The 1950s were a decade when science fiction writers seemed willing to imagine almost anything. 1950s Science Fiction 10 brings together 22 stories filled with alien encounters, voyages into space, mysterious creatures, unusual technology, and ordinary people suddenly confronted by something they cannot explain.
Philip K. Dick contributes two memorable tales. In James P. Crow, intelligence and prejudice collide in a future unlike our own, while The Father Thing turns a child’s suspicions about his own family into something far more frightening. Robert Sheckley brings his inventive humor to Keep Your Shape, Isaac Asimov offers the wonderfully unusual Misbegotten Missionary, and Harry Harrison looks toward humanity’s next frontier in Trainee for Mars.
The collection also features Harlan Ellison’s The Untouchable Adolescents, William Tenn’s Project Hush, Robert Silverberg’s Solitary, Michael Shaara’s Orphans of the Void, Zenna Henderson’s Before the Fact, and Murray Leinster’s Nobody Saw the Ship. Miriam Allen deFord, Randall Garrett, Donald A. Wollheim, Alan E. Nourse, and others add still more variety.
A spaceship can disappear without anyone noticing. A strange creature can threaten everything familiar. A mission to another world can go terribly wrong, and sometimes the greatest danger is already much closer than anyone realizes.
1950s Science Fiction 10 is another journey through a decade overflowing with imagination. Twenty-two vintage stories from legendary authors and overlooked voices, each offering a different doorway into the strange, surprising, and unpredictable worlds of classic science fiction.
