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joeure's review
3.0
I chipped away at this book for almost a year and then finished it as my flight to Chicago was taking off. Luckily, there are a few really good stories in here that I enjoyed enough to read again during the flight. These are: "Kaleidoscope" (Ray Bradbury), "The Color Out of Space" (H. P. Lovecraft), "What You Need" (Lewis Padgett), and "Manners of the Age" (H. B. Fyfe).
This book was compiled in 1953. If you ask me, science fiction still had a long ways to go in 1953. While a few of the short stories were very fun reads, the majority of them were just plain not very good. Despite some weird premises and a shocking number of lackluster plot twist-punchline hybrids, it was still really cool to see how these 43 authors thought about the future in 1953 [and as early as 1913 in Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague" (which is about a plague that ended civilization in 2013! Cool!)] There were also a few instances of scientific thinking that fairly accurately predicted later discoveries, which was exciting to come across.
You can probably find the best stories from this book published elsewhere. That's how you should read them.
This book was compiled in 1953. If you ask me, science fiction still had a long ways to go in 1953. While a few of the short stories were very fun reads, the majority of them were just plain not very good. Despite some weird premises and a shocking number of lackluster plot twist-punchline hybrids, it was still really cool to see how these 43 authors thought about the future in 1953 [and as early as 1913 in Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague" (which is about a plague that ended civilization in 2013! Cool!)] There were also a few instances of scientific thinking that fairly accurately predicted later discoveries, which was exciting to come across.
You can probably find the best stories from this book published elsewhere. That's how you should read them.
djwudi's review
3.0
While I love these big collections of Golden Age stories (though my copy was printed in the 80s, the collection was actually assembled in 1952 or 1953), and there are a lot of fun ideas and stories, it can lead to an occasional amused wince when you stumble across stories that incorporate the often non-malicious but still very present societal racism or gender biases of the time. Made me laugh more than once. Still a great collection of stories.
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