Archive for January 2020
Every January, I get to read some cool stuff that isn’t usually on my radar. This year was no different. (ok, well, some of it was on my radar, but my reaction to what I was reading was nice and surprising!)
But? Something happened this January during my Vintage reads that has never happened before. I mean, it has, but not due to reading vintage science fiction.
what happened, you ask?
Reading Vintage Science Fiction this year, more than any other year I’ve done this, made me want to go out and get a ton of biographies. I want to get a biography of Begum Rokheya, Oscar Wilde, and Orson Welles, and I want to know all about Mary Shelley’s world, and what life was like when she grew up. I want to know more cool stuff about these hella cool people!
I’m not a biography reader, so saying that I want to read biographies is a big stinkin’ deal!
Your turn:
What did you get out of Vintage Science Fiction Month this year?
While you’re chewing on that, here’s the latest batch of Vintage links!
Heather at Froodian Slip enjoyed Isaac Asimov’s famous Foundation, and she’s interested to see what happens next in the series. She also enjoyed Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, a collection of stories that revolve around a man who is so freakish that the freak shows don’t even want him.
WikiFiction celebrates Jack Vance’s novel Emphyrio, which turns 50 years old this year. John didn’t much care for Emphyrio, but he is a huge fan of Asimov’s The End of Eternity.
Howling Frog continues to amaze, with reviews of Star Trek 10 by James Blish (I LOVE these Star Trek episode novelizations!), The Door Through Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ordeal in Otherwhere by Andre Norton, and Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper.
Bookforager had a good time with Trader to the Stars by Poul Anderson, and now I am also imagining Rijn as talking with Brian Blessed’s voice!
If audio is more your thing, SFFAudio has an excellent podcast, courtesy LibriVox, of Philip Jose Farmer’s The Green Odyssey. They also have audio of Ray Bradbury’s I, Mars. Their website has a TON of Vintage discussions!
Video more your thing? Head over to Lydia Schoch’s site for a review of the short 1930 scifi film It’s a Bird . Lydia also had a good time reminiscing about The Trouble with Tribbles.
Neal at Gutenberg’s Son has some excellent suggestions, if you’re looking for a new Vintage book to read.
It’s official, Sara Light-Waller has THE BEST garage door!
Kristin Brand recommends Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, with a few disclaimers.
Mervi’s reviews reviews Jack Vance’s final Planet of Adventure volume, The Pnume. The aliens are fun and curious, even if some of the scenes were eye-rolling.
Planetary Defense Command gave E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman books a try, with Galactic Patrol. He enjoyed the wackyness, but wasn’t real keen on the telepathy stuff.
SciFi Mind read Frank Herbert’s Destination Void, which asks the questions of how (or why) do you keep a mission alive, when the mission may have been designed to fail? Thanks to John’s review, this book has now become a MUST READ for me!
I get most of these links through our twitter feed and by people leaving their links in the “Vintage Scifi Not-A-Challenge tab up top. Apologies if I missed yours! Please leave your link in the comments, and I’ll do my best to get this post updated with your links.
Thank you everyone, for an amazing Vintage month!!
War of the Worlds Redux
Posted on: January 29, 2020
I didn’t have another Vintage SciFi Month post planned. . . until I yesterday afternoon when I listened to a very fun episode of RadioLab. (and yes, I listen to podcasts the same way I read anthologies: in random order)
The title of the episode was just War of the Worlds, and I could guess what it was about, but the episode was a million times more fun than I expected! Sorry, Yes, this blog post is one huge advertisement for their hella fun War of the Worlds episode and for RadioLab in general.
Maybe you already know this timeline?
1898: H.G. Wells writes War of the Worlds.
1938: Orson Welles does his Oct 30th radio broadcast of his version of War of the Worlds, which takes Wells’ story and makes it sort of news-y.
Right at the beginning of the broadcast, Welles announces that this is a science fiction story, and then at the end of the broadcast he announces it again. He and his radio crew assumed they were giving people a fun Halloween scare. And yet, people freak the hell out any way.
The Radiolab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich go into all sorts of fun historical detail about how how Newspaper and Radio were not friends, and “We interrupt this broadcast for an important news bulletin” was really new at the time, and how listeners would channel surf the same way we channel surf today.
It’s just a damn good podcast episode.
They talk about how the police station fielded hundreds of calls from people worried about a Martian invasion, and how people swore they saw smoke above the city. People had convinced themselves that they saw something, and they didn’t see anything! because nothing was actually happening! And that Welles had no idea that he’d scared the shit out of people until the next morning when he read the newspapers.
