The Golden Age of Science Fiction Vol. I by Algis Budrys

The Golden Age of Science Fiction Vol. I Reviews

• 
  Jim Balkwill

  Some very good stories but some stories that are very outdated either technically, like martians or culturally, like the roles of women. Also, very mixed levels of writing.
• 
  Rachel

  To me, this one is hard to get through. Tedious.
• 
  Greg

  Meh, a couple of gems buried by stories best forgotten.
• 
  Alan Lewis

  A look back at an anthology of short works from the golden age of science fiction. While some are dated, I enjoyed them just as much. One story in particular looked ahead to the future.....1960.
• 
  William Knight

  This one took me 3 tries over two years to finish, which is unusual for me. I found the first "story," a book-length novel, hard to read. Eventually, I got further in and found it more interesting. But it is over 20% of this long anthology. The rest of the stories are a mixed bag, with no apparent connection. Some are old classics and some much newer. I'd read a number of them, some recently enough I skipped them.
  
  The table of contents is not linked to the stories, making it hard to move to the next one easily. I had to page through to the next story. I'd skip this one if you don't have it.
• 
  Bill Borre

  "Blind Spot" by Bascom Jones - A Martian works for a human discriminatory government program but doesn't realize the bigotry until his finance's father quashes their wedding plans.
  
  "Waste Not, Want" by Dave Dryfoos - Fred tires of endless consumption and attempts to resist but is taken by police to the hospital and forced to undergo brain surgery.
  
  "The Nothing Equation" by Tom Godwin - This story is about the negative effect upon the human mind isolated in space.
  
  "Cully" by Jack Egan - Cully is lobotomized so that he can make it past Venusian telepathic cannibals and destroy them.
• 
  Daniel

  If you can get through the first story, by far the longest and most drawn out, you will find the rest enjoyable. Some are perfectly paced while others are the beginnings of novels cut entirely too short. A few made me pause briefly to wonder before moving to the next and a couple made me laugh out loud, though I could not now tell you which.
• 
  Kc

  The stories are a little bit dated and some of them are almost offensive to my modern sensibilities, but it is really cool to read science fiction written more than 40 years ago. The storylines are similar but the imagining of where we would/could be is fascinating.
• 
  Ernie

  Good variety, some goofiness and some almost-classics.
• 
  Jim

  abandoned reading
• 
  Sarah

  4/3/13
  i don't know when i'm going to pick this up again, so marking it as "read" for now.
• 
  Jan

  finished the manuscript found in the copper cylinder story.
• 
  Janet Jay

  
  
  Some good, some bad, but I enjoyed the thorough sampling of the stories of that period.
• 
  Sharon

  Interesting collection of short Si-fi stories, some better than others. Read this on my nook.
• 
  NJ Wong

  I like science fiction anthologies, as they contain the "better" stories from many different authors.
  
  All the stories in this collection are good. Or at least they are to my liking. I don't like some modern writing techniques where the author narrates the story in first person, and invents a lot of made-up words instead of using their equivalents in current English. Hence, I did not enjoy books like Dune or The Clockwork Orange, where I get too distracted and irritated by the made up language that I fail to enjoy the book itself. Luckily, most of the stories in this collection do not employ this "postmodern" narrative style. I guess that is why the collection is labelled "Golden Age", as the stories definitely have an "old-fashion" sense of style.
  
  According to the introduction, most of the stories are from the 1930s to 1950s. Unfortunately, none of the stories - nor their authors - are described in any detail. Each chapter lands you straight into the story. I do not know when the story was written, and there is no short bio about the author or about why this particular story from the author was chosen for the collection. This is a failing. If you read Isaac Asimov's science fiction anthologies, he will always write a brief intro about the when and the why of the story and the author. This makes reading the story more appealing, because the reader will have form an emotional connection (no matter how slight that may be) to the author prior to reading the author's story. Of course, with Google/Wikipedia and a constant internet connection to the world wide web, digging information about the author and the story is easier nowadays than in the past.
  
  I mention this because the very first story in this collection, "A Strange Manuscript found in a Copper Cylinder" by James De Mille is actually the longest story in the collection (almost 220 pages ), and was first published in 1888! I was absolutely flabbergasted because there are 50 stories in this anthology, and the anthology has 990 pages in total. And the first story was already 220 pages! 220 pages is almost a whole book in itself.
  
  Luckily, the other 49 stories had more reasonable lengths of 20 to 40 pages .
  
  Unfortunately, there is no explanation why this 220 page novella from James De Mille was selected for this anthology. I would have love to read something from Algis Budrys about why he included this novella in this collection. As there was no description about James De Mille either, I didn't know he was contemporary to authors like Jules Verne, H G Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle (Doyle's "Professor Challenger" stories are SF stories). If such tidbits of information were offered as a preface to each story, then the brilliance of the story would be given better light. I am quite amazed that this story from 1888 feels so contemporary and refreshing, and truly marvelled at the imagination of the author to be able to concoct such a story back in the 1880s, that doesn't feel dated even when read in 2016.
  
  Although there are 5 books in this series of anthologies, I will not be reading the other 4 volumes
  of the "The Golden Age of Science Fiction" anthologies because of the lack of author's/story bio to introduce each story. Anthologies are like "recommendation lists". However, I want to know the reason for each recommended work, which this series of anthologies does not provide.