November's Nefarious Navigations of Notorious Novels (and other literary forms).

bluespider100 said:
Extracted from wiki, ...
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Hmm... with all due respect to Wiki, I think this is a little misleading. There are actually two books available under the title The Rediscovery of Man. The first, which has also been called at various times The Best of Cordwainer Smith but is more frequently titled Rediscovery was first published in 1976.

The second, The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, didn't appear until 1993 and was a typically thorough volume produced by NESFA.

I suspect whoever wrote the Wiki entry is getting confused between the two.
 
Ian Whates said:
There are actually two books available under the title The Rediscovery of Man. The first, which has also been called at various times The Best of Cordwainer Smith but is more frequently titled Rediscovery was first published in 1976.

The second, The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, didn't appear until 1993 and was a typically thorough volume produced by NESFA.
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I have both the excellent NESFA HB edn. and the entitled SF Masterworks edn. entitled The Rediscovery of Man. I guess this means I have the best of both "worlds"....;)
 
Ian Whates said:
The second, The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, didn't appear until 1993 and was a typically thorough volume produced by NESFA.
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Would you happen to know if all Smith's short sf was collected in book form prior to this volume, or did NESFA actually rescue some short stories from magazine oblivion for this collection? I'm not asking for specific titles, just general knowledge. If there's any digging to be done I'm more than willing to get my fingernails dirty.
 
This book contains some stories not found in the pre-NESFA The Rediscovery Of Man collection. I own The Instrumentality Of Mankind and the Gollancz Masterworks reprint of The Rediscovery Of Man but not the NESFA collection. The NESFA site says:

he Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith is the second book in the "NESFA's Choice" series. It brings back into print all of the short science fiction of Cordwainer Smith, and includes two never before published stories.
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So the NESFA volume has material never before reprinted elsewhere. NESFA also reprints Smith's novel Norstrilia, which I enjoyed greatly even if his real achievement, I think, was in his science fiction short story cycle.

I continue with my re-read of Moorcock's Corum books; now reading The King Of Swords. I'm also reading, and thus far am greatly impressed by, Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm.
 
QUOTE FROM ABOVE (heh heh) "he Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith is the second book in the "NESFA's Choice" series. It brings back into print all of the short science fiction of Cordwainer Smith, and includes two never before published stories."

Many thanks for that. Until I find out differently I'm going to assume that except for those "two never before published stories" all Smith's sf originally appearing in magazine form has since been reprinted in books.
 
Finished Cryoburn by Lois Bujold - excellent...

BTW, if you get the H/B of this book, tucked away in the back is a CD-Rom containing the complete Miles Vorkosigan saga in downloadable form - not only to PC or Mac, but to Kindles, i-Pads, Reader, etc - a real bargain...:D
 
Half way through The City and The City - China Mieville. Really I ought to be revising and writing an essay on green romanticism.
 
Finished The Left Hand of God... It started so strong and then kinda died off. It is advertised as such a tragic tale but i didnt really get that feeling too much from it. The first 100 pages made it seem like it was written for a YA audience but 18+ in creepyness. That kind of died off too. Still a 3.5 our of 5.

I am deep into The Edge of the World by Kevin J Anderson. It is actually a lot better than i was expecting. I havent read anything by him since i was a teenager reading the Jedi Academy books. I will be reading the rest of this series for sure.
 
Just finished "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes and now onto "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein.
 
Fried Egg said:
Just finished "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes and now onto "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein.
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Two excellent books there Fried Egg, read Flowers about two years ago and was blown away by it, and Moon years and years ago but still remember how much I enjoyed it.

Well a bit of a delay on my front, events conspiring against me, but I've just started The Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
I cleared my reading deck so I was free to read it as soon as it went on sale and look what happens... :rolleyes:
 
Perpetual Man said:
Two excellent books there Fried Egg, read Flowers about two years ago and was blown away by it, and Moon years and years ago but still remember how much I enjoyed it.

Well a bit of a delay on my front, events conspiring against me, but I've just started The Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
I cleared my reading deck so I was free to read it as soon as it went on sale and look what happens... :rolleyes:
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Totally agree, Flowers for Algernon is the one book I always recommend to anyone who hasn't read it. My laptops called Algernon as well and when it crashes...

I think you'll enjoy Towers of Midnight - this series is really gaining momentum again under Sanderson shame it didn't happen a few books earlier.
 
woodsman said:
Totally agree, Flowers for Algernon is the one book I always recommend to anyone who hasn't read it. My laptops called Algernon as well and when it crashes...

I think you'll enjoy Towers of Midnight - this series is really gaining momentum again under Sanderson shame it didn't happen a few books earlier.
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I know what you mean about Algernon, I think I saw it listed in an 'official' top 10 SF books of all time, and thought I should try to read it, loved it. It also stands out as the once SF book I managed to get my mother to read from beginning to end, and she thought it was superb too! My wife read it as well, but struggled with the end, because she felt it was so sad!

I've read teh first few chapters of Towers and am really enjoying it, agreeing with you about the extra zing that Sanderson has brought to the series.

Part of me still wonders though, what it would have been like had Jordan lived to complete it...
 
Yeah I struggled to finish Algernon because of the end. Although the saddest thing for me was how his workmates treated him in the beginning.


I don't want to speak badly of the dead, but I really feel Jordan had lost his way with the series. I don't think it would have been quite so good had he had to finish it. Don't get me wrong, I'm sorry that he couldn't, because any author deserves to be able to finish their works, but I'm not upset that Sanderson has stepped in.
 
I agree with you about Jordan really, after the third book things started to stretch a bit, and by the time of the sixth well I think most people agree things were ummm treading water, or at least paddling forward far too slowly.

I've often thought of something Terry Pratchett once said about a common writers trap of creating characters that you knew would eventually die, it was their purpose to the flow of the story, but in order to make the deaths work you had to make the characters likeable so the reader would feel the loss. Of course the author then falls in love with them his/herself and finds it hard to kill them when the time comes. I wonder whether Jordon fell into this trap, putting off character deaths by slowing the pace and stretching things to the detriment of the series.

But it was too slow, and Sanderson has really brought it back to life - my comment about Jordan was as you say because he deserved to finish his work, and perhaps that on his blog, toward the end he had said that the last would be the last, and probably a faster read because of it as everything came together.

But we will never know, and of course, Sanderson is a superb writer with some great books under his belt already
 
I think you're all being a bit generous with regards to Robert Jordan. He could have wrapped up that series if he really wanted to. He dragged it out simply because it was a good cash cow.

I'm sure Sanderson's talents could be better employed writing his own original works. I think the series should have been left unfinished, a testament to the folly of endless series that have no clear plan in mind.
 
I probably am being a bit generous, and that on some level I think that in the least there should have been some sterner editing, but at the same time I'm aware that Jordan had plenty more series he wanted to write.

If I remember rightly one original, another set in the WoT world, so he may well have been doing as much as could to make as much money as he could, but it was not as if he was bereft of ideas.

At the same time the disease that took him, and the treatments were painful and horrendous, and perhaps he felt that if he kept going (dragging the series out) it gave him something to fight on for.

(I'm not trying to defend the latter books - they were to say the least not as good as the earlier ones - but I'm trying to say there may well have been a reason for it.)

As to leaving the series unfinished, well Jordan went to the grave determined to finish it, virtually writing until the day he died. So perhaps it should have been left unfinished, but he had done so much toward getting there... my biggest gripe was that in one of his blogs, he swore blind that the last book would be the last book (Book12) no matter how long it turned out to be. It was only after his death it was split into 3...

But I'll shut now, I'm dragging this thread way off topic!

What IS everyone reading this month?
 
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