One benefit of being a reader of a certain vintage—old enough to remember inkwells in school desks, say, if not old enough to have used a dip pen1 —is the giddy joy of encountering insert ads in mass market paperbacks. It wasn’t just that they weakened the spines of the books or that some of them were youth-inappropriate cigarette ads. A fair fraction of them were variations on this ad.
Founded in the early 1950s, the mail order Science Fiction Book Club was a godsend for isolated readers like myself2 . Not only did they automatically send out books until actively stopped (a wonderful way for chronic procrastinators to encounter new authors), but they offered wonderful collections, anthologies, and omnibuses of unusual size. These were tomes heavy enough to stun a moose. For SF addicts, these books were like being able to order our drug of choice by the 100kg sack.
Here are my five plus one* favourites from the Before Times:
The Hugo Winners, Volumes 1 & 2, edited by Isaac Asimov. This collection was always featured prominently in the insert ads, so it is no surprise that this was the very first volume I bought. Strictly speaking, it should have been called some of the Hugo Winners, as it restricts itself to novellas, novelettes, and short stories. You won’t find The Demolished Man or The Big Time in here, but you will encounter a delightful assortment of shorter pieces published between 1955 and 1968. The book includes classics like Simak’s “The Big Front Yard,” Bloch’s “That Hell-Bound Train,” and the original version of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers For Algernon.
Science fiction is always evolving, but the contrast between the first volume (which collects stories from 1955 to 1960) and the second (which collects material from 1962 to 1968) is a striking record of the sea change that came over SF in the era of the New Wave. Of course, nobody embraces change quite like the denizens of science fiction fandom; I can only imagine the gleeful cries of joy as stories like Clarke’s “The Star” were followed by more experimental efforts along the lines of Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage.”
A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher, has a rather bold title, given that American commercial science fiction was barely out of nappies when this two-volume treasury was first published in 1959. Whereas Asimov had celebrated the collective taste of fans, A Treasury put Boucher’s editorial tastes and considerable experience on display. Some might expect, given that many modern Best Of lists mention the same handful of works over and over, that there would be a considerable overlap between The Hugo Winners and A Treasury. Not so. None of the twenty-five works in Boucher’s two-volume anthology showed up in the Asimov collection. Boucher offered tales from engineer-bait like George O. Smith’s “Lost Art” to a complete novel, the vengeance-fest The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.
I was most fond of the SFBC’s anthologies, but I also took a shine to The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert A. Heinlein, which I’ve worn out twice3: once in the SFBC hardcover and once in a Berkley Mass Market Paperback. It collects Heinlein’s future history stories as of 1967, omitting only Orphans of the Sky—but that does not dim my pleasure in the twenty-one stories and two full novels it *does* include.
Before the Golden Age was also edited by Isaac Asimov, who helmed The Hugo Winners series. This collection has a different focus. Asimov assembled older works from the infancy of American science fiction, none of them apt to win any awards. A lot of the stories are dreadful quite primitive, stressing action over characterization and prose style. The collection is still fun, however, if only as a fascinating tour of early U.S. science fiction.
(*) Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, gets an asterisk because it’s the one I couldn’t have purchased from the SFBC when I was a callow youth. The SFBC edition of this 1949 classic came out in 1990, by which time I had long owned a copy. One has to envy the teens of 1990 who got to encounter it for the first time4. Adventures offered almost three dozen pieces, all from the 1930s and 1940s. Like Before The Golden Age, this volume is more interesting as history than literature.
The five (plus one) books listed above have one thing in common: women authors are rare or absent. OK, it’s understandable that the Heinlein collection didn’t include any women, but as to the other books… there were women writing SF in the olden times. These anthologists (all male, one might note) declined to collect their works. Stay tuned for anthologies that addressed this oversight.
Of course, it goes without saying these books were and are my favourites. Those of you who were also SFBC customers in the days of yore might have your own favourites (perhaps A Science Fiction Argosy by Damon Knight, or the various Science Fiction Hall of Fame collections). Feel free to discuss their merits in comments!
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
[1]I am just slightly younger than cheap, reliable, ballpoint pens.
[2]My early SFBC love is one reason that I was so pleased to work for them as a first reader from 2001 to 2014.
[3]I see skeptical expressions at the notion that I was ever a Heinlein fan. Well, you don’t get this bitter, disappointed, and jaded without reading and rereading the relevant works over and over.