The hosts then asked what I thought (boy was I wrong!) was a rather silly question: Could someone pull this same stunt again? Could someone trick listeners into thinking a radio drama about an obviously fake event was real?
um, Yes.
Two more times, actually!
Sandkings by George R R Martin
Posted on: January 26, 2020
What if I told you that Game of Thrones was Martin’s weakest work?
First, you’d punch me.
Then, as I was getting up off the floor, you’d say “wait, he wrote something else?”
Yes! Many something else’s! Lots of really good something else’s! Lots of excellent horror and science fiction!
If you enjoyed Game of Thrones even the tiniest bit, do yourself a favor and find some of Martin’s non-fantasy short stories. “A Song for Lya” will make you weep. “Fever Dream” will make you enjoy vampire fiction again. “The Pear Shaped Man” is creepy AF. I never get sick of rereading “Nightflyers”. And “Sandkings” is enjoyable as hell. And that’s about one millionth of all the great stuff he’s written.
“Sandkings”, published in Omni magazine in 1979, barely counts as Vintage Science Fiction (at least how I arbitrarily reckon). This story won the Hugo and the Nebula. Unless you are willing to dig through dusty back corners of used bookstores, your best bet for reading “Sandkings” is to buy a digital copy, or get your hands on either Martin’s Dreamsongs volumes or the Vandermeer edited Big Book of Science Fiction. Dreamsongs and Big Book go for about $30 a piece, and in my opinion are a steal at any price.
Spoilers ahead.
So what is “Sandkings” about? It’s about how easy it is to think that something small must be stupid. How easy it is to think that something that communicates differently, that thinks differently, that grows differently, must be dumb. And making dumb animals do silly things for our entertainment is fun, right?
I love how this story plays with foreshadowing, and how Jala Wo plays Kress like a violin. She knows when she has him, and she strings him along, and it is horrible and wonderful and I don’t feel bad at all that Kress gets exactly what he deserves. Remember the movie Gremlins? That’s the rated G, very kindergarten version of “Sandkings”.
Simon Kress likes to have exotic pets. He craves being able to brag that he has something that no one else has. He’d never heard of Wo and Shade’s shop until that day, but isn’t that where one buys the oddest things, at store’s no one has ever heard of?
Wo sells him some tiny sandkings, along with the required giant aquarium, and the instructions to keep them fed, and treat them kindly. The tiny sandkings, about the size of beetles, have a hive mind and a bit of telepathy. Treat them right and they will see you as their god.
Of course Kress can’t resist!
Vintage Sci Fi Round up!
Posted on: January 22, 2020
So many wonderful Vintage SciFi Posts! I’ve been adding to the draft of this blog post for a couple of days now, so If I missed you, add your link to the comments and I’ll update the post.
Too many posts for me to visit, read, and comment on! the best problem a blogger could ever have!
I am in awe of Jean at Howling Frog Books and the quantity of reviews she has posted! Jean, how do you do it?? Recently, Jean has posted reviews of The Lotus Caves by John Christopher, The Case Against Tomorrow by Frederik Pohl, Siege Perilous by Lester Del Ray, and The Metal Monster by A. Merritt. Seriously, Jean, how do you get so much reading and review writing done??
Bookforager gets the prize for next most Vintage Science Fiction reviews posted in a short period of time, she recently posted reviews of The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard and The Airs of Earth by Brian Aldiss.
Musings of a Middle Aged Geek has more than just musings on the 1960 movie version of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. If you’re looking for an indepth post about this film, you just found it!
Scifist 2.0 takes us on a trip through some very early silent science fiction movies. Science fiction wasn’t new. . . but movies were!
it’s been a great month for Vintage SciFi movie blog posts! The Initiative has a great post on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, one of my favorite old movies.
Lydia Schoch reviewed Philip K Dick’s Second Variety, in which robots are just following their programming, to the further demise of humanity. And you end up feeling bad for the robots.
Medleyana is taking the opportunity to rediscover the works of Henry Kuttner. After reading this article, you’ll want to (re)discover Kuttner too!
Berthold Gambel of Ruined Chapel mostly enjoyed Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, finding the underground cities a little far fetched. Like the rest of us, Berthold was not impressed with how Asimov wrote female characters.
