SQJ Taipei

This was a really fun book to read. I like sci-fi, but my exposure has been somewhat limited. We didn’t have sci-fi books around the house (that I remember) and I guess my friends weren’t into it either. I liked Star Wars and later, Star Trek although I’ve never read any of the books related to those franchises. I’ve watched all 10 seasons of Stargate SG-1. The point is this: I like sci-fi, but my experience is limited to mostly the usual pop culture stuff.

This was the first “anthology” I’ve ever read in this genre and I loved it. It includes 26 short stories published between 1929 and 1964. These are the stories and the authors that birthed a genre. This is a great book if you are interested in sci-fi but aren’t that familiar with some of the classics in the genre.

I enjoyed nearly every story. I was continually amazed at how much of what the author’s dreamed up and wrote has actually happened! Not in the area of space travel (usually to Mars in these stories) but they have things like moving walkways, fax machines, handheld computers, tv, video conferencing and more. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for the stories written later to include those ideas, but it is amazing that they show up in the earliest stories too.

As I was reading, I thought I’d try to put a brief review of each of the stories, but if you know me… you know that I always dream big… often too big. There is no way I can justify spending the time on mentioning every story. But I’ll give you a list of the ones I really liked:

The Roads Must Roll by Robert A. Heinlein (audio link)
Nightfall by Isaac Azimov
Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Lewis Padgett (A movie just came out: The Last Mimzy)
Huddling Place by Clifford D. Simak
Arena by Fredric Brown (Was the basis of the Star Trek TOS episode Arena)
The Little Black Bag by C.M. Kornbluth
Surface Tension by James Blish
The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke

MISC
Wikipedia link for this book
I added the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 2 to my Amazon.com Wishlist.