The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology [Paperback]

Gordon Van Gelder (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2009

Collecting more than two dozen stories that originally appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—the premiere speculative fiction magazine—this extraordinary anthology celebrates 60 years of top-notch genre fiction. Including “All Summer in a Day,” Ray Bradbury’s lasting tale of what happened on one special day; “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes, describing what happened to Charlie Gordon when he was made into a genius; “Harrison Bergeron,” Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdist cautionary tale of mandatory equality; and “The Electric Ant” by Philip K. Dick, concerning what Garson Poole learned after the accident that hospitalized him. This remarkable collection also features some of the most highly acclaimed, award-winning authors, including Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, Shirley Jackson, Peter S. Beagle, Karen Joy Fowler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Theodore Sturgeon, and Roger Zelazny. Hand-picked by the magazine’s current editor, this is an unmatched assemblage of appealing, first-rate fiction.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. F&SF editor Van Gelder has assessed, culled and organized the magazine's best stories to produce this definitive volume of work from speculative fiction's top authors, from Alfred Bester's Of Time and Third Avenue (1951) to Ted Chiang's The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (2007). Hauntingly sad tales are laid alongside hopeful tales of the far future and heroic tales of honor and duty, but all have an intensity of emotion and draw the reader in with vibrant characters, fully realized settings and ingenious writing. Van Gelder's introductory disclaimer that this contains two dozen of our best stories rather than the best two dozen stories may explain the lack of inclusions from the 1980s. For sheer reading pleasure, this anthology is unparalleled. (Oct.)
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From Booklist

The long-lived magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction has issued many retrospective anthologies but none more vaunting than this one marking its sixtieth anniversary. As editor Van Gelder admits in the introduction, promising the very best is perhaps overreaching somewhat, given the hundreds of outstanding choices F&SF’s archives afford. Yet the results here are more than just satisfying, and the lineup of contributors amounts to a who’s who of speculative-fiction masters: sf geniuses such as Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, and Harlan Ellison and fantasy legends like Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Peter S. Beagle. A few particulars: William Tenn’s Eastward Ho! wryly depicts a future in which Native American warriors finally take their lands back from the white man. Daniel Keyes’ heartbreaking Flowers for Algernon watches as a mentally handicapped janitor is granted superintelligence during a scientific experiment, only to find it slipping away when the experiment fails. Every story is a priceless gem showcasing its author’s superlative craftsmanship and ability to engage the emotions while captivating the imagination. --Carl Hays

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Tachyon Publications; Anv edition (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1892391910
• ISBN-13: 978-1892391919
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #171,686 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gordon Van Gelder worked as a book editor for St. Martin's Press for more than a decade. He has been the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction since 1997. He lives in New jersey.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid collection of stories over the lifetime of F&SF Magainze, October 10, 2009

By 

Jvstin "Paul Weimer" (Circle Pines, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology (Paperback)

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book through the kind offices of the Publicist of the publisher, Tachyon Publications.

The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder, is an anthology of stories across the eponymous magazine's 60 year history.

Although I am not a heavy reader of SF magazines (when I read SF stories, its usually in anthologies or collections), it is clear to me, immediately, that F&SF has had a wonderful history of publishing some of the best stories in SF history.

And a swath of those stories are ably collected by Mr. Van Gelder in this collection. The stories range in publication date from 1951 (Alfred Bester's Time and Third Avenue) to 2007 (Ted Chiang's story The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate).

Arranged in chronological order, the stories show the changes and evolution of the SF story with a high quality of selected stories throughout. Its not just a "most famous" story group either. While there are genre-famous stories like Flowers for Algernon, the Deathbird, and Harrison Bergeron, there are stories that are in that class, but much well less known. (Zelazny's This Moment of the Storm, for instance, or Peter Beagle's story sequel to the Last Unicorn, Two Hearts come to mind)

With that in mind, I devoured this book quickly and gleefully. I enjoyed the touchstones to the classics and old favorites, and discovering new (to me) stories as well. Gelder has done an top notch job.

