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American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1960-1966 (LOA #321): The High Crusade / Way Station / Flowers for Algernon / . . . And Call Me Conrad (The Library of America)

door Gary K. Wolfe (Redacteur)

Andere auteurs: Poul Anderson (Medewerker), Daniel Keyes (Medewerker), Clifford D. Simak (Medewerker), Roger Zelazny (Medewerker)

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"This volume, the first of a two-volume set gathering the best American science fiction from the tumultuous 1960s, opens with Poul Anderson's immensely popular The High Crusade, in which aliens planning to conquer Earth land in Lincolnshire during the Hundred Years' War. In Clifford Simak's Hugo Award-winning Way Station, Enoch Wallace is a spry 124-year-old Civil War veteran whose lifelong job monitoring the intergalactic pit stop inside his home is largely uneventful--until a CIA agent shows up and Cold War hostilities threaten the peaceful harmony of the Galactic confederation. Daniel Keyes's beloved Flowers for Algernon, winner of the Nebula Award and adapted as the Academy Award-winning movie Charly, is told through the journal entries of Charlie Gordon, a young man with severe learning disabilities who is the test subject for surgery to improve his intelligence. And in the postapocalyptic earthscape of Roger Zelazny's Hugo Award-winning . . . And Call Me Conrad (also published as This Immortal) Conrad Nomikos reluctantly accepts the responsibility of showing the planet to the governing extraterrestrials' representative and protecting him from rebellious remnants of the human race. Using early manuscripts and original setting copy, this Library of America volume restores the novel to a version that most closely approximates Zelazny's original text."--Provided by publisher.… (meer)
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LOA has published a series of sci-fi novels over 4 volumes covering the 50s and 60s. In this volume, 4 novels by different authors are intended to show the continuing evolution of sci-fi genre. Although these stories were relatively unknown at the time, they were unique in their own respective ways. ( )
  walterhistory | Jun 16, 2023 |
The High Crusade (1960) by Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson isn't an author I have much experience with, but I did love his time travel fantasy There Will Be Time (1972), which I read many times as a kid. But on the other hand, my copy was part of a Signet double with The Dancer from Atlantis (1971), which I never even got through the first chapter of despite several attempts! LibraryThing tells me I own many anthologies with his stories in them, but most of the time I don't mention his contributions in my reviews, so I must not have found them notably good or bad. Thus, I was very curious how I would take this book.

It turns out that I took it very well! The High Crusade opens in medieval England, where an alien spaceship lands in a country village, ready to frighten the locals. However, guile, brutality, and sheer luck lead to an upset when the villagers manage to slaughter all of the aliens bar one and take over the ship. The local baron loads most of his village's population onto the massive ship. He intends to fly the ship to the Holy Land and "liberate" it, but the surviving alien tricks him and engages the autopilot, taking the ship back to the alien colony from whence it came, with no reference coordinates to enable a return to Earth.

It's hilarious and charming. The humans are outclassed and outgunned, but keep going anyway. The baron doesn't even know how to use a napkin, but manages to outwit aliens who have hand-held nuclear weapons through superior strategy and a propensity to bluff outrageously. The novel is narrated by a monk named Brother Parvus. Would the novel's plausibility hold up to strict scrutiny? Perhaps not, but it's such a joy to read that you won't want to hold it up to strict scrutiny. It zips along (only 140 pages long in this edition) and doesn't outwear its welcome, as it continuously escalates. Soon the baron is organizing an interstellar alliance against the invading aliens and converting other aliens to Christianity! Jo Walton has a great tribute to the novel here, and says it better than I can.

It is a bit funny that this lost the Hugo Award for Best Novel to A Canticle for Leibowitz, also a science fiction novel about a Catholic monk (or monks) recording information for posterity. Must have been something in the air in 1960! I think it would be pretty difficult to argue that Canticle wasn't the right choice—it's certainly the one of the finalists I would have voted for—but this is a worthy finalist for sure, and well worth reading, and I'm glad editor Gary K. Wolfe included it in this Library of America anthology of 1960s sf. Poul Anderson was a finalist for Best Novel seven times, but never won; he did win many times in the various short fiction categories, however: twice in Best Novella, thrice in Best Novelette, and twice in Best Short Story.

Way Station (1963) by Clifford D. Simak
In 1964, the Hugo Award for Best Novel was given to Clifford Simak's Way Station. Simak is an author I haven't read much of; last year, I read his 1967 novel Why Call Them Back from Heaven?, but other than that it's just pieces of scattered short fiction in anthologies like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. (I do remember liking his story "Immigrant" in Galactic Empires, Volume I.)

