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desperanceGosh, what a lot of '70s SF anthologies I do have, to be sure.
And I'm fairly sure that half of them replicate half the same stories, because that used to happen back then, that between the magazines and the single-author collections and the best-of anthos and the yearly anthos, you could end up with three or four copies of the same story quite easily. Nevertheless, they're all coming. These are the books that pretty much defined my notion of what SF was and ought to be: the Asimov/Silverberg/Sturgeon/Zelazny axis, with Ellison as a dominant outlier. This is the heartwood, my golden age - and much as I love novels and always have done, it's the short stories that seemed to matter more, in terms of shaping what the genre was, what it did and where it went. Even this late, into the '70s. I don't think it's true any longer, but the genre has become so diverse and there is so much of it, I'm not sure anything shapes it any longer, I think it just sprouts tendrils and tumours and keeps growing in a dozen different directions at once. [When I was a kid, you could pretty much have read everything, if you worked at it; certainly you could keep abreast of everything published new in the UK, and a whole lot of imports on the side. Not now. Even Clute can't read everything now.]
Actually, I'm a little shocked by how much paperback SF I have in general. I am filtering, and even so: I've filled 15 boxes and I haven't finished yet. I knew it was the collection I was most proud of, it has a coherent sense of itself, but even so. That's a lot of boxes.
And I'm fairly sure that half of them replicate half the same stories, because that used to happen back then, that between the magazines and the single-author collections and the best-of anthos and the yearly anthos, you could end up with three or four copies of the same story quite easily. Nevertheless, they're all coming. These are the books that pretty much defined my notion of what SF was and ought to be: the Asimov/Silverberg/Sturgeon/Zelazny axis, with Ellison as a dominant outlier. This is the heartwood, my golden age - and much as I love novels and always have done, it's the short stories that seemed to matter more, in terms of shaping what the genre was, what it did and where it went. Even this late, into the '70s. I don't think it's true any longer, but the genre has become so diverse and there is so much of it, I'm not sure anything shapes it any longer, I think it just sprouts tendrils and tumours and keeps growing in a dozen different directions at once. [When I was a kid, you could pretty much have read everything, if you worked at it; certainly you could keep abreast of everything published new in the UK, and a whole lot of imports on the side. Not now. Even Clute can't read everything now.]
Actually, I'm a little shocked by how much paperback SF I have in general. I am filtering, and even so: I've filled 15 boxes and I haven't finished yet. I knew it was the collection I was most proud of, it has a coherent sense of itself, but even so. That's a lot of boxes.