I was on the road yesterday, or I would have had this post up already. I’m going to post several short posts today and maybe tomorrow to address a few things. I usually don’t do more than one post per day, but most of these topics aren’t really related.
This first post will be about the eclipse. I’ll tie it into my thoughts on a piece fo fiction. Continue reading
Today, as I’m writing this, it’s January 13. Or to put it another way, it’s the birthday of Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961). I’ve been on the road since I got off work this morning, and only got home about forty-five minutes ago, which is why I’m posting this so late. Most of you probably won’t see it until tomorrow.
I say all that to say that I’ve not had a chance to read anything by Smith today, so I’m going to do something different. I’m going to take a brief look at the four CAS collections Lin Carter put together for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. That’s the Ballantine I reference in the title of the post. I’m not going to put “Adult Fantasy” in the title.
As an aside, do you have any idea what comes up if youtype “Ballantine Adult Fantasy” into a search engine? Hint: Don’t try this at work.
So just to recap, here is the shortlist in the short story category for the Retro Hugos:
Links are to the posts of the individual stories. While I enjoyed all of these stories and will probably reread them at some future date, I didn’t find them all equally good. This is simply my not so humble opinion; your mileage may vary.
“The Wedge” was the weakest of the stories here. In part, I think, that’s because it’s part of a bigger story arc. I suspect it’s on the final ballot in part due to the reputation of the Foundation series and the author. Ditto for the Bradbury minus the series angle. I could say the same about the two Simak stories as the Asimov except that these are in my mind the two strongest tales on the list.
As for the Brown and Van Vogt entries, they are both examples of their author’s best work at this length. I tend to favor the Brown a bit over the Van Vogt, but that might be because it was one of only two stories (the other being “I, Rocket”) that I hadn’t read before and was therefore fresher.
As for which which of the Simak I think was the strongest, that’s a tough call. I would probably go with “Huddling Place”, although I can easily convince myself that “Desertion” is the better of the two. Some I’m going to compromise and declare a tie.
And just a sidenote of possible interest. DAW books began publishing a series of anthologies in somewhere around 1980 (I’m too lazy to look it up) entitled Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories. Each volume collected what Asimov , with the assistance of Martin H. Greenberg, considered the best stories of the year. The first volume covered 1939, and the series ran for 24 volumes, with a 25th published by NESFA Press and edited by Robert Silverberg after Asimov’s death. The sixth volume covers 1944, the year of the current Retro Hugos.
That volume contains 13 stories, Eight of them are on the Retro Hugo ballot. One which isn’t is Leigh Brackett’s “The Veil of Astellar”, which should be on the novelette ballot. Don’t get me started. After the Retro Hugos have been awarded, I will probably reread the rest of the stories. I read this book in high school, and I don’t remember some of the stories.
I’ll start on the novellas I haven’t already covered in the next post. The story will be “Killdozer!” by Theodore Sturgeon. That story was revised for book publication, so I’m reading it in, you guessed it, The Great SF Stories 6,
The Retro Hugo nominees for best novelette are (links are to reviews):
All of these stories are strong contenders. There isn’t a bad one in the bunch. but they aren’t all equal. With the exception of “Whent he Bough Breaks” and “The Children’s Hour”, I’ve not read any of them since high school. Continue reading
“The Wedge” was originally published in the October 1944 issue of Astounding. It’s a Foundation story and was reprinted as “The Traders” when the stories were collected in book form. It was published after “The Big and the Little” but placed before that story (as “The Merchant Princes”).
I thought this was a fairly weak story. A trader gets an emergency message instructing him to go to a particular planet where another trader has gotten himself in trouble with the local potentate.
The trader who is in trouble is actually an agent of the Foundation, and the protagonist knows this. The Foundation has been trying to gain influence and power two ways. With missionaries of the religion the Foundation has set up and through agents who act as traders.
The agent in trouble has violated a ban on nuclear power. Many of the star systems have reverted to a pre-atomic level of technology since the Empire pulled back from the edge of the galaxy.
The trader uses entrapment to bring about a a change in the policy by blackmailing his main opponent. The story was worked out logically and held my interest, but it is the weakest of the Retro Hugo stories I’ve read so far.
