Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Sands of Time by P. Schuyler Miller P. Schuyler Miller. Peter Schuyler Miller (born February 21, 1912 in Troy , New York ; died October 13, 1974 on Blennerhassett Island , West Virginia ) was an American science fiction writer and critic. contents. Miller's parents were the chemist Philip Schuyler Miller and the teacher Edith May, née Figgis. He grew up in the Mohawk Valley in New York State, which established his lifelong interest in the Iroquois culture and archaeological legacy . In later years he was a dedicated amateur archaeologist, contributing to the anthropological division of the Carnegie Museum , the Eastern States Archeological Society , the Van Epps- Hartley Chapter of the New York Archeological Association , the Society for American Archeology, and the Society for Pennsylvania Archeology , for their journal Pennsylvania Archaeologist he was interim editor. When Miller died in 1974, aged only 62, he was on a field trip to a Fort Ancient culture archaeological site west of Parkersburg , West Virginia. Miller was a good student, gave the graduation speech of his year at the age of 15 and then studied chemistry at Union College in Schenectady , where he graduated with a Masters in 1932 . He then worked as a laboratory assistant at the General Electric Research Institute in Schenectady until 1934 . From 1937 to 1952 he worked in adult education and public relations at the Schenectady Museum and eventually became its director. From 1952 to 1974 he was a technical writer for the Fisher Scientific Company in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania . From his youth, Miller was an avid reader of science fiction, starting with the stories of Jules Verne . In August 1924 he bought his first SF magazine, an issue of Hugo Gernsback's Science and Invention , and was henceforth a loyal reader of pulp magazines such as Argosy and Weird Tales, and later of Astounding . He began contributing to the early fanzines , became a member of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA), corresponded with Robert E. Howard , the creator of Conan the Cimmerian , for whom he and his friend John D. Clark wrote a “résumé " Which appeared in Howard's The Hyborean Age in 1938 . However, he was not satisfied with reading science fiction and being an active member of the SF fandom of the 1930s, but began writing SF stories himself. In 1930 he won the Air Wonder competition advertised by Gernsback, which was endowed with 150 dollars in gold - a tremendous sum for Miller, then 18, and not just for him, which is why there were over 500 entries. The story, The Red Plague , was of course also printed in Wonder Stories and Gernsback said it was one of the best stories that has appeared in his magazines so far. Over the next 20 years Miller published around 50 stories and a novel, Genus Homo (1950, German as Die neue Herrherr ), which he wrote together with Lyon Sprague de Camp , in which the apes have evolved in a distant future and now the Rulers of the world, an idea that was later taken up in Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes . When science fiction began to appear less in pulp magazines and more as paperback and eventually as a hardback book from the 1950s onwards, Miller remained an avid reader and buyer. However, he no longer had to buy a lot, but received review copies, because from 1945 he had started to write SF reviews for Astounding , which from 1951 appeared regularly under the title The Reference Library . By the end of his life he wrote hundreds of book reviews, practically every SF title worth reading during this time was competently discussed by him, although he usually did not make too great claims, but he was still considered reliable. When his sister left a large part of Miller's library to the Carnegie Museum after his death , a catalog was created and published which contained 3,500 volumes excluding the paperbacks, which was another 4,600 volumes. Miller was honored with the Special Convention Award as best critic at the Worldcon 1963 in Baltimore . In 1975 he was posthumously awarded the Locus Award for his work as an SF critic . He is credited with coining the term Hard-SF for scientifically and technically oriented science fiction. The Sands of Time by P. Schuyler Miller. Anthopology 101: The Best of Time and Space. By Bud Webster. For me, as with many people of my generation (give or take a few years), the primary source for science fiction and fantasy was the library, both school and public. My parents didn't read it; my mother read mysteries and my father read only the daily paper, and my older sibs wouldn't begin reading sf or fantasy until much, much later, so I didn't have sf books or magazines around the house. But the library was sanctuary for me. Nobody would chase me, nobody would yell at me, and best of all, nobody there would rag me for reading books. I'd have stayed there forever if I could have. It was quiet, cool, and it's where I became addicted to books, both as artifacts and because of the content. I was probably all of nine years old when I first found the thick, heavy collections of stories edited by Conklin and Healy & McComas for the first time. But there they were, that pair of behemoths: Adventures in Time and Space (ed. Raymond J. Healy and Francis McComas, Random House 1946) and The Best of Science Fiction (ed. Groff Conklin, Crown 1946). They changed my life, and without a doubt altered the way I read science fiction, and I wasn't the only one. For decades after their initial publication, those two books were not just the cornerstones of any library sf section, but supporting walls. They were checked out over and over, rebound again and again, replaced and set out once more to be pored over again. One of the most significant reasons these two books are so important in the field of science fiction is that they contain between hard covers for the first time stories, most of them now considered classics of the era, that would otherwise have been almost impossible to obtain. Pulp magazines, from which the vast majority of the stories came, were never intended to be kept, but thrown away. They were printed on the cheapest paper, barely bound between thin covers, and as soon as the next issue hit the stands the old numbers disappeared, covers stripped, into trash heaps. Other anthologies had preceded, of course. J. Berg Esenwein's Adventures to Come (McLoughlin Brothers, 1937) was the first, although it had no measurable affect on the literature. The Other Worlds (Funk, 1941), edited by Phil Stong, author of State Fair , took at least half its content from Weird Tales ; Stong was critical of most magazine science fiction, calling it "pablum of reiterated nonsense." Donald A Wollheim edited two; The Pocket Book of Science Fiction (Pocket Books, 1943), which was not only the first paperback science fiction anthology but the first such anthology to lay claim to being science fiction, and Portable Novels of Science (Viking, 1945). But as important as these were, none of them would have the impact that the Conklin and Healy & McComas books would have. Consider: two major hard-cover publishing houses commissioned large and representative anthologies of science fiction, something that had never been done before on this scale. Even the fan presses hadn't yet collected pulp stories by different authors in a single volume. This was an open admission by the publishers that they no longer considered science fiction to be pulp trash, but a marketable and viable literature worthy of preservation. So, how did they happen? I've gone into detail about Conklin's entry into publishing elsewhere, so I won't repeat it here. Suffice it to say that he wrote his first book (on lending libraries) in 1934 and stayed in publishing freelance from then until his death in 1968. Although Conklin had read Wells' Men Like Gods in 1924 and had gleefully read his roommate's collection of old Argosy and All-Story pulps with their "scientific romances" by Garritt P. Service, Austin Hall and Merritt in the early '30s, he didn't become what he termed "an earnest devotee" of modern sf until 1944. That was the year he proposed The Best of Science Fiction to Crown Books. Healy and McComas met through Anthony Boucher sometime in the 1930s, most likely because all three were active in (gasp!) socialist politics. McComas, in fact, was made to feel unwelcome at his job with a major oil company because he attempted to unionize the office workers. In 1941 he began a series of jobs in publishing, most notably two years at Random House. They pitched the idea to Random House president Bennet Cerf, and were given the go-ahead. The race was on. Obviously, since they were assembling the anthologies more or less simultaneously, there's no story overlap; this is, of course, one of the reasons they complement each other so well. It also means that, since Healy & McComas got there first, they were able to nail the cream of the Astounding crop before Conklin had a chance to pick. Nevertheless, the Conklin is not an inferior book because of it; Conklin was perfectly capable of finding quality work among the vast number of pulp stories that were left. Let's look at why these two workhorses have outlasted so many others. First and most important, the editors knew what they were looking for and how to get it.