[4]Hrrmmm. I must admit that the two-year run of my series, Young People Read Old SF, suggested that young people may be less attuned to the charms of older SF than I was.
Those are all very familiar. In fact they’re probably all in the house. One volume of the Treasury was in the headboard for years, though it seems to have been returned to home now.
Introductions to stories in anthologies like these are how a lot of people my age found science fiction fandom, too — the editor talked about interacting with the author of the story being introduced, and fairly frequently that was described as being at a convention. (Dangerous Visions had that, too).
Three for six this time, the Asimov Hugo Winners and the the most awesome Heinlein _The Past Through Tomorrow_ collection. And my Heinlein is worn out also with several of the loose pages stuffed back in. Some of the loose pages are even in the right place !
I have SO MANY of these books, carted from one dwelling to another over the past three decades. Sometimes I pet them, but they’ve gone unread for so long that I feel like they should go.
Can’t do it, though. Just looking at them in my mind’s eye reminds me of that sensawunda they brought me through my teen years.
So Orphans of the Sky was part of Heinlein’s Future History? Not sure if I knew that …
Me, I joined the SFBC much later (1990 or thereabouts), so my own bulky classics included things like the two-volume omnibus editions of Fafrhd & the Gray Mouser and of Tanith Lee’s Flat Earth books; and Tad Williams’ To Green Angel Tower was pretty bulky all on its own.
Plus a couple of nice, albeit more reasonably sized, David Hartwell anthologies: Masterpieces of Fantasy & Wonder and Masterpieces of Fantasy & Enchantment.
(That’s my one regret about moving to primarily eBook reading — all of those great anthologies, original & reprint, that will never get an eBook edition because the rights issues would be nightmarish.)
Orphans is set on the first human starship in the FH. Methuselah’s Children is set on the second. As I once commented about “The Menace from Earth”:
The connection is confirmed in Time Enough for Love:
Ending with Orphans would have been a huge downer, which may be why it was left out.
A Treasury of Great Science Fiction (in our local public library, yay!) and the Heinlein both made huge impressions on teenaged me. Not sure if I have both volumes of the former in the basement or not, the Heinlein is definitely there and maybe one of the Hugo Winners volumes as well.
Why did I not suggest this be titled “I like big books and I cannot lie”? Stupid brain.
Good to know I wasn’t the only one who joined SFBC by selecting books based more-or-less on tonnage.
‘Of course, nobody embraces change quite like the denizens of science fiction fandom; I can only imagine the gleeful cries of joy as stories like Clarke’s “The Star” were followed by more experimental efforts along the lines of Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage.”‘
I was a pre-teen buying Analog every few months in rural Ohio, but even I heard the screams of outrage. Thank the FSM that Twitter hadn’t been invented yet.
I joined the SFBC in the late 80’s through early 90’s. It was great for finding stuff my local library or small bookstore didn’t have on their shelves. I didn’t go for a lot of anthology’s but I probably have the Fafrhd & the Gray Mouser, and I have a special edition of Stranger in a Strange land. I did pick quite a few omnibus editions of various authors . I can’t wait to go through our storage for all my books from my mom’s old house and visit some old friends from high school. My relatives keep telling me I have to many books already but, my old stuff is finally where I can get to it and put it in my place in town. They read books once and get rid of them they don’t understand why I keep them.
I joined SFBC back in either college or grad school and did get a pretty good deal with my intro (including an ominbus of the Wrinkle in Time books)…that said, I don’t even remember my login anymore, so I can’t unsubscribe, meaning I still get the Featured Selection emails. Thankfully whatever credit card I used to have isn’t around anymore so I can’t get automatically charged for the books or credits or whatever it is now! I used to have to log in every month to decline them.
Asimov is the most overrated SF author of all time.
Others:
* The two volumes that make up the 5 books of Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber
* the first five books of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files are also divided into 2 books
* PJ Farmer’s World of Tiers six vols in two; the first three of Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat in one vol…
there’s lots and lots of these on my shelves.
The only annoying thing is to look across a shelf and see a pocket paperback for vol 1 in a series, an SF book club edition for 2-4, and the trade editions beyond that because I can’t wait.
Half the hardcovers in my library still came from the SFBC. Best of all were the 3-in-1 (or variations thereof) and the Best of … short story collections of the pulp masters. The SFBC is almost entirely responsible for entrenching, if not creating, my book addiction. Heinlein; Asimov; Clarke; Dickson; Eddings; Asprin; Bradley; Cook; Stasheff…..Ahhh.
