The Short Story Thread

[J-Sun]

More . I said in the Pohl thread that I had In the Problem Pit (1976) in the TBR. Turns out it was a TBRR - the first story seemed so familiar I did some checking and it looks like I did read this collection in April '01. Since I was enjoying the first story and since I wanted to make sure I'd really read the whole collection, I kept on.

It's an odd collection - he'd collected five 70s stories in his tenth collection (1972's Gold at the Starbow's End) and had just had The Best of Frederik Pohl (1975) come out, selecting from his first nine collections. So his eleventh collection does both, collecting three post-Starbow stories (and two articles) for the first time and going back over the first nine collections to reprint seven more older stories. My favorites show that the TBO missed some things but that the mix could have profitably been more newer stories and fewer reprints.

My favorite is probably "To See Another Mountain" (1959) which has the then-40 year old (and now 93, I think) Pohl writing powerfully and convincingly from the POV of a 95 year old scientist who is being treated by a psychiatrist. The story goes interesting places from there but I don't want to say too much. I also particularly liked "In the Problem Pit" (1973), involving a very special sort of think tank, even if it is a "very early-70s was just the very late-60s" kind of tale, and "I Remember a Winter" (1972) about which even Pohl says "I thought it was science fiction, but I wasn't at all sure anyone else would. So I sent it to Damon Knight for an opinion. He never said whether he thought it was sf or not, but he did publish it in Orbit." I don't think citing Damon Knight makes for a very compelling argument on the science fiction score. I personally fail to see how it's science fiction, though it may well be "speculative" philosophical fiction but, whatever it is, it's pretty good.

I'd also give honorable mentions, in that I liked them or significant aspects of them, to "Let the Ants Try" (1949), which is your usual time-travel-story-with-a-twist, which I usually don't like but, despite the inevitable logical difficulties, this has a sardonic something extra; "What to Do Until the Analyst Comes" (1956) about the guy who can't partake of "Cheery-Gum", which is kind of like the ultimate anti-depressant; and "Some Joys Under the Star" (1973), which is a whacked-out tale of galactic conflict, crazy earthlings, and a happy-ray gone wrong, told with a kind of Douglas Adams-ish juxtaposition of the cosmic and trivial and with its happy relation of profound tragedies.

There's also a one page intro about the book, a three page outro about SF generally, and a nice eleven page article on the Golden Ages of Campbell and Gold/Boucher.

Like I've said elsewhere, whether I remember something doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the quality of a thing. Before (re)reading this, I had completely forgotten I'd already read it, though most of the stories did become at least vaguely familiar once I got into them but, while this isn't the greatest collection since sliced bread, it is a very good one and recommended.

 

[j d worthington]

"A Deskful of Girls" uses the Chagewar concept of the "ghostgirls" which are kept for the entertainment of the warriors who find themselves in the stations, one of which forms the base for the novel The Big Time. I vaguely recall other connections to the set, but it has been a very long time since i read Changewar, and would have to go back through the story again to refresh my memory....

nomadman: If you've not read The Big Time (or at least some of the other Changewar tales), you're in for a treat.....


Extollager: On which? The Lovecraft is fairly common knowledge; though some libraries have managed to hold onto their copies, there are always copies which go "missing" only to later turn up in sales of someone's private collection. Ellison's work gets stolen both by fans and by those who object to it, and a lot of libraries have had the same sort of experience here they do with HPL. The central library here, for instance, once had an extensive Ellison collection, but it has been whittled down to a very tiny handful... and not through the usual routes of damage or not circulating enough to take up shelf space....

 

[J-Sun]

"A Deskful of Girls" uses the Chagewar concept of the "ghostgirls" which are kept for the entertainment of the warriors who find themselves in the stations, one of which forms the base for the novel The Big Time.

Okay - that still sounds pretty thin, but I guess it'd qualify to connect them. I think I recall the core of the novel, but I'm not recalling that ghostgirls also featured in it. Thanks for that - I'll keep an eye out whenever I re-read them. I also need to watch more carefully for the "When the Change-Winds Blow" connections. The thematic connections, at least, in that one are obvious but the explicit history/terms/gimmicks that specifically connect it also escaped me, IIRC. But the others that are usually attributed to the series are clearly Snakes'n'Spiders stories.

nomadman: If you've not read The Big Time (or at least some of the other Changewar tales), you're in for a treat.....

