Is there life on Mars?

A lightning review of The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, edited by Tom Shippey (London: Oxford, 1992). 586 pp. Paperback.

This book was the textbook in a course in science fiction that I took in college in 2017, as one of my general elective requirements. I had taken a similar course in my second year of university, for much the same reason (while still in engineering, before switching to English). The university course was much more text-heavy, studying ten novels over the term. Of the thirty stories in this anthology, we only read about five, drawing from other sources for the rest of the lessons.

The stories in this book, published in 1992, are a survey of science-fiction short stories from the beginning of the genre ("The Land Ironclads," a 1903 story by H. G. Wells) to the then-present ("Piecework," a 1991 story by David Brin). While I was familiar with some work of the majority of the authors represented, the only story I had read previously was William Gibson's "Burning Chrome." So the anthology was as nearly as fresh for me as it could be.

My favourite story of the collection was "A Martian Odyssey," by Stanley G. Weinbaum. This 1934 story was the first time a science-fiction alien to behave as an alien, instead of a green-skinned human or a monster. The biggest surprise was "As Easy as ABC" by Rudyard Kipling; I hadn't realized that Kipling had dabbled in science fiction (and it's a pretty good story, too, from 1912). I was also surprised by the lack of contributions from the "Big Three," apart from one Clarke story, "Second Dawn." It seems to me that a survey of the best science ficiton short stories ought to include one of Isaac Asimov's robot stories and Robert A. Heinlein's Future History stories.

Give The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories a look if you want a good, historical sampling of the science fiction genre, and don't mind that it's too old for the last 30 years.