Great Collections (*not* anthologies)

[J-Sun]

As for the available Vance collections over the years, get two or three of them and you pretty much have all his sf stories available in book form as they tend to recycle the same bunch over and over. Even LOST MOONS isn't completely free from this. What we need is a new collection of uncollected stories. But is there a publishing house that brave?

Yep, some authors have that problem and Vance is one - between stuff I have anthologized and just the little in the Pocket TBO, it's hard to find a collection that gets you more than a couple of stories, unless it's one of those 50 dollar volumes. And those are who seem to be the "brave" publishers these days: you either spend 50 bucks a volume or you get it in ebook only. The days of mass-market paperback (or even just regular press) collections are 99.9% over and the big publishers even want to get rid of all mass-market paperbacks (and collections).

Henderson's is a very soft sort of sf/fantasy, but I found her collection The Anything Box a terrific read way back when. Not sure what I'd think of it now.

"Soft" is a good word for it and not just in terms of "hard" SF but she seems to be just a very quiet, peaceful writer in general. Some people can do this and appeal to me and some can certainly be very good at it and I don't doubt she is. And, to be fair, I've only read a handful of stories at most.

I disagree with ISFDB on "You're All Alone" being a novel or short novel; I think it's a novella. At any rate, it's short enough some readers faster than me could probably finish it in a sitting.

Yeah, if it's a novel, it's a "pedantic" novel. In my book, it's 105 pages which won't generally hit people as a novel and could almost never have been published by itself (I do have a 108 page Poul Anderson book) and certainly couldn't be now. But if it's c.380 words a page (and most PBs are c.350-450 wds a page) it would hit the very low word count technical definition of "novel." To me it's about perfect: the length novel lovers and short fiction lovers could both love!

 

[J-Sun]

It's hard to go wrong with any of the single author collections put out by NESFA:

Yep. Most of those are "Complete Works" things which, if you like the author enough or can easily afford them, is almost always the way to go.

If you'll allow me to cheat a bit and list a collection by two authors who usually collaborated (and were married), I will include Two-Handed Engine (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore)

Yeah, I don't think that's cheating at all. I've actually thought about amending the definitions I gave in the first post because they aren't quite right. Some weird phrasing like "a volume of short fiction authored by one or more authors working together on each piece of short fiction in that volume" to account for the famous teams of Kuttner & Moore and Pohl & Kornbluth and so on. And that's another expensive (and I ain't kidding - $225!!) collection the SFBC made available to me. Hope to get to it someday. All the collections I have credited to Kuttner or Moore are all very good and pretty much everything I've already read in it is, so I expect to enjoy it.

Each of these is a collection of stories set in a particular world. The collections include novels and short fiction.

I'm not familiar with those two titles but this was a whole section I was shying away from as it opens a huge can of stories. I like stories and novels and singletons and, to an extent, series, but I love story series. The three greatest of all-time, for me, are

The Asimov's The Complete Robot is a 2-in-1 minus a frame plus a lot of stories; his The Foundation Trilogy is a 3-in-1, and Heinlein's The Past Through Tomorrow is a several-in-1 minus a couple of unrelated stories, plus a couple of related ones. However folks get them, get them!