![the shining blade of leibowitz the shining blade of leibowitz](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MWzM_fTlo8s/maxresdefault.jpg)
I also want to mention that YA and children’s adventures of this era are incredible! Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon, Hergé’s Tintin in Tibet and The Calculus Affair and The Red Sea Sharks, Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix the Gaul, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, C.S. Not that there’s anything wrong with rarified and self-conscious.
![the shining blade of leibowitz the shining blade of leibowitz](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wF3RIT69zhw/maxresdefault.jpg)
Yet they’re not so self-conscious as New Wave science fiction and fantasy the pleasure they offer to the reader is less rarified and self-conscious than what was to come. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and Michael Moorcock’s The Stealer of Souls already contain New Wave elements. Dick’s Time Out of Joint and The Man in the High Castle, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan and Cat’s Cradle, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, J.G. The apex of Cold War paranoia coincided with the apex of the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction and Fantasy - by 1963, the New Wave era of these genres was visible on the horizon. Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword, Philip K. MacDonald wrote some of the best crime novels of all time. It was also a great era for caper adventures: Between 19, Richard Stark, Jim Thompson, Donald Hamilton, Lionel White, Ed McBain, Eric Ambler, Patricia Highsmith, Andrew Garve, and John D. The Golden Age of adventure was in the rearview mirror, during the Fifties, but Alistair MacLean, Helen MacInnes, Geoffrey Household, and newcomers Lionel Davidson and Len Deighton, did some of their best work during these years. straightforward combat), is a favorite of General David Petraeus’s. PS: Jean Lartéguy’s The Centurions, whose context is the complexity of guerrilla warfare and insurgency (vs. In contrast to Bond’s rococo thrills, Graham Greene, and John le Carré gave us morally ambiguous - yet suspenseful, exciting - espionage adventures. I enjoyed these books as an adolescent, but find them unreadable now. No, Goldfinger, For Your Eyes Only, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Fleming’s first Bond book, Casino Royale, appeared in the cusp year of 1953 before 1964, he’d publish Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds Are Forever, From Russia, with Love, Dr. JOSH GLENN’S *BEST ADVENTURES* LISTS: BEST 250 ADVENTURES OF THE 20TH CENTURY | 100 BEST OUGHTS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST RADIUM AGE (PROTO-)SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TEENS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TWENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST THIRTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST GOLDEN AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FORTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FIFTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SIXTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST NEW WAVE SCI FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SEVENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST EIGHTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST DIAMOND AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST NINETIES ADVENTURES | NOTES ON 21st-CENTURY ADVENTURES. I hope that the information and opinions below are helpful to your own reading please let me know what I’ve overlooked. Although it remains a work in progress, and is subject to change, this BEST ADVENTURES OF THE FIFTIES list complements and supersedes the preliminary “Best Fifties Adventure” list that I first published, here at HILOBROW, in 2013. This page lists my 100 favorite adventures published during the cultural era known as the Fifties (1954–1963, according to HILOBROW’s periodization schema).