The Short Story Thread

One of these days there's gonna be a hell of a career retrospective but, in the meantime, this was reasonably good overall. But, for me, the Xeelee stuff is still where it's at with Baxter. :)

Universes, a 'best of' collection of Steve's short fiction is about to appear from PS Publishing. It's one of five titles that PS are launching at this year's Eastercon in Bradford. I know this because among the other four titles sharing the launch is a shiny new collection called Growing Pains by... oh, who is it now...? Oh yes, me. :rolleyes:
 
I just read a short story by Rad Bradbury in the late Bob Guccione's Omni Magazine called "I Suppose You Are Wondering Why We Are Here" about a man who ends up summoning the ghost of his dead parents. It was definitely a little strange. And tedious, as far as Bradbury goes.

Has anyone else read it and felt this way? Was it just me? I found myself wondering what the message was. Seemed so different than Bradbury's usual work.

Sidenote: I miss Omni magazine -- I just bought a few original copies which is pretty sweet (nerd alert, I know). I still find it so fascinating to behold the depths of the editor Bob Guccione's interests. From Penthouse magazine to Omni -- definitely an interesting mix.
 
Universes, a 'best of' collection of Steve's short fiction is about to appear from PS Publishing.

Thanks for that but I couldn't find any information on it - PS doesn't even list it in their forthcoming titles and the rest of the net seems oblivious - do you know the contents (and price!)?

It's one of five titles that PS are launching at this year's Eastercon in Bradford. I know this because among the other four titles sharing the launch is a shiny new collection called Growing Pains by... oh, who is it now...? Oh yes, me. :rolleyes:

That must be... well, exciting would probably be an understatement. (Well, I see it's your second collection, but I don't guess that makes you jaded about it.) Congrats. :)
 
Universes, a 'best of' collection of Steve's short fiction is about to appear from PS Publishing.

Came across a little more information about that Baxter collection - according to the publisher it's not a "best of", but just three story series (two of them pendants to novel series) in one volume. And it's [pound symbol]24.99, which is a lot of American rupees (and would be plenty even if it was $24.99). Not particularly interested in that anyway, as I'm not interested in the novel series but, for those who might be, I pass it on.
 
Just an invitation to anyone interested in discussing some classic short stories -- we have threads available on Groff Conklin's famous science fiction anthologies, Robert Arthur's macabre anthologies, and Walter de la Mare's own stories.

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http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/539121-reading-around-in-groff-conklins-anthologies.html

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/539680-reading-around-in-robert-arthurs-anthologies.html

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/539586-walter-de-la-mare.html
 
Just finished Alastair Reynolds' Zima Blue (14 stories, 450 pages). I'm still not sold on him as a novelist (though he has 10 million reasons not to care what I think) but I've liked all three of his collections I've read.

I'd already read "Merlin's Gun" and at least one other story but I've never forgotten the fact of it, even if I'd forgotten the details, and it was about as great as I remembered it. It's an extremely widescreen space opera that has as much idea content and eyeball kick as a few hundred pages of his standard novel. Alas, it has two prequels that are just too flawed to work (and diminish the main story, in a way), though the second written and first in internal order, "Hideaway", has many of the virtues of "Merlin" and the third written and second in internal order ("Minla's Flowers") starts well enough before it tanks - it is actually completely unnecessary to the series. "Hideaway" isn't required but is at least closely related. (I normally just ignore stories I don't especially like on this thread but it feels necessary to mention the whole series.)

An almost magical story for me - despite the bizarre use to which a certain piano player is put - was "Understanding Space and Time", about the last man alive trying not to go completely insane on his Martian base and his attempts to learn everything about everything. I could see this not working for a lot of people but it was just brilliant to me.

Reynolds seems to have trouble writing good near-future earth-based stuff as he, himself, notes in one of the short afterwords to each story but the exception is "Everlasting". As a side-effect of its clever structure and given that it is so earth-based and near-future (generic present day), it's basically a mainstream story in which a "not suicidal" person invites a girl over to discuss quantum mechanics and play Russian roulette all night.

I also especially liked the stories with the reporter Carrie Clay that bookend the collection, the last of which gives it its title. The first, "The Real Story", involves the first, um, people to set foot on Mars and how they got that way and where they go, while the second, ("Zima Blue", of course), deals with a unique artist and the nature of memory and life.

I also liked "Spirey and the Queen", which had an almost Baxter-ish "space combat story" feel and some nifty ideas and excitement along the way.

Since I noted that there's a trio of Merlin space operas and a duo of Carrie not-quite-so-space-operas, I should note that there's a duo of parallel worlds stories, too, with "Signal to Noise" and "Cardiff Afterlife" but I found those fatally flawed.

