The Definitive 1950s Science Fiction Reading Challenge

By James Wallace Harris, Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Over at Worlds Without End, they routinely offer reading challenges for people who use their science fiction book database. My post “The Defining Science Fiction Books of the 1950s” inspired their page, “The Defining Science Fiction Books of the 1950s” which displays the books from the list in their database format, nicely illustrated by book covers. You can join and tag books you own, want to read, have read, or want to buy and read. You’ll need to sign up and set a password, but that’s no big deal.

World Without End has collected many award list and best-of book lists, so it’s a great way to find outstanding science fiction books to read.

If you click on “Roll-Your-Own” image, you’ll be taken to a list of Reading Challenges.

Then look for this icon.

After you sign up, you can always go directly here, where you can see a list of members in the challenge, and which books they are reading or have read. The challenge is to read one book from each year 1950-1959 from the Defining List of 1950s SF. Look through the years to select each book you want. Clicking on the cover will allow you to mark the book read, reading or unread, and you can check to use it for the challenge.

The books go in the list 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. So if you want the books to read 1950-1959, left to right, you’ll need to enter all 10 starting with the 1959 first, and go reverse order years. Otherwise, if you add them one year at a time, the final list will read 1959-1950. Since I don’t want to commit what book I’ll read for each year until I read them, I’m entering in reverse order.

This is a fun reading challenge for those people who love classic science fiction. The 1950s were when science fiction book publication ramped up, and many of the classic stories from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s were reprinted in hardcover and paperback. I started 1950 by rereading The Martian Chronicles, which were short stories Bradbury wrote in the late 1940s, but collected together to create a fix-up novel of related tales. I listened to an audiobook edition read by Stephen Hoye, and it was excellent. The characters sound like I’m listening to a 1940s movie.

There is also a forum at the WWE site for discussing the books in the challenge.

If you love old SF, and want to see what other people are reading and saying about these old books, give it a try.  After the 1950s are finished, DrNefario, the creator of the challenge, plans to create one for the 1960s.

JWH