Book Companion:

Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction, Fifth Edition

Neil Barron

Preface

Most science fiction, like fiction generally, is undistinguished. (See the publication figures in Chapter 6 to understand why this must be so.) Anatomy of Wonder has always sought to identify the best, better, or historically important works of fiction and the related nonfiction that analyzes, explains, and helps put the fiction in perspective. The guide serves multiple audiences:

The casually curious reader who is skeptical and wonders how much, if any, of this “Buck Rogers stuff” is really worth reading (as a percentage of the large total, not much is).
The devoted fan, who often thinks he (mostly he—see Chapter 6 for some demographics) knows the field thoroughly. He may be surprised at the very wide variety of distinguished work, old and new.
SF buffs who wish to match their interests and favorite books against those of the guide’s very knowledgeable contributors, who strove for infallibility without pretending to it.
Librarians, most of whom are not SF readers but who need an easy-to-use source to answer questions, advise readers, and placate the intimidating know-it-all fan.
Collection development librarians who are unwilling to settle for a (usually) randomly selected SF collection and want to acquire at least some of the best books listed in Chapter 16 to add balance and historical depth.
Teachers, from el-hi to college, who are either teaching a science fiction course or want to use a work of science fiction in a course in anthropology, politics, history, or women’s studies, among many other fields.
Futurists who are looking over the near horizon, exploring possible future scenarios and seeking new ideas or works that question traditional assumptions.
Scholars relatively new to the study of SF who need an overview of previous research.
Anyone seeking the sense of discovery provided by the best SF, in the meaning suggested by the Hungarian American biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi, winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, who said: “Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.”

Here are some of the key improvements in this new edition:

The historical/critical narrative essays now follow one another in Part I, providing a succinct, balanced survey of SF from its earliest progenitors to summer 2004. Chapters 1, 2, and 5 were completely rewritten, with all the other chapters thoroughly revised.
The approximately 1,400 entries in Part II, the annotated fiction bibliography, document and amplify the essays. All authors of novels and collections are now in a single A–Z alphabet under their most commonly used name; cross-references from pseudonyms are included. Little or no use of the author index is necessary.
All anthologies follow and are now sequenced by title, following current library practice, with editors included in the author index.
Young adult (YA) SF is now integrated with the essays and the fiction bibliography and is clearly labeled. The target teenage audience for YA books often ignores the well-meaning efforts of publishers and librarians and reads as much or more nominally adult SF. Adult readers should ignore the YA tag, for the best YA books are fully equal to their “adult” counterparts. A complete list of the 159 annotated YA books, 37 of them new to this edition, appears in Chapter 16.
SF literature and film do not exist in a vacuum. To provide a historical context, a selective chronology of the more important books and films and sci-tech discoveries and developments is available in the Book Companion section of the Libraries Unlimited Web site (http://lu.com).
The theme index is much more detailed. Contributors were asked to assign at least one, and sometimes several, theme headings to each novel, some anthologies, and some works of nonfiction.
When the fourth edition of Anatomy of Wonder was compiled in the early 1990s, the World Wide Web was far more rudimentary than today. Web site addresses and often e-mail addresses now appear throughout the guide, and Chapter 8 annotates some of the best sites and cross-references online sources that are discussed in other chapters. Online sources help keep this guide current.
The earliest period of SF has been partially mapped by various scholars, among whom one of the most distinguished is Brian Stableford, who wrote a new Chapter 1, revised Chapter 2, and explored the earlier years in his Scientific Romance in Britain 1880–1950 [9-184].
The best books listing was enlarged by adding to contributor and outsider reader choices the selections in several best books guides.
Two sections of the fourth edition have been dropped. SF poetry is a relatively minor and very specialized field that, in my judgment, has never produced major works. The audience for comics overlaps but is largely distinct from that for SF (the annual comic-con in San Diego attracts many times the number attending even the largest world SF conventions).

