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American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1960-1966

The High Crusade, Poul Anderson | Way Station, Clifford D. Simak | Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes | . . . And Call Me Conrad [This Immortal], Roger Zelazny

Edited by Gary K. Wolfe

Overview

Overview

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The tumultuous 1960s was a watershed decade for American science fiction. While acknowledged masters from the genre’s golden age reached the height of their powers, a new wave of brilliant young voices emerged, upending the genre’s pulp conventions with newfound literary sophistication. SF writers experimented and crossed boundaries, questioning their predecessors’ often utopian faith in technological progress and boldly imagining new possibilities of human existence in novels that continue to astonish today.

Here, in the first volume of a two-volume collector’s set, editor Gary K. Wolfe gathers four trailblazing novels that reveal the full range of the decade’s creative intensities. In The High Crusade (1960), Poul Anderson celebrates the space operas of the pulp era, but with a madcap twist: when technologically advanced aliens touch down among the seeming primitives of medieval England, they find they have met their match. Clifford D. Simak’s Hugo Award–winning Way Station (1963) follows the progress of an unassuming Civil War veteran whose rural Wisconsin homestead has, unbeknownst to his neighbors, become an unlikely nexus of intergalactic battle.

Daniel Keyes’s much-loved best seller Flowers for Algernon (1966) imagines a near-future in which intelligence can be enhanced artificially—but Keyes downplays the speculative and technical possibilities of his premise in favor of intimate character study, taking the SF novel in daring new directions. In the postapocalyptic thriller This Immortal (1966)—published here under the author’s preferred title _. . . And Call Me Conrad_—Roger Zelazny weaves a skein of ancient myth and legend into his tale of mutant humans and blue aliens with the allusive daring and stylistic virtuosity that exemplify the New Wave at its best.

Gary K. Wolfe, editor, is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and the author, most recently, of Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature and Sightings: Reviews 2002–2006. He writes regular review columns for Locus magazine and the Chicago Tribune, and co-hosts with Jonathan Strahan the Hugo-nominated Coode Street Podcast.

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This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-501-3 738 pages

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N° 321 Library of America Series

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