Arkham Sampler, The Seventeen Basic SF Titles


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Arkham Sampler was a quarterly fantasy and horror magazine, edited by August Derleth, that ran eight issues beginning Winter, 1948. The Winter, 1949, issue was devoted to SF, and includes results of a survey, conducted by Derleth, of twelve writers, editors, and critics for their choices of "basic science fiction titles". Results are reproduced here from Maxim Jakubowski & Malcolm Edwards' The SF Book of Lists (Berkley, 1983), page 173.

Ranked: Yes

Titles Cited: 17

Publication: Arkham Sampler, Winter, 1949

  1. H. G. Wells, Seven Famous Novels by H.G. Wells (Knopf, 1934)
  2. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Chatto & Windus, 1932)
  3. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (Methuen, 1930)
  4. Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas, eds., Adventures in Time and Space (Random House , 1946)
  5. A. E. van Vogt, Slan (Arkham House, 1946)
  6. H. G. Wells, The Short Stories of H.G. Wells (Ernest Benn , 1927)
  7. August Derleth, ed., Strange Ports of Call (Pellegrini Cudahy, 1948)
  8. S. Fowler Wright, The World Below (W. Collins Sons, 1929)
  9. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World (Hodder and Stoughton, 1912)
  10. William Sloane, To Walk the Night (Farrar and Rinehart, 1937)
  11. Olaf Stapledon, Sirius (Secker & Warburg, 1944)
  12. Philip Wylie, Gladiator (Knopf, 1930)
  13. John W. Campbell, Jr., Who Goes There? (Shasta, 1948)
  14. Groff Conklin, ed., The Best of Science Fiction (Crown, 1946)
  15. Erle Cox, Out of the Silence (Vidler, 1925)
  16. Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (Methuen, 1937)
  17. John Taine, Before the Dawn (Williams & Wilkins, 1934)

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