American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels Of The 1950s (2012)

Here is literary irony at glorious work: The Library of America has issued a gorgeous two-volume collection of novels, American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, most originally published as cheap paperbacks with cheesy covers. Yet many of the stories here — by Robert Heinlein, Fritz Leiber, Leigh Brackett, and others — now come off as highly crafted material. This anthology contains the spores of sci-fi themes that would blossom, consciously or by chance, in much of contemporary film, TV, and literary fiction. Indeed, 1953's The Space Merchants, by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, now reads like a precursor to everything Mad Men addresses about the ad business — just set in the future, and on various planets. A