The Science Fiction Hall of Fame is a classic, one-volume library of works from the so called Golden Age of Science Fiction. These stories are from the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's, when science fiction was booming. This volume contains the works of some of the biggest and most well known authors in the field, such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon and James Blish, among many others.
Don't get this volume mixed up with the pulp science fiction thats out there. The stories within are among some of the most famous out there. Nightfall, Surface Tension and Flowers for Algernon are in here, some of the classic stories out there.
Each and every one of the twenty-six stories in this book are exciting, thoughtful, interesting and are at the edge of imagination. They cover everything from bioengineering, first contact, mutations, god, robots, Mars and space travel, all the things that come with science fiction.
One of the most interesting things about these stories is that they were written seventy, sixty, fifty or fourty years ago, yet the ideas and writing are just as vivid as they would be written today. Some of the things that are being written about had not been invented or conceived by science, but are now the forefronts of science now. Bioengineering and robotics are the big ones. First contact and space travel still remain in science fiction for the most part, but who knows what will happen, expecially if some of those ideas were correct?
This is a must for any science fiction fan out there.

This is the basic collection of classical SF short stories. My copy is so tattered and worn out that I'm hoping to find a new one-- and this is my second copy. It was the text of our Science Fiction as English Lit class in college, and it's a book I've treasured ever since.

This is by far and away the master work off all that science fiction anthologies has given us.

Here is a complete list of the titles included.

A Martian Odyssey

Twilight

Helen O' Loy

The Roads must Roll

Microcosmic God

Nightfall

The Weapon Shop

Mimsy Where the Borogoves

Huddling Place

Arena

First Contact

That only a Mother

Scanners live in Vain

Mars is Heaven!

The Little Black Bag

Born of Man and Woman

Comming Attraction

The Quest for Saint Aquin

Surface Tension

The Nine Billion Names of God

It's a Good Life

The Cold Equations

Fondly Fahrenheit

The Country of the Kind

Flowers for Algernon

A Rose for Ecclesiastes

If you can find this book then buy it. It's awsome. Science Fiction only truly shined back in the 30's and up through the 60's and some of the 70's. This collection encompasses for the first time most of those great short-fiction works.

Enjoy!

Last year I picked up a copy of "A Century of Horror" at my local Barnes & Noble store. It was so good I bought others in the series, including Century of Science Fiction and A Century of Fantasy. All are excellent. Silverberg and Greenberg did a superb job of selecting top notch stories, including stories by Fritz Lieber, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Philip Dick and James Blish. If you like Science Fiction and you like the short story format, this is a must-have for your collection.

-George Hulseman

This collection of SF shorts from the 1950's is one of the best collections of it's kind. Highly recommended for folks who like good SF.

This is a good book for anybody who reads a lot of science fiction/fantasy and has a real interest in the people who write it. Robert Silverberg is an author who will be given the Grand Master award from SFWA in the future. His novels like Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, and A Time of Changes are classics of the field. Even some of his later works like The Face of the Waters and The Alien Years show signs of greatness.

But, this book is a collection of essays that RS has written over the years. They show us inside his thinking process. He also tells us about the world of an SF writter and about the other personalities who make up the field.

Good book for people interested in the author and his work.

I discovered Robert Silverberg's work while browsing the library. I was a book called The Book of Skulls. I thought it looked interesting so I took it home and read it. I haven't looked back since. I have read nearly everything I can find by this wonderful man. That brings me to this book. When I finished this book, I had reached a turning point in my life. I began reading Golden Age SF. It really bothers me when younger people say why should I read that? A bunch a dead guys wrote that smelly stuff (since most/nearly all SF was in the pulps). I have read Cliff Simak, Lewis Padgett (who is really C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner), Robert A. Heinlein, Lester del Rey, John W. Campbell (Night is beautiful), A.E. van Vogt, and many others, and I must say, though some is extremely corny (The Vault of the Beast by van Vogt..."Ha! We're going to take over mankind!), it provided much of the richness that is now in the field. Before reading Reflections and Refractions, I had no idea about this other world. Now I have begun reading about the authors themselves, and the editors, and definitely believe my life is fuller because the great Golden Age.

