My friend shadroe and I started up a local reading group for classic science ficion. We settled on the Classics of Science Fiction list to guide us, a compilation of several critical lists of the best and most important science fiction novels. While I consider myself a science fiction fan, I went through the list and checked off only about a dozen titles I'd read, out of almost two hundred.

Why so few? Because I studied English literature in college, and science fiction isn't really in the canon. You can often take a course on science fiction, but in one course you won't read enough novels to give you a solid foundation. And colleges don't generally offer more than one. So my fiction reading bandwidth was occupied with lots of non-scifi.

It's been a great journey for me. After the last year of reading almost nothing but strong scifi classics in my spare time, I have a new understanding of the history of the genre, and I feel like it's just barely a first glimpse. But it's already been such an amazing view, I'll be on this path for a while.

As we reached the end of our last reading cycle (all the members of the group pick a book from the list, and we read one every three weeks before we pick another batch), I read far enough ahead that I decided to independently read the three volumes of Asimov's anthology Before the Golden Age, stories that appeared in the magazines when Asimov was growing up in the '30s. I'm halfway through the collection now, and it's a particular eye-opener. I kind of knew science fiction magazines were more important in the early days of science fiction than they've been in my lifetime, but it's a new experience to actually read some of the best short stories from the early days. It's like I've seen the mountains for my whole life, I'm finally trekking out to climb some of them, and I'm finding the beauty of the valleys and rivers below them. I've already made a point of picking up some of the other short-story collections on our list, Campbell's 1952 Astounding Science Fiction Anthology, Conklin's The Best of Science Fiction, and Adventures in Time and Space. I'd like to read all of these before I get to the new-wave Dangerous Visions anthologies.