Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 8119171" data-attributes="member: 508">I started a two-volume hardback series, A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher.  It was published in 1959 and the introduction states that these stories were collected not because they were the absolute best around, but because they were the best around that hadn't already been collected in other anthologies - in other words, Boucher was trying to gather together stuff he thought the reader might not have seen before.  It's a collection of 8 short stories, 12 novelets (I think the term "novella" is more commonly used today), and 4 full-length novels, and the introduction uses the now-rather-humorous phrase "modern (1938-1958) s.f. which had been overlooked by earlier anthologists."  I'm still on the first story, a 125-page novella (or novelet, if you prefer) called "Re-Birth" by John Wyndham (author of "The Day of the Triffids" and "The Midwich Cuckoos," if those ring any bells), which is an engaging story of a post-nuclear apocalypse world filled with religious "pure strain humans" (to borrow a Gamma World term) who feel they must slay all mutants and their recent discovery of a band of mutants who outwardly look human but have - gasp! - telepathic powers!  Fortunately, the mutants are in telepathic communication with a band of mutants from the two-island paradise of "Zealand" who are coming to their rescue before the religious hordes get to the renegade telepaths.I'll probably be skipping two of the novels - The Weapon Shops of Isher by A. E. van Vogt and The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester - because I've already read them, but I don't recognize any of the other works in the set so I'll press on with them.Johnathan</blockquote>

Verification