The SFWA Science Fiction Hall of Fame: The Complete Set

In 1965, the Science Fiction Writers of America was founded. In 1966, they presented the first Nebula Awards for the best sf of the previous year. But what about the best sf up prior to that point?

The SFWA held a vote, and the result was an anthology of twenty-six short stories from 1929 to 1964, entitled The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, edited by Robert Silverberg. This was published in 1970 by Doubleday and remains in print, though now from Tor. 

This must have been a success for everyone involved because it was followed up in 1973 by The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two, edited by Ben Bova, which collected the best pre-1964 novellas. Collecting twenty-two novellas would make the volume quite massive, so it was split into two hardbacks, volumes two-A and and two-B. These also remain in print from Tor.

I acquired volumes one and two back in 2007 when I was invited to pick through the sf books of the late brother of one of my mother's friends. Story-for-story, volume one is excellent, one of the best sf anthologies I've ever read; if I was going to teach some kind of general sf survey, it would definitely be on the syllabus. Weirdly, I didn't find volume two-A very satisfying, but I do think that volume two-B had as good a hit rate as volume one.

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The SFWA must have wanted to keep a good thing going (my understanding is that the organization receives the royalties from the books), because 1981 and 1986 saw the release of volumes three and four, respectively. (Volume three was edited by Arthur C. Clarke and Geo W. Proctor; volume four, Terry Carr.) But with the best pre-SFWA stories collected, these shifted to collecting the best stories from the SFWA era, which is to say, Nebula Award winners. Volume three collects Nebula-winning short fiction (short stories, novelettes, and novellas) from 1965 to 1969, and volume four from 1970 to 1974.

These seem to me to be kind of redundant, given the SFWA already publishes annual volumes of Nebula winners, and the hit rate is presumably lower when you're collecting the sixteen best stories of five years, not the twenty-six best of thirty-five. I imagine readers must have felt the same, because these volumes have no subsequent US editions after their original publications by Avon. 

I own both volumes three and four; I found them in used bookstores in 2009 and 2012, respectively. Of the two, I have only read volume three. It was fine. Some excellent stuff, but indeed, not as strong as volumes one or two-B.

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I have read other histories of the SFWA's Hall of Fame series, and they usually stop here, but that's not really where it ends! In 1991, the name of the organization was changed to "Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America." Volumes three and four of the Hall of Fame do contain fantasy stories because fantasy is eligible for the Nebulas, but volumes one and two did not. So the SFWA held a new vote, for the best fantasy short fiction up to 1990.

The result of this was The Fantasy Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg, published by Harper in 1998. (Confusingly, in 1983, Silverberg had already co-edited an anthology with this title, released by Arbor House.) This is billed as being as good as the original Science Fiction Hall of Fame, but I would guess for whatever reason it has not had the staying power, because it did not stay in print.

Back in 2019, upon finishing volume three, I tracked down a copy of this online; I'd never encountered it in the wild, and it seemed like I wasn't going to if I hadn't done so after ten years. 

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There is one final "Hall of Fame" volume from SFWA, but it's very different from the others. The SFWA European Hall of Fame is a collection of translations of non-Anglophone sf from Europe, containing sixteen short stories; this was edited by James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow, published by Tor in 2007. I believe it was funded by a grant from the SFWA, hence the title.

I did encounter this in the wild, to my surprise, given fifteen years had passed without me bumping into it. It was in the book room at ICFA a couple weeks ago, and I immediately grabbed it. As you can see in my photo above, it is very different from the others! I had been hoping its dimensions would match.

But I'm always happy to have a complete set of any series; it only took me nineteen years in this case! (I am the only LibraryThing user to own all seven volumes, fact fans.) Hopefully it doesn't take nineteen years for me to get around to reading my remaining three volumes. 

Review: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Three edited Arthur C. Clarke and George W. Proctor

Hardcover, 623 pages
Published 1982 (contents: 1965-69)
Acquired January 2009
Read August 2019

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Three: Nebula Winners, 1965-1969
edited Arthur C. Clarke and George W. Proctor

My reading of the first two volumes of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (which actually occupied three books) predates this blog, but I enjoyed volumes one and two B, and found volume two A lacking. In the stronger volumes, it felt like every story was a great, just one after another after another. Which, one supposes, is what you want out of a series called "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame." Volume three is somewhere in the middle; while I remember mostly bouncing off volume two A, volume three contains some great work, some important work I'm glad to have read, and some stuff that while not terrible, did little for me.

Highlights included the two stories by Harlan Ellison: "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and "A Boy and His Dog." The latter, about a boy and his telepathic dog in a postapocalyptic wasteland, is kind of a predictable Twilight Zoneesque affair, but with more sex and violence, elevated by a strong sense of voice. The former was excellent sf-as-satire, and feels even more pressing in the 2010s than it did in the 1960s, I suspect. After reading Ellison's biography last year, I realized I'd read little of the man's actual work, so it was nice to have some fall into my lap.

There are a couple Roger Zelazny stories as well; while I found "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" kind of meh, I really enjoyed "He Who Shapes." More intelligent dogs, this time used to aid blind people. Interestingly, Zelazny can imagine self-driving cars... but not text-to-speech or speech-to-text technology! But it's a cool concept, well-executed, and the self-driving cars are kind of an incidental detail of the story, but one whose implications he pursues in interesting ways nonetheless.

Of course I was fond of Brian Aldiss's H. G. Wells pastiche, "The Saliva Tree," which does a good job of doing the Wellsian thing of reimagining humanity's place in the universe through biological analogy. The bit where he stuffs in all the story titles was a bit much, but overall this gets both the flavor and the mission of the early scientific romances.

Samuel Delany is someone else I'm always meaning to read more of. "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" was strong on atmosphere, but a little impenetrable; however, I was very impressed by "Aye, and Gomorrah . . .", which imagines not only a group of sexless spacers (the radiation of space damages the sexual organs), but a group of people who would be attracted to them.

I was also pleased to read some more of Robert Silverberg's short sf, another person I feel like I haven't read enough of; "Passengers" is grim and well put together. And I've read Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonrider" before (it's a novella that became the middle third of her novel Dragonflight, which I read as part of The Dragonriders of Pern omnibus), but it mostly works on its own, too, and I enjoyed it all over again; it reminded me that I have a few more Pern novels I have never read.

Other good stories, though not as strong as the above, included Michael Moorcock's "Behold the Man" and Richard Wilson's "Mother to the World." And then there are several more besides. It's a big book, with sixteen stories ranging from about ten pages to ninety. There were only two stories I bounced off completely: Richard McKenna's "The Secret Place" and Kate Willhelm's "The Planners." I don't think either was bad; they just never grabbed me. It's a good hit rate for an anthology.

Unlike volumes ones and two, volume three of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame is no longer in print, but if you come across it in a used bookstore (as I did), it's worth your time and money. I look forward to reading volume four and beyond in time.