composed of stories published mostly in Astounding from 1944 onward. An enduring work, it won one of the very earliest awards for SF or fantasy, the International Fantasy Award, in 1953 (two years after Stewart’s Earth Abides, which I reviewed here in January, won the same award). It’s Simak’s most popular book along with his Way Station, published a decade later.

Gist

The book tells the future of humanity as it abandons cities for country estates and then moves off Earth to settle other planets, and in parallel the rise of an artificially created Dog civilization. By the end, humans have largely propagated outward to other planets, and Earth is left to the intelligent dog civilization, to whom these stories are myths.

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A Case of Conscience by James Blish. First Edition: Ballantine Books, 1958.
Cover by Richard Powers (click to enlarge)

A Case of Conscience
by James Blish
Ballantine Books (188 pages, $0.35 in paperback, April 1958)

James Blish’s 1958 novel A Case of Conscience, a Hugo Award winner in 1959, is one of the most famous SF novels that deals with religion. (The other major 1950s novel concerning religion is Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I’ve also reread recently).

There aren’t many SF novels dealing with the religion, and it’s easy to understand why; science fiction and religion would seem to be at cross purposes. Religion typically entails belief in supernatural beings, claims about the nature of reality (e.g. the origin of the universe), and deference to ancient authority, while science fiction is about the possibilities of our understanding the universe on the basis of the evidence it presents us, and, like science itself, disregards ancient authority. How to reconcile these aims? Any SF story that presupposed the truth of this or that religion would, in practice, be placed in the religious fiction corner of the bookstore (or in one of the numerous specialty bookstores devoted to one religion or another). While books or stories that imagine that angels, or fairies, or gods are real in the supernatural sense would, within our genres, be classified as fantasy.

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Cover by H. Lawrence Hoffman

Earth Abides (Random House, 373 pages, $3 in hardcover, 1949)
by George R. Stewart
Cover by H. Lawrence Hoffman

Here is one of the best science fiction novels of all time. It’s about the entire world, and implicitly the entire human race, and it’s as timely as ever as, for one reason or another, humanity faces the realization that its indefinite survival on planet Earth is not guaranteed.

The novel is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. It was published in 1949 and was Stewart’s only SF novel (though he wrote a couple earlier novels about natural catastrophes, including one about a storm that inspired the US National Weather Service to give storms names). It won the first International Fantasy Award in a year preceding the advent of the Hugos. (Stewart never wrote any other science fiction, and this novel wasn’t published as science fiction, but was later embraced by genre critics, much as the famous novels by Huxley and Orwell were.)

Above is the cover of the first edition. And here are the two editions I’ve read, a 1971 Fawcett Crest paperback with a Paul Lehr cover, and the 2006 Del Rey trade paperback edition.

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The Early Asimov (Doubleday, 547 pages, $10 in hardcover, September 1972)
By Isaac Asimov
Cover by Barry Kiperman

This is a book I’d never read before, and debated recently about whether to ever read it. On the one hand, life is too short to read every book one might have accumulated, and this book consists, frankly, of all the stories from Asimov’s early career that had not already been included in 10 earlier collections — all the leftovers. (Those 10 include I, Robot as well as the three Foundation “novels,” since those were largely comprised of earlier magazine stories.)

Thus I had passed over it several times before. On the other hand, I kept noticing early stories by Asimov in various anthologies, and realized that I’d never read those stories, or only a couple of them via those anthologies. So why not catch up on the others and just read through this 1972 book? An attraction is the substantial, autobiographical notes Asimov provides, detailing how each story was written and submitted; the book is subtitled “Or, Eleven Years of Trying.”

Such notes proved so popular here that he provided similar notes in subsequent books (like the anthology Before the Golden Age) and then in two lengthy volumes of autobiography over the next eight years.

So before considering individual stories, here are the broad takeaways from reading this book.

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