Fantastic Imaginings
A Journey through 3,500 Years of Imaginative Writing, Comprising Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction
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Fantastic Imaginings
Buy Now for £16.99
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Narrated by:
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Stefan Rudnicki
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David Burney
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Scott Brick
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Cassandra Campbell
About this listen
Collected here are the stories, poems, and religious writings that preceded and helped form the science fiction and fantasy genres. The collection explores the key imaginative roots and their later literary permutations. The author list alone reads like a literary who’s who and includes many writers not primarily known for their forays into the fantastic. Organized by topic rather than simple chronology, this volume allows the listener to trace the history of robots, aliens, and apocalypses up to some of their most recent manifestations.
Topic chapters and represented authors include "Transformers" (Card, Asimov, Rossetti), "Shocking Futures" (Swift, More), and "Traveling Fools" (Carol, Burroughs, McCaffrey). This definitive collection of science fiction and fantasy sources illustrates how earlier generations imagined the future.
©2004 2009 by Stefan Rudnicki (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.This is not at all a global or real historical survey of fantasy themes, as I was hoping from the description. It's mainly American, a little European, and mostly 20th century, with a sprinkling of earlier stuff. On the theme of 'Pan', for instance, there's four or five modernish short stories and just one tiny snippet from The Bacchae.
It leans heavily towards not-exactly-timeless stories that sound as though they're drawn from pulp magazines-- not a bad thing! as I'd come across hardly any of these before and they're generally good fun and read with spirit. Still, they're not towering masterpieces by any means and there's about twenty too many of the nymph-like, nagging and/or drippy women typical of the genre which gets a bit grating.
Though I would love to hear a real anthology of the historic roots of modern genre fiction, I can't mark down this audiobook for not being what I want it to be. Four stars, mostly pretty good stories excellently read.
This badly needs a table of contents available somewhere, there's dozens of stories and good luck remembering who wrote what as the introductions fly past.
Fun Pulp Anthology
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