The Road to Science Fiction

The Road to Science Fiction is a series of science fiction anthologies edited by American science fiction author, scholar and editor James Gunn. Composed as a textbook set to teach the evolution of science fiction literature, the series is now available as mass market publications. The six-volume set collects many of the most influential works of the genre. It was published originally by Signet and then by White Wolf Games Studio. Volumes 1 through 4 are currently being reprinted in paperback format by the company Scarecrow Press.

Reception

Everett Franklin Bleiler described the first two volumes as follow: "A historical anthology... A good selection, with good headnotes". ^[1]

Volume 1 and 2 was also reviewed by: ^[2]

• David Mogen (1979) in Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review , July 1979
• Joseph Nicholas (1980) in Vector 99

Volume 3 was reviewed by:

• Thomas A. Easton [as Tom Easton] (1980) in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact , July 1980
• Joseph Nicholas (1980) in Vector 99

Volume 4 was reviewed by:

• Neil Barron (1983) in Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review, #11, January-February 1983
• Frank Borsch (1994) in Blizz, #29 (in German)
• Clinton Lawrence (1997) in Science Fiction Weekly , 5 May 1997
• Thomas A. Easton [as Tom Easton] (1997) in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 1997

Volume 5 was reviewed by:

• Clinton Lawrence (1998) in Science Fiction Weekly, 18 May 1998
• Steven H Silver (1998) in SF Site , Mid-May 1998, (1998)
• Damien Broderick (1999) in The New York Review of Science Fiction , April 1999

Contents

Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to Wells

• A True Story by Lucian of Samosata
• The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandeville (excerpt) by an unknown author
• Utopia (excerpt) by Thomas More
• The City of the Sun (excerpt) by Tommaso Campanella
• New Atlantis (excerpt) by Francis Bacon
• Somnium by Johannes Kepler
• A Voyage to the Moon (excerpt from Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon ) by Cyrano de Bergerac
• A Voyage to Laputa (an excerpt from Gulliver's Travels ) by Jonathan Swift
• The Journey to the World Underground (excerpt) by Ludvig Holberg
• "Micromégas" by Voltaire (not included in the Signet edition)
• Frankenstein (excerpt) by Mary Shelley
• "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• "Mellonta Tauta" by Edgar Allan Poe
• "The Diamond Lens" by Fitz-James O'Brien
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (excerpt) by Jules Verne
• Around the Moon (excerpt) by Jules Verne
• She (excerpt) by H. Rider Haggard
• Looking Backward (excerpt) by Edward Bellamy
• "The Damned Thing" by Ambrose Bierce
• "With the Night Mail" by Rudyard Kipling
• "The Star" by H. G. Wells

The anthology was published Signet in 1979 and reprinted by Scarecrow Press in December 2002.

Volume 2: From Wells to Heinlein

• "The New Accelerator," by H. G. Wells
• "The Machine Stops, by E. M. Forster
• The Chessmen of Mars (excerpt) (Signet edition) or Under the Moons of Mars (excerpt) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• "The People of the Pit," by A. Merritt, replaced by Merritt's "The Moon Pool" in the Scarecrow Press edition (2002)
• "The Red One," by Jack London
• "Dagon" by H. P. Lovecraft
• "The Tissue-Culture King" by Julian Huxley
• "The Revolt of the Pedestrians" by David H. Keller, M.D.
• Last and First Men (excerpt) by Olaf Stapledon
• Brave New World (excerpt) by Aldous Huxley
• "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum
• "Twilight," by John W. Campbell
• "Proxima Centauri" by Murray Leinster
• "What's It Like Out There?," by Edmond Hamilton
• "With Folded Hands" by Jack Williamson
• "Hyperpilosity" by L. Sprague de Camp
• "The Faithful" by Lester del Rey
• "Black Destroyer," by A. E. van Vogt
• "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov
• "Requiem" by Robert A. Heinlein

Published by Signet, 1979, reprinted by Scarecrow Press, September, 2002.

Volume 3: From Heinlein to Here

Contained work published between 1940 and 1977.

