The Road to Science Fiction

The Road to Science Fiction is a series of science fiction anthologies edited by American science fiction author, scholar and editor James Gunn. Composed as a textbook set to teach the evolution of science fiction literature, the series is now available as mass market publications. The six-volume set collects many of the most influential works of the genre. It was published originally by Signet and then by White Wolf Games Studio. Volumes 1 through 4 are currently being reprinted in paperback format by the company Scarecrow Press.

Everett Franklin Bleiler described the first two volumes as follow: "A historical anthology... A good selection, with good headnotes".^[1]

Volume 1 and 2 was also reviewed by:^[2]

• David Mogen (1979) in Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review, July 1979
• Joseph Nicholas (1980) in Vector 99

Volume 3 was reviewed by:

• Thomas A. Easton [as Tom Easton] (1980) in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, July 1980
• Joseph Nicholas (1980) in Vector 99

Volume 4 was reviewed by:

• Neil Barron (1983) in Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review, #11, January-February 1983
• Frank Borsch (1994) in Blizz, #29 (in German)
• Clinton Lawrence (1997) in Science Fiction Weekly, 5 May 1997
• Thomas A. Easton [as Tom Easton] (1997) in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 1997

Volume 5 was reviewed by:

• Clinton Lawrence (1998) in Science Fiction Weekly, 18 May 1998
• Steven H Silver (1998) in SF Site, Mid-May 1998, (1998)
• Damien Broderick (1999) in The New York Review of Science Fiction, April 1999

• A True Story by Lucian of Samosata
• The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandeville (excerpt) by an unknown author
• Utopia (excerpt) by Thomas More
• The City of the Sun (excerpt) by Tommaso Campanella
• New Atlantis (excerpt) by Francis Bacon
• Somnium by Johannes Kepler
• A Voyage to the Moon (excerpt from Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon) by Cyrano de Bergerac
• A Voyage to Laputa (an excerpt from Gulliver's Travels) by Jonathan Swift
• The Journey to the World Underground (excerpt) by Ludvig Holberg
• "Micromégas" by Voltaire (not included in the Signet edition)
• Frankenstein (excerpt) by Mary Shelley
• "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• "Mellonta Tauta" by Edgar Allan Poe
• "The Diamond Lens" by Fitz-James O'Brien
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (excerpt) by Jules Verne
• Around the Moon (excerpt) by Jules Verne
• She (excerpt) by H. Rider Haggard
• Looking Backward (excerpt) by Edward Bellamy
• "The Damned Thing" by Ambrose Bierce
• "With the Night Mail" by Rudyard Kipling
• "The Star" by H. G. Wells

The anthology was published Signet in 1979 and reprinted by Scarecrow Press in December 2002.

• "The New Accelerator," by H. G. Wells
• "The Machine Stops, by E. M. Forster
• The Chessmen of Mars (excerpt) (Signet edition) or Under the Moons of Mars (excerpt) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• "The People of the Pit," by A. Merritt, replaced by Merritt's "The Moon Pool" in the Scarecrow Press edition (2002)
• "The Red One," by Jack London
• "Dagon" by H. P. Lovecraft
• "The Tissue-Culture King" by Julian Huxley
• "The Revolt of the Pedestrians" by David H. Keller, M.D.
• Last and First Men (excerpt) by Olaf Stapledon
• Brave New World (excerpt) by Aldous Huxley
• "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum
• "Twilight," by John W. Campbell
• "Proxima Centauri" by Murray Leinster
• "What's It Like Out There?," by Edmond Hamilton
• "With Folded Hands" by Jack Williamson
• "Hyperpilosity" by L. Sprague de Camp
• "The Faithful" by Lester del Rey
• "Black Destroyer," by A. E. van Vogt
• "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov
• "Requiem" by Robert A. Heinlein

Published by Signet, 1979, reprinted by Scarecrow Press, September, 2002.

Contained work published between 1940 and 1977.

• "All You Zombies" by Robert A. Heinlein
• "Reason" by Isaac Asimov
• "Desertion"' by Clifford D. Simak
• "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore)
• "The Million-Year Picnic" by Ray Bradbury
• "Thunder and Roses" by Theodore Sturgeon
• "That Only a Mother" by Judith Merril
• "Brooklyn Project," by William Tenn (Philip Klass)
• "Coming Attraction" by Fritz Leiber
• "The Sentinel" by Arthur C. Clarke
• "Sail On! Sail On!" by Philip José Farmer
• "Critical Factor" by Hal Clement
• "Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester
• "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin
• "The Game of Rat and Dragon," by Cordwainer Smith
• "Pilgrimage to Earth" by Robert Sheckley
• "Who Can Replace a Man?" by Brian W. Aldiss
• "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• "The Streets of Ashkelon" by Harry Harrison
• "The Terminal Beach" by J. G. Ballard
• "Dolphin's Way," by Gordon R. Dickson
• "Slow Tuesday Night" by R. A. Lafferty
• "Day Million," by Frederik Pohl
• "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," by Philip K. Dick
• "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," by Harlan Ellison
• "Aye, and Gomorrah," by Samuel R. Delany
• "The Jigsaw Man," by Larry Niven
• "Kyrie," by Poul Anderson
• "Masks," by Damon Knight
• Stand on Zanzibar (excerpt) by John Brunner
• "The Big Flash" by Norman Spinrad
• "Sundance," by Robert Silverberg
• The Left Hand of Darkness (excrpt) by Ursula K. Le Guin
• "When It Changed," by Joanna Russ
• "The Engine at Heartspring's Center," by Roger Zelazny
• "Tricentennial" by Joe Haldeman

First published by Signet in 1979, reprinted by Scarecrow Press, May 2002.

