The Short Story Thread

[Fried Egg]

I just read my eight year old daughter, for a bedtime story, "The hoard of the Gibblens" by Lord Dunsany. I was worried before hand that the linguistic style might be too flowery for her and I was worried that the sudden abrupt ending might be too unpleasant but I need not have worried. She seemed to follow it with ease and enjoyed it. I'm well pleased.

Now to consider whether any of the other stories of his might be suitable...

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Fried Egg

I just read my eight year old daughter, for a bedtime story, "The hoard of the Gibblens" by Lord Dunsany. I was worried before hand that the linguistic style might be too flowery for her and I was worried that the sudden abrupt ending might be too unpleasant but I need not have worried. She seemed to follow it with ease and enjoyed it. I'm well pleased.

Now to consider whether any of the other stories of his might be suitable...

Perhaps "The Kith of the Elf-Folk" or "The Highwayman"...?

[J-Sun]

Originally Posted by Fried Egg

She seemed to follow it with ease and enjoyed it. I'm well pleased.

Good deal.

Originally Posted by Fried Egg

I haven't read any Cordwainer Smith yet but I am looking forward to reading the S.F. Masterworks edition that I have on my to-read shelf shortly. Perhaps it will make good holiday reading this summer?

I don't know - it may well, but it's not light reading. Very dense, allusive, symbolic, etc. So it depends on what you look for in summer holiday reading.

I should also note (had a thread - maybe this one - where I had some confusion over this) that the SF Masterworks volume, Rediscovery of Man, is a Gollancz retitle of the Ballantine/Del Rey The Best of. Whereas the NESFA edition, The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith is basically a resorted omnibus of TBo, IoM, and Quest of the Three Worlds (the O'Neill stories), and includes everything but Norstrilia (and the story versions of it).

[nomadman]

Originally Posted by J-Sun

I don't know - it may well, but it's not light reading. Very dense, allusive, symbolic, etc. So it depends on what you look for in summer holiday reading.

I wouldn't say it's particularly heavy reading either, at least not in the way that much of, say, Gene Wolfe's fiction can be. Smith's works are extremely multilayered, and rewarding on many levels, but they're not the type of stories that require you to have extensive background knowledge of the symbols, allusions and metaphors he uses in order to get the main thrust of things.

[J-Sun]

Originally Posted by nomadman

I wouldn't say it's particularly heavy reading either, at least not in the way that much of, say, Gene Wolfe's fiction can be. Smith's works are extremely multilayered, and rewarding on many levels, but they're not the type of stories that require you to have extensive background knowledge of the symbols, allusions and metaphors he uses in order to get the main thrust of things.

Yep, agreed - that's a good counterbalance. I didn't mean to imply it was exceptionally difficult - just not typical "beach reading".

[J-Sun]

Just finished the collection "half" of the Ace "double" of The Green Millennium/Night Monsters. Night Monsters is four whole stories of eighty pages. It starts with "The Black Gondolier" which has a lot of great touches and details but the "big gasp ending" doesn't entirely come off and the central supernatural conspiracy teeters between brilliance and silliness but, due to Leiber's skill, mostly worked for me as far as it went. But, most importantly, it's a single "sympathetic listener" relating the second-hand tale of the "traumatized friend with a weird upon him" and has really the single image/concept/thematic nexus of black oil, blackoil, blackoil! So it should obviously be a short story, right? But it's a too-long novelette of 31 pages. So, worth a read if you're into Leiber or weird stuff but not entirely successful.

That's followed by "Midnight in the Mirror World" which I love but read recently in The Mind Spider, so didn't re-read.

After that, there's one nearly as good - "I'm Looking for Jeff" is a really good macabre tale - it may not be all that spoil-able because it's a fairly standard type but I'll still avoid saying anything about it, just in case. But I really enjoyed it (if "enjoyed" is the right word).

It ends with "The Casket-Demon" which is readable but not particularly good, dealing with an ancient family curse, an actress who must stay famous or fade away (so what'd she do as a child?) and makes fun of the Hollywood entourage and so on.

Strange arrangement as you normally open and close with your stronger pieces and put the filler in the middle and this was backwards to me. Anyway, IMO, "Midnight" and "Jeff" shouldn't be missed.

[Extollager]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

Unfortunately, Ellison's books are frequently stolen from libraries, as are those of Lovecraft.

Huh! How do you know, if you don't mind my asking?

I just returned an interlibrary loan copy of Ellison's Strange Wine which had a scribbly signature by Ellison's name on the title page. I don't know what his autograph looks like on books. I was curious if it was printed there or was written, so I just moistened a finger tip and touched it, and it smudged. I don't hold with stealing, including stealing library books, but it is funny in a way to think of people stealing Ellison's books, and here's one that may have been signed by the man himself on the public library open shelves. (Grand Forks, ND, public library, but don't anybody go and steal it now.)