A highly entertaining series of short stories. The stories in this book are very original and are not reprinted in many other collections of Alternate History, with the exception of two. If you love alternate history, I encourage you to read, if not buy this book.

Everyone has wondered "What if..." at some point, whether the question involved his or her own life or some pivotal event in history. History as we know it is jolted and questioned at every turn in this emotional collection of engaging and imaginative fiction. Many "what if..." questions are addressed in this volume that allow authors and readers alike to rewrite history, correcting perceived wrongs or tragedies ("Suppose They Gave a Peace..."), creating heroes where none existed before ("The Lucky Strike"), and exploring horrors best left to imaginations and late night readings ("We Could Do Worse"). Any fan of science fiction will enjoy these well-selected, well-ordered stories.

This is a 3-story anthology with nuclear war as a common theme. By far the best is Spinrad's entry, which (I think) is not available anywhere else. It's a hilarious tale of a pot-smoking Arab oil sheik bent on acquiring nukes to annihilate Israel, and an attendant power struggle between a screwball American president (a former used-car salesman) and a computer-animated corpse of the Soviet Communist Party Secretary General. All the comdey ingredients are there and Spinrad makes the best of them!

The short stories in this book will take your mind to places that you will never forget. The best part about this book is the quality of EVERY story of which there are about 12 or so (that's from memory so don't quote me on it). You will want to read the rest of the books in the series after reading this one! There is no doubt that the stories in this book fix the realm of science fiction firmly into the history of human literature.

This was the first "The Best of Robert Silverberg" ever published, and it was published right after this writer's most fertile period. It includes 10 stories, ranging from "Road to Nightfall" (1954) to the 1971 Nebula Award winning "Good News from the Vatican" (1971). The book has a foreword by Barry Malzberg, who gives a good review of the work, and the importance of Robert Silverberg up to that point. Robert Silverberg himself does an introduction to his stories, which were taken from at least seven different collections. Two of the stories -"Hawksbill Station" and "Nightwings"- were later expanded to succesfull novels, Nightings also won a Hugo Award as a short story. There is yet another award-winner included: "Passengers", winner of the 1969 Nebula Award. But it is up to yo, the reader, to decide whether the award-winning stories are indeed better than the seven who did not. To the reader who has read more from Silverberg it is to say whether these stories are indeed 'The Best' that Robert Silverberg produced over that period, because he had some nineteen (!) collections done up to that point and I for myself at least found several who I dearly missed in this one. A definitive "The Best of Robert Silverberg" over that period compiled by me however would have some 30-40 odd stories, just too much for the average 'The Best of'.

I buy every Robert Silverberg title I don't already own, and this one had a sort of surprise for me: I already had each and every story that is printed in this book. How come? This is an omnibus of the following excellent collections: "Unfamiliar Territory", "Capricorn Games" and "The Feast of St. Dionysus". My reason for keeping this copy are the interlaced story introductions by Robert Silverberg, telling the story behind the stories. If you don't already own these three titles, buy this one imediately. It was published in Britain as volume 3 of "The collected stories of Robert Silverberg" and there are as now at least 6 volumes published, who together provide a treasurebox of the best what Science Fiction stories can offer, especially when it goes together with the insights and retrospects of Mr. Silverberg himself.

Born With the Dead was a fast-paced, yet horribly slow. It left you feeling tired. When a work has that much effect, there's something to it. The Saliva Tree has brilliant use of dialogue. These people are just average people living in extraordinary cirucmstances; just what the core of science ficiton is. The aliens rather reminded me of truly evil Bunniculas, completely without innocencence. A great "alien invader" story. They are both outstanding pieces of literature, and I'm glad to have bought this Tor Double.

Silverberg does an excellent job at tracing the various dating techniques throughout history. He writes it in a somewhat adventurous way, that makes the reader eager to learn more. I wish he'd release a newer version that would cover some of the very latest techniques. This is a must read for anyone questioning the age of the earth or other archeological findings. He shatters the critics arguements that scientist are biased and use circular reasoning for dating methods. The correlation between independent measurements using diverse methods is truly astonishing.