The Road to science fiction Book

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.