James Nicoll Reviews

Damon Knight’s Orbit anthology series was published between 1966 and 1980. Over fourteen years, Knight edited twenty-one volumes (which I own), as well as one volume featuring the best stories from Orbit (which I don’t own because what would be the point when I already had the stories in question). Offering stories that ranged from avant-garde to more standard fare, Orbit came to be viewed as suspiciously intellectual by some of the grumpier SF authors, with consequences that will be seen when the relevant volumes are reviewed. 

Time is not science fiction’s friend. It can be particularly hard on cutting-edge works, whose social views may age badly while the aspects that were ground-breaking at the time were so widely copied in the following decades later it’s now hard to understand the initial praise. Will Orbit stories now reflect quaint values? Will what was then new seem ho-hum? I sure hope the stories are (mostly) neither troglodytic nor passe, because I have agreed to review all twenty-one volumes. 

Onward!