Eclectic Theist continues the Asimov trend with a review of the Hugo and Locus award winning Foundation’s Edge, which is the fourth book in what I thought was a trilogy.
Need more Daneel Olivaw? Head over to Wiki Fiction for John Schmidt’s article on Connecting the Daneels.
Kaedrin reviewed James P. Hogan’s debut novel Inherit the Stars. This novel was apparently Hogan’s response to being disappointed by Clarke’s 2001. Strangeness is found on the moon, much chatting between scientists ensues.
Froodian Slip reviews another one of my favorites, “Who Goes There”, by John W Campbell, Jr. This short story was the inspiration for so much future scifi, I can’t even!
Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations discusses A.E. Van Vogt’s generation ship short story “Centaurus II”. If you like what you read in this review, the short story is available to read for free online.
A late edition that I missed was Patrick’s post at Family and Friends Blog about enjoying the works of Isaac Asimov.
This book is 200 years old. This post will have spoilers. I also might be spoiling a very early scene in an even older book, so there’s that.
It’s a famous story, how Frankenstein came to be created: simplified greatly, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont, and Lord Byron spend the summer together. A “ghost story” contest is hatched. Mary has a terrible dream, starts writing what she dreamed, and the rest is history.
(hey, have you read The Stress of Her Regard, by Tim Powers? I think I really need to!)
I’ve had this particular paperback of Frankenstein since high school. Younger me wrote notes in the margins, and underlined words I didn’t know. Lol, I haven’t changed a bit, I still do that.
You know how I can tell these notes in the margin were written when I was in high school? So, there’s a scene where Victor is off to college, and he, well, takes a break for a few months. The note I wrote in the margin was “didn’t his profs miss him?” . Only a high school junior would write that!
My high school was Frankenstein-crazed. The film starring Kenneth Branagh and Robert De Niro came out in 1994, and a year or two later our drama club put on a play that was a post-apocalyptic re-telling of Frankenstein (best high school memory? The scene where the kid who played Igor had to get the abnormal brain and bring it back to the lab. Our “brain” was a cauliflower covered in green jello. As Igor carried it around, he licked it. A lot. It was hilarious!)
This paperback that I have, it makes a big deal that the book’s subtitle is “The Modern Prometheus”, so I hadn’t realized until I did some research that when you buy a copy of Frankenstein at the bookstore, it will rarely have this subtitle. As a kid, I didn’t get the whole Prometheus connection, he’s the guy who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to man, right? Who cares about a little bit fire?
Prometheus did more than steal fire from the gods. Prometheus gave humanity some of the powers that until then, only the gods had had – the power to create fire, and more importantly, the power to create life. In contemporary western culture, Prometheus has equally become a symbol of quests for scientific knowledge as it is a cautionary tale of over-reach and hubris.
Hubris causes all sorts of entertaining science fictional stories to happen, doesn’t it? But where’s the line between entertaining and cautionary?
Anyway.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 200 years, you know the plot of Frankenstein.
And thanks to the fact that Shelley revised the text in 1931 to drastically change the themes, Hollywood, and pop culture, the original story has gotten all mashed up.
Victor Frankenstein was not a mad scientist who had a lab in a castle. He never had an assistant named Igor. The creature isn’t stupid. The creature is never specifically referred to as “Frankenstein’s monster”, he’s referred to as a monster, a creation, a wretch, an abortion.
And those movies, where the monster gets a bride? That’s actually the happiest possible ending.
- In: Jo Walton
- 11 Comments
Award winning books must be the best books that were written that year, right?
right?
as anyone who has ever taken part in a “Read the Hugo’s” challenge, this is not always true.
If you’re reading Hugo winners or nominees for Vintage month, or ever, I highly recommend tracking down a copy of An Informal History of The Hugos, by Jo Walton. It’s a chunkster of a book, and not one that’s meant to be read cover to cover in one (or ten sittings), the volume contains Walton’s “Revisiting the Hugos” series of articles she wrote for Tor.com, along with a selection of comments and additional commentary for each year’s nominees and winners. For a taste of what to expect, check out any of her original articles at Tor.com.
Like the Vandermeer edited Big Book of Science Fiction, I’ve been flipping through Informal History, stopping a pages that have book titles I recognize, to see what Walton thought of them. What did she think of Dune? What did she think of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or Way Station, or Lord of Light, or Philip K Dick or Andre Norton? It was super interesting for me to see where we completely disagreed on our opinions, books that I loved and she thought were just ok at best.