Genres that forget their history are condemned to fail by that forgetting. Collections like this help the genre of SF keep in mind its roots and history. Any serious fan of science fiction would do well to dip their oars into this volume.

The lineup:

Of Time and Third Avenue, Alfred Bester

All Summer in a Day, Ray Bradbury

One Ordinary Day with Peanuts, Shirley Jackson

A touch of Strange, Theodore Sturgeon

Eastward, Ho!, William Tenn

Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes

Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut

This Moment of the Storm, Roger Zelazny

The Electric Ant, Philip K Dick

The Deathbird, Harlan Ellison

The Women Men Don't See, James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon)

I see You, Damon Knight

The Gunslinger, Stephen King

The Dark, Karen Joy Fowler

Buffalo, John Kessel

Solitude, Ursula K Le Guin

Mother Grasshopper, Michael Swanwick

macs, Terry Bisson

Creation, Jeffrey Ford

Other People, Neil Gaiman

Two Hearts, Peter S Beagle

Journey into the Kingdom, M Rickert

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, Ted Chiang

13 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not So Very Best, December 11, 2009

By 

Paul Cook (Tempe, Arizona USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology (Paperback)

Were one young enough not to have read The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as I have from the late 1950s onward (and published once in it myself) one would gather by the earlier review posted here that this is a good, perhaps even great anthology. It's not. It doesn't even come close. Van Gelder has put together a book that's excellent, but excellent up to a point, and that's about half way through the book when, around 1990 all of science fiction and fantasy being published began to show a marked decline in both quality and writing style. Various critics and writers have written extensively on this topic already, so I won't dwell on it here, but the stories in the latter half of this anthology (with the exception of "macs" by Terry Bisson--an acknowledged, and terrifying, classic) visibly pale in comparison to the previous stories. Stephen King's "Gunslinger" is here, but I'd rather Van Gelder reprinted J.G. Ballard's "Cloud Sculptors of Coral D" or any of the Vermillion Sands stories published in F&SF. And Ballard is only one of 40 writers I'd much have preferred to see here. I suspect that "Gunslinger" is in this book to help sell the anthology, and, I suspect, so is Peter S. Beagle's "Two Hearts". Both stories, while containing tropes of the fantastical, they are nonetheless written in a very realistic, almost Hemingway-esque prose--serviceable, journalistic--that considerably diminishes any fantasy element that someone such as Clark Aston Smith or Fritz Leiber would have easily conjured. (And I am talking about magic here: the magic of new worlds created, a sense of wonder.) The problem is that Van Gelder is playing his favorites (which is allowed--it's his magazine, after all). He tips his hand when he chooses the very weak (and atypical) story by Zelazny, "Moment of the Storm" from 1966. Van Gelder admits in the introduction that he could have chosen "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" or "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth", much more mature stories by Zelazny, but he didn't. "Moment of the Storm" would never in a thousand years be considered among Zelazny's "very best". (The fact that it's rarely been anthologized is no excuse to include it here.) In fairness, Van Gelder undoubtedly was trying to put together an anthology that would offer some stories commonly anthologized and others not. Fair enough. But the fantasy stories here really fall flat. The Peter S. Beagle story is the one that amazed me (and disappointed me) the most. The flatness of the prose style comes across as mere reportage; it's about a village besieged by a griffin. Okay. Cool. But where's the lyrical prose that can be found in the best fantasy written? No mood is conjured, so real sense of wonder created. I remember feeling sucked into the world Orson Scott Card created in his novel, "Hart's Hope" (and that even isn't one of Card's best novels!). You read that and you're most definitely in his creation--because of the prose style. Gabriel Garcia Marquez does the same thing in "One-Hundred Years of Solitude". Is there a Jack Vance novel or story that doesn't work the same way? Cordwainer Smith. C.M. Kornbluth. Where are those guys? Yet the Beagle story is here because Beagle has written one great book that nearly everybody worships. I just wish this was a better anthology than it is. However, to think of it another way, you could look at this book as something like a canary in a coal mine: it shows what many of us older readers have known for a while: that starting about 25, perhaps 30 years ago, both sci-fi and fantasy fell into a creative decline (even though sales have soared). Stories after that time seem less innovative and choose to fall back on familiar tropes and conceits. Nothing seems magical, no one seems to be bringing anything new to the table. Just the familiar. Just what sells. (Isn't that, in the end, the name of the game anymore?)

