The Event Horizon

3. Book Reviews

3.1 The Road to Science Fiction, Vol 3: From Heinlein to Here by James Gunn, reviewed by Soh Kam Yung

James Gunn is a respected critic in the Science Fiction field, so when this book was available, I had to get it to see what he said. Covering the field of Science Fiction between the 1940s (when Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov first began writing) to the early 1980s, this anthology provides a history of SF in that era, as well as good essays on the period and on the authors themselves, as well as being filled with high quality fiction, most of which is now unavailable.

Regretfully, I can only highlight a few of the stories in this book. A larger review of each of the stories can be found in the review at my web site:

``All You Zombies'' by Robert A. Heinlein is one of the few Heinlein stories I didn't read before (hang head in shame) and it's a wonderful story that plays with the idea of time paradoxes introduced by time travellers.
``Mimsy were the Borogroves'' by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore) is a chilling story based on the idea that Lewis Carroll's (in)famous `Jabberwocky' poem may actually be a gateway to a multi-dimensional world. After reading it, I still find myself twisting my ``brilligs'' and ``slithy thoves'' in hopes of following along to a new world (grin).
``Brooklyn Project'' by William Tenn (Philip Klass) is a funny story that looks at the other aspect of time-travel: whether, in travelling into the past, you will affect the future. As this story shows, it does...yet it does not!
``The Cold Equations'' by Tom Godwin is a classic hard SF story that shows that at times, no Star Trek like solution can help solve the problem of getting a certain mass to a certain place with a certain amount of available energy.
``The Game of Rat and Dragon'' by Cordwainer Smith is a story about how man and its `partners' (cats) act together to help bring space-ships safely across space in a universe filled with galactic horrors. Probably the most interesting in this story is the portrayal of the relationship the partners and humans and how other people view it.
``We Can Remember it for You Wholesale'' by Philip K. Dick was the story on which the movie, ``Total Recall'' was based on. This story has another, deeper level, than the one shown in the movie and, in some ways, shows off Dick's paranoid fiction style better.
``Kyrie'' by Poul Anderson is an amazing look how even psychic connections between two people are still subject to Einstein's Theory of Relativity with untold effects on the participants.

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