Loved those collections!
I always wished there was ink in those wells. This discussion brings back memories. Retired from a career revolving around science, I was a chemistry major because Dale Arden was. I lovedette L.Sprague de Camp, Heinlein, Asimov and John Carter stories.
I have a question I have for years been trying to find the author of a short story published in Omni. Does anyone know who wrote a story about a man and his young son fleeing a magic war walking on a road. As the day goes on, the young boy ages by nightfall becoming an old man, only to begin again as a child the next day.
It’s haunted me for years
Tho I do have some of the Hugo collections, I’m not a big short story fan. I loved SFBC for collecting mass market pb originals (even hardcovers) into omnibuses. Asimov’s Foundation, Lackey’s Last Herald Mage, McCaffrey’s Dragonriders – so many great series I discovered thru the club.
12: I feel like that’s probably a very competitive field.
@5: Weirdly “The Past Through Tomorrow” also excludes a short story definitely in the Future History – “Let There Be Light” and includes a couple of stories that don’t fit in the Future History (“We Also Walk Dogs…” – a great story, but with technology and a solar system that doesn’t fit the future history, and “The Long Watch,” which is a prequel to “Space Cadet” – and it’s hard to reconcile those two stories with the Future History).
As I recall the intro deal at the time I subscribed was 6 books for 10 cents. A shockingly good deal. I got the Hugo Winners Volumes 1 & 2 of course, and I think I got the Amber books out of that first batch as well. Well worth it.
I subscribed to the SFBC in the early 70’s and of course got the Hugo Winners and Hall of Fame collections. But the best deal I ever came across was an introductory offer from the Book of the Month Club when JRR Tolkien’s The Silmarillion was first published. The BOMC offered the Silmarillion in full size hardcover plus the Hobbit in green slipcased illustrated edition and the three volumes of the Lord of the Rings hardcover boxed set plus the Tolkien Companion by JEA Tyler in hardcover. I think the offer was all that for $5 plus shipping. Those volumes have been read many times and have a place of honor in my family bookcase.
@SFRyan
I remember that story – but not the title or author, inevitably. I think it was in a “future war” anthology of some kind, but unfortunately there are a lot of those.
@sfryan
Got it! “Morning Child” by Gardner Dozois:
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/morning-child/
I managed to remember a distinctive bit of dialogue and that was enough to search on.
Thank you Sophie Jane
Being of a certain age myself, I thoroughly enjoy your forays into the past, and I too have a number of the books mentioned. I wanted to draw attention to a particular favorite in the Boucher anthology: Theodore Sturgeon’s “The [Widget], The [Wadget], and Boff.” Like a lot of Sturgeon, despite the overall of-its-time general sexism, it contains some interesting takes on sexuality that are still relevant. Plus it’s an absorbing and funny read.
Thanks for this. It was weird reading it, because I felt like I could have written it… Right down to the school desks with inkwells and the lifeline out of isolation.
Much to my parents chagrin – both of whom warned me about the trap of a book-of-the-month club – I subscribed to the science fiction book club and got my hands on as many titles as I could. They all came printed on that rough-hune paper with the jagged edges inside of hardcover end pieces that were just the wrong size to fit next to either commercial paperbacks or traditional hardcover books….
I loved all of them. I especially remember the Treasury book you have here, along with Harlan Ellisons Dangerous Visions series.
When I went to college I left most of them behind. Large and bulky they didn’t travel well or lend themselves well to dorm room life, but I kept a few old favorites and have them today – including Dangerous Visions.
Kindle books are nice and compact but these were special.
I still carry around my Moon Tour Reservation card, given as a bonus for joining the SFBC!
Favorite anthology: “21 Children of Wonder”, back when all selections were $1 each.
Being a serious professional procrastinator, but also always having been on a budget, I took advantage of a New York State law that said that every club of this sort had to offer a “Positive Option Plan” where you didn’t get anything unless you specifically ordered it. The clubs didn’t publicize this, and I don’t remember how I found out about it, but I wrote and instructed every book, LP or CD club that I joined to put me on that plan immediately. When I moved to New Jersey, my plan was grandfathered in.
