My Reading Recs From 2024

Capsule Reviews of Vintage Novels and Short Fiction

“The Robot Who Wanted To Know” by Harry Harrison, one of my reading recs for this year, was the cover story of the March 1958 issue of Fantastic Universe. Cover by Virgil Finlay.

Happy Boxing Day! As we’re about to usher in 2025, I decided it would be fun to look back at what I’ve read this year both for this newsletter and otherwise and put together some William Emmons Books reading recommendations. I’ve chosen five vintage novels and ten vintage pieces of short fiction to endorse. I’ve included capsule reviews for these as well as for a couple honorable mentions.

Process Notes

This is a set of recommendations is meant to be subjective rather than objective—I am not claiming these are a ‘best of’ or even a representative sample of vintage science fiction. My criteria for inclusion on the list were multifarious and applied intuitively. The result is a list of works picked because they’ve had a lasting impact on me intellectually or emotionally, they were of high literary quality, they were particularly outre, they have some kind of essential William Emmons Books-ish characteristic, or I otherwise believe they deserve to be more widely read.

My main area of interest this year has been American magazine science fiction 1926-1959 and—though I did read outside this area from time to time—the works selected reflect the 1926-1959 science fiction focus in a number of ways. For one, no fantasy was selected despite my growing interest in this area of literature. Similarly, though perhaps less benignly, all the selected works were written by white American or English men. (One woman and one Pole got honorable mentions.)

While it is true that there were a number of women publishing science fiction in American magazines prior to 1960, they were a small minority. If I had read a different batch of stories this year, works by, e.g., Leigh Brackett, Katherine MacLean, Judith Merril, or Margaret St. Clair likely would have made the list.

Novels

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (1956) (reread) (AKA Tiger!, Tiger!) is the spine of my developing-but-still-skeletal theory of proletarian science fiction. In the past, my description of this vein of science fiction has sometimes leaned a bit too heavily on something like a working class identity politics. More correctly, while the class origin origin of the protagonist, space sailor Gully Foyle, is a part of why I call this novel proletarian science fiction, the designation also has to do with the philosophical content of the novel. This includes but is probably not limited to: (1) the evolution of Foyle’s personal morality throughout his quest for revenge against a capitalist who wronged him; (2) Foyle’s attitude toward bourgeois society in general; and (3) Foyle’s ultimate attitude and actions toward the masses at the end the novel. A less idiosyncratic capsule review might have started out by saying that this one’s a gnarly and violent science fiction version of The Count of Monte Cristo, then rehearse something I’m not really qualified to say about the novel’s influence on cyberpunk, and throw in a content warning that during a particularly amoral and destructive phase Foyle rapes a woman who is kind to him barely off camera. The Stars My Destination is my personal favorite science fiction novel in part because of the well-packaged countercultural ideological content, in part because I like Bester’s prose and storytelling, and most of all because its ending has a lot to say about human potential and responsibility.

A Case of Conscience by James Blish (1958) is a big think about Catholic theology and evolutionary biology in which the increasingly schizophrenic subterranean society of the future is brought low by the televised antics of a juvenile reptile alien trickster. Blish comes across as deeply conversant with the religion and the science involved and the proof is in the pudding. I reviewed this novel earlier this year and I copped to finding the protagonist and the plot, both deeply religious, to be jarring and upsetting to my secular humanist self. Since that time I haven’t stopped thinking about the novel. Great food for thought.

What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown (1948) belongs to a favorite subgenre of mine, recursive science fiction. Recursive science fiction is a fancy name for science fiction about science fiction. In an early use of the multiverse concept, this novel is about a science fiction editor transported by accident to a science fiction dimension. The main thing going on is that the protagonist is disoriented in a dangerous world that is both familiar and alien. Somehow without getting too deep into the weeds, the novel grinds various science fiction axes. Brown takes his shots at the bug-eyed monsters and scantily clad women that were common on the covers of science fiction pulps in the 1940s and at insufferable guys who wrote in to science fiction magazine letter columns.

The Journey of Joenes by Robert Sheckley (1962) (AKA Journey Beyond Tomorrow) is an expansive satirical takedown of all the major institutions of mid-century American society. A Polynesian-born American man called Joenes visits the United States for the first time and gets swept up into a little bit of everything before being present during society’s self-destruction and returning to the South Pacific. The novel takes the form of various scriptures and oral traditions developed by people who have based their post-apocalyptic religious philosophies on Joenes’ life or on the teachings of a beatnik named Lum that Joenes meets early in the novel. Somehow most of it still holds up as satire of extant institutions.

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (1895) (reread) (free audiobook) is among the first modern science fiction novels. I hadn’t read it in more than 20 years. This time reading it, I appreciated how it relates to other works. For one, the narrator’s inability to immediately discern the contours of the world of the far future is accompanied by a direct swipe at utopian works like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. More viscerally, I felt that the novel has a lot of the quality of 1920s and 1930s American magazine science fiction that I often describe as elemental but without having its American descendants’ rough edges. It was infused with a farsighted poetry like that of my favorite Don A. Stuart (John W. Campbell, Jr.) stories and at moments was even reminiscent of something by Edmond Hamilton or Clark Ashton Smith from Weird Tales. Of course, it’s its own strange and beautiful thing.

