More Issues At Hand: Critical Studies In Contemporary Science Fiction

Author: James Blish (as William Atheling Jr.)

William Atheling, Jr., was the name that James Blish took when he began writing science fiction criticism in the early 1950s. Before this, no-one had criticised science fiction like this. Above all, Blish believed that science fiction writers should be held to the same literary standards as any other writers, and in savaging writers known and unknown Blish initiated the movement that resulted in the works by Budrys and Clute and Gary Wolfe also included on this list. In the first of the two collections, he has gathered the reviews that deal mainly with the magazines of the day; the second collection deals mainly with the books. Here you'll find his excoriating response to the short stories of Theodore Sturgeon, to Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis, to Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. The reviews are fresh, invigorating, and even today any would-be writer will benefit from re-reading them. Frankly, without this pioneering work, we wouldn't have today's criticism, or this website, or possibly even science fiction as we know it.