Besides the Boucher, one of my favorites was Triad, which included A. E. van Vogt’s The World of Null A, The Voyage of the Space Beagle & Slan.
re: women authors,
My copies of Boucher, Asimovs, and Healy/McComas are in deep storage, so I can’t check, but, to be completely fair to the anthologists, for the volumes labelled Hugo Winners, you probably couldn’t include women authors if they did not win the Award. However, if the anthologies included Lewis Padgett or Lawrence O’Donnell (or even Henry Kuttner) stories, (which is pretty likely) then they were written at least in part by C.L. Moore.
Boucher’s anthology includes a Judith Merril story and a Mildred Clingerman story as well as a Kuttner/Moore story. Healy/McComas has 3 Lewis Padgett titles.
Hi! Thanks for the post!
I was thinking that I was a SF fan whereas I don’t even knew about SFBC (Maybe because I’m french, and like you can see, I’m not really good in English). But thanks for sharing some of your time with us!
Ps: I don’t know what you ear about “young people”, but I’m 23’s and hope I’m still one! think just that when you’re young, you have so many to discover, and you look at it with so candid eyes, that you don’t need to search on the internet to find something you don’t have already read. Most important, you don’t care to read some random or bad stories, still are stories!
I tell you that because for most part, I just enter in an old book shop, bought 10 book for 5€ and go away.
Selection criteria? did I know the writer? Did the cover look good? Or the title sound the same? Did the first words spoke to me? Why? I don’t know.
But if I can afford, why not?
F & SF’s first competition was for “misleading book blurbs.” None of the entries published beat the SFBC ad in the same issue: “He knew the Martian Love Secret and it spelled his doom: <i>Stranger in a Strange Land</i>.”
Your comment about how young people tend not to be impressed by old SF is a back-handed compliment to those big sections of YA-and-Teen oriented genre books in B&N.
As for myself I never actually bought anything from the SFBC…the Military Book Club is another matter!
I still have my SFBC “Treasury of Great Science Fiction”, with my kid signature and the date 1970 scrawled in it. I think the other 2 books I got when I joined were “The Foundation Trilogy” and “The Beast That Shouted Love At the Heart of the World”, both long gone. I read some of the stories over and over, others I barely got through once. There are actually 4 novels in the anthology, Anderson’s “Brain Wave”, van Vogt’s “Weapon Shops of Isher”, and Wyndham’s “Re-Birth” (aka The Chrysalids) as well as the Bester.
About 40% of my books are from the Book Club, including all of the above pictured.
As for the young folks and their eeelectronical books, I say get off my lawn, and get a big heavy hardcover.
btw the Treasury includes both a “Lewis Padgett” and a “Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore” story, as well as the Merril and the Clingerman.
Ah, Adventures in Time and Space. That was the first anthology I ever owned. I lived for anthologies back in those days of the inkwells because it was the only way I could find new authors and old classics. I was always looking for new editors to give me a different flavor of sf. Our library had one 20 inch shelf for their sff collection and it was half empty.
I joined the SFBC many times (free books each time!), and own all of the above. Though my Adventures in Time and Space is the original paperback.
32: Why not? Shelf space and floor loading come to mind. Not as much of an issue with ebooks, of course.
I have several of these as ebooks. They may not be *legit* copies. But I’m happy to be able to read Adventures In Time And Space and both volumes of A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction on my reader.
I joined the SFBC in the late 60s, and I got the Treasury of Science Fiction (2 volumes) and Heinlein’s Future History in the initial package. Then within just a few months, they sent me Nova by Samuel Delany, Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. I quit the club when I went off to college, but I got very high value indeed in the short time I was a member.
SFBC should have a tombstone – it is 100% deceased.
No more original anthologies, hardly any older classics, few omnibi, monthly selections seemingly selected by a guy named Jimmy (aged 16), every book arriving damaged…
The current state of SFBC is the saddest thing in all of Fandom to me. They stopped being relevant right around 2011.
My first four SFBC books (from a 70s ad in Galileo magazine) were the Hugo Winners anthology, the Foundation Trilogy, Larry Niven’s “A World Out of Time” (I’d read one of the Rammer stories in a Galaxy anthology, so I was excited to discover more of the story), and Brian Aldiss’s excellent “Galactic Empires” anthology. (Poul Anderson! Michael Shaara. Though the cover was, perhaps, not precisely tailored to an eight-year-old.
)
I was clearly tending to the familiar (two books with Asimov’s name on the cover, one expansion of a story I’d read) and to sheer mass (half the selections were two, two, two volumes for the price of one, and another was a trilogy in a single volume). But In the event it was a pretty amazing bang for the buck (the dime!) in both quality and variety.
