Before The Golden Age

Before The Golden Age

Before the Golden Age: A Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930s is an anthology of 25 science fiction stories from 1930s pulp magazines edited by Isaac Asimov. It was first published in April 1974.

The anthology was inspired by a dream Asimov had on the morning of 3 April 1973. In his dream, Asimov had prepared an anthology of his favorite science fiction stories from the 1930s and was getting a chance to read them again. After waking, he told his fianceé Janet Jeppson about the dream, and she suggested that he actually do such an anthology. Doubleday agreed to publish the anthology, and Asimov's friend Sam Moskowitz provided him with copies of the relevant science fiction magazines. Asimov completed work on the anthology on 10 May.

The stories were selected by Asimov, and the main selection criterion was the degree to which they influenced him when he was growing up in the 1930s. The prefatory material and individual introductions to the stories fill in the details about the early life of the child prodigy, which effectively makes the volume an autobiographical prequel to his earlier collection The Early Asimov. The anthology also includes "Big Game", a story written by Asimov in 1941 and never sold.

The stories collected in the anthology, although they range in quality from embarrassing to very good, are of a kind rarely anthologized and provide a unique historical and cultural retrospective of the genre.

The anthology was first published as a large hardcover by Doubleday in 1974 and re-issued as three smaller paperbacks by Fawcett Books the following year. The series was re-issued multiple times in the period of 1975-1984 in sets of either three or four paperbacks. As of 2010, it is out of print.