I've long been impressed by Stableford's critical work in science fiction, his entries on the themes and authors of science fiction in both versions of New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and his own Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature. So I was curious to see what he could do at longer essay lengths.

As with most of my science fiction reference works, I didn't read this book cover to cover, just read the entries that caught my eye. These essays appeared in various places -- and sometimes in different forms - from 1976 to 1987. Some of the subjects were already dead when they were covered. Others went on to make significant additions to their corpus.

I bought the book mostly for its title essay dealing with Clark Ashton Smith. Smith is undergoing a bit of a resurrection these days, but, in 1987 when the essay was written, Smith was the lesser known of Weird Tales' "Three Musketeers" which also included H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard. What some find irritating in Smith's work - the outre vocabulary and elaborate descriptions - is, argues Stableford, inherent to the "alchemy of words" - to borrow a phrase from Arthur Rimbaud, one of Smith's literary models along with other French Decadents and Edgar Poe - Smith practiced. Smith was not at all interested in modeling the human condition but in literary escapism via verbal incantation, and Stableford suggests that the need for escape accounts for Smith's greatest output, in quality and quantity, coinciding with the travails of tending to two sick parents in a primitive, isolated cabin in the Sierra Nevadas.

I also read two other essays on authors I know only through a few short stories. David H. Keller was a doctor who is mostly remembered today for some horror stories, but Stableford argues that he was the first science fiction writer to deal with the implications of biotechnology - a theme Stableford himself has insightfully covered in his own fiction - albeit in a crude, pulpish way. Civilization's sickness - and its cure via apocalyptic destruction and rebirth - was Keller's usual theme. However, Stableford thinks he protests too much in his insistence that marital and parental love and tolerance for others be the key features of civilization. Keller comes off as unconvincingly resolving, in sickly sweet endings, conflicts in those areas.

Mack Reynolds, in a 1979 essay, looks to be a fascinating writer. Buried under his action plots - often involving agents for oppressive systems who become turncoats and revolutionaries - is a serious consideration of capitalism and Marxism. He seems to have seen them as two stale orthodoxies maintained by a power elite uninterested in "progress" - however slippery that notion is. Stableford even cites his Looking backward, from the year 2000, inspired by Edward Bellamy's dull, but influential Looking Backward from 2000 to 1887, as science fiction's first utopian work in 40 years. Since that essay, Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars has filled that niche and other writers, like Ken MacLeod and Charles Stross, have taken up Reynolds mantle of seriously dealing with the shape of future societies and economies. Still, I'll be looking around for editions of Reynolds' and Keller's work.

Other subjects are Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett, Kurt Vonnegut, Barry Malzberg, Robert Silverberg, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, and Stanley Weinbaum.

In my sampling of the book, Stableford still strikes me as an invaluable and insightful critic well worth reading for anyone interested in science fiction's history and themes. ( )