BooksOfTheMoon

This volume collects two earlier Penguin SF collections from the 50s and 60s and is a pretty mammoth affair, coming to over 600 pages and containing 36 stories. Given the time period that the stories were written in (mostly the 1950s, with some outliers in the decade either side), some inevitable themes arise. These are primarily concerned with nuclear apocalypse and ‘Reds under the bed’ type allegories.

There are some great stories here and very few misses. Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall is welcome at any time and William Tell’s Eastward Ho! is a nice reversal of the conquest of America. I’m not necessarily a fan of John Steinbeck, but his The Short-Short Story of Mankind is excellent while Howard Fast’s The First Men is a nice Ubermensch story in the vein of Olaf Stapledon.

That’s just a brief skim through the selection. As I say, there are very few misses, so this is worth a read if you’re a fan of Golden and Silver Age SF, or even if you’re just curious about the history of the genre.

This collection of short stories includes the famous Supertoys Last All Summer Long as well as the two sequels that Aldiss wrote and which form the basis of the film A.I. I’ve never managed to read Supertoys until now and I found it a moving story of a boy whose mother doesn’t love him. The sequels were interesting, but they felt much more bitter than the original story and, to my mind, jarred slightly.

I didn’t find most of the other stories in the collection hugely memorable, really. Most of them had a feeling of ‘fable’ about them, so they felt more like fairy tales wrapped in an SF shell, which I like in bits, but I found it wearing after a while. To my mind the best story in the collection, other than Supertoys was probably White Mars, a Socratic dialogue describing how a brief utopia is formed on Mars and offering a hopeful vision of the future of Humanity.

While all the stories here have merit, beyond the title one, I don’t know if I’d read many of them again.