[Later] ....Yes, it looked like these samples:



So I guess I have smudged Harlan Ellison's autograph.

When I was a youngster in southern Oregon, I used to come across Arkham House books and Gnome Press books etc. occasionally in public libraries. I suppose they are likely to have been stolen from the public, who bought them, by now. It seems the Grants Pass, Oregon, public library had ? Beyond the Wall of Sleep ? and I'm quite sure they had The Coming of Conan.

[Fishbowl Helmet]

I haven't read the massive thread, but I thought I'd mention a few.

James Thurber, The Thurber Carnival collection of shorts is a great read.
Wodehouses, Just Enough Jeeves has a lot to recommend it.
50 Funniest American Writers is a great anthology.
Deliriously Happy, Larry Doyle a former writer for the Simpsons, mostly humorous articles rather than short fiction.

[nomadman]

Have been reading a few of Leiber's and Tim Powers's short stories this month. Leiber's Four Ghosts in Hamlet is a wonderful piece, which draws on Leiber's time in the theatre to add a depth and richness to what is already a smart and eerily effective ghost story. It's full of well drawn characters and intriguing little details about the life of traveling stage actors, and the supernatural element, when it appears, is so naturally and subtly introduced as to seem entirely plausible given the confines of the piece.

A Deskful of Girls is less successful. It's another ghost story, though this time the ghosts are alive and out for revenge. The basic premise of the tale is an interesting one, about the possibility that fears and neuroses can be made manifest if sufficiently aroused, but it's also tied in to the whole Change War series, which I'm unfamiliar with, and whose elements I found frankly confusing.

The Inner Circles is an odd little piece about an alcoholic who has visions of grotesque black figures that all seem to represent elements of his psyche but which his wife and child are somehow able to sense. I must confess I ended up skim-reading this one so I didn't get everything that Leiber was trying to say here. Will probably re-read at a later date.

Tim Powers is a first-rate novellist, but he's considerably weaker in the short form. Many of the stories here are rather too offbeat to work as anything other than curious series of incidents, and Powers's often despair-ridden and tortured characters aren't really given enough space to breath in the twenty or thirty pages he gives them. The best of the stories thus far (I'm reading them in order) is A Soul in a Bottle, an engimatic ghost story about a dead poet and her sister that achieves a level of menacing strangeness that begins to approach his longer, better works. The Hour of Babel is another decent piece, about the incursion of an otherworldly entity in a pizza parlour thirty years ago, and a secretive organization's attempts to recreate the experience in the present, with devastating results. The Bible Repairman, the title piece of the collection, is a great idea, and pretty effective in spots, but it's just a little too short and undeveloped to really do the whole thing justice. The final piece I read, Parallel Lines, is a fun though rather forgettable tale of two elderly sisters, one of whom is dead, and their attempts to better understand their relationship.

[J-Sun]

Originally Posted by nomadman

A Deskful of Girls is ... tied in to the whole Change War series, which I'm unfamiliar with, and whose elements I found frankly confusing.

Yeah, it's considered "a Changewar tale" but, frankly, I don't see how or why. I think it just got included in the Gregg Press The Change War (1978) but shouldn't have been - perhaps the Silbersack intro to that explains why, but I can't find the intro online and have the fiction contents, so will never buy it. "Deskful" follows a Changewar story in The Best of Fritz Leiber (1974) but, in Leiber's own afterword, he describes "Try and Change the Past" as a Changewar story but does not describe "A Deskful of Girls" as one. As loose and non-cumulative as the Changewar stories are, I don't think it helps the story or the series to try to consider "Deskful" as connected to them.

-- Wow. I just noticed in my last post in the thread that I never directly said The Green Millennium/Night Monsters was by Leiber, only mentioning "Leiber's skill" in passing in the middle of the paragraph. Geez. So, yeah, that one's by Leiber.

[J-Sun]

More . I said in the Pohl thread that I had In the Problem Pit (1976) in the TBR. Turns out it was a TBRR - the first story seemed so familiar I did some checking and it looks like I did read this collection in April '01. Since I was enjoying the first story and since I wanted to make sure I'd really read the whole collection, I kept on.

It's an odd collection - he'd collected five 70s stories in his tenth collection (1972's Gold at the Starbow's End) and had just had The Best of Frederik Pohl (1975) come out, selecting from his first nine collections. So his eleventh collection does both, collecting three post-Starbow stories (and two articles) for the first time and going back over the first nine collections to reprint seven more older stories. My favorites show that the TBO missed some things but that the mix could have profitably been more newer stories and fewer reprints.

