The shores of tomorrow Book

A treasury of space opera - four excellent novellas from the early days of sci-fi, impressive not so much for their adventure or their psychologizing (though excelling at both) as for their beautiful, dreamlike imagery, their profound poetry. They have been very well chosen by the editor, who, besides having taste for what is truly original about sci-fi, has picked stories consistent in tone which flow into one another. The hero wins, but barely, at terrible cost, and the horizon is dark. All four, but particularly the middle two, elevate the meaning of their genre twice over: no longer the opera of prancing prima donnas, but that of choirs screaming silently against the emptiness of space. The strange melding of down-on-their-luck noir antiheros with unlimited speculation on space, time, and the human race is one of the most poignant in all literature.