(And because they were initially out of Galactic Empires, they offered me a replacement book from any of their clubs, so I also wound up with Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Then they unexpectedly sent the Aldiss anthology anyway.)
@43 — Galactic Empires! I loved those Aldiss anthologies, although I was getting paperbacks from the library (and now have paperback copies of my own on my shelves).
More generally: The one thing that sometimes bugged me about SFBC doing their own editions of other publishers’ books was that they’d scale everything down to that 9″ hardcover size, so if I have a series of mixed original and SFBC editions, the SFBC ones stick out like sore thumbs.
My dad had all these books, and several others besides. I remember with crystal clarity him showing me the hardcover collections of The Dragonriders of Pern and The Harper Hall of Pern, and saying “You’re not ready for these yet (I was eleven), but I think you’ll really like them in a few years.” And I did (I would have committed murder for a dragon when I was a teen, let alone a fire-lizard), and we had so many talks about dragons and space travel and science fiction, and it gave us a bond that holds to this day.
Yeah, storage space can be a problem, but you still got the option of the library! Where I discovered SF with Jules Vernes at 8 with the school library (but, to admit, Jules Vernes is not considered as a science fiction writer in France, you will find him on the same shelf that classic literature (like Victor Hugo or Emile Zola) and that’s maybe why I found it here
I think that the problem is more that it is (in France at least) a genre that is really depreciate, (For most people, it’s only “independence day”, with UFO and alien invaders.) so you rarely find a real Sci-fi Shelf, it will be a Fantastic-Fantaisy-SciFi shelf, with a lot of “child and teenager book” (but even in those, you can find really great idea) but most librarian, even those who don’t like sci-fi knows about Asimov, Bradbury or Wells
About an old french sci-fi author : René Barjavel wrote interesting things like “La nuit des temps”/”the ice people” (really, really good, hope translation is too) or “Le grand secret” (not sure this one was translate)
#42: I agree, SFBC is DEAD now. There’s a rich and deep 100+ year legacy of SF/F/H to mine for great titles, but now SFBC ONLY focuses on the hyper-contemporary, mainstream titles.
Aside from that, they’re a rip-off. You can almost ALWAYS get a better deal on their titles anywhere on the internet, and even at the brick and mortars.
SFBC is a textbook example of taking something great and running it into the ground. It really shows how the loss of a couple of great editors can make all the difference in the world to a publishing enterprise, and to a community.
The Science Fiction Book Club was the foundation of my personal SFF library. I joined back in the 70s and bought books from them for years, filling several books shelves with wonderful hard cover books. Classics by authors like Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, Roger Zelazny, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Poul Anderson, Harry Harrison, and more.
I rejoined just to get a SECOND copy of the 2 volume Chronicles of Amber as I wore out the first one.
@47:
Ellen Asher wasn’t lost; she was fired not long after breaking Campbell’s long-standing record for longest time in a single editing job. The owners of SFBC wanted a new direction; if they’d thought, they might have realized they were setting up for straight down….
Nice! I own the three Asimov editions and the Treasury, with the Treasury being one of my introduction offers when I joined in 1973. I remain a member.
One of the comments above said Asimov was over-rated as an SF author. Yes, he’s dated, though I disagree with the comment. But his editing of anthologies with his memories and commentaries are great. His writing of, say, Robert Silverberg saying of a young Ellison, “Let’s kill him now” are worth the price of admission.
I run a large used book sale (2 sale/year, all material donated, money to scholarships for local girls) where I also do the SFF section. Even though we clear back to the bare shelves every spring, I always have at least one copy of the Treasury of Great Science Fiction (usually both volumes). I guess so many people bought it that it still comes in regularly.
@26 I came here to mention those too! — I joined the SFBC in the early 70s, and the Dangerous Visions anthologies are one of the SFBC editions I still have.
James, the link to the RSS feed on your author page on Tor.com is broken, and please please please can you get an RSS feed onto your reviews site? Please?
I joined the SFBC in 1972, while in college. I still have every book that I bought. I just went to stand before my bookshelves. So many wonderful books… I think the Santuary Collections from Robert Asprin and Lynn Abbey, with all the writers that contributed, are wonderful. My favorite collected work, however, is Brent Weeks Night Angel Trilogy. Much later book club release, I know, but still a treasure for me. I was not familiar with his work and bought it just because it was a collection. I am soooo glad that I did. (And yeah, you can buy it now in bookstores. But many of us got it years ago.)
