Emulating You've Got to Read This (1994), this sizable collection consists of stories that influenced famous writers during their upbringings. The difference is that this is a genre anthology and the influenced authors in question are the editors; these are their personal favorites. Given those limitations, the chosen tales are varied and entertaining, and the work of relative unknowns as well as late, great genre veterans. The enduring classics include Arthur C. Clarke's "Rescue Party," featuring aliens who scour Earth for survivors before the sun goes nova; John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" which inspired the Hollywood monster flick The Thing; and Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question," which speculatively traces the evolution of computer intelligence into the far future. One surprising entry is an early sf tale on interstellar exploration by Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novelist Michael Shaara. With the emphasis on pulp sf from the 1940s and '50s, fans get to discover some lost gems among the forgotten (and remembered) classics. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Publisher Jim Baen joins two of his top authors to collect the stories which made them SF readers in their youth and fitted them to make major impacts on the SF field today. The quality of the stories in this huge volume compares favorably with that of any collection in the past fifty years--there's been nothing of equal size and quality since Groff Conklin's Omnibus of Science Fiction in 1952. Nevertheless the selection wasn't through some would-be objective standard but rather by a deliberately subjective process: these are the stories which, when the editors read them, turned their worlds around. Each story was picked because of the emotional charge it gave one or more of the editors on first reading. The story sources range from Analog to Weird Tales, the first appearances from the early '30s to the mid '60s. Many were written by the greatest names in the SF field. These are stories that made the editors think and feel. They will do the same for you.