Most of this collection deals with either the "many worlds" concept of QM - most of the Earth based stories - or is set on or related to Mars, or is widescreen space opera. My only real problem throughout the collection is that Reynolds often has vicious characters who aren't appealingly or sensibly vicious, so to speak, or has dumb characters (who are sometimes also vicious) and the dumb characters often enable dumb plots to "work". Sometimes this ruins a story for me and sometimes it's just a hiccup I can ignore and, of course, some stories don't have those problems. It's just a thing I've noticed.

Still and all, much recommended.

-- Oh, forgot to note: I have the 2009 Gollancz edition. The original 2006 Night Shade Books edition only had ten stories - the Gollancz adds "Cardiff Afterlife", "Minla's Flowers", "Digital to Analogue", and "Everlasting". So, IMO, it doesn't add much except "Everlasting" but it does add a companion Merlin and Many Worlds story and a sort of "Raver Madness" story with "Digital".
 
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Finished Charles Stross' Accelerando. This is usually billed as a novel but all its parts appeared in Asimov's magazine as stories[1] so I'll treat it as such. Some of the stories work as stories and almost all start that way and repeat some concepts along the way so as to be standalone but several have unsatisfying endings when considered as standalone short fiction. But this is the good ol' "tell a future history in a sequence of stories that make at least a book" paradigm, even if the future history just runs from c.2010/2020-2100 with a little extension into "we're not sure when it is, maybe 2300". Parts of it are already dated and parts of it are extremely imaginative and a lot of fun even if it is a posthuman singularity story and the first rule of the singularity is that you do not talk about the singularity (otherwise known as conceptual failure when the going gets tough).

Anyway, the first three are all about Manfred Macx and are worthwhile: "Lobsters", "Troubador" and "Tourist". These deal with pre-singularity humanity hurtling towards the Point with most of Manfred's consciousness residing in his specs (alas, not apparently mirrorshades) as he tries to invent a new economy by giving away brilliant ideas in exchange for creature comforts and geek cred.

The next one and half of the three dealing with Macx' daughter, Amber, are also worthwhile. "Halo" primarily deals with Amber escaping her domineering orthodox mother's influence by selling herself into indentured servitude aboard a spaceship to a company that she owns which was set up by her father. But, because the company is based in an Islamic country, her mother converts to Islam to try to get an Islamic judge in a one-man spaceship floating around Jupiter to give control back to her. The rest largely deals with Amber's efforts to foil this plan and become Queen of Jupiter. Not only that but, in "Router", they upload copies of themselves into a Forwardian star wisp the size of a Coke can propelled by Solar-system-based laser to go visit a brown dwarf discovered three light years away around which orbits an interface to an alien wormhole system. The crew naturally live in a VR so that we have talking dinosaurs with Ukrainian accents and a Queen wearing old fashioned clothes in old fashioned buildings but, because of the POV and interests, Stross manages the feat of making it feel like AM rather than FM until he sort of blows it in the end. (A feat most "posthuman"/singularity authors can't manage or don't even try.) Then the stories kind of unravel and I only found "Curator" to be particularly noteworthy after that. It deals with Sirhan, son of the Amber who stayed behind. (All the last three should deal with Sirhan as the previous three dealt with Amber and the three before those dealt with Manfred, but they don't really.)

Oh, and did I mention the solar system has its planets broken up into computronium and there are AI lobsters in space and a godlike cat? And that most of this somehow feels more like science fiction than fantasy?

Anyway - it's a mess but it's certainly an interesting mess for at least the better half.

[1] I actually have almost all of them and read at least the first one but fell behind in my magazine reading around then and still haven't read all of them and forgot I even had those stories in them. So I have it on hardcopy almost twice and even have an html page of it - which I found and downloaded after I bought the book but before I finally read it - which may still be freely available on Stross' site or somewhere on the "GR-R-REAT computer".
 
Trifecta. :(

<hypnotist-voice>The Chrooons wiiill reeead mooore shooort fiiictiooon. The Chroooons wiiiill...</hypnotist-voice>

I don't know about the copyright status of this so pardon if there's anything wrong but this site linked me to another site which hosts Norman Spinrad's "Carcinoma Angels". If I seem science fictionally weird sometimes much of it can likely be explained by the fact that some of the first SF stories I ever read were Asimov's Foundation stories and Norman Spinrad stories and I loved them both. I re-read this online just now and I highly recommend getting a print copy for further reading - it looks better, feels better, reads better, and doesn't have typos like the failure to italicize "in" in "baseball cards were in" and "literal supply" when it's "liberal supply". But this is a way you can sample Spinrad's delights before buying a copy. The pages suggest getting Dangerous Visions, which is a fine anthology but I'd actually recommend getting Spinrad's own The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde, which contains this story and many more variegated mind benders. I mean, get both, but if CA works for you, it makes sense to go for more Spinrad directly.

