Portland Public Library

American science fiction, four classic novels 1953-1956, Gary K. Wolfe, editor

eng

Includes bibliographical references

no index present

novels

American science fiction

bibliography

775418654

Gary K. Wolfe, editor

The Library of America, 227

four classic novels 1953-1956

Following its acclaimed three-volume edition of the novels of science fiction master Philip K. Dick, The Library of America now presents a two-volume anthology of nine groundbreaking works from the golden age of the modern science fiction novel, works by turns satiric, adventurous, incisive, and hauntingly lyrical. Long unnoticed or dismissed by the literary establishment, these visionary "outsider" novels grappled in fresh ways with a world in rapid transformation and have gradually been recognized as American classics that opened new imaginative territory in American writingThis, the first of two volumes surveying the decade's peaks, presents four very different visions of uncertain futures and malleable selves. Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1953), acclaimed in its day by Kingsley Amis as "the best science fiction novel so far," brought a ferocious, satiric edge to its depiction of a future world dominated by multinational advertising agencies. In Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), a group of damaged individuals finds a strange new fulfillment in what may be the next stage of evolution. Leigh Brackett was one of the first women to make her mark as a science fiction novelist. In The Long Tomorrow (1955), she pits anti-urban technophobes against the remnants of a civilization that destroyed itself through nuclear war. The hero of Richard Matheson's fable-like The Shrinking Man (1956), condemned to grow ever smaller by a mysterious cloud, moves through humiliations and perils toward what Peter Straub calls "a real surprise . . . a fresh, wide-eyed step into a world both beautiful and new." Here are four classic novels that, each in a different way, open fresh territory, broaching untried possibilities and brimming with the energies of an age fearfully conscious of standing on the brink of the unknown. -- Dust jacket