Arthur Hlavaty on the 1950s SF classics

The latest issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction, prospering as an electronic publication under the helm of its new publisher, Kevin Maroney, has an excellent review of the Library of America's American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s. It's written by "Supergee," e.g. Arthur Hlavaty.

I subscribe to NYRSF and I read Arthur's piece on my Kindle, but it's been posted at the journal's Web site, so that everyone else can read it, too.

I recommend Hlavaty's piece to anyone interested in SF; you'll read a pithy discussion of Robert Heinlein's career as a novelist and perhaps learn something about Star Wars. The nine novels under discussion are The Space Merchants, Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth; More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon; The Long Tomorrow, Leigh Brackett; Double Star, Robert Heinlein;  The Shrinking Man, Richard Matheson; The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester; A Case of Conscience, James Blish; Who? by Algis Budrys, and The Big Time, Fritz Leiber. (While I'm generally well-read in SF, I've read only two of these, the Heinlein and the Sturgeon. I recommend both.)

Part of the fun of reviewing a work of this sort is to second-guess the choices that the Library of America made; Hlavaty says the obvious omission is Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, but he surmises, surely correctly, that a Bradbury collection must be in the works. Fahrenheit aside, he doesn't see any clear mistakes, although he argues for the inclusion of The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. I would have pushed, instead, for The Dying Earth by Jack Vance. I'd like to believe Dying Earth is omitted because Library of America is planning a Vance collection, but I'm not holding my breath.