Science Fiction Source Book

Small correction: Good is the condition; the publisher is Longman. David Wingrove is the editor rather than the sole author, as the book contains contributions from several prominent science-fiction writers and critics.

Science fiction has imagined galactic empires, immortal humans, sentient planets and machines capable of thinking independently. It has also produced thousands of books with nearly identical pictures of spaceships on their covers, leaving the ordinary reader to wonder which particular future is worth entering. The Science Fiction Source Book arrives with maps, recommendations and a large supply of opinions.

Edited by David Wingrove, this ambitious reference volume combines a history of science fiction, an examination of its principal subgenres, essays by working writers and a vast guide to authors and books. It is part literary companion, part reading list and part emergency navigation system for anyone who has become lost somewhere between Isaac Asimov and Roger Zelazny.

Brian Aldiss begins with a concise history of the genre, tracing its development from early speculative literature through scientific romance, pulp magazines, the Golden Age and the more experimental fiction of the post-war decades. The journey demonstrates that science fiction existed long before bookshops decided precisely which shelf should contain it.

The historical section considers how writers responded to industrialisation, scientific discovery, world war, nuclear weapons, space travel and changing ideas about humanity’s future. Every technological advance supplied possibilities for utopia and disaster, although disaster generally produced the more attractive cover illustration.

Brian Stableford surveys fifteen major science-fiction subgenres and thematic traditions. These include space opera, time travel, alternative history, utopian and dystopian fiction, alien encounters and speculative treatments of future societies. The categories are useful, though science-fiction novels frequently ignore them and wander into several departments without completing the appropriate forms.

Space opera takes politics, warfare and personal rivalry into the galaxy, where everything becomes larger and can be settled with fleets. Time-travel fiction allows characters to alter history and then spend the remainder of the book attempting to repair it. Alternative history explores worlds in which one important event happened differently, often producing an alarming quantity of military tailoring.

Utopian fiction imagines a perfect society; dystopian fiction explains what happened once the organising committee took control. Stories about robots ask whether machines can become human, while stories about humans occasionally suggest that this would not represent an obvious promotion.

At the centre of the volume is an enormous consumer guide covering approximately 880 novelists and more than 2,000 individual works. Entries describe authors and books, identify major titles and offer assessments intended to help readers choose among several lifetimes’ worth of speculative fiction.

Books are rated for readability, characterisation, idea content and literary merit. This permits the critic to distinguish between a novel containing splendid ideas and no believable people, a beautifully written book in which nothing occurs, and the rare masterpiece that achieves both thought and entertainment without accidentally becoming 900 pages long.

The ratings are informative, convenient and guaranteed to provoke disagreement. Every reader will eventually discover a cherished novel receiving fewer stars than deserved, while an inexplicably celebrated work has been rewarded for qualities visible only to the editorial committee. Reference books thereby encourage active critical engagement, sometimes expressed through muttering.

The guide ranges across celebrated authors, prolific professionals and figures who have slipped from general memory. It provides an intriguing snapshot of the genre as it appeared in 1984: which reputations seemed secure, which newer writers appeared important and which books had already been quietly assigned to the cupboard of abandoned futures.

A further section allows leading writers to discuss their own working methods. Contributors include Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Silverberg, John Sladek, Lisa Tuttle, Gene Wolfe and Roger Zelazny, among others. They reveal how imaginary worlds are constructed through observation, planning, intuition, rewriting and the persistent requirement to remain at the desk.

These accounts are especially valuable because the finished novel conceals the ordinary labour behind it. Readers encounter strange planets and transformed civilisations; writers encounter drafts, deadlines and paragraphs that seemed perfectly adequate yesterday. Even the future must pass through revision.

Wingrove and Malcolm Edwards also examine publishing and criticism, the two processes through which manuscripts are transformed first into books and then into subjects of disagreement. Editors, magazines, specialist publishers and reviewers shaped the history of science fiction almost as decisively as the writers themselves. A revolutionary idea still requires somebody to print it and persuade a distributor that readers exist.

Kingsley Amis provides an afterword containing his own distinctly sceptical assessment of the field. Having once championed science fiction as serious literature, he remained unimpressed by much of its subsequent development. Every movement eventually acquires an elder statesman announcing that the revolution became disappointing after everyone else joined.

Published in 1984, the book appeared just as cyberpunk and personal computing were beginning to alter the imaginative landscape. William Gibson’s Neuromancer was published that year, while the internet remained largely outside ordinary public experience. The source book therefore captures science fiction at the exact moment another future arrived and began rearranging the index.

Its age now makes it doubly fascinating. It remains a guide to decades of classic science fiction while also revealing how the genre saw itself in the early 1980s. Some predictions have dated, some anxieties have become ordinary life and several supposedly futuristic devices are now used mainly to display pictures of cats.

This is an excellent reference for collectors, students, booksellers and readers searching for neglected authors or another substantial reading project. It is scholarly enough to consult seriously but sufficiently opinionated for recreational browsing and prolonged arguments with people who are not present.

This copy is in Good condition, showing ordinary signs of age and previous use but remaining entirely serviceable for further exploration. Offered by Crappy Old Books, it is a comprehensive and entertaining guide to the literature of possible futures—carefully organised in 1984, shortly before the future ignored the recommended reading list and arrived anyway.

Keep browsing: See more Science-Fiction books Other books by David Wingrove