Librarians have often been disappointed with “new” or “revised” editions, only to find the changes cosmetic and the additional cost incommensurate with the claimed improvements. Let me reassure them: every edition of Anatomy of Wonder has been extensively revised and updated, with useful new features added whenever possible. This fifth edition is no exception. Here is a summary of the key changes since the fourth edition (1995). A great many of the entries retained from that edition have been revised. Many annotations discuss more than one book (as in series), but the entry is counted only once here.

Chapter	Entries	New Entries	Retained Entries	Comments

Front matter				Detailed chronology added
1	151	92	59	Completely rewritten and expanded
2	161	46	115	Revised, with many new entries
3	248	1	247	221 adult, 25 YA retained
4	370	4	366	Chapter 4 covered 1963 to 1994 in 4th ed.
5	485	245	240	YA fiction, formerly Chapter 5, is now integrated with adult fiction
6				More-detailed discussion of SF reader demographics, themes
7	36	14	22	Multiple-author reference works moved to Chapter 10
8				Online sources (new). Web sites also appear in multiple chapters
9	255	103	152	Rapid growth in critical studies
10	173	82	92	Multiple-author guides moved here
11	83	36	47	Updated tables and introduction
12	96	51	45	Comics dropped
13	35	10	25	Discussion of fandom added
14	27	11	16	Extensively updated
15	69	2	67	OPAC Web site addresses added
16				List of YA books added
Theme index				More fiction indexed more thoroughly

Looking Back—A Personal Reminiscence

A careful reader of the fourth edition of this guide may recall that I said it was to be the last edition I planned to edit, having plowed the ground repeatedly. It would have been had not four grant applications for a projected book (having nothing to do with fantastic literature) been turned down. Maybe, I then thought, I can get it right the fifth time. I hope I did. So far as I know, no SF reference book has gone through five editions.

This guide had its origin in three bibliographic essays in Choice, an excellent book review journal targeted mostly to academic libraries. When no one picked up on my idea for such a guide, I enlisted the help of a handful of academics, none of whom I’d then met personally. The first edition, in 1976, was less than half the length of this fifth edition, with the chapters on secondary aids reflecting the then rudimentary stage of scholarship and the limited recognition of the field as worthy of study. In spite of its inadequacies, it was selected as an outstanding reference book by a division of the American Library Association and sold about 9,300 copies in cloth and paper, far more than any later edition. Later editions were also well reviewed and nominated for awards.

The second (1981) and third (1987) editions added coverage of SF not translated into English in an attempt to offset the insularity of monolingual readers. Unfortunately, the economics of publishing and the rapid growth in the primary and secondary literature made retention of this coverage impossible in later editions.

In “The Erosion of Wonder,” an autobiographical piece published in Fantasy Commentator 51, Fall 1998, I traced the reasons for my declining interest in SF. It is appropriate to end this reminiscence with my concluding words from that essay:

But if I no longer find much SF plausible, for reasons I have only sketched, the memories linger. Like you, I have explored the dead sea bottoms of Barsoom, joined Carson Napier in the misty mythical forests of Venus, admired Martin Padway’s efforts to prevent darkness from falling, worshipped “she who must be obeyed,” sensed a Mr. Hyde on the fringes of my own consciousness, and witnessed the Time Traveller 30 million years hence, shivering on a dying earth. Names jostle one another: Robida, Verne, Wells, Doyle, Čapek, Campbell, Merritt, Stapledon, Weinbaum, William, Zamiatin, joined by Aldiss, Ballard, Blish, Bishop, Bradbury, Brunner, Compton, Dick, Disch, Ellison, Heinlein, Lem, Malzberg, Silverberg, Sladek, Sturgeon, Tiptree and Waldrop. Other figures huddle indistinctly on the fringes of memory.
Is there any example of SF that, even roughly, parallels my erratic journey through SF? The closest analogue I could think of is the life of David Selig, the protagonist of Dying Inside, whose tragic sensibility opposes the facile optimism of too much SF. His final words can serve as mine:
The world is white outside and gray within. I accept that. I think life will be more peaceful. Silence will become my mother tongue. There will be discoveries and revelations, but no upheavals. Perhaps some color will come back into the world for me, later on. Perhaps.