SF: Authors' Choice

SF Authors Choice #1

by Harry Harrison (Editor)

Anthology of 14 stories by Brian W. Aldiss, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, JG Ballard, James Blish and Damon Knight, Theodore R. Cogswell, de Camp, Philip Jose Farmer, Frank Herbert, Fritz Leiber, Katherine MacLean, Grederik Pohl & Mack Reynolds.

Genres: Science Fiction, Anthologies, Short Stories, Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1968

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Harry Harrison (born Henry Maxwell Dempsey) was an American science fiction author best known for his character the The Stainless Steel Rat and the novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966), the basis for the film Soylent Green (1973). He was also (with Brian W. Aldiss) co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[STU · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leading SF authors asked to submit their favourite story with a blurb on how they wrote the story or SF in general.
First published in 1968.
Not sure how I would have viewed the stories back then, but in the present time I find none of them particularly memorable.

[Brad Munson]

It's really rather remarkable; I picked this up on a whim at a used bookstore for under a buck because many of the authors' names are legendary even now, though this book was published in the Sixties and most of the stories are from the later Fifties. A few are absolutely prophetic -- which, yes, is not the role of SF really, but once in a while .. brr. And though I'm reading stories that, in some cases, are nearly half a century old, they are all so well-crafted and wise that they seem as fresh as yesterday's download. It's strange: I started the read in a nostalgic turn of mind, like when I picked up Clifford Simak's THEY WALKED LIKE MEN and, before that, James Blish's CITIES IN FLIGHT. But it didn't work out that way: these are just good stories, and age just doesn't matter. Find it! Read it!

[Nicholas Whyte]

http://nhw.livejournal.com/854761.html[return][return]A baker s dozen of stories by well-established authors (Aldiss, Anderson, Asimov, Ballard they are printed by alphabetical order), some of which go some way to challenging comfortable political preconceptions (though one L. Sprague de Camp s Proposal is I fear serious rather than satirical in its anti-feminism). It also struck me that a lot of the stories were really about death; the very first, Aldiss Judas Danced , is about an execution and the last, Mack Reynolds Retaliation , is a post-nuclear holocaust vignette (with a sting in the tale the viewpoint characters, for whom the author has developed our sympathy, are Russians not Americans). Anyway, a good collection.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some are ok - some are tedious

[Luigi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not just short stories by great authors but also each one writes about their craft.