I totally agree with #42. The SFBC stopped selling older material and It became almost elite. When I quit around 2010 you suddenly could “earn” books with points which are like $10 each. I bought every Heinlein omnibus I could get and the club introduced me to Crichton, Clarke, Dickson and so many others.In fact first purchase was Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury is awesome!!!) Last purchase was Way of Kings book 1
Owned most of those (didn’t own the hardback FH, but went through a couple paperbacks of it). My later favorites were the”Year’s Best…” edited by Gardner Dozois.
“Treasury…” was one of my all-time favorites
I sincerely wish I still had my old library, but it is a long, and angry-making story as to why I don’t.. Another time, perhaps.
I first signed up with the SFBC in 1971, and I used to have a very difficult time deciding which 6 or 7 titles I could afford to buy every month. I dropped out of it a couple times (college, job, girlfriend, etc.), yet I’d always end up rejoining, especially when they’d offer those fat volumes like the ones pictured above. I joined up again around 2008. But over the last few years, they barely offer 3-4 new titles each month, and often from authors I don’t read. They’re also not exclusively a science fiction club anymore, but also offer thrillers, historical fiction & nonfiction, graphic novels, and other stuff I never used to see offered. They also no longer print any of those omnibus volumes it used to be SO nice to see made available. I purchase maybe 4 books from them a year. There is, however, one nice change: they offer publishers’ editions now, instead of the cheaper Book Club Editions. I think I might almost prefer getting the cheaper BCEs if I was offered a wider range of selections.
#12 You have clearly never read any of George Eliot’s work.
Silas Marner is without a doubt the most boring collections of wood pulp pages ever connected together in a binding.
Not a huge fan of Azimov myself, but the man entertained more people than most other writers, and that has to count for something.
I joined the SciFi Book Club in the early 60s. Late in the 1990s they publish a 50th Anniversary series: You bought them one at a time. 8 volumes from each decade: 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s with a different style dust jacket for each decade numbered 1 thru 40. They fill up a row of two of my five bookcases.
Of course, they led off with a Heinlein book: “The Door into Summer”. Many of the early classics are here: books by Asimov, Clarke, Simak, Philip K Dick (The Man in the High Castle). It wasn’t until # 15 that you run into a woman author: Ursula K. Le Guin. However, in the third decade they published books by three women: James Tiptree, Jr., the first African-American writer Octavia E. Butler and Joan Vinge.
I’ve noticed something that jumps out at me: the earliest books were all fairly short not much longer than novella length. About the middle 70s the books started getting much longer. We may think of Neil Gaiman being a modern writer, but in 1990 he teamed up with Terry Pratchett to create the priceless “Good Omens.” About the same time, the other Neal…Stephenson brought us into the 21st or 22nd Century with Snow Crash.
I must admit that my two favorites from this series are Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” and Connie Willis’ “Doomsday Book”.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the article and comments; thank you all! As editor of the SFBC from 1973 to 2007, I was delighted to see that so many of you enjoyed the books we chose for you (I didn’t do it all myself). Editing SFBC was as close to a dream job as I could have found — they actually paid me to read science fiction!
As for the relatively small trim size of most of our books — why do you think we were able to sell them so cheaply? It was, in fact, a standard size in publishing for many years, especially for genre hardcovers. And when we occasonally offered a book at the larger 6″ x 9″ size, because reducing it to 5½” x 8¼” would have made it wider than it was high, we got complaints from members who didn’t like that it broke the uniformity of their SFBC shelves. <sigh>
40+ years after joining the SFBC, I’m still hauling 4 of these 6 books around. The book club was my first foray into hardbacks. At the time, it was tough enough to scrape up the 75¢ for a new paperback (which often felt too thin for my money), so the quantity (and quality) for the price was unbeatable!
Honestly hate moving any more, due to the ~1200+lbs of science fiction.
Box it. Shift it. Unbox it. Shelve it. Repeat as necessary.
That 10 cent deal was what got me hooked (60 years ago, OMG). I’ve read many of those mentioned, collected just about all (though now in digital format, helpful as my eyesight changes) and enjoyed the feel of them. I’ve reread many of them repeatedly, but the ones by van Vogt (Space Beagle, Null-A) still stand among my favorites. The only reason I cancelled my subscription was because I joined the Air Force (1966) and had no idea how I was going to be able to even get the books wherever I was headed. When I finally returned to civilian life, I found that , when my parents sold their house and moved to an apartment, they’d donated all my books. It’s taken years to replace them.