Her commentary isn’t formal reviews, she’s talking about mostly if she liked the book when she was a teenager reading it for the first time, if it has re-readability, if it is print and/or available at the library, if it’s a title people are still interested in talking about. Where applicable she gives a brief mention to the location of that year’s WorldCon, who was nominated for different awards, other notable works that were published that year, and an invitation for people to suggest works that should have been nominated, but weren’t. She starts at 1953, and goes all the way to the year 2000. Yes, ok, this non-fiction commentary doesn’t totally qualify for Vintage Month, but I swear, while I was writing this blog post, I only paid attention to the chapters that cover 1953 – 1979!
I discovered this wonderful short story in The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer. I did some research on the author, and learned about her incredible legacy. Read the story because it’s fun, learn about Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein (also known as Begum Rokheya) because she’s freaking amazing.
One of the many wonderful things about fiction that’s older than 100 years old, is that you can often read it for free, online. If a fifty pound anthology isn’t for you, you can read “Sultana’s Dream” at Strange Horizons, where they reprinted the story as part of a series on Utopias.
Because all science fiction (and a lot of art) is a reaction and reflection of the time in which it was written, here are a few contextual things you might want to know before you read “Sultana’s Dream”.
- Begum Rokheya was born in 1880, in what is now known as Bangladesh, and at the time was British India
- She is considered the pioneer feminist of Bengal
- She was raised in an intellectual, multi-lingual home that was wealthy but also very traditional. This combination meant that she learned Arabic and Urdu, and then English and Bengali.
- You may want to understand what purdah is. (or not. up to you)
Reading this story sent me down a google rabbit hole of the phrase “gender-flip”. That term has to be fairly new, right? hahahaha, NO. I love that gender-flipping has been having a moment for the last, oh, 20 years, but the concept has been around for quite a while. My brain is also going down the rabbit hole of “what was social media way back when?” more on that at the end of this post.
“Sultana’s Dream” plays with gender flipping (and women’s rights!), with the idea that in this Indian Utopia, the women run the country and the men are kept in seclusion.
The plot goes like this: Sultana is drowsing away the afternoon, when a woman walks into her room and invites her out for a walk. Sultana at first thinks the woman is her friend Sister Sara, but later realizes the woman is a stranger. Upon leaving Sultana’s home, they end up where not-Sister Sara lives, and Sultana states that she feels weird walking around in public unveiled, as she is a purdahnishin.
The rest of the story is not-Sister Sara explaining to Sultana how her women-run world, called Ladyland, came to be. A young Queen insisted that all women in the country have access to education, thus women’s universities were started. The women’s universities used their discoveries and inventions for the good of the whole community, while the men stayed focused on military might. The men insisted that the inventions that came out of the women’s university’s were nice, but nothing compared to the value or importance of military strength and other men’s work.
When the country finds themselves on the losing side of a war, the Queen and her female advisors come up with a plan, which I won’t spoil. They win the war, and in the process transform the country into one where women can be in public unveiled, and the men are kept in seclusion. When the men ask to be let out of seclusion, the Queen’s response is “if their services should ever be needed, they would be sent for, and that in the meanwhile they would remain where they were”.
Vintage Sci-Fi Round Up!
Posted on: January 9, 2020
We’re about a week into Vintage month, and it’s been so wonderful so far! There’s been wonderful discussions in comments sections, chit chat on twitter, cool stuff happening every where!
I catch the posts I can, so anything i missed, feel free to leave a link in the comments.
Howling Frog Books is having a blast using the Vintage SciFi Month bingo card, and has reviewed Spock Must Die by James Blish, Bill the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison, and Exiled from Earth by Ben Bova. Three reviews in a week? Yikes, I gotta up my game!
Bookforager has a beautifully written review of Driftglass by Samuel R Delany. Srsly, if you have not read his work, you are missing out!
Eclectic Theist enjoys Past Master by R.A. Lafferty, with bonus recommendations in the comments section.
Kristen Brand has a blast talking about her favorite Vintage Scifi tropes. What are you favorite vintage scifi tropes? which ones annoy you?
Wiki Fiction offers a very indepth look at Stanislaw Lem’s fiction, and primarily the frustration with Solaris. I too was frustrated, but as luck would have it, I ended up being OK with how it ends.
Judith Tarr (yes, that Judith Tarr!) is over at Tor.com talking about reading Andre Norton’s Quag Keep. Fantasy fiction certainly wasn’t new in the last 70s, but Dungeons and Dragons was.