Anyway - just thought I'd pass it on. :) (Also, while I didn't re-read them, I recall Bloch's "A Toy for Juliette" being great and, speaking of Asimov, there's one of his many masterpieces in "The Last Question" and several other mostly familiar and good-to-excellent stories.)

-- And then there's this: Rachel Swirsky's science-fictionally and fantastically inflected not-sf-or-f at all "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love".
 
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Am I killing this thread? Using up all the pixels? Should I shut up and go away? :confused: Numero fouro:

Just finished Fritz Leiber's Night's Black Agents. Awhile back I said, "he doesn't seem to be one of those story writers whose individual collections are always all that great" and this is true but those subpar ones are in a definite minority.

This book is arranged in three sections. The first is "Ancient Adventures" with two stories ("The Sunken Land" and "Adept's Gambit") which mark the first appearances in Leiber-book-form of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser - the second of which was a long novella first published in this book. The second is "Transition" which contains just "The Man Who Never Grew Young". I didn't re-read those because I have them in other collections already and will be re-reading the Lankhmar stories soon anyway. The third is "Modern Horrors" (I guess what they call "urban fantasy" now) and contains nine fantasy/horror stories of about 170 pages (in this 1978 edition - seven in the 1947 original) and are worth the price of admission all by themselves.

"Smoke Ghost" is an extremely effective tale of the filth of the city manifesting as a Thing. "The Inheritance" is a mondo creepy tale of possession and murder. "The Hound" is a riff on the Smoke Ghost idea but still effective and with a great ending. "Diary in the Snow" is a spiffy tale of a science fiction writer's imagination being a little too vivid. "The Automatic Pistol" has its flaws but has a great "hardboiled crime-story meets weird tale" vibe and a nice bit of economical scene setting. "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" even works okay as a tale of the Lovecraftian player of games. About the only of the originals that didn't work for me was "The Hill and the Hole". Then the additions are nice and mostly fit their section: "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" scoots forward slightly to 1949 and is a great femme fatale story - "There are vampires and vampires." And "A Bit of the Dark World" (the only non-40s story at 1962) maybe didn't work as well for me as it should have in that it was talky and overly descriptive and very much a California story (the others are all Chicago stories - even the ones set in Montana) but was a wildly imaginative tale of cosmic horror that still had an effect.

Excellent - highly recommended. There is no blood and gore here but there's no white sheets and clanky chains either - and there may be a few dashes of old Freudian stuff but it doesn't mess up anything - it's mostly some nice spooky, chilling, weird stuff of the modern/urban sort at which Leiber excelled.
 
Just to let you know your reviews are appreciated . . .

"The Girl With the Hungry Eyes" is one of Leiber's finest stories, in my opinion. (Of course, Leiber was one of the finest writers of speculative fiction anyway. The man had style.) In its psychological depth, particularly in the amazing last paragraph, it goes far beyond "just a horror story."

Just as high up there, in my estimation, is "The Man Who Never Grew Young," which is brilliant. The basic time-reversal premise has been used before (by no less than F. Scott Fitzgerald, in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", and in modern works like Time's Arrow by Martin Amis) but never with such a sweeping view of humanity.
 
Just to let you know your reviews are appreciated . . .

Thank you but it's not so much whether my reviews are appreciated as that I'd appreciate reviews from others and would like to know folks are still reading and enjoying short fiction. I saw a great post in the March reading thread by dask about a magazine issue he'd read - made me want to read it - and I'd just like to see more of that in this thread.

"The Girl With the Hungry Eyes" is one of Leiber's finest stories, in my opinion. (Of course, Leiber was one of the finest writers of speculative fiction anyway. The man had style.) In its psychological depth, particularly in the amazing last paragraph, it goes far beyond "just a horror story."

Yep - like I say, there's some stray bits of Freudianism in Leiber but I don't think either of us mean that regarding Leiber's psychological acuity. While "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" wasn't one of my very favorites (still good) one of the best parts of it was the psychology where the narrator would make little observations about himself and his friend and their relationship and the sort of mental second-guessing and "well it seemed like a good idea at the time" and so on. Most of the stories have elements like that and many deal, of course, with the characters oscillating back and forth between rationalism and thinking they're nuts and accepting that the fantastic is real and so on. But, yeah, there's a psychological aspect that's central to "Girl".