> My early SFBC love is one reason that I was so pleased to work for them as a first reader from 2001 to 2014.
Hi, James
So– you read for Andrew Wheeler?
Oh, for those Halcion™ days of rasfw…..
> Just becuae you misees the point of the article lady, don;t think it
> is not irrelevant. –‘Lazarus Cain’, to Dorothy J Heydt, rasfw 6/7/04
[Rimshot]
ↂ 
Indeed I did work for Andrew.
I joined the SFBC through one of those 10¢ offers in 1961 or so, and still have several of the books—including, of course, The Treasury of SF Classics, plus a Mary Kornbluth anthology, and a 1950s Best of F&SF, edited by Boucher and McComas. I used to have the 2-volume Treasury of Great SF, but sold it—a decision that I have since come to regret.
Man what the heck happened to SFBC? They were my go to source for Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror.
Don’t know exactly where you came from James, but I spent most of my teenage years in a small farming town in New Zealand whose only claim to fame was a large number of retired people living there.
Those Asimov books Hugo Winners, Volumes 1 & 2, were my life-line to sanity.
I joined the airforce and got out of there at 19, but even though New Zealand’s airforce wasn’t, and still isn;’t likely to become a space force anytime soon, it was the closest I could find!
The oldest SFBC book I still have is dated Jan 4, 1960. “A treasury of great science fiction” two volumes edited by Anthony Boucher.I would have been in college then. I also have a reservation for a trip to the moon dated 1956.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4vl6wboxjlnltgr/Moon-Tour-Reservation_1956.pdf?dl=0
SF is very definitely not what it used to be, but then, what is?
I joined the Club briefly in high school, before going off to college, but early in married life was the *best*! I’d join as me, get free books, join as my spouse, & get free books in both names! They had the lovely feature of canceling your membership in a few months, if you quit buying after getting the required purchases. I got lots of great, bulky books over years & years, until they stopped canceling memberships so conveniently. The SFBC was frequently the first hardback edition of so many wonderful books & compilations of books. I still remember it very fondly, & what a thrill it was to meet Ellen Asher at WorldCon.
I, too, have fond memories of SFBC, though I can’t remember exactly when I joined (early 80s, in high school?) or when I left. :-D
Great to see @Ellen Asher comment upthread!
Due to Mount TBR growing faster than my ability to read, I know I have at least a few unread SFBC tomes. ;-) Don’t judge me.
@54. James, the link to the RSS feed on your author page on Tor.com is broken, and please please please can you get an RSS feed onto your reviews site? Please?
Hm. Turns out there’s a weird bug with some of the RSS feeds here. We’re working on fixing it but for now you can get James’ feed at this link: https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/feed/
I am in the 4 books for 10¢ club. Joined in the early 60s and almost never turned down the monthly offerings. In 1988, when we moved to another state, I donated my collection to the local library. I heard from the librarian years later when she retired that the books were lent until they fell apart. I still have Galactic Empires, the Treasury, et al as they were the best. I missed them so much that I joined Easton Press (married and richer now) to get all the classics and the first editions to re-read. But I miss the way the SFBC books were a surprise package every month and how their editions felt and smelled. My youth was well spent reading them!
@54, 72: Just an update to say that the problem with the RSS feed has been addressed, should anyone want to subscribe to James’ feed directly–thanks!
Yay!
This is not only a quick discussion of these six volumes, it is also a nice very broad-brush discussion of science fiction in general . I learned some valuable tidbits from this. Thanks.
When I joined the SFBC, the monthly offering was 2001: A Space Odyssey. I still have the flyer.
I thoroughly enjoyed this article (and the comments). Personality, and footnotes even!
Asimov was, is and always will be my fave, whether he was writing fiction or fact, or was editing. So many close runners-up (including Heinlein).
Thanks for this real treat.
Ah, The Past Through Tomorrow! I too wore out my copy & got another – must track it down to reread yet again! Thank you for this article! These books, and others, started me on my SF (now F&SF) journey, back in the post-inkwell days of the cartridge pen.
I first joined SFBC in the 70’s through my mom (I was in middle school, lol) and one of the first books I got was McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern trilogy omnibus and I fell in love. I bought a few anthologies but my real love was the omnibus editions of older series that were only available at that time in brittle yellowed mass market editions, as well as books that were never published in hardcover but that I reread so often that the MM’s were falling apart.
