I love this guy's hat.

My latest reading adventure from the pile of books that I bought at the Literacy Austin Booksale a few months back was New Tales of Space and Time: Brand-new Stories by the World's Best Science Fiction Authors Edited by Raymond J. Healy with an introduction by Anthony Boucher (1951).

This handy purse-sized volume contains ten stories that were commissioned just for this book and not previously published elsewhere, the most well-known of which would have to be Ray Bradbury's "Here There be Tygers." My knowledge of science fiction authors isn't as comprehensive as it could be, so the only other authors I recognized were Isaac Asimov and A. E. van Vogt. The stories range from really pretty awesome (Bradbury, Asimov, Neville, Cartmill, van Vogt), to rather boring and blah (Bretnor, Heard). And one story coined a term so hilarious that I think it deserves its own post, probably tomorrow (Boucher).

The most interesting thing about this anthology, aside from the fact that none of the stories had been published before, is that the editor commissioned the stories with the idea that they would all react against "two principal trends in fictional thinking about the future: an abject reliance on the coming superman... or a despairing belief that man is going to hell in a chromium-plated plastikoid handbasket, doomed to be the slave of his own machines -- if he doesn't blow himself up first." The authors tried to write their stories in "a major key" with a "fresher, more positive approach [to the] major themes in science fiction." Instead of being wishy-washy and utopian, this thematic limitation tended to stretch the authors' imaginations and lead to some really creative and engaging science fiction reading.

The only sad thing about this book is that the glue in the spine of my copy is all brittle and old and the book sustained some major structural damage as I was reading it. The second half of my reading extravaganza was therefore much more delicate than the first.

[quotes above taken from the book's introduction]