On a completely different note, I just stumbled across "Health Tips for Traveller" by David W. Goldman whose Nebula-nominated - and very different - "The Axiom of Choice" (PDF) I read last year. One line, especially, in "Health Tips" had me laughing out loud:
"Means of non-conscious both pharmacological and percussive are on offer by helpful Pooquar portal agents." The person who left a comment was, um, struck by that as well.
. At his site, you can apparently read everything he's written which, based on those two, I'll be doing sometime. :)

-- Oh, forgot to mention that I'd also read "Invasion of the Pattern Snatchers" in Analog about five years ago and that's also good. And that's almost as different from the other two as they are from each other. Interesting range, while still maintaining coherence.
 
Hi, J-Sun.

My immediate reaction is to disagree with you about "The Hill and the Hole," but it's been long enough since I read it that I can't recall why I disagree.

I hate when that happens.

Yep - like I say, there's some stray bits of Freudianism in Leiber but I don't think either of us mean that regarding Leiber's psychological acuity. While "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" wasn't one of my very favorites (still good) one of the best parts of it was the psychology where the narrator would make little observations about himself and his friend and their relationship and the sort of mental second-guessing and "well it seemed like a good idea at the time" and so on. Most of the stories have elements like that and many deal, of course, with the characters oscillating back and forth between rationalism and thinking they're nuts and accepting that the fantastic is real and so on. But, yeah, there's a psychological aspect that's central to "Girl".
It's also been awhile since I read "Girl" but not long ago I was thinking it seemed prescient. At the time of writing, there were young women like the Gabor sisters who might have sparked some thoughts along the lines of people achieving fame by being famous for being famous and what if they could actually feed on that; but with the advent of the Internet and social media there's been an abundance of young women who could be her, from Paris Hilton to the Kardashians to Lindsay Lohan, the attention and craving for their "glamor" in turns feeds them in some way and seems to perpetuate a pattern.

If you're of a mind, there is an even more dyspeptic story that I think used "Girl" as a model, "The Kind Men Like" by Karl Edward Wagner. I found it hard to take. Written in the 1980s, it could be more graphic, though I don't think Wagner overdid with this one, it follows a similar logic in later circumstances.

Randy M.
 
Hi, J-Sun.

My immediate reaction is to disagree with you about "The Hill and the Hole," but it's been long enough since I read it that I can't recall why I disagree.

I hate when that happens.

Hi, Yeah, it happens to me a lot - I'm bad with story titles and even when I can connect them, I often remember my reactions to stories better than the stories themselves.

It's also been awhile since I read "Girl" but not long ago I was thinking it seemed prescient. At the time of writing, there were young women like the Gabor sisters who might have sparked some thoughts along the lines of people achieving fame by being famous for being famous and what if they could actually feed on that; but with the advent of the Internet and social media there's been an abundance of young women who could be her, from Paris Hilton to the Kardashians to Lindsay Lohan, the attention and craving for their "glamor" in turns feeds them in some way and seems to perpetuate a pattern.

Yep, good points - I hadn't even thought of specific timely references like that - but that's on "the girl" angle - I thought Leiber did a great job also talking about the men who do and don't do the "feeding", as well.

If you're of a mind, there is an even more dyspeptic story that I think used "Girl" as a model, "The Kind Men Like" by Karl Edward Wagner. I found it hard to take. Written in the 1980s, it could be more graphic, though I don't think Wagner overdid with this one, it follows a similar logic in later circumstances.

Thanks for the tip - it sounds interesting and I'll try to keep it in mind.

***

I said awhile back that I regarded Varley's The Persistence of Vision and The Barbie Murders as essential collections. I can add Blue Champagne to the list. For a long time I didn't make a point of getting it because I thought, "Ah, I've got half of it," but then I got to thinking, "But it is Varley... and it is two novellas and a couple of stories... and the novellas are "Eight Worlds/Anna-Louise Bach" stories," so I finally gave in and got it. "Blue Champagne" is just a "hand of a master" story in that you start out a little confused but interested and before you get too confused or impatient he gradually reveals or explains things until the strange and unfamiliar becomes home. It's an emotional story without being sentimental or mawkish. It's got brilliant ideas large and small - from amazing space habitats to fascinating prosthetics - without being too "wiring diagram". Interestingly, Bach - who is in about five stories, all told, is really the third banana in this story which gives an interesting perspective. She's still a complex and rounded character and doesn't particularly like one of the others and comes to have problems with both, so you can see them in both positive and negative lights and see how it's largely perspective. The core characters are the feelie star and the lifeguard and the primary concern is their unlikely love affair and how it might be bottled and sold. My only real problem with the story is that I felt the last paragraph was a bit too much of the narrator telling you what to think when the story was already done and the reader was perfectly capable of making his own mind. But that doesn't seriously impair a great story which reminds me of "The Persistence of Vision" in a couple of ways.

