As with Rediscovery, Volume 1 (you can read my review here) the idea of this anthology is to take largely forgotten stories written during the Silver Age of science fiction and bring them to a new generation of readers. The common thread among them? They’re all written by women, which makes them a rarity during that particularly sexist period of American history. Included with each story is a brief afterword by a rising star of today’s speculative fiction scene, talking about the story itself and about the author. Sometimes the author is a name I was familiar with, though usually I was not. (To be a little more precise, a pre-Time Quartet story by Madeleine L’Engle is in here; otherwise, I’d heard of none of them).
As with the previous volume of Rediscovery, this volume made me very sad for what might have been. There’s a good deal of talent on display in this volume, and for most of the writers here their publishing career consisted of a few short stories. Who knows if any of them could have been up there with Anne McCaffrey and Ursula K. LeGuin and Octavia E. Butler in the pantheon of speculative fiction greats, if the stars had aligned and they’d been born into a more encouraging era. Obviously we can never know, but we can appreciate the stories they produced despite the barriers they faced.
I’ve read a fair bit of Silver Age sci-fi, so I was easily able to see how these stories stand out. In many ways they felt more modern than most Silver Age stuff. There is a distinctly less misogynistic perspective here, which isn’t terribly surprising. But there’s also a general focus less on heroics and aliens and pewpewpew than in most of what I’ve encountered. Much more finding the fantastical in the everyday.
Yet these stories are still very much products of the 1950s. For example, in one story the protagonist thinks about “kissing girls who didn’t want to be kissed” with a casualness that would not (or at least should not) fly today.
Yet as with so much of the sci-fi written in the ‘50s, there are some fascinating questions asked here and fascinating ideas explored. Strongly recommended.
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