The Short Story Thread

[Connavar]

"Pre-Persons" is one of the most rated PKD i have seen by fans stories it will be interesting to read it.

No matter how he pulls of the story, its always great with thought provoking stories,ideas. Thats why PKD is a special writer.

 

[Fried Egg]

"Pre-Persons" is one of the most rated PKD i have seen by fans stories it will be interesting to read it.

No matter how he pulls of the story, its always great with thought provoking stories,ideas. Thats why PKD is a special writer.

That surprises me because it really wasn't a very good story from a literary/entertainment perspective. No where near the best story in the collection. Still, it's not a story you're going to forget in a hurry and I guess that's a good thing...

 

[Connavar]

That surprises me because it really wasn't a very good story from a literary/entertainment perspective. No where near the best story in the collection. Still, it's not a story you're going to forget in a hurry and I guess that's a good thing...

The topic he writes about i think is mostly the reason its so rated. Plus PKD fans are so many,different.

Some think Androids novel is among his best while i think its low level,mid level PKD. Fun,good but nothing too strong literary,storytelling wise.

 

[jojajihisc]

The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang is his usual excellent short fiction. It's a story about virtual reality and artificial intelligences created within it. Chiang never seems to take the story the direction you think it might go and a lot of times nothing really spectacular happens, but by the time you get to the end you realize you've read something that was very carefully thought out and executed. I've only three or four stories of his left and then who knows when I'll read one again. Hopefully not long.

Other good short fiction I've read recently:

I'm Alive, I Love You, I'll See You in Reno - Vylar Kaftan
Is This Your Day to Join the Revolution? - Genevieve Valentine
Names for Water - Kij Johnson

 

[jojajihisc]

Ragnarok by Paul Park.

Post-apocalypse in free verse.

 

[slack]

Videotape - Don Delillo

The notion of amateur video being 'realer than real' or superreal is very interesting.

 

[thatollie]

I liked Felicity Shoulders' story in Asimov's Jan 2010 issue, Conditional Love. It was nominated for the Best Short Story Hugo and is available to read for free.

Conditional Love by Felicity Shoulders

 

[slack]

A couple by Orson Scott Card from his book Unaccompanied Sonata and Other Stories:

Quietus
Deep Breathing Exercises

Very interesting stories, both of them, but maybe they could have been fleshed out more.

 

[J-Sun]

Here's how not to read a collection: I bought Bruce Sterling's A Good Old-Fashioned Future as soon as it came out. IIRC, it took me years to get around to reading it and I somehow stopped two stories from the end, when the last three were loosely connected. More years went by, and I finally read "Bicycle Repairman" and "Taklamakan". Both won Hugo awards, incidentally. (The first, "Deep Eddy" didn't, but was nominated.)

This series would have been more fun in at least one regard if I'd read them when they were new and NAFTA was much higher in the public consciousness. The principle of the US and its constitution being superseded by para- (or un-)consitutional international treaties remains as relevant as ever, however.

"Bicycle Repairman" takes place in a sort slum that's on its way to regeneration from low-rent youthful idealistic types whose sociopolitical sensibilities vary, but many of whom tend towards a kind of anarchy or libertarianism. Sterling amusingly inverts Varley in that his jazzed future has people de-sexualizing themselves rather than trans-sexualizing themselves. It's a fascinating story with an excellent prose style - Sterling's crammed prose hitting on all cylinders. There's quite a bit of sardonic humor as well. It's every bit an award winner.

And it doesn't hold a candle to "Taklamakan". That story has as its main characters a unsexed "female" and a character who was a relatively minor participant (in foreground terms) of "Bicycle Repairman". They're both high-tech futuristic "Spiders" - extreme climbers on overdrive - who are working covert military ops as a sort of a lark. It's a way for them to get cool toys and execute cool "hacks" (these stories are steeped in an MIT sensibility). The stuff they find when they make their "intrusion" into an secret underground radiation waste dumping ground (nominally) and the things that happen are absolutely wild - this would have been most people epic novel or even trilogy. The tangibility and detail and incredible imagination make this a classic. There's a line in it where one character is talking to another about the insanely bizarre biotech self-generated designs of some things and how that's the only way it could be done and he says, "There's not enough money in the world to pay human brains to think like that," and I could imagine Sterling sitting at his data entry device, laughing maniacally.