• "All You Zombies" by Robert A. Heinlein
• "Reason" by Isaac Asimov
• "Desertion"' by Clifford D. Simak
• "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore)
• "The Million-Year Picnic" by Ray Bradbury
• "Thunder and Roses" by Theodore Sturgeon
• "That Only a Mother" by Judith Merril
• "Brooklyn Project," by William Tenn (Philip Klass)
• "Coming Attraction" by Fritz Leiber
• "The Sentinel" by Arthur C. Clarke
• "Sail On! Sail On!" by Philip José Farmer
• "Critical Factor" by Hal Clement
• "Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester
• "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin
• "The Game of Rat and Dragon," by Cordwainer Smith
• "Pilgrimage to Earth" by Robert Sheckley
• "Who Can Replace a Man?" by Brian W. Aldiss
• "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• "The Streets of Ashkelon" by Harry Harrison
• "The Terminal Beach" by J. G. Ballard
• "Dolphin's Way," by Gordon R. Dickson
• "Slow Tuesday Night" by R. A. Lafferty
• "Day Million," by Frederik Pohl
• "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," by Philip K. Dick
• "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," by Harlan Ellison
• "Aye, and Gomorrah," by Samuel R. Delany
• "The Jigsaw Man," by Larry Niven
• "Kyrie," by Poul Anderson
• "Masks," by Damon Knight
• Stand on Zanzibar (excerpt) by John Brunner
• "The Big Flash" by Norman Spinrad
• "Sundance," by Robert Silverberg
• The Left Hand of Darkness (excrpt) by Ursula K. Le Guin
• "When It Changed," by Joanna Russ
• "The Engine at Heartspring's Center," by Roger Zelazny
• "Tricentennial" by Joe Haldeman

First published by Signet in 1979, reprinted by Scarecrow Press, May 2002.

Volume 4: From Here to Forever

• "Born of Man and Woman," by Richard Matheson
• "The Luckiest Man in Denv," by C. M. Kornbluth (not included in the Signet edition)
• "Common Time," by James Blish (not included in the Signet edition)
• "My Boy Friend's Name is Jello," by Avram Davidson
• "The First Canticle," by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• "Nobody Bothers Gus," by Algis Budrys
• "Flowers for Algernon," by Daniel Keyes
• "The Moon Moth" by Jack Vance
• "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges
• Dune (excerpt) by Frank Herbert
• "Light of Other Days," by Bob Shaw
• "The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electronic Bard" by Stanisław Lem
• "The Heat Death of the Universe," by Pamela Zoline
• "The Planners" by Kate Wilhelm
• "The Dance of the Changer and the Three" by Terry Carr
• "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain," by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)
• "Where No Sun Shines" by Gardner Dozois
• "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" by Gene Wolfe
• "Angouleme" by Thomas M. Disch
• "Gather Blue Roses," by Pamela Sargent
• "With a Finger in My I," by David Gerrold
• "The Ghost Writer," by George Alec Effinger (Signet edition)
• "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand," by Vonda N. McIntyre
• "Air Raid," by John Varley
• "Uncoupling," by Barry N. Malzberg
• "Rogue Tomato," by Michael Bishop
• "This Tower of Ashes," by George R. R. Martin
• "Particle Theory," by Edward Bryant
• "View from a Height," by Joan D. Vinge
• "The Word Sweep" by George Zebrowski
• "The World Science Fiction Convention of 2080" by Ian Watson
• "Abominable" by Carol Emshwiller
• "Exposures" by Gregory Benford
• "Schrödinger's Kitten," by George Alec Effinger (not included in the Signet edition)

First published by Signet, 1982, reprinted by White Wolf, January 1997 and Scarecrow Press, 2003)

Volume 5: The British Way

(White Wolf, March 1998)

Influential British SF published prior to 1986'