Agreed - I think the novel may be the best of them, but I especially like "The Oldest Soldier" and they're all pretty good.

 

[nomadman]

"A Deskful of Girls" uses the Chagewar concept of the "ghostgirls" which are kept for the entertainment of the warriors who find themselves in the stations, one of which forms the base for the novel The Big Time. I vaguely recall other connections to the set, but it has been a very long time since i read Changewar, and would have to go back through the story again to refresh my memory....

Thanks for the background. Still, I think A Deskful... would be a better companion piece to that particular novel, as none of those elements was at all clear on their own.

nomadman: If you've not read The Big Time (or at least some of the other Changewar tales), you're in for a treat.....

I'm actually planning on reading The Big Time very shortly, after I've finished my current reads (Fleming's Casino Royale and Zelazny's The Dream Master).

 

[Fried Egg]

I've just finished "The Forest", the opening story in Laird Barron's "Occultation" collection. Launched back into Barron's grim, crawling chaos vision of reality with a bang. Great stuff.

 

[J-Sun]

Finished Philip K. Dick's Collected Stories, Vol.4. My favorites were "Autofac", about the automated factories running wild after a war; "Captive Market", about commerce at its finest; "The Minority Report", a kind of semi-coherent van Vogtian thriller; and "The Days of Perky Pat", in which Martian careboys drop supplies to altruistically keep the ruined human race alive and adults play with dolls to remind themselves of the "ol-days" before the war and children play in the ruins, hunting mutant critters.

Oddly, all my favorites were re-reads, from one place or another, except "Captive Market", though I didn't like "Perky Pat" when I read it the first time mumblety-mumble years ago - I did the second and now third time.

Other stories of note were "The Unreconstructed M" which wasn't quite a success, but was interesting; "Waterspider" which is a really interesting piece about Poul Anderson being abducted by time travelers and drops more great SF names than you can shake a stick at and seems to very accurately characterize them, much to my surprise; "What the Dead Men Say", which seems to long anticipate some of Dick's goofy last works with its all-powerful voice from heaven (or is it?) motif; and "Oh, to Be a Blobel" which trips all over its symbolic feet but is interesting anyway.

But, actually, all but a few are interesting enough to read, even if I wouldn't put them in a "Best of" or anything. I found "Orpheus with Clay Feet" too close to "Waterspider" to be necessary though it's okay in a minor way taken by itself. I didn't like "Stand-by" at all and he actually wrote a sequel to it which was better but still not needed ("What'll We Do with Ragland Park?"). The other seven were at least mediocre.

I do notice that a lot of people read all 40-some novels of Dick and dozens of books on him and some of those even read all the collected stories. I have to say that, based on the last few novels (one of which I did like) and my reaction to this volume of the collected stories (even though I liked several of them) that I'm about burned out on PKD and my 10/15 novels and Collected Stories volumes are plenty. (I've got one of each still to read.) He, more than most writers, creates stories (of whatever length) out of a reusable cluster of parts and I feel very familiar with the parts even if I haven't read all the possible permutations. And I couldn't recommend this collection except as part of the whole thing, though I definitely do recommend at least the four I singled out.

 

[J-Sun]

And now for something completely different...

I read John Campbell's The Planeteers and re-read the other side of the Ace double (which I'd previously had as a tiny single), The Ultimate Weapon.

The Planeteers are five linked stories about Penton and Blake exploring the solar system and hardly destroying anything, unlike Campbell's usual intergalactic apocalypses. Hard to pick my favorite - can't go wrong with the first one which, while pulpy, is nowhere near as pulpy as it sounds: "The Brain Stealers of Mars". It's not like that high-falutin' Star Trek episode, "Spock's Brain" - Martians aren't literally stealing brains, but they are telepathic and thus can pilfer things from the brains of others. There were aspects of the 3rd and 4th ("The Immortality Seekers", "The Tenth World") that maybe make those stick out more than the other two. "The Double Minds" (#2) is just kind of an action story that doesn't have much else and he might have been getting a little worn out with "The Brain Pirates" (#5) which is just as metaphorical as the first. And then The Ultimate Weapon is either a novella or just clocks in at 40K words to be a 106 page novel (123 when by itself in a later edition) - a story of aliens from an unpleasant sun liking ours better. It does a great job of painting a desperate super-science war of attrition as the aliens slowly conquer the solar system but then kind of collapses in magic and some stuff I can't get into without spoilers.