• "Born of Man and Woman," by Richard Matheson
• "The Luckiest Man in Denv," by C. M. Kornbluth (not included in the Signet edition)
• "Common Time," by James Blish (not included in the Signet edition)
• "My Boy Friend's Name is Jello," by Avram Davidson
• "The First Canticle," by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• "Nobody Bothers Gus," by Algis Budrys
• "Flowers for Algernon," by Daniel Keyes
• "The Moon Moth" by Jack Vance
• "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges
• Dune (excerpt) by Frank Herbert
• "Light of Other Days," by Bob Shaw
• "The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electronic Bard" by Stanisław Lem
• "The Heat Death of the Universe," by Pamela Zoline
• "The Planners" by Kate Wilhelm
• "The Dance of the Changer and the Three" by Terry Carr
• "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain," by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)
• "Where No Sun Shines" by Gardner Dozois
• "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" by Gene Wolfe
• "Angouleme" by Thomas M. Disch
• "Gather Blue Roses," by Pamela Sargent
• "With a Finger in My I," by David Gerrold
• "The Ghost Writer," by George Alec Effinger (Signet edition)
• "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand," by Vonda N. McIntyre
• "Air Raid," by John Varley
• "Uncoupling," by Barry N. Malzberg
• "Rogue Tomato," by Michael Bishop
• "This Tower of Ashes," by George R. R. Martin
• "Particle Theory," by Edward Bryant
• "View from a Height," by Joan D. Vinge
• "The Word Sweep" by George Zebrowski
• "The World Science Fiction Convention of 2080" by Ian Watson
• "Abominable" by Carol Emshwiller
• "Exposures" by Gregory Benford
• "Schrödinger's Kitten," by George Alec Effinger (not included in the Signet edition)

First published by Signet, 1982, reprinted by White Wolf, January 1997 and Scarecrow Press, 2003)

(White Wolf, March 1998)

Influential British SF published prior to 1986'

• The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (excerpt) by Lieutenant-Colonel Sir George Tomkyns Chesney
• Flatland (excerpt) by Edwin A. Abbott
• After London; or, Wild England (excerpt) by Richard Jefferies
• "The Doom of London," by Robert Barr
• "A Corner in Lightning," by George Griffith
• "The Country of the Blind" by H. G. Wells
• "As Easy as A.B.C." by Rudyard Kipling
• "A Negligible Experiment" by John D. Beresford
• "The Horror of the Heights" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• "The Rat" by S. Fowler Wright
• Star Maker (excerpt) by Olaf Stapledon
• "The Great Fog," by H. F. Heard
• "Hobbyist" by Eric Frank Russell
• "Dreams Are Sacred, by Peter Phillips
• "Made in U.S.A." by J. T. McIntosh
• "The Star" by Arthur C. Clarke
• "The Emptiness of Space," by John Wyndham
• "The Voices of Time," by J. G. Ballard
• "The Drowned Giant," by J. G. Ballard
• "The Totally Rich," by John Brunner
• "Mouth of Hell," by David I. Masson
• "The Discontinuous," by D. G. Compton
• "It's Smart to Have an English Address" by D. G. Compton
• "The Muse" by Anthony Burgess
• "The Nature of the Catastrophe," by Michael Moorcock
• "The Power of Time" by Josephine Saxton
• "Mason's Life" by Kingsley Amis
• "Settling the World" by M. John Harrison
• "Working in the Spaceship Yards," by Brian W. Aldiss
• "Appearance of Life" by Brian W. Aldiss
• "An Infinite Summer" by Christopher Priest
• "Custom Fitting" by James White
• "Written in Water" by Tanith Lee
• "The Great Atlantic Swimming Race" by Ian Watson
• "And He Not Busy Being Born" by Brian M. Stableford

(White Wolf, July 1998)

• Journey to the Center of the Earth (excerpt) by Jules Verne
• "The War of the Twentieth Century," by Albert Robida
• "Another World" by J.-H. Rosny-Aîné
• "The Dead Fish," by Boris Vian
• "Heavier Than Sleep," by Philippe Curval
• "The Valley of Echoes," by Gérard Klein
• "The Knot," by Élisabeth Vonarburg

• "The Sandman," by E. T. A. Hoffmann
• "The Universal Library," by Kurd Lasswitz
• "The Hunter Gracchus," by Franz Kafka
• "The Building," by Herbert W. Franke
• "Loitering at Death's Door," by Wolfgang Jeschke
• "Ikaros," by Erik Simon

• "Mnemosyne's Children," by Svend Åge Madsen
• "Time Everlasting," by Sam J. Lundwall

• Epilogue from R.U.R. by Karel Čapek
• "The Hunt," by Stanisław Lem (from Tales of Pirx the Pilot)
• "The Divided Carla," by Josef Nesvadba
• "That Invincible Human Spirit, or, The Golden Ships," by Alexandr Kramer
• "The Neuhof Treaty," by Ovid S. Crohmalniceanu

• "The Strangers," by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
• "Share It With Me," by Kirill Bulychev

• "The Time Machine," by Dino Buzzati
• "Cancerqueen," by Tommaso Landolfi
• "The Spiral," by Italo Calvino

• "The Alabaster Garden," by Teresa Inglés
• "The Babylon Lottery," by Jorge Luis Borges
• "Blacamán the Good, Vendor of Miracles," by Gabriel García Márquez
• "Chac-Mool," by Carlos Fuentes

• "Einstein the Second," by Laxman Londhe

• "The Mirror Image of the Earth," by Zheng Wenguang
• "Corrosion," by Ye Yonglie

• "Beyond the Curve," by Kōbō Abe
• "Take Your Choice," by Sakyo Komatsu
• "The Legend of the Paper Spaceship," by Tetsu Yano

• SF Site review of Volume 5
• The Scarecrow Press