My favorite is probably "To See Another Mountain" (1959) which has the then-40 year old (and now 93, I think) Pohl writing powerfully and convincingly from the POV of a 95 year old scientist who is being treated by a psychiatrist. The story goes interesting places from there but I don't want to say too much. I also particularly liked "In the Problem Pit" (1973), involving a very special sort of think tank, even if it is a "very early-70s was just the very late-60s" kind of tale, and "I Remember a Winter" (1972) about which even Pohl says "I thought it was science fiction, but I wasn't at all sure anyone else would. So I sent it to Damon Knight for an opinion. He never said whether he thought it was sf or not, but he did publish it in Orbit." I don't think citing Damon Knight makes for a very compelling argument on the science fiction score. I personally fail to see how it's science fiction, though it may well be "speculative" philosophical fiction but, whatever it is, it's pretty good.

I'd also give honorable mentions, in that I liked them or significant aspects of them, to "Let the Ants Try" (1949), which is your usual time-travel-story-with-a-twist, which I usually don't like but, despite the inevitable logical difficulties, this has a sardonic something extra; "What to Do Until the Analyst Comes" (1956) about the guy who can't partake of "Cheery-Gum", which is kind of like the ultimate anti-depressant; and "Some Joys Under the Star" (1973), which is a whacked-out tale of galactic conflict, crazy earthlings, and a happy-ray gone wrong, told with a kind of Douglas Adams-ish juxtaposition of the cosmic and trivial and with its happy relation of profound tragedies.

There's also a one page intro about the book, a three page outro about SF generally, and a nice eleven page article on the Golden Ages of Campbell and Gold/Boucher.

Like I've said elsewhere, whether I remember something doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the quality of a thing. Before (re)reading this, I had completely forgotten I'd already read it, though most of the stories did become at least vaguely familiar once I got into them but, while this isn't the greatest collection since sliced bread, it is a very good one and recommended.

[j. d. worthington]

"A Deskful of Girls" uses the Chagewar concept of the "ghostgirls" which are kept for the entertainment of the warriors who find themselves in the stations, one of which forms the base for the novel The Big Time. I vaguely recall other connections to the set, but it has been a very long time since i read Changewar, and would have to go back through the story again to refresh my memory....

nomadman: If you've not read The Big Time (or at least some of the other Changewar tales), you're in for a treat.....


Extollager: On which? The Lovecraft is fairly common knowledge; though some libraries have managed to hold onto their copies, there are always copies which go "missing" only to later turn up in sales of someone's private collection. Ellison's work gets stolen both by fans and by those who object to it, and a lot of libraries have had the same sort of experience here they do with HPL. The central library here, for instance, once had an extensive Ellison collection, but it has been whittled down to a very tiny handful... and not through the usual routes of damage or not circulating enough to take up shelf space....

[J-Sun]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

"A Deskful of Girls" uses the Chagewar concept of the "ghostgirls" which are kept for the entertainment of the warriors who find themselves in the stations, one of which forms the base for the novel The Big Time.

Okay - that still sounds pretty thin, but I guess it'd qualify to connect them. I think I recall the core of the novel, but I'm not recalling that ghostgirls also featured in it. Thanks for that - I'll keep an eye out whenever I re-read them. I also need to watch more carefully for the "When the Change-Winds Blow" connections. The thematic connections, at least, in that one are obvious but the explicit history/terms/gimmicks that specifically connect it also escaped me, IIRC. But the others that are usually attributed to the series are clearly Snakes'n'Spiders stories.

nomadman: If you've not read The Big Time (or at least some of the other Changewar tales), you're in for a treat.....

Agreed - I think the novel may be the best of them, but I especially like "The Oldest Soldier" and they're all pretty good.

[nomadman]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

"A Deskful of Girls" uses the Chagewar concept of the "ghostgirls" which are kept for the entertainment of the warriors who find themselves in the stations, one of which forms the base for the novel The Big Time. I vaguely recall other connections to the set, but it has been a very long time since i read Changewar, and would have to go back through the story again to refresh my memory....

Thanks for the background. Still, I think A Deskful... would be a better companion piece to that particular novel, as none of those elements was at all clear on their own.

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

nomadman: If you've not read The Big Time (or at least some of the other Changewar tales), you're in for a treat.....

I'm actually planning on reading The Big Time very shortly, after I've finished my current reads (Fleming's Casino Royale and Zelazny's The Dream Master).

[Fried Egg]

I've just finished "The Forest", the opening story in Laird Barron's "Occultation" collection. Launched back into Barron's grim, crawling chaos vision of reality with a bang. Great stuff.