The Golden Age of Science Fiction is an anthology of science fiction short stories all originally published between 1949 and 1962. The stories were selected and introduced by Kingsley Amis, who also wrote an Editor's Note and a 21-page Introduction. The collection was first published by Hutchinson in 1981 and was released in paperback by Penguin in 1983.
The book includes the following stories:
- "The Quest for Saint Aquin", by Anthony Boucher
- "The Xi Effect", by Philip Latham
- "The Tunnel under the World", by Frederik Pohl
- "Old Hundredth (short story)", by Brian Aldiss
- "A Work of Art", by James Blish
- "Harrison Bergeron", by Kurt Vonnegut
- "The Voices of Time", by J. G. Ballard
- "Specialist", by Robert Sheckley
- "He Walked Around the Horses", by H. Beam Piper
- "The Game of Rat and Dragon", by Cordwainer Smith
- "The Nine Billion Names of God", by Arthur C. Clarke
- "The Streets of Ashkelon", by Harry Harrison
- "The Country of the Kind", by Damon Knight
- "The Machine that Won the War", by Isaac Asimov
- "Student Body (short story)", by F. L. Wallace
- "It's a Good Life", by Jerome Bixby
- "Sister Planet" (short story), by Poul Anderson
Famous quotes containing the words golden, age, science and/or fiction:
“But if that Golden Age would come again,
And Charles here rule as he before did reign;”
—Robert Herrick (1591–1674)
“Not even old age knows how to love death.”
—Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)
“Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)