If you relished how The History of Science Fiction strides from Mary Shelley through Gernsback and Campbell to the New Wave, cyberpunk, and global SF, you’ll love Aldiss’s panoramic tour. It revisits many of the same milestones Roberts unpacks—Shelley’s foundational spark, Wells and Verne’s machinery of ideas, the magazine era’s gatekeeping, and the shock of Moorcock’s and Ballard’s New Wave—while adding Aldiss’s own sharp, often contrarian insights about where the field came from and why it keeps reinventing itself.

Roberts’s dry asides about Gernsbackian prose, Campbellian certainties, and the genre’s habit of sending stoic heroes into absurd situations suggest you’ll appreciate Adams’s deadpan demolition of SF’s tropes. If you grinned when Roberts skewered earnest spacefaring optimism or nodded at his New Wave anecdotes, Arthur Dent’s improbable escape from Earth, the Babel fish’s "proof" of God’s nonexistence, and Zaphod’s gleeful nihilism will hit the same satirical sweet spot.

If the straight-ahead timeline in Roberts’s book—from Amazing Stories and Gernsback to Campbell’s Astounding—was your favorite throughline, Ashley’s meticulous chronicle is a treasure. You’ll get the day-by-day feel for editorial shifts Roberts highlights (Gernsback’s didactic gadgets, Campbell’s hardening of standards), plus deep context on authors he name-checks—like E. E. "Doc" Smith and C. L. Moore—as the magazine ecosystem that birthed modern SF takes shape issue by issue.

Loved how Roberts pivots from plot summary to argument—linking Wells’s scientific romances to later dystopias, or tracing how cyberpunk reframed New Wave concerns? This collection delivers that same heady payoff. Essays unpack many of the nodes Roberts discusses—utopias and dystopias, feminist SF after Le Guin and Butler, space opera’s resurgence—so you can drill deeper into the ideas behind the historical beats you enjoyed.

If Roberts’s chapters got you pondering what SF actually does—from Wells’s thought experiments to the New Wave’s inner-space and the allegorical edge in writers like Lem and the Strugatskys—this book turns those musings into a framework. Csicsery-Ronay dissects SF’s signature moves (estrangement, technologiés du merveilleux, world-building as argument) so the patterns Roberts illustrates with examples—from Shelley to cyberpunk—snap into philosophical focus.