• The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (excerpt) by Lieutenant-Colonel Sir George Tomkyns Chesney
• Flatland (excerpt) by Edwin A. Abbott
• After London; or, Wild England (excerpt) by Richard Jefferies
• "The Doom of London," by Robert Barr
• "A Corner in Lightning," by George Griffith
• "The Country of the Blind" by H. G. Wells
• "As Easy as A.B.C." by Rudyard Kipling
• "A Negligible Experiment" by John D. Beresford
• "The Horror of the Heights" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• "The Rat" by S. Fowler Wright
• Star Maker (excerpt) by Olaf Stapledon
• "The Great Fog," by H. F. Heard
• "Hobbyist" by Eric Frank Russell
• "Dreams Are Sacred, by Peter Phillips
• "Made in U.S.A." by J. T. McIntosh
• "The Star" by Arthur C. Clarke
• "The Emptiness of Space," by John Wyndham
• "The Voices of Time," by J. G. Ballard
• "The Drowned Giant," by J. G. Ballard
• "The Totally Rich," by John Brunner
• "Mouth of Hell," by David I. Masson
• "The Discontinuous," by D. G. Compton
• "It's Smart to Have an English Address" by D. G. Compton
• "The Muse" by Anthony Burgess
• "The Nature of the Catastrophe," by Michael Moorcock
• "The Power of Time" by Josephine Saxton
• "Mason's Life" by Kingsley Amis
• "Settling the World" by M. John Harrison
• "Working in the Spaceship Yards," by Brian W. Aldiss
• "Appearance of Life" by Brian W. Aldiss
• "An Infinite Summer" by Christopher Priest
• "Custom Fitting" by James White
• "Written in Water" by Tanith Lee
• "The Great Atlantic Swimming Race" by Ian Watson
• "And He Not Busy Being Born" by Brian M. Stableford

Volume 6: Around the World

(White Wolf, July 1998)

France

• Journey to the Center of the Earth (excerpt) by Jules Verne
• "The War of the Twentieth Century," by Albert Robida
• "Another World" by J.-H. Rosny-Aîné
• "The Dead Fish," by Boris Vian
• "Heavier Than Sleep," by Philippe Curval
• "The Valley of Echoes," by Gérard Klein
• "The Knot," by Élisabeth Vonarburg

Germany

• "The Sandman," by E. T. A. Hoffmann
• "The Universal Library," by Kurd Lasswitz
• "The Hunter Gracchus," by Franz Kafka
• "The Building," by Herbert W. Franke
• "Loitering at Death's Door," by Wolfgang Jeschke
• "Ikaros," by Erik Simon

Scandinavia and Finland

• "Mnemosyne's Children," by Svend Åge Madsen
• "Time Everlasting," by Sam J. Lundwall

Eastern Europe

• Epilogue from R.U.R. by Karel Čapek
• "The Hunt," by Stanisław Lem (from Tales of Pirx the Pilot )
• "The Divided Carla," by Josef Nesvadba
• "That Invincible Human Spirit, or, The Golden Ships," by Alexandr Kramer
• "The Neuhof Treaty," by Ovid S. Crohmalniceanu

Russia

• "The Strangers," by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
• "Share It With Me," by Kirill Bulychev

Italy

• "The Time Machine," by Dino Buzzati
• "Cancerqueen," by Tommaso Landolfi
• "The Spiral," by Italo Calvino

Spain and Latin America

• "The Alabaster Garden," by Teresa Inglés
• "The Babylon Lottery," by Jorge Luis Borges
• "Blacamán the Good, Vendor of Miracles," by Gabriel García Márquez
• "Chac-Mool," by Carlos Fuentes

India

• "Einstein the Second," by Laxman Londhe

China

• "The Mirror Image of the Earth," by Zheng Wenguang
• "Corrosion," by Ye Yonglie

Japan

• "Beyond the Curve," by Kōbō Abe
• "Take Your Choice," by Sakyo Komatsu
• "The Legend of the Paper Spaceship," by Tetsu Yano

References

1. Bleiler, Everett Franklin (1990). Science-fiction, the Early Years: A Full Description of More Than 3,000 Science-fiction Stories from Earliest Times to the Appearance of the Genre Magazines in 1930 : with Author, Title, and Motif Indexes. Kent State University Press. ISBN   978-0-87338-416-2.
2. "Series: The Road to Science Fiction". www.isfdb.org. Retrieved 2023-10-11.

• SF Site review of Volume 5
• The Scarecrow Press