FICTION IN REVIEW CLASSIC SCIENCE FICTION

1 6 2 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W J O H N C R O W L E Y ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone. Whatever Edmund Wilson conceived his American Pléiade to be, and whatever Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, and others of the original board of advisers thought might fill its volumes, the Library of America has taken some antic turns lately, its literary gatekeeping changing in consonance with a world of shifting cultural judgment. In 1995, volumes 77 and 78 collected journalism about World War II, surprising amid the company but surely worthy of inclusion in any library of American writing; in the same year, almost all of Raymond Chandler’s work entered the precincts. Things settled down then for a few years (Dashiell Hammett and George S. Kaufman and his Broadway collaborators were the only figures welcomed in from outlying districts), but in 2005 the horror writer Peter Straub edited a volume of H. P. Lovecraft, and a corner was turned. Lovers of Lovecraft rejoiced. It was clear that old distinctions N i n e C l a s s i c S c i e n c e F i c t i o n N o v e l s o f t h e 1 9 5 0 s , V o l u m e 1 : 1 9 5 3 — 1 9 5 6 , edited by Gary K. Wolfe (Library of America, 803 pp., $35); V o l u m e 2 : 1 9 5 6 — 1 9 5 8 , edited by Gary K. Wolfe (Library of America, 835 pp., $35) 1 6 3 R between high- and lowbrow, literature and not, serious and trivial, which of course had been eroding for a century like the striations of an ancient sandstone butte, would not keep a writer from the Bible paper and the silk bookmark. Saul Bellow and Thornton Wilder appeared, justly, in 2007, but Philip K. Dick also entered, and with that it was hard to suppress a sort of Anabaptist hilarity – all are to be saved! Since then the number of volumes appearing in each year has been climbing in accordance with that principle of accommodation . A record fourteen were published in 2012, including two volumes of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Nine Classic Science Fiction Novels of the 1950s, to be followed, surely – the logic is inexorable – by the same number from the 1960s, and on. The revaluation of values that in the movies began with Manny Farber (whom the Library of America has honored with a special publication) and the ‘‘termite art’’ of the B-pictures he loved has long grown general in the culture. A case can now be made for anything as being good of its kind, and, therefore, good tout court – if cases even need any longer to be made. So here are these nine SF novels by writers once known to legions of readers, not always by name but certainly by kind, immediately recognizable by their paperback covers. (One of the present volumes bears vintage cover art by Richard M. Powers; among the last of his hundreds of pulp covers was my own first SF paperback .) Some of these wordsmiths claimed, or were credited with, a certain perspicacity about Things to Come, but I can’t help thinking that from wherever it is they now look down they are taken aback to see themselves in the American pantheon. What is the Golden Age of science fiction? Answer: Twelve. This classic wheeze is attributed to various smart persons, but I first heard it given to Theodore Sturgeon, a writer of many varieties of pop hackwork (Star Trek episodes, crime novels, B-movies) but best known for his SF novels and stories from the 1950s, which was certainly a Golden Age of SF in another sense – the sense in which we call up the Golden Age of the wooden flute, the Golden Age of the Studebaker: a period that for fans is golden with the remembered light of other days. Sturgeon’s most famous novel, More Than Human, is among these nine, along with...