Honorable Mentions

The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem (1961) (translated by Michael Kandel, 1975) got edged out at the last minute by my reread of The Time Machine. On the level of craft, this satirical narrative of false realities within false realities is probably a better novel than What Mad Universe but the latter is more on brand for this blog. This one is a must read for fans of Philip K. Dick.

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915) (free audiobook) is a self-published utopian and lost race novel containing a fascinating admixture of maternal instinct-driven Bellamyite socialism and feminism, white supremacist eugenics, and the author’s own idiosyncratic j’nai c’est quoi. In it, three wealthy men from America discover a hidden country of parthenogenetic white women who have been cut off from the rest of the world for centuries (millennia?) in which the organizing principle is motherhood. A tortured love story of sorts, the novel is light on plot and strong on dialogue pillorying capitalist civilization and Christianity.

Short Fiction

The Creatures That Time Forgot by Ray Bradbury (1946) (free audiobook) makes the list and supplants other stories by Bradbury because it is maybe the weirdest thing I read all year. In it, descendants of crash-landed refugees on a very irradiated planet have adapted to have a lifespan of only eight days. A dramatic and elemental story with very bad science!

“Encounter in the Dawn” by Arthur C. Clarke (1953) (free audiobook) is a story about an emotionally charged exchange between one of the last survivors of a war-torn and collapsing galactic civilization and a hunter-gatherer on prehistoric Earth. I am partial to caveman stories but they are usually bad. This one is very good.

“The Aristocrat” by Chan Davis (1949) is a great example of Marxist ideation applied to a post-apocalyptic context. It’s also a hell of yarn where a woman undermines and politically outmaneuvers her husband. It deserves to be more widely read and discussed. I wrote a full review of it here.

“The Days of Perky Pat” by Philip K. Dick (1963) is about what kind of play helps us develop and what kind of play holds us in arrested development. In a post-apocalyptic and post-scarcity landscape, the adults of an insular community devote themselves to an elaborate game involving a doll named Perky Pat who is perpetually 17 while their children run wild fighting mutant animals. Unlike their parents, the children display curiosity about and to some extent mastery over the world around them. Things really kick off when the adult protagonist uses the mayor’s radio to challenge the residents of another community to play the game, staking Perky Pat herself against the strangers’ Connie Companion Doll, who unlike Perky Pat grows up.

“The Robot Who Wanted To Know” by Harry Harrison (under pseudonym Felix Boyd) (1958) (free audiobook) is a short one about a robot who wants to know what love is. He studies the topic extensively, disguises himself as a man, and successfully romances a woman at a ball—until she finds out what he is and the story goes to a poignant and tragic place. Someone might dismiss this story as kind of a trifle but it stuck in my memory because of Harrison’s sense of humor and because I am sentimental about robots.

“The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R. Jones (1931) (free audiobook) is a great example of how delightfully madcap early American magazine science fiction could be. It’s about a man who wanted his corpse preserved forever in a satellite and the immortal machine man aliens who resurrect him by turning him into a machine man also. His resurrection comes eons after the sun has turned red. Thus transformed and radically displaced in time, the protagonist goes on an emotional roller coaster before accepting his new strange eternal life in the far future. I often recommend this story to people but I don’t know if I have ever convinced anyone to actually read it.

“The Proud Robot” by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner) (1943) is a comedy story about an alcoholic inventor and a self-obsessed uber-robot he builds while drunk. The robot is not only intelligent but has extra senses given nonsense names. The story lampoons the legal system and the film industry and probably other things I’m forgetting besides. This one is a classic of Golden Age Campbellian science fiction by a master craftsman of the pulps.

“Second Childhood” by Clifford D. Simak (1951) (free audiobook) is a story about a millennia-old immortal man who wants to die but who is not allowed to do so by the laws governing his immortal society. In order to forget his life, he builds himself a giant nursery and seeks to become an adult-sized baby. Uh spoiler alert: he is successful. Powerful imagery as the story progresses.

“The Monster of the Prophecy” by Clark Ashton Smith (1932) (free audiobook) is about a suicidal young poet who is whisked away to an alien planet where he is used in a many eyed and many limbed alien wizard’s political machinations. I’ve been mainlining Smith lately and it was tough to select which one of his stories would make this list. Finally I decided I wanted one where his erudite facility for outlandish and abstruse description is turned to science fantasy. I landed on this one in particular because it has a funny and wholesome interspecies romance at the end which may not be very Smithian but which tickles me all the same.

“Twilight” by Don A. Stuart (John W. Campbell, Jr.) (1934) is a sort of plotless and poetic far future vignette about the time of humanity’s ultimate decline told in a game of telephone by a time traveler from a robust more recent future epoch to a guy from the present to another guy from the present. People near the end are exceptionally long-lived but they are few and far between, don’t reproduce very much, and have lost their creative spark. They’ve also lost their knowledge of the workings of the great mechanized cities which whir on eternally all across the solar system despite being largely absent of people. The story’s most ambitious portions are some songs from the far future about the fall of man which have a haunting impact on the various characters involved in narrating the story. I have a suspicion that my favorite Golden Age Campbellian science fiction author may be Campbell himself, warts and all.

Reader Participation

Did you read any stand out science fiction, fantasy, or weird fiction of an older vintage this year that you’d recommend? Drop me a comment and let me know what you think some good reads are.