Mammoth Book of New World Science Fiction (60s): Short Novels of the 1960s

by Martin H. Greenberg

Paperback

Published July 15, 1991

About the author

Martin Harry Greenberg was an American academic and speculative fiction anthologist. In all, he compiled 1,298 anthologies and commissioned over 8,200 original short stories. He founded Tekno Books, a packager of more than 2000 published books. In addition, he was a co-founder of the Sci-Fi Channel.

For the 1950s anthologist and publisher of Gnome Press, see Martin Greenberg.

Reviews

[Elizabeth Scott Tervo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recently I remembered how much I liked Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight (read it in 9th grade), even though I found it jarringly incomprehensible most of the way through. Lately I discovered that Dragonflight was put together from two novellas, so I determined to read them both and find out whether the structure was difficult for this reason. Perhaps I could pick up clues about how to put together a novel from shorter works, or how not to. This Mammoth volume contains the first half, Weyr Search, and I found the second half online.
I discovered that the two novellas form the two halves of the Dragonflight, mostly verbatim. There is no mystery of how it was put together. But Weyr Search contains in itself the difficulty, which turns out to be the switch between the Lessa-story and the F’Lar story: the transitions are not clear and it is not clear when/where things are happening. For example, in the first section Lessa wonders if Fax is coming. In the second section F’Lar meets Fax coming out of Ruatha. In the third section Lessa sees Fax and F’Lar meeting for the first time, both outside Ruatha before coming in. These are small problems, of course, but confusing to the young reader. McCaffrey was a very experienced writer so I am surprised she did not smooth this out.
Here’s what I found was good about Weyr Search:
-McCaffrey’s inventiveness: the world of Pern is interesting, dramatic, and colorful!
-many of the characters are very well done: Lessa for example
-the watch-wher. In the novella for some reason its character and its relation to Lessa are more developed and poignant.
-Weyr Search is definitely the stronger half
Here’s what I liked less now about Weyr Search and also the second half:
-the banter can be tedious
-the romance is a bit predictable (more than I realized as a 9th-grader!)
-the political machinations are not so interesting
-F’Lar’s insistence that Thread does exist and will return seems less convincing.

[Jonah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished another dog-eared anthology! I know I at least began reading this 2003.... six years later it's done. Some of the stories were a little amateurishly written. But Eve of Rumuoko, the first one I read, really grabbed at how cinematic and Tarantino-esque it was. The farthest I've progressed from ever writing a screenplay was to try and adaptation of this story.

The Highest Treason is also powerful, as well as The Suicide Express. Be warned about the latter though, since it is a concise and mind-blowing short story prequel to the Riverworld series. I was so intrigued by the concept of Riverworld that I started to read the books of the series, and by the third or fourth volume I was getting very frustrated with it, and not in a good way.