That was written in 1981 and the next story in the collection, "Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo", was written in 1985 and picks up a few years after the last one left off. I'm unlikely to forget Charlie, who we meet as a young girl living on the quarantined space station, Tango Charlie. Definitely not your usual protagonist. There is an infodump/synopsis of "Blue Champagne" in "Tango Charlie" which is an odd choice as it was written specifically for this book, so is telling us stuff we already know but nowhere near as well as the first time - you could say the synopsis makes it stand by itself but it doesn't really, as the synopsis is insufficient. And, as far as the story itself, it has a sort of perplexing main resolution although the very end ending makes sense. But there are things that happened in my life while reading it that probably make me unable to see it clearly anyway. Still, it was a good and worthwhile story, even if I liked "Blue Champagne" by far the best.

Together these make up a mini-novel of 137 pages and are worth a book all by themselves. I love how energetic these stories are and, I have to admit, there's a bit of the "good old-fashioned future" to them - there's a smartass computer, sure, but there's not a whiff of godlike AI or The Singularity or posthumanity or fantasy or anything - just a vividly imagined and socially different future of real habitat structures and human lives.

There are also a couple of lesser, shorter stories in "The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)", a story you could fault for being a bit of a rant, but a very vivid one, and "The Unprocessed Word" which is a somewhat longer rant against word processors - "No thanks! I'd rather read a VarleyYarn®!" - which was amusing enough. There are also what I recall as being the very good "Options" and the nifty black hole tale, "Lollipop and the Tar Baby" and, oh yeah, a couple of Hugo/Nebula winners in "Press Enter[]" and "The Pusher". I didn't re-read any of that this time, though, as I'm in a hurry. But all are worth a re-read and I ordinarily would.
 
I just read a short story in Stephen King's "Night Shift" called Sometimes They Come Back. I thought it was really good to be one of the very first that he ever sold to a magazine.
 
I said awhile back that I regarded Varley's The Persistence of Vision and The Barbie Murders as essential collections.

I read the story "The Persistence Of Vision" back when it was a really big thing and couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Wonder if it's worth reading again?
 
I read the story "The Persistence Of Vision" back when it was a really big thing and couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Wonder if it's worth reading again?

The first time I read that story I really disliked it. On a second reading, I figured out that I was reacting emotionally to the tactile communication among the inhabitants of Keller, which I found distasteful. I realized that this was my own hangup, and that it was a fine story.
 
THE STARMEN OF LLYDRIS by Leigh Brackett has several things going for it. First off, this:


I know I've shown this several times already but who's gonna complain? Second, its initial publication was in a magazine known for proudly touting the virtues of scientifiction when it was still flopping in the gutter. Third, it's pure unadulterated space opera by the queen of space opera (mostly 'cause she was married to the indisputable king of space opera, Edmond Hamilton) and make no mistake, this ain't no chick lit. Brackett can swing as mean a club as any of her male peers, and in this story, a shade meaner. There's little doubt 1950s stf fans bought this magazine more than just the jaw dropping Earle Bergey covers.

Speaking of covers, here's what the story looked like when Ballantine reprinted it 25 years later.

Dean Ellis's take is different from Bergey's obvioulsy but just as valid, strumming the Sense Of Wonder chords in a different key. My usual habit when I come across a novel in a magazine I already have in book form is to skip it then read the book after I finish the mag. They tend to be updated and put into a sort of definitive form which has in the past held great appeal for me. This time I decided not to risk any modernizing and drink straight from the bottle. After all, why mix orange juice with Dom Perignon? With star-ships whose hulls are "scarred by the atmosphere of unnamed worlds" and capable of "light years of speed," ultra wave interstellar radio communication, and gem like weapons I can't even begin to explain how they work, this "novel of galactic adventure" is modern enough. But not so modern to be denied its glorius vacuum tube sf status, and if you tilt your mind's ear at just the right angle you can hear it cry out to be indulged as such.
 
I read the story "The Persistence Of Vision" back when it was a really big thing and couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Wonder if it's worth reading again?

Yes. It's a fine story... it just isn't at all comfortable or to the taste of a lot of people....
 
Leight Brackett Stark series, is more hardcore, macho hero than i have seen in Science Fantasy type story. To think her writing chick flick is funny to me who adore her Stark series for being more hardcore version of John Carter type.

The mag says Starman story is Galactic Adventure, is it really Space opera story of hers?
 

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