(Caveat: And, yes, the one story I published in F&SF falls into the period of decline I mentioned. It was a time travel story. Fun to write. Glad it was taken by Ed Ferman. The rule still applies.)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Many must-read stories in this collection, August 6, 2010

By 

Stefan "Stefan" (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology (Paperback)

The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology is an excellent collection of 23 stories picked from the treasure trove of short fiction that's been published in the eponymous magazine over the past 60 years. Editor Gordon Van Gelder -- also the editor of the magazine since 1997 -- has done an admirable job, picking stories that illustrate the diversity of both the genre and the magazine. As such, this is a great anthology for SF&F fans as well as newcomers looking for a taste.

The line-up of authors in this collection looks like a veritable Who's Who of speculative fiction: Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman -- just to name a few of the most famous ones. What's even more impressive is the fact that all the stories collected here saw their first publication in the magazine. It really gave me pause when I realized that a towering classic such as "Flowers From Algernon" by Daniel Keyes first appeared in this digest-sized magazine (and if you haven't read that story yet, you have at least one perfect reason to get this anthology right now!). Every story is preceded by a brief and thoughtful editorial note, often highlighting its author's involvement with the magazine.

The quality of these stories is, as could be expected, almost uniformly excellent. Stand-outs for me were: the previously mentioned "Flowers For Algernon" which is about a mentally retarded man who gains a brief period of brilliance via a scientific experiment; "Solitude" by Ursula K. Le Guin, an exquisite and touching story set in her Hainish Cycle; "Creation" by Jeffrey Ford, about a young boy's attempt to create life; and "Mother Grasshopper" by Michael Swanwick, about how a far-future civilization becomes reintroduced to death. If I could give these stories individual ratings, they'd all have five stars by their names, with the majority of the others getting a solid four stars. The only disappointment for me was "Buffalo" by John Kessel, a reverie about a fictional meeting between the author's father and H.G. Wells.

By the numbers: out of the 23 stories collected here, I'd call 12 solidly science fiction, 6 definitely fantasy, 1 horror, and the rest hard to place but trending towards the fantastical. Included in that last category is Harlan Ellison's "The Deathbird", which is more or less a genre of its own and one of the oddest things I've read in years. The stories are spread out across the six decades of the magazine's existence, although strangely enough not a single story from the eighties was included. The earlier part of the anthology is predominantly science fiction, and as fantasy became more popular over the years, more stories of that genre appear towards the end of the collection. The only real "high fantasy" story included here is Peter S. Beagle's "Two Hearts," in which the author revisits his classic The Last Unicorn. In terms of length, the stories vary from barely 3 pages (Neil Gaiman's "The Others," a terrifying vision of hell) to Stephen King's 44 page story "The Gunslinger," one of the 5 stories that make up the novel of the same name, originally serialized in the magazine.

Another number, and one that might raise an eyebrow, is 5: the number of female authors represented here, compared to 18 male authors. Also, some readers may look for one or more legendary stories from the magazine that unfortunately aren't represented here. My personal pick would be to add Fritz Leiber's "Ill Met in Lankhmar" novella, originally published in F&SF Magazine and certainly one of its classic -- and now sadly underappreciated -- stories.

Still, it's easy to second-guess almost any anthology, let alone one that attempts to span the life of one of the most revered magazines in speculative fiction. When all's said and done, this is undeniably an excellent collection of stories -- one that will give readers a great look at the history of F&SF Magazine and, in doing so, the history of the entire genre. It's possible that some reader will already be familiar with many of these stories, but if you aren't, The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology is practically a must-read. Highly recommended.