Thursday, April 24, 2014

Delving Back Into Old Science Fiction Short Stories

I have a large collection of old science fiction short story anthologies.  Back in the 1980s Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg undertook a project to assemble what they considered to be the best sci-fi short stories published each year from 1939 through 1963, a span of time that they termed "The Golden Age of Science Fiction".  I tend to agree with that appellation: these stories tend to tower above others within this genre. I know this because I bought every volume in the series!  Each book is titled The Great SF Stories, followed by a number.  "1" represents 1939, "2" is 1940...and so on to "25" (1963).  After this series ended, Donald A. Wollheim began his own series, titled The [year] Annual World's Best SF Stories, covering material originally published from 1964 through 1990.  I own those as well. Since then, Gardner Dozois has been engaged to this day editing his own popular annual science-fiction short story anthologies. And there have been other "year's best science fiction" series as well.  But my favorite series is the older Asimov/Greenberg one.

In recent years I've gone more for full-length novels than short stories, and those old anthologies have fallen into storage instead of use.  But I'm thinking of pulling them back out and reading them.  This would be a lot easier if I could digitalize them and put them on my Kindle...