Anyway - not exactly required reading but fun if you like that sort of thing.

-- Hm. Apparently TUW is 33K words, so it is a novella. I knew it was borderline but it sure seemed closer than that. And it's available for free at Gutenberg. Hard to beat free, though it's not his best.

 

[Nerds_feather]

a recent-ish story i really liked was "sultan of the clouds" by geoffrey landis

 

[Extollager]

I do notice that a lot of people read all 40-some novels of Dick and dozens of books on him and some of those even read all the collected stories. I have to say that, based on the last few novels (one of which I did like) and my reaction to this volume of the collected stories (even though I liked several of them) that I'm about burned out on PKD and my 10/15 novels and Collected Stories volumes are plenty.

Being a PKD completist isn't for me. I've found some of his writing (e.g. Galactic Pot-healer) unfinishable, even though I have read quite a few of the short stories and about eight of the novels.

 

[J-Sun]

a recent-ish story i really liked was "sultan of the clouds" by geoffrey landis

Yep, I really liked that one, too.

Being a PKD completist isn't for me. I've found some of his writing (e.g. Galactic Pot-healer) unfinishable, even though I have read quite a few of the short stories and about eight of the novels.

I finished it, but didn't like it, either. Sliding a little OT here, but I've actually had reasonably good luck with his novels - I think the only ones I actively disliked were GPH and The Zap Gun, while I read Radio Free Albemuth a zillion years ago and recall disliking it. And then, despite Dr. Bloodmoney being one of his Big Classics, I didn't like it either, though it's easily the best of the four. I think I liked all the rest (to widely varying degrees) but the problem is that, even when I like them, I find myself liking them for similar reasons and disliking the same elements in them. I don't think there are many more I'd "like" even if they were "good". And, to get back on topic more, I certainly won't be getting rid of my Collected Stories and I doubt any compilation would match my list of favorites but in retrospect (almost - one more to go) a good comprehensive selection would have been sufficient though nothing that actually exists looks quite right.

 

[Fried Egg]

Sometimes you get completely blown away by a short story and that's just happened to me after reading "Incentive" by Brian Aldiss in his collection "Canopy of Time". I was struck by the fact that it seemed so...Ligottian...in it's vision. And to think that it was written in the late 50's.

I'm surprised by the occaisional flashes of brilliance that Aldiss displayed throughout his career. A lot of his work is just so-so but evey now and then I am reminded why I'm a fan.

 

[J-Sun]

The LoA has created a great website I discuss in the LoA thread and one of the offerings is the complete text of five Leiber Changewar stories. I've read them very recently and I just intended to glance at "The Oldest Soldier" to see how it looked online and ended up reading the whole thing yet again yesterday. Great story - and free for all.

 

[Extollager]

Today I read Arthur Machen's "The Tree of Life," a minor ironic effort, non-supernatural. I have an Ordnance Survey Explorer map (#152) and was struck by his use of apparently real locales. Has anyone here tramped around Kemeys Graig, Llantrisant, Castell-y-Bwch, etc.? If I'm not mistaken, these must have been within the compass of a day's hike from where Machen grew up.

 

[Extollager]

A couple of Jack Finney short stories:

"Contents of the Dead Man's Pockets" -- I have to admit that this one almost literally made me squirm with vicarious anxiety. I don't think I had read the story before; it's from Stories of Suspense, which I bought on 24 July 1973!

"'I Love Galesburg in the Springtime'" --a Ray Bradburyian story, set not in RB's Green Town, but the real Illinois city of Galesburg. I read it in a book to which the story gave the title. Here's a magazine illustration for it:

 

[J-Sun]

Spent most of July and a chunk of August being distracted by a multitude of things and reading Dozois' 29th Annual. I don't know if it's nikulturny to mention one's blog as I don't recall seeing it done but I started that with a long discussion of the book. Short version is that if you like dystopian or posthuman/AI stories or stories written in a kind of fantasy way you might well like it a lot but I only especially liked Tom Purdom's "A Response from EST17" (which features two competing probes arriving at an alien world with two main factions in their society and how the four interrelate from one of the alien faction's points of view), David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell's "A Militant Peace" (a really ingenious, thought-provoking, and well-dramatized piece on an invasion of brute pacifism, mainly from Viet Nam to North Korea), and John Barnes' "Martian Heart" (a Martian magnate recalling his humble beginnings, and the love of his life, for posterity).