(This echos some stuff he builds the later "Kiosk" around (not in this collection). It's an interesting variant on Dick's wholesale negative take on "autofac"-like things.)

"Deep Eddy" is the first story and the title character recurs mostly off-screen in the other two. It's international like the third and in the same quality ballpark as the others and, indeed, the whole collection is superb. Must-read SF. It's really strange to me that he wrote a Leggy Starlitz novel and there's a brilliant Leggy Starlitz story in here ("The Littlest Jackal" - with the earlier "Hollywood Kremlin" being in Globalhead) and, yet, he didn't write enough Eddy/Lyle/Pete stories to fill a collection or give one or more of them their own novel. But I'll gladly take whatever there is.

 

[J-Sun]

Um. I don't think I can be faulted for posting twice in a row if they're separated by two months.

Finished reading Leiber's The Night of the Wolf. The idea of this is that he took three novellas and a short story, retitled them to all include "Wolf" in the title, and arranged them, with brief introductory paragraphs, into a sort of future history of human insanity and war. He may well have revised the stories, themselves - I dunno.

The first, 1962's "The Creature from Cleveland Depths" (aka "The Lone Wolf" despite the "lone wolf" being married), seems to anticipate a really clunky blackberry or 5G phone or something. This ends up controlling every aspect of people's lives (do tell) and becoming sentient. However, the characters and initial narration are a bit off-putting.

Next comes a really frustrating story. 1960's "The Night of the Long Knives" (aka "The Wolf Pair" despite there ending up being a third character) takes place after a nuke war (one of these where we're supposed to believe anyone would survive). I feel like Gold Eagle books owes Leiber some money. The opening is extremely strong: it takes place in the Deathlands and has no dialog for the first two chapters of 24 pages, despite our guy meeting his girl. And they're both basically psychotic killers. This put me in mind of Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" (1969). Unfortunately, with the introduction of the third character in the third chapter and their taking off on an Adventure, the story takes a pretty good dive. Then it transmutes into a story of two warring high-tech post-Big War factions which is okay - better than the initial left turn - but not exactly the original story. And while the first section seemed to have an almost Budrys-like depth and complexity, the more Leiber has his characters talk about their murderous mania, the more it sounds like a hobby like chess and the more superficial or just wrong the psychology starts to seem (possibly very vague minor spoilers)

Spoiler

and Leiber lets a bit of his own stuff come through by making it literally an AA when they want to stop killing folks

(end semi-spoiler). I dunno - this is definitely worth reading but nowhere near as good as it seemed like it was going to be.

Next, the shortest story, 1944's "Sanity" (aka "Crazy Wolf") is interesting - I first read it as a random story in The Best of where it seemed excellent - if all but a handful are crazy, who's "right"? However, it ironically loses a lot of impact by being sandwiched amidst stories on basically the same thing, rather than coming like a bolt out of the blue.

It closes with 1950's "Let Freedom Ring" (aka "The Wolf Pack") which has a relatively early surreal meeting with an attractive woman that produces "You're All Alone"/The Sinful Ones vibes, but kind of loses that. This also lacks ultimately appealing characters and, frankly, just didn't make much sense to me.

I'm a fan of a lot of Leiber's work and I may hang on to this in order to re-read "The Night of the Long Knives" to see if I can make any more sense of its failings (or even come to see it as a success) but I can't really recommend this to anyone but fans, and not enthusiastically to them.

 

[JustPassingThrough]

I didn't even see this thread!

Most excellent. I read mostly short stories so I will post on here like fly's on rice!

 

[dask]

I read "Night of the Long Knives" a while back and was both entertained and frightened by it.

