1960s
11 books
- If you like your 1920s adventures earnest and unhurried, this delivers: Richard Chandos, freshly sent down from Oxford, ends up digging in shifts for treasure at the bottom of an Austrian well while Rose Noble's gang circles. The prose is mannered, almost courtly, which is half the charm.
- A breezy frontier yarn told by Walt, a teenage reporter covering his whole grim planet, where the sun stays up for a thousand hours and everyone hunts sea monsters for a living. Piper keeps it light and quick, and the town drunk turns out worth watching.
- You get Arcot, Morey, and Wade pushing their impossible ship into stranger dimensions, with Campbell piling on cosmic ideas faster than character development. It’s pulpy, talky, and scientifically dated, but if you enjoy old space opera’s reckless sense of scale, its wild speculations are good company.
- If you like your time travel scrappy rather than tidy, Ross Murdock stranded in an alien planet's past, with a Polynesian diver and two trained dolphins for company, is good fun. Norton keeps it fast and a little pulpy, and the veiled Foanna give it a nice eerie edge.
- Jack Holloway, a crusty old prospector, finds a small golden-furred creature in his shower stall, and suddenly the whole planet's fate hinges on whether it can be called a person. It's breezy and warm, half courtroom drama, and gentler than you'd expect from 1962 sci-fi.
- Brion Brandd wins a planet-wide contest of body and mind, and his prize is being dragged to a desert world where fanatics are about to get everyone nuked. It's fast, pulpy sixties Harrison, a puzzle dressed as an adventure, and the empathy angle gives it a nice odd streak.
- A revenge story that keeps outgrowing itself: Lucas Trask sets out to hunt the man who shot his bride, and somewhere between raids he accidentally starts rebuilding civilization on Tanith. Piper's more interested in politics and trade than laser battles, which is exactly why it works.
- You get a brisk, old-school frontier adventure through Shann Lantee’s eyes, with Warlock’s dangerous landscape and uneasy human dealings with its native people doing much of the work. The characters are sparely drawn, but the survival tension and strange planetary atmosphere stay with you.
- The Conscience of a Conservative non-fictionYou get a clear, combative window into mid-century American conservatism, with Goldwater arguing for limited government, states’ rights, and individual responsibility. Read it as political history more than settled wisdom, especially because its civil-rights chapter exposes the movement’s serious moral blind spots.
- Travis Fox wakes on an alien world with his memory scrambled back toward his Apache ancestors, and Norton takes that setup seriously, questions of who you are when your past is weaponized. Old-school pulp adventure on the surface, but thoughtful underneath, and it moves fast.
- Delany wrote this at nineteen, and it shows in the best way: a pulpy quest (a poet, a four-armed thief, a stolen jewel, a strange irradiated island) told in language that keeps going oddly lovely on you. Short, dreamlike, rough in spots, worth an afternoon.