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The Road to Science Fiction #2
The Road to Science Fiction 2: From Wells to Heinlein
Volume 3 Lanham, Scarecrow Press, 2002.
544 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published February 1, 1979
2 people are currently reading
127 people want to read
About the author
James E. Gunn
267 books117 followersAmerican science fiction author, editor, scholar, and anthologist. His work from the 1960s and 70s is considered his most significant fiction, and his Road to Science Fiction collections are considered his most important scholarly books. He won a Hugo Award for a non-fiction book in 1983 for Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. He was named the 2007 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Gunn served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, after which he attended the University of Kansas, earning a Bachelor of Science in Journalism in 1947 and a Masters of Arts in English in 1951. Gunn went on to become a faculty member of the University of Kansas, where he served as the university's director of public relations and as a professor of English, specializing in science fiction and fiction writing. He is now a professor emeritus and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which awards the annual John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award at the Campbell Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, every July.
He served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1971–72, was President of the Science Fiction Research Association from 1980-82, and currently is Director of The Center for the Study of
Science Fiction. SFWA honored him as a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2007.
Gunn began his career as a science fiction author in 1948. He has had almost 100 stories published in magazines and anthologies and has authored 26 books and edited 10. Many of his stories and books have been reprinted around the world.
In 1996, Gunn wrote a novelization of the unproduced Star Trek episode "The Joy Machine" by Theodore Sturgeon.
His stories also have been adapted into radioplays and teleplays:
* NBC radio's X Minus One
* Desilu Playhouse's 1959 "Man in Orbit", based on Gunn's "The Cave of Night"
* ABC-TV's Movie of the Week "The Immortal" (1969) and an hour-long television series in 1970, based on Gunn's The Immortals
* An episode of the USSR science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, filmed in 1989 and entitled "Psychodynamics of the Witchcraft" was based on James Gunn's 1953 story "Wherever You May Be".
Gunn served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, after which he attended the University of Kansas, earning a Bachelor of Science in Journalism in 1947 and a Masters of Arts in English in 1951. Gunn went on to become a faculty member of the University of Kansas, where he served as the university's director of public relations and as a professor of English, specializing in science fiction and fiction writing. He is now a professor emeritus and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which awards the annual John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award at the Campbell Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, every July.
He served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1971–72, was President of the Science Fiction Research Association from 1980-82, and currently is Director of The Center for the Study of
Science Fiction. SFWA honored him as a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2007.
Gunn began his career as a science fiction author in 1948. He has had almost 100 stories published in magazines and anthologies and has authored 26 books and edited 10. Many of his stories and books have been reprinted around the world.
In 1996, Gunn wrote a novelization of the unproduced Star Trek episode "The Joy Machine" by Theodore Sturgeon.
His stories also have been adapted into radioplays and teleplays:
* NBC radio's X Minus One
* Desilu Playhouse's 1959 "Man in Orbit", based on Gunn's "The Cave of Night"
* ABC-TV's Movie of the Week "The Immortal" (1969) and an hour-long television series in 1970, based on Gunn's The Immortals
* An episode of the USSR science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, filmed in 1989 and entitled "Psychodynamics of the Witchcraft" was based on James Gunn's 1953 story "Wherever You May Be".
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 19, 2016
I liked learning about the historical origins of the “Golden Age” of SciFi but each story only had 2-3 pages of commentary, and If you remove the historical significance and take the stories for simple enjoyment, they don’t really stand the test of time very well; Contents:
"The New Accelerator," by H. G. Wells **
"The Machine Stops," by E. M. Forster **
excerpt [but I read both full books] The Chessmen of Mars, (chapters II and III), (if reading the Signet edition) *** or Under the Moons of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs ****
"The People of the Pit," by A. Merritt *
"The Red One," by Jack London *
"Dagon," by H. P. Lovecraft *
"The Tissue-Culture King," by Julian Huxley ***
"The Revolt of the Pedestrians," by David H. Keller, M.D. **
excerpt [but I’m readying the full book] from Last and First Men, (chapter XIII HUMANITY ON VENUS), by Olaf Stapledon *
excerpt [but I read the full book] from Brave New World, (chapters 16 and 17), by Aldous Huxley ****
"A Martian Odyssey," by Stanley G. Weinbaum ***
"Twilight," by John W. Campbell ***
"Proxima Centauri," by Murray Leinster ***
"What's It Like Out There?," by Edmond Hamilton ****
"With Folded Hands," by Jack Williamson ***
"Hyperpilosity," by L. Sprague de Camp **
"The Faithful," by Lester del Rey **
"Black Destroyer," by A. E. van Vogt **
"Nightfall," by Isaac Asimov ***
"Requiem," by Robert A. Heinlein ***
"It is the merest cant and twaddle to go on asserting, as most of our press and people continue to do, that increase of scientific knowledge and power must in itself be good. I commend to the great public the obvious moral of my story and ask them to think what they propose to do with the power which is gradually being accumulated for them by the labors of those who labor because they like power, or because they want to find the truth about how things work." - Julian Huxley, The Tissue-Culture King, The Yale Review, Apr. 1926.