 

[J-Sun]

I read "Night of the Long Knives" a while back and was both entertained and frightened by it.

Cool - as I understand it, it's not a real famous story and I was afraid not many others here would have read it. I think your magazine and my book are the only places it exists. Neat cover, too. Kind of midway between abstract and literal but conveys the feel of the first part of the story. Didn't know it was a cover story (and it always gets me how magazines were able to stretch the truth ("book-length" if your book is 82 pages ) - even the book says it's composed of four novellas when one of them obviously isn't, so it's still stretching).

So do you think there's anything to my impressions, or am I just missing it? It was a compelling story with a lot of good stuff but I can't say it works overall for me - though I want it to, if that makes any sense. Though, if it's been too long for you to say, I get that.

 

[Connavar]

I have that Wolf collection by Leiber you are talking about but i cant seem to find it.
I have read only one of story of Leiber before and not really keen on trying him for real with a collection like this.

 

[dask]

Next comes a really frustrating story. 1960's "The Night of the Long Knives" (aka "The Wolf Pair" despite there ending up being a third character) takes place after a nuke war (one of these where we're supposed to believe anyone would survive). I feel like Gold Eagle books owes Leiber some money. The opening is extremely strong: it takes place in the Deathlands and has no dialog for the first two chapters of 24 pages, despite our guy meeting his girl. And they're both basically psychotic killers. This put me in mind of Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" (1969). Unfortunately, with the introduction of the third character in the third chapter and their taking off on an Adventure, the story takes a pretty good dive. Then it transmutes into a story of two warring high-tech post-Big War factions which is okay - better than the initial left turn - but not exactly the original story. And while the first section seemed to have an almost Budrys-like depth and complexity, the more Leiber has his characters talk about their murderous mania, the more it sounds like a hobby like chess and the more superficial or just wrong the psychology starts to seem (possibly very vague minor spoilers)

Spoiler

and Leiber lets a bit of his own stuff come through by making it literally an AA when they want to stop killing folks

(end semi-spoiler). I dunno - this is definitely worth reading but nowhere near as good as it seemed like it was going to be.

So do you think there's anything to my impressions, or am I just missing it? It was a compelling story with a lot of good stuff but I can't say it works overall for me - though I want it to, if that makes any sense. Though, if it's been too long for you to say, I get that.

Yeah, my impression mirrors yours in general though I tend not to read/analyze as deeply as you. Fritz Leiber is an author whose light never shone very brightly in the murky terrain of my personal preference. The big noise of THE BIG TIME faded with no trace of echo; GATHER, DARKNESS! did little more than that; my recollection of SHIPS TO THE STARS and THE MIND SPIDERS AND OTHER STORIES is, unfortunately, little more than these are titles of books I have read. Having said that, "Coming Attraction" is every bit the classic it is said to be so I know he has it in him. I came across "Long Knives" by chance. I was looking for post-holocaust stories in Clute/Nicholl's SF Encyclopedia and when they mentioned Lieber's "extremely savage" story I rushed to see if I had it. The sang-froid ruthless of the world this took place in was so well presented the story couldn't help going anywhere else but down with any new plot twist. So, yes, the story started high and gradually dwindled as you said, but not from any writing defect from Leiber but from my own reading tastes. To make a short story even longer, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend "Long Knives" to any one who enjoys bleak, hopeless, end of the world type visions.

 

[J-Sun]

I came across "Long Knives" by chance. I was looking for post-holocaust stories in Clute/Nicholl's SF Encyclopedia and when they mentioned Lieber's "extremely savage" story I rushed to see if I had it.

That's weird - I either never read that bit or forgot it. That same paragraph also mentions Budrys' False Night (which I have as Some Will Not Die - a revised version from 1978). I'm not actually a big post-holocaust fan as a sub-genre (at least, I don't seek them out directly) but if they're well done, I like them just as stories. So I may not know enough to recommend stuff but, just as a book, the Budrys is really good - I don't know if being a fan of the sub-genre would make it even better or if it might be a relatively tame example, so seem worse - but I thought I'd mention it. (Off-topic for this thread, though, as it's a novel.)