At SFBC, I was able to pick up a HC omnibus of 3 to 4 books by an unknown author for what I’d have paid for a single MM. I fell in love with Robert Zelazny’s Amber Series, Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar Series, John Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation Series, Larry Niven’s Ringworld Series, anything by Elizabeth Moon, CJ Cherryh, Wen Spencer, Robert Lynn Asprin, Jody Lynn Nye, Tanya Huff, David Weber, Andre Norton, Piers Anthony, and most by Julie E Czerneda, Charles de Lindt, Spider Robinson, Ray Bradbury, Ben Bova, Charles Stosser, Marian Zimmer Bradley, and so many more.
Although I switched to primarily ebooks in 2011 after first exploring the joys of independent publishers in 2007, I still have a few authors that I still collect in HC or other print after collecting them for 10 to 30+ years. It just means that now I will usually buy an ebook copy as well, as soon the price goes down or I find a good sale.
I have so many print books that I often can’t find what I want to read when I want to read them. Especially with the really long series or prolific authors like Lackey, McCaffrey, etc. Having ebook duplicates means I can always find what I want to read, I can carry them all with me and access them via my ereader, tablet or even my phone (in order of preference). I wish I could afford to buy duplicates of all of my favorites, but it would take $10,000+ to do even a fraction of them, at 13,000+ print books collected over 40+ years, lol.
Actually, switching to ebooks was more a necessity to save my now 35 year marriage, lol, since I have books piled everywhere in spite of 10 bookcases, 11 MM sized shelves on the wall of a hallway, 8 stacks taller than I can reach across my fireplace, multiple stacks across a 12 foot banister AND about 14 66qt Rubbermaid bins filled with approximately 50 books each.
It sure was a good idea to switch to ebooks, huh?! 
Of course I have almost 9,000 ebooks now. Can you say addicted to reading? 
I just read Flowers For Algernon( the complete book, not the short ) today, and oh boy! I was so touched by this book, it shook me for all the purity and innocence displayed by the character Charlie. Despite his supreme intellect and fame, he was still empathetic towards Algernon and the rest, even when his intelligence was deteriorating rapidly. This book would surely touch empaths at all the more different levels. Such a beautiful theme for any classic book.
As a youth…maybe even before high school…1969 or earlier, I remember signing up for sfbc more than once. I saved up allowance and special chores to buy the books most interesting
1. Foundation trilogy
2. Dune
3. The first few McCaffery dragon novels
4 the treasury 2 volumes
5. Heinlines past thru tomorrow
Are a few I recall getting. I had only one near by newsstand, and they carries few if any sf…only comics, newspapers, and a few popular magazines.
Mom would get furious when I forgot to return the book of the month notice. But we would bundle it up and drop it in the mail, or I would get an advance on my allowance.
After I fulfilled my obligation, I would send in my cancellation…and a year or two later again sign up for my 5 books for …was it a dollar or so?
I always watched each month to see what books were on the subscription list, watching for 5 must get titles.
I looked today at their website…not much there to attract a young reader
Hello science fiction loving friends. My dad is the reason I am in love with science fiction and he always talks about being a member of the science fiction book club (I believe in the late 1970s-1980s). He loves to tell me about the big collection of beautiful hard cover classics he received that helped him survive a very rough time in his life. Unfortunately, my dad moved away from home at one point and didn’t have enough room in his car to take the collection and shortly after being gone his brother donated the entire thing to a thrift store without permission. This is something my dad talks about occasionally and I can tell that it’s very upsetting to him. He’s an over-the-road truck driver who very recently switched to being local in an effort to have a more stable home life. He doesn’t own much of anything because of this and has very few things to fill his newly found space that he’s trying to create for himself after two decades of living in a truck. As the insane book lover/collector that I am, I had the idea of trying to fill his space with some of these classics. Is anyone able to help me with a list of books that may have been part of the science fiction book club during this time?
If so, please send me an email to leannafc11@icloud.com
Guess who has two thumbs and review/lists of SFBC books from the 1950s to 2001?
Before the Golden Age has a foreword by Asimov that includes a vivid early description of what one might now call “realizing these stories have been touched by the Racism Fairy”.
@84: I’ve read some of the stories you tell of your life, and am somewhat surprised that you still have two thumbs.
Ha ha I very nearly didn’t after the fruit salad sabre mishap and semimolten glass thing.