The best books on science fiction’s Golden Age

The first part of Isaac Asimov’s autobiography provides a fascinating, clear-eyed glimpse into the emerging world of science fiction as the young Asimov grows up in New York, works in his immigrant parents’ candy store, and dreams of writing stories.

There’s a certain innocence in the pre-war world where young kids were dreaming up science fiction, and Asimov is at his best here, relying on extensive diary records to recall his first meetings with Campbell, Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard, to name a few. A window into a long-vanished world, it is never less than compelling.

Growing up in New York around the same time as Asimov was Fred Pohl, young, ambitious, argumentative, and occasionally brilliant.

We meet many of the same people – and see the same events – that Asimov describes, in a somewhat different light, as Pohl forges his own path through the emerging world of science fiction, as an agent, editor, and writer in his own right.

It’s beautifully written and again, provides a fascinating insight into that long-ago world, complete with its many petty feuds – that the socialist Pohl was banned from the first Worldcon only to start his own competing event across the street is a marvelously entertaining anecdote recounted both here and by Asimov.

Merrill, a brilliant editor and writer in her own right, was a rare woman to cut through the chauvinistic world of the Golden Age writers.

The book recounts her journey as a writer (she wrote the classic SF story “That Only a Mother”), editor (as in the ground-breaking 60s anthology England Swings SF), her short-lived marriage to Fred Pohl and her fascination with socialism. It certainly gives you a different view of the male-dominated world of science fiction at the time, and an insight into one of SF’s important practitioners.

Anthony Boucher straddles the history of both crime fiction and science fiction.

As the founding editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction he has an oversized role in the history of the genre. As a crime writer, he gave his name to the Anthony Awards, which are handed out every year at the annual Bouchercon.

His SF story “The Quest for Saint Aquin” is a classic. None of this, admittedly, has much to do with Rocket to the Morgue, Boucher’s roman-à-clef mystery set in pre-WW2 California in which the emerging world of science fiction comes to glorious life. A young L. Ron Hubbard makes an appearance, as do Robert A. Heinlein and the rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons.

The mystery matters less than the characters, who though moving under different names are all very much true to life.

The only novel on my list, this is simply fun.

It’s a box of delights set in the early days of the pulps, in which two of the greatest pulp writers of their era – Lester Dent and Walter Gibson, authors of Doc Savage and The Shadow – team up with L. Ron Hubbard to solve the murder of H.P. Lovecraft. While Malmont’s follow-up – The Astounding, The Amazing and the Unknown – deals more directly with the Golden Age (it features both Asimov and Heinlein), my heart belongs to this marvellous pulp adventure, if only for Hubbard’s glorious appearance.

We tend to think of Hubbard as the controversial figure he later became, forgetting that in his heart he was always that cocky young pulp writer, and it was this notion that inspired, in large parts, my own book.