“The Big and the Little” was originally published in the August 1944 issue of Astounding. This is a Foundation story. It was published before “The Wedge” (10/44) but was placed after it when the stories were collected in book form.
There is a bit more substance to this story than there is to “The Wedge”, which I’ll review when I get to the short story nominees. A trader who was born on Smyrno (rather than Terminus, the location of the Foundation) is given the task of investigating the disappearance of ships in the Republic of Korell.
Spoilers Ahead Continue reading
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
Alec Nevala-Lee
hardcover $28.99
ebook $15.99
This one seems to be getting some buzz, although I have to admit I hadn’t heard of it until I saw it in B&N. This review is probably more appropriate for Futures Past and Present, but I’m posting it here because this is the main blog and gets more traffic.
I’ve always been interested in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, as Campbell’s first decade as editor of Astounding has often been called. Not because I remember those years. I’m not that old ya disrespectful young punks; now get off my lawn. I did grow up reading many of the authors from that period in paperback reprints. So when I saw a history of that time period, I grabbed it. Continue reading
So earlier this month, Jasyn Jones made the statement in a blog post that John Campbell did not usher in a Golden Age of Science Fiction. His thesis is that Campbell, when he became editor of Astounding, ushered in a golden age in which science fiction rose from being a genre of poorly written fiction with wooden characters and bad science to great heights. Indeed, this is the general narrative. Jones reasserts his thesis that this ain’t so in a followup post.
For those who are new to the field and think it began when you started reading it or shortly beforehand or have been around for a while and simply haven’t been paying attention, John W. Campbell, Jr., took over the editorial reigns of Astounding from F. Orlin Tremaine in 1938 and dominated the field for a dozen years until F&SF and Galaxy came along in 1950. Indeed, Isaac Asimov says as much in the opening paragraphs of his introduction to his anthology of Pre-Campbell science fiction, Before the Golden Age (Doubleday, 1974). Note to self: reread this book and blog about it.
Now, before I get started on this post, I want to say that I mean no disrespect to Mr. Jones and none of what follows in in any way meant to be a personal attack. Furthermore, I think he brings up a number of valid points, and for the most part I agree with him. My differences are more with some of the attitudes that have been expressed in reaction to the posts in question, as well as other posts in other places. I’ve not had a chance to read all of them, so rather than post links, I’ll let you hunt them down if you’re so inclined.
But since I grew up reading a great deal of Campbellian SF, much of it in the Ballantine Best of series and DAW’s Isaac Asimov Present the Great SF, I’m rather fond of the science fiction written by “guys with screwdrivers”, as Campbellian SF is being called. So I’d like to express my admiration of it. Continue reading
Today marks the 122nd anniversary of Clark Ashton Smith’s birth. He was one of the Big Three of Weird Tales, the other two being H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (but then I probably don’t need to tell you that).
Like Howard, Smith was also a poet as well as a fiction writer. (Yes, Robert E. Howard wrote poetry, some of the best I’ve ever read.) Unlike Howard, Smith’s fiction has a complexity to it Howard’s lacked, especially in word choice. Isaac Asimov went on record complaining that he didn’t like reading Smith because he had to keep looking words up in the dictionary. (You see, kids, in the dark days before computers we had these things called dictionaries and when you didn’t know a word, you went to the dictionary and…ah, never mind.) And if Asimov had to look it up, then you know it probably wasn’t on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
In spite of the work involved at times, Smith is still very much a writer worth reading. I’ll be tackling at least one of his collections later this year for the posts I’m doing at Black Gate on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. There were four now highly collectible volumes of Smith’s work published as part of the BAF series. In fact the very first BAF book I ever owned was Smith’s Hyperborea. I’ve only dipped into Smith’s works a little, but he was a writer of wild imagination. We could use more like him today.
I’ve been traveling this weekend, so I just heard the news when I got home and logged in to the computer. Ralph McQuarrie has passed away. He was most famous for his work on Stars Wars, but I think my favorite work of his was the set of illustrations for Isaac Asimov’s Robot Dreams, back in the 1980s. He will be missed. Rest well, Ralph, and peaceful dreams.