20th Century SF

I suppose that this blog is really about my reading of sf in the second half of the twentieth century, beginning in the 1950's with comic strips including Classics Illustrated adaptations of:

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court

The Time Machine

The War Of The Worlds

The Time Machine is always in the background while reading Poul Anderson's time travel works just as Robert Heinlein's Future History is always in the background while reading Anderson's future histories.

For me personally, the main names to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century were not Heinlein, Asimov or Clarke but Blish and Anderson. I got involved with Blish first but Anderson was more prolific, hence this blog.

We listed seven "major bodies of work" by Anderson here. The equivalent although shorter list for James Blish is:

Cities In Flight

The Seedling Stars

The Haertel Scholium

After Such Knowledge

If we revisit the Blish list shortly, then we will do that on the James Blish Appreciation blog but link to there from here.

There has now been a quarter century of twenty-first century sf which I have mostly not kept up with. We are now living in what used to be the future: the twenty-first century.