Its oldest story is “The Star.” The Big Book of Science Fiction has nearly a hundred stories and I’ve read maybe a quarter of them. I’ve been dipping into The Big Book of Science Fiction edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer since it came out in 2016.
Readers who buy genre retrospective anthologies are shown a kind of photograph of the history of short science fiction, with each new anthology trying capture the genre in a pose by how the editors want their readers to see its history. Over time, the weakest older stories are left out of the latest anthology, and the best newer stories are added, revealing a kind of evolution. Every few years a new large retrospective anthology of short science fiction appears. An editor of a good retrospective anthology knows the genre and tries to keep older stories alive. They are usually remembered by anthologies. Nowadays I am fascinated by how science fiction short stories gain popularity and then fade from pop culture memory. What has changed is how the news is spread. And I’m not sure people now would react much differently than they did then. The story describes people’s reactions from from around the world at that time, but the astronomical events and effects upon the Earth would be the same today. Wells, published in 1897, is its science fictional setup would work just as well today in 2021. Wow, what a concept! And third, what if we found a dead city that was once occupied by aliens? What would it be like to walk among their ruins and imagine their lives from the clues they left? Second, I was introduced to the idea that people could escape the end of the world.
People have been entertaining that vision since the Great Flood. Imagining the end of the world provides no end of chilling speculation. First, planets from outside the solar system could fly through our interplanetary space and even collide with the Earth. It provided three new wonders to inflame my mind. For example, when I was twelve, I read the When Worlds Collide/After Worlds Collide double decker by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie. When I was young, reading science fiction thrilled me by giving me new ideas to ponder, ones I wasn’t getting from school.
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