Vintage Treasures: New Tales of Space and Time, edited by Raymond J. Healy
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Raymond J. Healy is one of the most important editors in the history of science fiction. Although he has a scant four books to his credit, he did as much to popularize and establish the field as editors with dozens more. His first book, Adventures in Time and Space (1946), edited with J. Francis McComas, is arguably the most important SF anthology of the Twentieth Century. Although it wasn’t the first true SF anthology (that honor belongs to Donald A. Wollheim’s The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction, 1943), it was enormously successful, and that success paved the way for the SF reprint anthology market as we know it today.
Before Healy and McComas, no major publisher would take a risk on the unproven genre of science fiction, which at the time was the province of low-paying pulp magazines. Adventures in Time and Space, a massive 1,013-page survey volume which reprinted the best early science fiction from Astounding Science Fiction and other magazines, found its way into libraries and schools across the country, and remained in print for decades. Its success virtually created the SF reprint anthology, which brought countless writers into permanent editions for the first time, and introduced them to a host of new readers. In 1952 the readers of Astounding/Analog voted Adventures in Time and Space the All-Time Best Book, beating out Slan, The Green Hills of Earth, and The Martian Chronicles.
After his enormous success with Adventures in Time and Space, Healy made one more major innovation. Instead of filling his next book with reprints, he bought brand new stories from the top writers in the field — and in the process invented the original science fiction anthology. The result was New Tales of Space and Time (1951). He did it again three years later with 9 Tales of Space and Time (1954). Both books were successful… and needless to say, highly influential, spawning thousands of imitators through the decades.