The sang-froid ruthless of the world this took place in was so well presented the story couldn't help going anywhere else but down with any new plot twist. So, yes, the story started high and gradually dwindled as you said, but not from any writing defect from Leiber but from my own reading tastes.

Interesting - I was thinking about this some more and came to a similar conclusion - I was thinking that the first part of the story could have made an excellent story if it had just gone on a little longer, but it'd be hard to get a novella out of it and I was thinking the last part would have been a fine adventure story and could have been a novella but that the two didn't mesh (only being held together by one plot(/character) element). IOW, I agree with you completely - the first part was really strong but didn't have much of anywhere else to go.

Fritz Leiber is an author whose light never shone very brightly in the murky terrain of my personal preference. The big noise of THE BIG TIME faded with no trace of echo; GATHER, DARKNESS! did little more than that; my recollection of SHIPS TO THE STARS and THE MIND SPIDERS AND OTHER STORIES is, unfortunately, little more than these are titles of books I have read. Having said that, "Coming Attraction" is every bit the classic it is said to be so I know he has it in him.

I have that Wolf collection by Leiber you are talking about but i cant seem to find it.
I have read only one of story of Leiber before and not really keen on trying him for real with a collection like this.

I think I actually like him more than you do, dask - he's either at the bottom of the top rank or the top of the next rank for me. But not at the top of the top for me, either. If he doesn't float your boat, though, then he doesn't. You've read most of the stuff that should do the trick. The only thing I could add is that The Wanderer is not a post-holocaust novel but is a disaster novel, so might be cool. And "You're All Alone"/The Sinful Ones (two different versions of one thing) just might be weird enough to work. Also, "Destiny Times Three" is another "complete novel" (like "Knives" and "Alone", i.e., a novella) that is a really cool alternate worlds story. If you've already read those or they don't do it for you, then Leiber's definitely not your guy.

(Well, I'm not a fantasy guy, yet like the Lankhmar stuff, but if you were a fantasy guy, you'd have to try that, also. But I don't think any of the three of us are, are we?)

Conn - did you mean you didn't want to read Leiber at all or just that you didn't want to start with The Night of the Wolf? Because I'd definitely recommend reading more than one story of Leiber's but I'd agree that NOTW isn't where anyone should start.

 

[dask]

Now I see it: I should have written "sang-froid ruthlessNESS." Wish I could think and type at the same time!
I have SOME WILL NOT DIE. If it's really good I'll slip in on the TBR fast track when my other books aren't looking. I also have YOU'RE ALL ALONE and THE SINFUL ONES. Is TSO a major rewrite or expansion of YAA or does it just use the same idea (nothing is said on the copyright page)?

 

[J-Sun]

Now I see it: I should have written "sang-froid ruthlessNESS." Wish I could think and type at the same time!

I knew what you meant - tyops happen.

I have SOME WILL NOT DIE. If it's really good I'll slip in on the TBR fast track when my other books aren't looking. I also have YOU'RE ALL ALONE and THE SINFUL ONES. Is TSO a major rewrite or expansion of YAA or does it just use the same idea (nothing is said on the copyright page)?

Wow, I name it, you got it. It's actually a more complicated history with TSO/YAA than just the two versions. The way I remember them (I unfortunately read both awhile ago and apart from each other) they have a lot of similarities and you'll definitely know you're reading the "same" thing, but they're very different at the same time - IOW, neither all new nor trivial revisions but between. I can't remember which I liked better, but I liked both.