“Abundance doesn’t necessarily produce happiness, but poverty almost always brings misery.”
The first volume suggested that before science fiction could be written people had to learn to think in unaccustomed ways; (1) "they had to learn to think of themselves not as a tribe, or as a people, or even as a nation, but as a species; (2) they had to adopt an open mind about the nature of the universe - its beginning and its end - and the fate of man; and (3) they had to discover the future, a future that would be different from the past or the present because of scientific advances and technological innovation. - The Road to Science Fiction #2: From Wells to Heinlein, James E. Gunn, 1979.
"The New Accelerator," by H. G. Wells **
"The Machine Stops," by E. M. Forster **
excerpt [but I read both full books] The Chessmen of Mars, (chapters II and III), (if reading the Signet edition) *** or Under the Moons of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs ****
"The People of the Pit," by A. Merritt *
"The Red One," by Jack London *
"Dagon," by H. P. Lovecraft *
"The Tissue-Culture King," by Julian Huxley ***
"The Revolt of the Pedestrians," by David H. Keller, M.D. **
excerpt [but I’m readying the full book] from Last and First Men, (chapter XIII HUMANITY ON VENUS), by Olaf Stapledon *
excerpt [but I read the full book] from Brave New World, (chapters 16 and 17), by Aldous Huxley ****
"A Martian Odyssey," by Stanley G. Weinbaum ***
"Twilight," by John W. Campbell ***
"Proxima Centauri," by Murray Leinster ***
"What's It Like Out There?," by Edmond Hamilton ****
"With Folded Hands," by Jack Williamson ***
"Hyperpilosity," by L. Sprague de Camp **
"The Faithful," by Lester del Rey **
"Black Destroyer," by A. E. van Vogt **
"Nightfall," by Isaac Asimov ***
"Requiem," by Robert A. Heinlein ***
"It is the merest cant and twaddle to go on asserting, as most of our press and people continue to do, that increase of scientific knowledge and power must in itself be good. I commend to the great public the obvious moral of my story and ask them to think what they propose to do with the power which is gradually being accumulated for them by the labors of those who labor because they like power, or because they want to find the truth about how things work." - Julian Huxley, The Tissue-Culture King, The Yale Review, Apr. 1926.
“Abundance doesn’t necessarily produce happiness, but poverty almost always brings misery.”
The first volume suggested that before science fiction could be written people had to learn to think in unaccustomed ways; (1) "they had to learn to think of themselves not as a tribe, or as a people, or even as a nation, but as a species; (2) they had to adopt an open mind about the nature of the universe - its beginning and its end - and the fate of man; and (3) they had to discover the future, a future that would be different from the past or the present because of scientific advances and technological innovation. - The Road to Science Fiction #2: From Wells to Heinlein, James E. Gunn, 1979.
May 25, 2017
This anthology covers the period from 1900 through 1940, a period treated in Adam Roberts’ history in two chapters: “High Modernist Science Fiction” and “The Pulps”. Gunn definitely favors the latter in his selections, with excerpts from Huxley’s Brave New World and Stapledon’s Last and First Men being the only overlap with Roberts’ “modernists”. Other writers included by Gunn who arguably fall into this category are E. M. Forster (“The Machine Stops”) and Jack London (“The Red One”).
Most of the stories are of reasonably high quality, several overlapping with Science Fiction Hall of Fame selections (Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey”, Campbell’s “Twilight”, and Asimov’s “Nightfall”), but Gunn does not leave the reader with the impression that magazine SF was entirely a series of triumphs; two rather mediocre stories, “The Tissue Culture King” by Julian Huxley and “The Revolt of the Pedestrians” by David H. Keller, M. D. represent the beginnings of the magazine era. The editor is more solicitous of established masters, breaking the chronological ordering of tales to present later stories by Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson, presumably stronger than their works from the 1930s, the era they are called on in part to represent. Hamilton’s “What’s It Like Out There?” stands out from the other selections in theme and tone – one is left unsure whether this is due to characteristics of the writer himself or the fact that the story comes from 1952; for me it had a definite post-WW II The Best Years of Our Lives feeling about it.
Williamson’s “With Folded Hands” is a gem for any anthology of this type, looking back to the roots of SF, synthesizing utopian writings with the Frankenstein myth and presenting the story through the experiences of a Wellsian “common man”. However since this 1947 story also shows the influence of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, I think it would have benefitted from being placed in its proper chronological sequence as part of Volume 3. One flaw in Williamson’s story is that, although it takes place on a future Earth where man has traveled beyond the solar system but not yet achieved faster-than-light travel, given the substantial time period implied by that combination the planet’s technology and customs, other than the existence of extremely limited robotic servants, have hardly changed from the period in which the story was written. The fact that this objection occurred to me so readily while reading the story is perhaps a testimony to the success of Gunn’s anthologies in indoctrinating me into an SF mindset.