 

[Extollager]

Flannery O'Connor's "The Enduring Chill" was well worth reading, though I think she handled the theme of estranged grown son and mother better in "Everything That Rises Must Converge." Love this author!

Jack Finney's "I'm Scared" in About Time presents a sequence of odd or disturbing incidents that prompt the narrator to an alarming theory, with which the story ends.

I've read a number of Lovecraft's earlier tales this summer and have noticed his practice of using the phrase "did not like," sometimes in a bathetic way -- perhaps he'll have recited a sequence of ghastly hints and dreadful details, and then write something like "I did not like the way the moon rose over the mound," "They did not like the sounds that came from the mound" -- these are imaginary examples, but this is the kind of thing I have in mind. It made me wonder if Lovecraft sometimes, perhaps especially relatively early on, composed his stories sentence by sentence but had an unsure grasp of how to orchestrate a tale as a whole.

"I did not like everything about what I saw, and felt again the fear I had had." -- "The Festival"

 

[j d worthington]

I've read a number of Lovecraft's earlier tales this summer and have noticed his practice of using the phrase "did not like," sometimes in a bathetic way -- perhaps he'll have recited a sequence of ghastly hints and dreadful details, and then write something like "I did not like the way the moon rose over the mound," "They did not like the sounds that came from the mound" -- these are imaginary examples, but this is the kind of thing I have in mind. It made me wonder if Lovecraft sometimes, perhaps especially relatively early on, composed his stories sentence by sentence but had an unsure grasp of how to orchestrate a tale as a whole.

"I did not like everything about what I saw, and felt again the fear I had had." -- "The Festival"

There is also the very good possibility, given HPL's having been influenced both by the Augustans and the Goths, that there is a distinctly ironic inflection intended here. It is also an indication of the character's restraint (in the early stages of a story) in using "violent" diction or description, something which, as the tale continues, becomes more and more eroded, leaving the hyperbolic language which has so oten been ridiculed, but which itself is an indication, not of the narrator's madness (something which is actually quite rare in Lovecraft, common knowledge to the contrary) but to his extreme restraint giving way in light of what he has encountered and which he feels an overriding compulsion to relate.

Lovecraft was very fond of using this sort of ironic tone in his letters, essays, and even poetry, for varying effects; and it is all too often overlooked how much this may enter into various of his prose tales as well. Obviously he did not intend it to be broadly humorous, but as an indication of the "stonewalling" we human beings tend to indulge in to protect our cherished illusions, it also plays a subtle role in depiction of character, as well as furthering HPL's constant contention that we simply lack the psychological/emotional wherewithal to honestly confront the genuine, unvarnished nature of reality and our place within it. In this, it is yet another example of our tendency to minimize or deny that which we cannot truly accept, something which is quite common in human behavior.

 

[Connavar]

I have started reading Harlan Ellison huge collection The essential Ellison 50 year retrospective.

My first ever story of his was Glowworm the first sale of his. It was a flawed story but the young Ellison showed potential with the bold, dark take on post apocalyptic story with the last man. In the very short story I felt for the poor Seligman and his loneliness, also I liked the twist of the story, the harsh words on the humanity.

 

[Fried Egg]

I've been slowly making my way through Daphne Du Maurier's "The Birds & Other Stories and I am very impressed. In particular, "The Apple Tree" I thought was exceptional. A classic supernatural/psychological tale about a man whose sense of relief and freedom after his wife dies is soon proved to be short lived as an apple tree in his garden uncannily reminds him of everything he didn't like in his late wife. I thought it was particularly good how the balance of sympathy is caused to shift throughout the story, first with him but moves towards her as we discover more about their past lives.

 

[dask]

The Man Who Would Be King by Rudyard Kipling. Didn't care for the movie despite the powerhouse trinity of Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and John Huston (sorry), but I picked up this anthology of Great Short Stories Of The 20th Century and sitting in Starbucks without my current read I decided to give it a whirl since it was the first story. Now I'm hooked and can't wait to get back to it. All the stories are by Nobel Laureates, by the way. I'm thinkin' the whole book could be a box of fish hooks!