This may be TMI but, as far as Leiber says in the back of the 1986 Baen reprint of TSO (if you don't have that one), in 1943 he began his third novel, aiming at 40K words, for Unknown but Unknown had to be shut down before he finished it. He eventually finished it anyway, after four years, at 75K, but it still hadn't sold by 1950, so he got it sold by rewriting it down to almost 40K as "You're All Alone". (Fantastic Adventures offered to publish it if he just cut it, but he apparently rewrote it, trying to recapture the original intent.) Eventually, he sold the book version to a publisher that changed it and "sexed it up" (sort of like what happened with van Vogt's The House That Stood Still aka The Mating Cry). But he'd signed away the rights and lost the original manuscript. He eventually got the rights back and reprinted it but had to revise some of what they'd done to it without being able to use the original manuscript. So there's actually four versions (1943-1947 manuscript, 1950 YAA, 1953 TSO, 1986 TSO), the first of which is lost.

As far as the Budrys, like I say, I don't know how good it would be to a post-holocaust aficionado and it's no Rogue Moon, but I'd say it was really good. It actually focuses more on the idea of rebuilding afterwards and the nature of man and mankind but it has plenty of taut, tough moments throughout and definitely starts out in intense collapse - unlike a nuclear deathlands, this is more a massive post-plague urban blight. Deathstreets.

-- Incidentally, I'd like to know about the nature of the revisions to the Budrys, myself. I know there are at least three versions of that one - a 1954 False Night, a revised apparently expanded 1961 SWND, and then a further revised 1978 SWND. It reads like an extremely good first novel and a fairly modern 1954 novel, so I guess the revisions must have been fairly substantial somewhere along the line, but I don't know. Particularly curious about what changed in '78.

 

[dask]

Here are the editions I have. Didn't know Baen had a newer edition than the Pocket Book. It'd be worth having just for the history. Always wanted to read the Budry's just for the cool cover. I checked my card catalog and unfortunately I don't have an old paperback copy FALSE NIGHT. Wish I did. Incidentally, I reacted to THE AMSIR AND THE IRON THORN pretty much like I did to "Long Knives" except more so. Started off stunningly good but then turned tepid without notice. Not sure what my problem was; should probably reread it and see if anything has changed. Whereas I still enjoyed "Knives" I can't say I truly did AMSIR.

 

[J-Sun]

Here are the editions I have. Didn't know Baen had a newer edition than the Pocket Book. It'd be worth having just for the history. Always wanted to read the Budry's just for the cool cover. I checked my card catalog and unfortunately I don't have an old paperback copy FALSE NIGHT. Wish I did. Incidentally, I reacted to THE AMSIR AND THE IRON THORN pretty much like I did to "Long Knives" except more so. Started off stunningly good but then turned tepid without notice. Not sure what my problem was; should probably reread it and see if anything has changed. Whereas I still enjoyed "Knives" I can't say I truly did AMSIR.

We have the same YAA and SWND but I haven't seen/didn't know about the Pocket TSO. (That's a pretty good cover - better than the Baen.) That prompted me to check the ol' SFE and the ISFDB
as something didn't make sense to me - why would it be reprinted in 1980 and then reprinted and revised only in 1986? But why would Leiber write an afterword for an '86 reprinting that wasn't different from a 1980 edition that he didn't write one for? - and the SFE/ISFDB says it was revised 1980, which must be the Pocket edition. (The ISFDB also has a description of the history which is better than mine.) But all my Baen edition says is "Copyright 1950 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co., Inc." and "A Baen Book" "First Baen printing, January 1986". And Leiber's afterword doesn't mention either 1980 or 1986 (I just assumed 1986 because that's what the copyright page said) and only refers to "the publisher" when talking about the new edition. I think your Pocket must have the afterword, too, and that's the first edition of the revised edition - the Baen's just a reprint, it seems. Though it seems like the Baen should legally have to say "Copyright 1950 Ziff-Davis; 1980 Fritz Leiber (or Pocket)" or something. Sorry for almost steering you wrong due to the lack of that.

Re: Amsirs, I've seen that in used bookstores a few times and, for some reason, have never gotten it - I didn't have it in my head that I'd never get it but I just didn't think I'd care for it for some reason. Based on what you say, maybe I was right.