The stories in this collection are intelligently selected to present common themes refracted through the sensibilities of different writers, aimed at different audiences, and developed over time. Gunn’s contention is that during this period, SF established itself as a literature that dealt with humans not as individuals or members of a nation, tribe, or race, but as members of a species. This point of view may perhaps justify the inclusion of Lovecraft’s “Dagon” or Merritt’s “The People of the Pit”, which otherwise are hard to think of as SF. The Anglophone bias shown in the second half of Gunn’s earlier anthology is in full effect here, with no translated excerpts and Zamiatin the only SF writer of the period mentioned who did not write in English. The introductions Gunn provides to each selection, taken in sequence, provide a brief history of the genre over this period. Some stories would also have benefitted from an afterword where “spoilers” would not have been an issue. I would like to know exactly what Gunn thinks happens at the end of A. E. van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer”. I am unconvinced that the positions and movements of the two spaceships are logically consistent, though I have only a vague idea of what van Vogt meant by introducing the technology of “anti-accelerators”; perhaps this piece of convenient imaginary technology was meant to cover any narrative missteps.
Most of the stories are of reasonably high quality, several overlapping with Science Fiction Hall of Fame selections (Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey”, Campbell’s “Twilight”, and Asimov’s “Nightfall”), but Gunn does not leave the reader with the impression that magazine SF was entirely a series of triumphs; two rather mediocre stories, “The Tissue Culture King” by Julian Huxley and “The Revolt of the Pedestrians” by David H. Keller, M. D. represent the beginnings of the magazine era. The editor is more solicitous of established masters, breaking the chronological ordering of tales to present later stories by Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson, presumably stronger than their works from the 1930s, the era they are called on in part to represent. Hamilton’s “What’s It Like Out There?” stands out from the other selections in theme and tone – one is left unsure whether this is due to characteristics of the writer himself or the fact that the story comes from 1952; for me it had a definite post-WW II The Best Years of Our Lives feeling about it.
Williamson’s “With Folded Hands” is a gem for any anthology of this type, looking back to the roots of SF, synthesizing utopian writings with the Frankenstein myth and presenting the story through the experiences of a Wellsian “common man”. However since this 1947 story also shows the influence of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, I think it would have benefitted from being placed in its proper chronological sequence as part of Volume 3. One flaw in Williamson’s story is that, although it takes place on a future Earth where man has traveled beyond the solar system but not yet achieved faster-than-light travel, given the substantial time period implied by that combination the planet’s technology and customs, other than the existence of extremely limited robotic servants, have hardly changed from the period in which the story was written. The fact that this objection occurred to me so readily while reading the story is perhaps a testimony to the success of Gunn’s anthologies in indoctrinating me into an SF mindset.
The stories in this collection are intelligently selected to present common themes refracted through the sensibilities of different writers, aimed at different audiences, and developed over time. Gunn’s contention is that during this period, SF established itself as a literature that dealt with humans not as individuals or members of a nation, tribe, or race, but as members of a species. This point of view may perhaps justify the inclusion of Lovecraft’s “Dagon” or Merritt’s “The People of the Pit”, which otherwise are hard to think of as SF. The Anglophone bias shown in the second half of Gunn’s earlier anthology is in full effect here, with no translated excerpts and Zamiatin the only SF writer of the period mentioned who did not write in English. The introductions Gunn provides to each selection, taken in sequence, provide a brief history of the genre over this period. Some stories would also have benefitted from an afterword where “spoilers” would not have been an issue. I would like to know exactly what Gunn thinks happens at the end of A. E. van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer”. I am unconvinced that the positions and movements of the two spaceships are logically consistent, though I have only a vague idea of what van Vogt meant by introducing the technology of “anti-accelerators”; perhaps this piece of convenient imaginary technology was meant to cover any narrative missteps.
November 15, 2021
James Gunn really knows the history of science fiction well, and he develops the chronology nicely in chapters from the late 1800s to 1950. He clearly explains how the themes as well as the writing styles changed in each era, and he presents short biographies of outstanding authors who arose in those eras, taking the reader from H.G. Wells to Robert Heinlein. While I give the history a good 5 rating, the excerpts that he uses to illustrate the writing unfortunately don't grab me, reducing the rating to a 4. This is not the author's fault but just a shortcoming in my attention span.
August 23, 2017
A great selection of science fiction tales to illustrate the period in question. Almost inevitably if you are choosing the best then a significant number of them are going to be stories that are already very familiar to many fans of science fiction literature. However they are so good that I found myself taking the time to reread all but one of those tales that I had read before (and I very rarely reread any fiction).
February 19, 2013
Continuing from book 1, this book has a group of short stories from 1900 till about 1940. Since the golden age of science fiction didn't really start into the very late 1930s, a lot of these stories are only interesting in their historic sense. Many are hard to read and not really science fiction. The last half of the book has many notable stories by well known authors - Asimov, Heinlein, Campbell, Williamson. My favorite were The Revolt of the Pedestrians and Nightfall. Luckily all are written before Harlen Ellison stole and destroyed the genre for 15 years.
Want to read
April 25, 2011I think that the more I read, the more I find to read, and that I have already read and can't remember. Sad, really.
December 13, 2012
Good to read some of the old sci fi that gave birth to the current crop.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews