I’ve heard the name Poul Anderson here and there, and often in a positive light, yet I don’t think I’ve ever read anything from him, up until last week!
I was having a heck of a time looking at all the books he wrote, and how they were often out of order or intertwined, and I came up with an alternative solution:
A Short Story Sampler!
This is one of those books that has been retold, adapted, and parodied so many times that I thought I knew what I was getting into, and was very, very wrong.
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus was first published anonymously by Mary Shelley in 1818. Her name wasn’t publicly attached to the book until a French edition was released in 1921. The version I read was an 1831 edition with an additional foreword by Shelley herself, which told about how, when, and why she originally came up with the idea.
I'm finally getting around to finishing the Skylark series! Even though Skylark of Valeron had a pretty definitive ending back in 1934, apparently lots of readers, including Frederik Pohl, wanted more Skylark, and in 1965, Doc Smith agreed. He serialized the new book, Skylark DuQuesne, in IF Worlds of Science Fiction and collected into a book in 1966.
It was Smith's last book before he passed away.
Like a lot of Smith's stuff, the book starts with a crazy revelation--the method Seaton and company used to keep DuQuesne and the bodiless intelligences out of trouble turns out to have a fatal flaw, and probably won't last very long. This kind of reframing or even retconning is a pretty common element in Smith's sequels, so it wasn't too jarring. In fact, the reason given and the logic behind it is subtle but surprisingly sound.
I felt like I had been neglecting science fiction, so I went hunting around last weekend. There's a book of some of the early Hugo-winning short fiction, and first up there was The Darfsteller, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Well, I went looking for alternate copies of that novella and everywhere I looked the covers recommended Miller's classic novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz. Sometimes loudly. I figured I'd check it out.
I've heard of it but I had never read it until a few days ago!
What I found was a very solid book, with excellent worldbuilding, and with very good tone, characters, ideas, and perspectives. But the "very good" elements each fell slightly short of excellence for a specific reason, but more on that below.
Just a quick announcement, Naya Nomikou just published an excellent narration of my short story, "The Fifth!" She did an amazing job capturing the rising tension and confusion, and added some great ambience and sound effects, too!
Go check out her channel and her videos, and give her a like and a subscription if you wish! She reads a lot of great creepy stories I've never heard of, and good comedies and poetry as well.
Thanks to Naya for narrating my story!
This week's review will likely be out Wednesday evening, and I'm going to be talking about A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
I didn't expect to review this book this week. I needed something to kill half an hour and I thought I'd give this book a look. The same friend who gave me that three-novel Alien omnibus gave me this book, too, and I hadn't opened it yet.
The funny thing is, despite the relatively bad first impression I got from the book, it did a few interesting things that are worth noticing! I kept turning pages, and ended up finishing the book pretty quickly.
I'm talking about Alien: The Cold Forge, by Alex White, published in 2018. The front cover says it's an "All New Story" and "An Original Novel," and aside from a couple of early-on member-berries (mentions of Van Leeuwen and Carter Burke), it's true.
Today's topic is The House on the Borderland, by William Hope Hodgson, published in 1908. I decided to read this book based on Lovecraft's evaluation of Hodgson in his "Supernatural Horror in Literature" essay. Lovecraft said that Hodgson's writing was "Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life... perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality."
Further, Lovecraft called this book "Perhaps the greatest of all of Mr. Hodgson's works."
And, to be honest, I find myself agreeing with Lovecraft's evaluation, in both the positive and negative aspects.
There is more to Jules Verne's famous book about traveling into the Earth than I thought! This is what I learned when I went back to the second issue of Amazing Stories and saw the first part serialized there.
The original was published in French in 1864, then re-published in an expanded version in 1867. Then, the first English version was released in 1871, but here's the kicker: that first English version was drastically altered from what a straightforward translation would have been! The character names were changed, which may have been forgivable, but the structure of the story was actually pretty different, too. That "localized" English version was Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
Finally got a chance to read the third book in this Aliens omnibus: The Female War, by Steve Perry and Stephani Perry. Every time I read one of these, I learn something new, and this time it was that these books--all three of them--were novelizations of comic books, and not the other way around, as I thought when I reviewed the first two.
Anyway, this book continues the story of Billie and Wilks, with surprise ending guest from the previous book, Ripley! People are having a new kind of dream about the aliens on Gateway station, and this book is about figuring out what the dreams mean and what can be done about them.
I was going through some Amazing Stories and found out that they reprinted H.G.Wells's classic The Island of Dr. Moreau. I had never read it before, so I thought I'd give it a try!
The book was originally published in 1896, and there's a famous 1996 film that I never saw, but I did hear a bit about. Still, I knew little enough that the story was a bit of a surprise.
It combines a shipwreck story--a popular form back in the day--with dark, biological science fiction. It's written from the point of view of Edward Prendick, an English natural historian.
I recently picked up a collection of Harlan Ellison stories--it's called "Greatest Hits" but you know what that means: it's stories people other than Ellison think are "important," rather than necessarily "good."
I've never read much Ellison up until now. I read "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" once after watching the Retsupurae of the game.
Starting with the illiterate NPR headline and the (I imagine he rolled in his grave when they added the un-Ellisonly) warning about "outdated cultural representations and language," I was a little wary, but kept moving forward.
Got a reading of a short, funny story from 1912, reprinted in the first year of Weird Tales! It's called "Mr. Fosdick Invents the 'Seidlitzmobile,'" and it tells the tale of an inventor's attempt to use a precursor to good ol' Alka-Seltzer as motive force for a car!
Nightmare Asylum is the second novel in this Aliens Omnibus I got. Like Earth Hive, it was written by Steve Perry, and released in 1993, after the movie Alien 3. It is a direct continuation of the story of Earth Hive.
It's such a shame the Starship Troopers movie came out when it did, because I saw that and dismissed the book for way too long. Finally, I picked up a copy around ten years ago and damn if the book isn't a whole different animal.
In other words, this isn't my first reading.
This was the most ambivalent the Foundation series ever made me. Second Foundation is the third book in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and it was the last one for nearly thirty years. This book was serialized in 1948 and 1949, and novelized in 1953. The next book didn't come until 1982. So this was the conclusion of Asimov's vision until publishers begged him for more.
This book is a pretty serious classic of Japanese space opera. Written by Yoshiki Tanaka in 1982 (I think), it spawned a series of 10 main books and 5 volumes of side stories. It was adapted into anime twice, and manga, and video games. But it didn't really make it over to the U.S. in any official capacity until around 2016.
I don't read too many of these, but my friend Justin (author of The Good Guy and more, and also my co-host on The Wordy Pair) gave me this Aliens omnibus, with three novels in there.
The first one, Earth Hive (which I keep remembering wrongly as Hive Earth) was surprisingly good.
This book was attached to the end of the Lensman Super Pack I bought a long time ago, but after I read through all of the main books, I looked at this one and it seemed like it was mostly unrelated to the Lensman series, at least in the first few pages that I read. So, I neglected it for a while.
Last weekend, I decided to give it a look, and I quite liked what I found. This book is a novel created by stitching together three of Doc Smith's stories about a guy named Neal Cloud. It has also been called Masters of the Vortex, but the version I read was called The Vortex Blaster. There might be some small differences between versions.
e
Right after "The Floor Above," which I did a reading of last week, appears a short story by Vincent Starrett called "Penelope." It has tons of great elements of a good weird tale:
I loved this book back in the 1990s when I first read it. I even went so far as to buy a big collection of the whole series, and enjoyed the hell out of it. But I gave it to a friend, so it had been over twenty years since I had read this book, when I picked it up recently for a review!
