Where are the SF classics?

By Brian Clegg

I was wandering around a bookshop the other day (after the obligatory check to see if they had my latest in stock), and was struck by a significant difference between the general fiction books and the science fiction section*.

In the general fiction, there were plenty of classics. Books that we may now feel are a little dated in some ways, but nonetheless are great works of fiction and deserve to be read still. But amongst the science fiction, apart from a few Asimovs and the inevitable Dune (for obvious movie reasons), most of the great names of the past were simply missing. This feels wrong.

I don’t think my reaction is pure nostalgia. Admittedly, not every past SF title has aged well. But, for instance, the last two SF books I’ve read were by Pohl & Kornbluth and Bester respectively, and both were still far more engaging than whatever this week’s Brandon Sanderson title is. For that matter, many of the classics aren’t good pieces of writing when measured by some modern metrics, but that’s not the point – they stand the test of time despite this. And that’s the case with the SF greats too.

Gollancz (or, rather, its parent company), one of the big names of science fiction publishing, has at least helped by resurrecting many old SF titles with their impressive SF Masterworks and SF Gateway series – and the bookshop did have a couple of books from these ranges. But even so, it’s such a shame that younger readers are not getting the same opportunity to be confronted with the classics in this genre as they are in the general fiction section.

*  Actually it wasn’t a science fiction section, it was science fiction and fantasy, which I find distinctly irritating. I do read both, but I prefer my browsing more clearly defined. (I also hate, incidentally, the way Waterstones has merged popular science into a vague smart thinking topic, and has lost its crime section entirely.) 

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.