No, I haven’t given up on this challenge, but I have had to put it on hold due to time restrictions.

I’m going to relaunch it sometime in January or early February.  There are some things related to my wife’s cancer and my job that could interfere with restarting, so I’m not sure of the exact start date.

I’m going to modify the challenge a bit and focus initially on two anthologies.  One will be Before the Golden Age, edited by Isaac Asimov.  The other is Science Fiction of the 30’s, edited by Damon Knight.

The Asimov anthology is considerably longer, and he broke the book up into years, with autobiographical essays between the stories.  Knight, on the other hand, has divided his book into three sections that are basically Beginning, Middle, and End, although his terminology is a little different.  In both books, there are multiple stories per each section.

There’s also very little overlap between the two books.  So here’s what I’m going to do.  I’m going to read all the stories in a section and write a single post about them.  This means, of course or at least of course for those who can do math, that I will be posting more about Before the Golden Age than I will about Science Fiction of the 30’s.

I’ll also try to compare and contrast the two editors’ tastes.  We’ll see how well that works.

I read both of these anthologies decades years ago.  I’m pretty sure I was in 8th or 9th grade when I read BtGA, because I can still remember the second hand shop where I bought it.  (That was a marvelous place, full of books by authors I had only heard about or only read a short story by, probably in a Robert Silverberg anthology in the junior high library.)  I’m sure it was later in high school, possibly college or even early graduate school, when I read Science Fiction of the 30’s.

I know I greatly  enjoyed both books, and they both had a lasting impact on my reading tastes, especially the Asimov collection.  So that will be one of my projects at the beginning of the year.