Science Fiction of the 20th Ce
The best thing about this sf history? It looks like a million bucks. Almost every page sports vintage magazine or paperback cover art (in later chapters, movie posters and stills) in eye-popping color that visually punches through page-filling stark white, deep black, or purple backdrops, some of which resemble construction blueprints--very astrodynamic. Robinson's text is less...
The best thing about this sf history? It looks like a million bucks. Almost every page sports vintage magazine or paperback cover art (in later chapters, movie posters and stills) in eye-popping color that visually punches through page-filling stark white, deep black, or purple backdrops, some of which resemble construction blueprints--very astrodynamic. Robinson's text is less impressive. Instead of tracing the genre's literary developments, he recounts its commercial publishing history, from its beginnings in the fabled pulp magazines of the 1920s to its growth spurt in the digests of the 1950s to the rise of the paperback sf novel in the 1960s to the current state of affairs, in which movie and TV spin-offs account for a growing number of sf books. The chronicle's leading players are editors, such as Hugo Gernsback, Ray Palmer, John W. Campbell, and Donald A. Wollheim, and, later, filmmakers. Ironically, Robinson's workaday prose could have been further edited to reduce repetition and solecisms. When it gets tedious, go back to ogling the pictures.