''Sprague de Camp's New Anthology of Science Fiction'' is a collection of
science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...
stories by American writer
L. Sprague de Camp
Lyon Sprague de Camp (; November 27, 1907 – November 6, 2000) was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy and non-fiction. In a career spanning 60 years, he wrote over 100 books, including novels and works of non-fiction, including biog ...
, edited by
H. J. Campbell. It was first published in both hardcover and paperback in 1953 by
Panther Books
Panther Books Ltd was a British publishing house especially active in the 1950s and 1960s, specialising in paperback fiction. It was established in May 1952 by Hamilton's Ltd and titles carried the line "A Panther Book" or "Panther Science Ficti ...
.
The book contains six short works of fiction by the author, the first two of them stories in his ''
Viagens Interplanetarias
The ''Viagens Interplanetarias'' series is a sequence of science fiction stories by L. Sprague de Camp, begun in the late 1940s and written under the influence of contemporary space opera and sword and planet stories, particularly Edgar Rice ...
'' series not collected elsewhere.
Contents
*"Introduction" by H. J. Campbell
*"
Calories
The calorie is a unit of energy. For historical reasons, two main definitions of "calorie" are in wide use. The large calorie, food calorie, or kilogram calorie was originally defined as the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of on ...
"
*"
The Colourful Character"
*"Juice"
*"Proposal"
*"
The Saxon Pretender"
*"
The Space Clause"
Reception
Anthony Boucher
William Anthony Parker White (August 21, 1911 – April 29, 1968), better known by his pen name Anthony Boucher (), was an American author, critic, and editor who wrote several classic mystery novels, short stories, science fiction, and radio d ...
, writing in ''
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
''The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction'' (usually referred to as ''F&SF'') is a U.S. fantasy and science fiction magazine first published in 1949 by Mystery House, a subsidiary of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Press. Editors Anthony Boucher a ...
'', called the book "most misleadingly titled; it is not an anthology edited by de Camp, but a group of six de Camp stories selected by H. J. Campbell." While noting they were "
l new to book form," he considered them "a drab assemblage of unfunny humor and (what is even less forgivable) unsexy sex."
[Boucher, Anthony. "Recommended Reading," in ''The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction'', v. 7, no. 6, Dec. 1954, pp. 92-93.]
References
1953 short story collections
New Anthology of Science Fiction
Panther Books books
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