The Science Fiction CenturyEdited by David G Hartwell
Robinson, trade paperback, 1005 pages, £14.99
Review by Mike Don (1998)
A retrospective collection, and an ambitious project, selecting a representative sample from the century’s output of a prolific and worldwide genre in 45 stories. Hartwell is a highly respected SF editor, so there’s no doubting the quality of his choices, some of them classics but many lesser-known and less anthologised.
A plus is the number of contributions from authors outside the English-speaking hegemony – French, Belgian, Italian, Polish, Russian, German – whose works are not as well-known as they should be, due to difficulties in translation maybe.
On the other hand it is rather deflating to find that, for Hartwell, British SF seems to have ended with John Wyndham. Every reader will have their own omitted favourites, but you can’t please everybody. And Hartwell’s erudite introduction is a gem in itself.