Sara Light-Waller has an excellent profile of Captain Future, at PulpFest. the mythos of Captain Future goes back to the first Worldcon, how cool is that?
Still looking for Vintage recommendations? Prepare to have your TBR explode. Not only does Joachim Boaz have a list of excellent Vintage Scifi recommendations, he’s got an entire website, Science Fiction and other Suspect Ruminations that is 99.99% Vintage Scifi Goodness!
I know I missed plenty of links. Help a girl out and put them in the comments? you can also tweet them to @VintageSciFi_
- In: Tom Godwin
- 6 Comments
Hey, so sorry to tell you, but it already looks like 2020 is going to be a thinky year for me. Thought experiments, taking things apart to see how they work and then trying to put them back together, connecting things that are really obscurely connected, asking questions and not caring about the answer, and then getting bored and moving onto the next thinky thing.
Let’s start with a famous short story called “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin, published in 1954. The story is available to read free online, at Lightspeed Magazine.
If you’re not familiar with this story, you’ll want to go read it at Lightspeed before reading the rest of this post, because there are major spoilers ahead. If you liked it so much you want to own it in print, Baen Books published a nice collection of Godwin’s short fiction*. I’m not at all ashamed to admit that “The Cold Equations” is the only short story in the collection that I’ve read.
“The Cold Equations” gets a lot of discussion because of how cruel the physics of the story is, does the stowaway deserve what happened to her, engineering that’s too stupid to be negligent, etc. Those reasons, and plenty more, is why we still enjoy talking about this story more than 60 years after it was written.
If any of that sounds interesting, I recommend this excellent post (warning, major spoilers) on Tor.com by James Davis Nicoll. The Wikipedia page for “The Cold Equations” also has some interesting material about how when editor John Campbell bought the story in the early 50s, he pushed the author to change the story so that it didn’t have a happy ending.
Many articles and think pieces online like to take this story apart because of, to misquote Derek Kunsken’s The Quantum Magician completely out of context, “the math was inescapable”. (damn do I love that line)
To me, “The Cold Equations” is nothing more than The Trolley Problem thought experiment with very thin veneer of a plot. What’s the trolley problem? To steal directly from Wikipedia:
And since you are barreling down the tracks at the speed of a well, speeding train, you only have a few seconds to make your decision. nice, huh?
For a more entertaining introduction to The Trolley Problem, I recommend you watch season 1 and 2 of The Good Place**. they have a little too much fun visualizing that you have a split second to make your decision.
Anyway, what does any of this have to do with “The Cold Equations”?
SPOILERS , if you haven’t already read the short story:
The Orbit of One’s Soul
Posted on: January 4, 2020
I finished Lem’s Solaris shortly after drafting my last blog post. I hadn’t realized how close I was to the end of the book!
I’d been warned (thanks wikipedia) that the books ends rather abruptly. And it does! the end is going along nicely, and then it just BAM, ends. I was like “where’s the rest of the story?” but no, all the rest of the pages in the book were blank.
Lemme give you some context, plot-wise. Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, has traveled out to the Station on the ocean planet Solaris, to continue his studies. There are only a few other scientists on the station, and when Kris arrives, he learns the man he hoped to meet and study with, Gibarian, has committed suicide.
All sorts off other weird things happen, that I won’t spoil, because they are the meat of the story. And if I mention them, I will color your experience, and I don’t want to do that.
Cool things about the station: there is a library! and it is full of paper books! When Kris needs to kill time, or just needs a quiet place to think, he goes to the library! The station also has video calling, you can basically Skype/Facetime other people in other locations in the Station. pretty neat!
Scientists have been studying Solaris for decades. We’ve convinced ourselves that the planet-covering ocean is sentient, and maybe intelligent, and that when the ocean solidifies itself and sometimes imitates us, that it is trying to communicate with us. The strange happenings on the station, is that also the Ocean trying to communicate with us?
The whole concept of the novel is that there are things humanity will never understand, that we need to be at peace with the fact that we will never be able to communicate with Solaris, that we may never be able to communicate with an alien intelligence, ever. We can’t seem to figure out the best way to make contact with Solaris, and Solaris sure as hell has no freakin’ idea how to communicate with us in a way that makes any sense. We can observe each other, we can attempt to communicate, but we will never succeed. Failure is in itself, the knowledge that the thing you are trying isn’t working, and to try something else.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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