Way Station is an odd book: after the American Civil War, a Union soldier named Enoch returns home to Wisconsin and is recruited to operate a "way station" for Galactic Central, a place where aliens can materialize and rest on their way to destinations further out in the spiral arm. For this, he is essentially granted immortality. At the time the book takes place (much of it is told in flashback), four things converge: the CIA discovers and takes an interest in this immortal man, a political faction in Galactic Central wants to close the way station on Earth by any means necessary, Enoch takes a woman into his home when she's abused by her father, causing the locals to end their longstanding policy of ignoring him, and an important peace conference is breaking down, meaning the Cold War may be about to turn hot.

Like Fritz Lieber's The Big Time (1958), also a Hugo winner from this era, it has big ideas, but takes a subdued, personal, perhaps even slow approach to them. That said, many like to point to Simak's style as "pastoral sf." (Searching "pastoral, science fiction" as a tagmash on LibraryThing brings up sixty-nine works, though only the top dozen would really seem to count. Simak is its top practitioner with his 1965 novel All Flesh Is Grass, and Way Station itself comes in sixth.) It's a defense I buy: I imagine that even in 1963, this felt like a story from another era. Simak's style captures the emotions Enoch must feel as a man out of his own time and the tone really communicates his isolation without slipping into being maudlin. The flashbacks we go into about Enoch's life over the years, encounters he's had with various aliens especially, are effective and Simak manages to evoke a world that is beyond Enoch's comprehension (and ours) but tantalizing and promising. Probably one of the most admirable parts of the novel is the way Simak communicates Enoch's orientation toward the universe, one of wonder and hope.

Given that even good contemporary sf often seems to want to emulate streaming television programs rather than play to the strengths of prose, I appreciated how different this book was. (Oddly, a Netflix film adaptation of this book was announced in 2019, though nothing has been heard since.) That said, I occasionally found myself wanting to skim—the pacing is a bit too languid from time to time!

There is, in the end, a lot going on here, and at the novel's conclusion, all those things kind of collide. Simak handles this very effectively, as elements of different plots and strands cross with one another in unexpected ways. But there's not just a unity of plot but also one of theme. People these days like to talk about "hopepunk" (thanks, I hate it), but sf has always provided us with hope. In Way Station, hope comes from caring: Enoch cares of course, but so does the woman Enoch rescues, and so do many of the various aliens Enoch meets, and so does Enoch's postman, and even the CIA agent assigned to shadow Enoch does, and without all of these people caring about things, the ending would have gone much differently. Near the end, Enoch thinks this:

A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years to come there might be no river—but in a million years from now there would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself—a thing that went on caring.

It's a sentiment worth awarding.
  Stevil2001 | Dec 9, 2022 |
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» Andere auteurs toevoegen

AuteursnaamRolType auteurWerk?Status
Wolfe, Gary K.Redacteurprimaire auteuralle editiesbevestigd
Anderson, PoulMedewerkerSecundaire auteuralle editiesbevestigd
Keyes, DanielMedewerkerSecundaire auteuralle editiesbevestigd
Simak, Clifford D.MedewerkerSecundaire auteuralle editiesbevestigd
Zelazny, RogerMedewerkerSecundaire auteuralle editiesbevestigd
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"This volume, the first of a two-volume set gathering the best American science fiction from the tumultuous 1960s, opens with Poul Anderson's immensely popular The High Crusade, in which aliens planning to conquer Earth land in Lincolnshire during the Hundred Years' War. In Clifford Simak's Hugo Award-winning Way Station, Enoch Wallace is a spry 124-year-old Civil War veteran whose lifelong job monitoring the intergalactic pit stop inside his home is largely uneventful--until a CIA agent shows up and Cold War hostilities threaten the peaceful harmony of the Galactic confederation. Daniel Keyes's beloved Flowers for Algernon, winner of the Nebula Award and adapted as the Academy Award-winning movie Charly, is told through the journal entries of Charlie Gordon, a young man with severe learning disabilities who is the test subject for surgery to improve his intelligence. And in the postapocalyptic earthscape of Roger Zelazny's Hugo Award-winning . . . And Call Me Conrad (also published as This Immortal) Conrad Nomikos reluctantly accepts the responsibility of showing the planet to the governing extraterrestrials' representative and protecting him from rebellious remnants of the human race. Using early manuscripts and original setting copy, this Library of America volume restores the novel to a version that most closely approximates Zelazny's original text."--Provided by publisher.

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