Product Review

In a deluxe two-volume collector's edition boxed set, eight mind-bending novels from science fiction's most transformative decade, including the landmark classic Flowers for Algernon

The tumultuous 1960s was a watershed decade for American science fiction. As the nation raced to the moon, acknowledged masters from the genre's "golden age" reached the height of their powers. As it confronted calls for civil rights and countercultural revolution, a "new wave" of brilliant young voices emerged, upending the genre's "pulp" conventions with newfound literary sophistication; female, queer, and nonwhite authors broke into the ranks of SF writers, introducing provocative new protagonists and themes. Here, in a deluxe, two-volume collector's set, editor Gary K. Wolfe gathers eight wildly inventive novels, the decade's best: Daniel Keyes' beloved Flowers for Algernon and Poul Anderson's madcap The High Crusade; Clifford D. Simak's Hugo Award-winning Way Station; Roger Zelazny's post-apocalyptic . . . And Call Me Conrad (previously published as This Immortal); Joanna Russ' Picnic on Paradise, a pioneering work of feminist SF, and Samuel R. Delany's proto-cyberpunk space opera Nova; R.A. Lafferty's quirky, neglected, utterly original Past Master; and Jack Vance's haunting Emphyrio.