I don’t know what the temperatures have been like where you are, but around here (west central Texas), It’s been hot. You know it’s been hot when the highs are in the low to mid nineties and it feels cool. Most of the last month has seen temperatures aourn one hundred four to one hundred six, with some days hitting one ten or more.
What has that to do with autumn? Continue reading
There were a lot of birthdays yesterday, but I was up late getting things ready for the first day of class today and wasn’t able to get a post up. Fortunately, I don’t have to do that tonight.
And that’s a good thing because today, August 22, is the birthday of Ray Bradbury (1920-2012).
I had seen some of Bradbury’s paperbacks in the children’s section of the public library in Wichita Falls when I was in fourth grade. They were the editions with a sktech of Bradbury in front of a horzontal illustration of something in the book. They were on a spinner rack with some Twilight Zone collections, James Blish’s Star Trek novelizations, and other books. I remember that was the rack I found Planet of the Apes on.
But I digress. Continue reading
Henry Kuttner (1915-1958) was born today, May 5. He’s been my favorite science fcition and fantasy writer ever since I read “Mimsy were the Borogoves” in The Best of Henry Kuttner the summer before I started high high school.
I was going to read and review Lands of the Earthquake (thanks for sending me a copy, Deuce), but I’ve been on the road with one of the dayjobs most of the past week. It took me all week to read “The Brood of Bubastis” for the Robert Bloch post, and I was falling asleep over the keyboard as I wrote it. So, obviously, I didn’t get to it. I’ll try to read it and post something in the next few months. Continue reading
Today as I write this is August 22. Ray Bradbury was born on this date in 1920. I’m not going to look at any of his stories. As I said on this year’s Lovecraft birthday post, I’ve been kind of busy.
But I did want to take a moment to acknowledge him and the impact his work has had on my life. Bradbury was one of the greatest short story writers the world has ever produced. There are still a number of his stories I’ve not read.
Yet.
Especially from the last couple of collections. I was busy trying to keep up with a toddler when they came out. I’m hoping to do a deeper dive later this year when things slow down. Until then, I’ll raise a glass tonight in his memory.
Let’s talk about cycles and rhythms of life, shall we? If you are fortunate to have enough stability in your life, then life will begin to develop cycles and rhythms. For example, it’s August. Summer classes are over, but the fall semester hasn’t started yet.
For a number of years now, I’ve read something by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) and posted about it on this date, August 22, in honor of his birth. The fact that the high temperatures for the last couple of days have been in the 70s (in Texas in August!!), making me think of fall and October and Bradbury. Continue reading
Today, January 2, is the birthday of Charles Beaumont (1929-1967). Beaumont was one of the writers of the original Twilight Zone. The reason Rod Serling asked Beaumont to write for him can be easily seen in Beaumont’s work.
One of Beaumont’s mentors was Ray Bradbury. Bradbury wrote in the introduction to Best of Beaumont (1982) that he and Beaumont lived in the same part of Los Angeles and used to pass a cemetery that had a sign advertising FREE DIRT. Continue reading
In addition to looking at Bradbury’s short stories “The Illustrated Woman” and “The Illustrated Man” in the previous post, I wanted to look at a pair of stories that might not be familiar to many of you. Those stories are “The Pendulum” and “Pendulum”. The former was written by Bradbury alone; the latter in collaboration with Henry Hasse. These could be a bit of a challenge to track down, although “Pendulum” is currently in print in The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury. Continue reading
Yes, the title of this post says “woman”, not “man.” No, that’s not a typo. Most people who read this blog are familiar with The Illustrated Man, a short story collection in which the framing device is a tattooed man whose tattoos show the stories. That’s not what this post is about. Bradbury also wrote a short story titled “The Illustrated Man” which probably served as the inspiration for the framing device in the collection of the same name.
Patience, please. We’ll get there. Just not yet. Continue reading
Today (August 22, 2020) marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ray Bradbury. If you’ll indulge a bit of nostalgia, I’m going to discuss the impact Ray had on my life.
It must have been the 6th grade, but it might have been the 5th. It’s been too many years now to be sure. One day in Mr. Thayer’s reading class, there was a guest waiting when we arrived from whatever class we’d been in before.
I don’t recall the gentleman’s name, but he was there to read to us. He told us was going to read a story by Ray Bradbury, who was a science fiction writer. Continue reading
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,