The Short Story Thread

[dask]

And my one Maine hb if Mr. Thead allows me.

[jojajihisc]

A Criminal Proceeding by Gene Wolfe - The insanity of a highly publicized and several years long trial is detailed. Complete with a stadium setting for maximum ticket sales. The story appears in the collection Storeys from the Old Hotel.

Even The Queen by Connie Willis - In a post-female liberation, world several women from one family get together to discuss the possibility of one of them joining the "Cyclists." And that is not a bike group.

[Connavar]

Even The Queen by Connie Willis i have read that story in 20 Years special of Year's Best SF.

Dont remember if i finished it though and not because of the very female issue of the story...

[jojajihisc]

Connavar - Which ones out of that collection have you read? I've read about half of them over a couple years span. Wolfe, Shepard, Kress, Crowley, Resnick, Bisson, Willis, Haldeman, Egan, Chiang, Kelly and Gloss so far. Favorites in bold.

[Connavar]

Originally Posted by jojajihisc

Connavar - Which ones out of that collection have you read? I've read about half of them over a couple years span. Wolfe, Shepard, Kress, Crowley, Resnick, Bisson, Willis, Haldeman, Egan, Chiang, Kelly and Gloss so far. Favorites in bold.

Resnick story i enjoyed most. I was thinking in the back of my head i'm so tired of all these future sf stories about anglo-saxons....

Then i read his interesting African story which was new,thrilling to me as an idea let alone the quality of the story.

Haldeman's None so Blind was very impressive too. I'm not sure if i read half or more, i have to check which i read and get back to you.

[Fried Egg]

I've started reading "The Dying Earth", a collection of interconnected stories by Jack Vance. The second one's entitled: "Mazirian the Magician" and as I read it, I realised I've read it before in an anthology.

I really love that story and am thoroughly enjoing the collection in general. Vance breaks all the rules, characters and places just pop in to (and out of) existence as needed to move the plot along. He does not spend time constructing a convincing world nor worrying about how to fit the story to the world in which it is set. The world and characters are strictly subservient to the plot rather than, as is often the case these days, the other way around. I wish more modern authors wrote like this.

[Connavar]

Originally Posted by Fried Egg

I've started reading "The Dying Earth", a collection of interconnected stories by Jack Vance. The second one's entitled: "Mazirian the Magician" and as I read it, I realised I've read it before in an anthology.

I really love that story and am thoroughly enjoing the collection in general. Vance breaks all the rules, characters and places just pop in to (and out of) existence as needed to move the plot along. He does not spend time constructing a convincing world nor worrying about how to fit the story to the world in which it is set. The world and characters are strictly subservient to the plot rather than, as is often the case these days, the other way around. I wish more modern authors wrote like this.

I wonder what you will think of the world when you have read the other 3,4 stories in the book. Its like he doesnt care about the setting but at the same the world becomes vivid through the characters,stories.

Guyal of Sfere the last story in DE i have in 3 books at home. Two other masters of short novels type collections.

I enjoyed,remember best Liane the Wayfarer,Guyal of Sfere.

[Jojo999]

Recently I tackled a few Brain Aldiss books I last read maybe 40 or so years ago when I was a teenager. I was blown away with the quality of many of his stories in Starswarm and No Time Like Tomorrow.

The stories in Starswarm occur a million centuries in the future from when mankind began space travel. The stories are vignettes from selected "sectors" of the galaxy at that time. Considering that this book was first published in 1964, I thought Aldiss was incredibly creative.

The stories in No Time Like Tomorrow are not linked together in any way but stand alone on their own themes.

I enjoyed all the stories but I will give particular mention to two stories:

"* T" about a time in the very far future where there are only two races in the whole universe and one of them, mankind is expanding to other galaxies and threatening the other race. The other race sends a mission back in time to destroy the Earth long before before mankind has had chance to develop.

The story "Poor Little Warrior!" is again about time travel, but this time a hunter from the future time travels back to the age of dinosaurs to kill a Brontosaurus. Unfortunately, he makes a serious miscalculation.

[jojajihisc]

The Gambler by Paolo Bacigalupi - A story about an Asian immigrant writer in the U.S. working for a news media company who must find a way to improve the popularity of his stories. This is really a pretty conventional story that could just about be set in the present time.

podcast

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[jojajihisc]

Roadside Rescue by Pat Cadigan - A man meets an alien after his car breaks down and asks for help. Service is rendered.

podcast

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

The Author Of The Acacia Seeds, subtitled And other extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguists, by Ursula K. Le Guin. An incredibly imaginative, evocative and thought-provoking little piece, it consists of three excerpts from a putative journal for academics who interpret animal and insect languages. The first piece looks at the poetry 'written' on a series of acacia seeds by a renegade worker ant who leaves her tribe to be a hermit. The second deals with strides in interpreting penguin language, with ballet dancers producing renditions of pieces from the penguins' language of gesture. The piece ends with a suggestion that researchers have focussed too much on the more overt language of the smaller, more active penguins and suggests that the relatively quiescent Emperor penguin may have a far more subtle and rich language-world. Finally, the head of the Association imagines new areas of study altogether - the language of plants, of lichen, and finally of minerals.

But my summary does this story no justice. It's a fascinating study of our ideas of communication and art, where one shades into another, and where behaviour or even just existence shade into language. Le Guin has gone on record describing Philip K Dick as America's own home-grown Borges, a title she herself can lay claim to with tales like this.

[Fried Egg]

I've started readin "Terror by Night" by Ambrose Biece an already I think I'm getting a sense of his bitter and unfair view of life.

I particularly liked "An occurrence at Owl creek bridge", set during the American civil war, and a civillian is about to be hanged from a bridge by Union soldiers but he lets himself dream about managing to escape and return to his family...

Also, "Haiti the Shepherd" is an excellent tale, almost like a parable, about hapinness (and it's elusiveness).

[Connavar]

House Dick by by Dashiell Hammett in Nightmare Town collection.

Of course a story with The Continental OP, a short one but a great one as must stories with The OP. The collection has 3 short stories about Same Spade that Hammett wrote as sequals for The Maltese Falcon after bieng forced publisher,fans.

But i bought the collection to get a complete collection of all the OP stories, i couldnt care less about Sam Spade at the moment.

[dask]

"Dagon" from THE CALL OF CTHULHU AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES edited by S.T. Joshi.

Later in his career H.P. Lovecraft would develop what August Derleth has coined the Cthulhu mythos, Lovecraft's literary "cosmicism", to help offset the burden of "mechanistic materialism," the philosophical light he bent to see the world around him. (Man, the hours I spent pilfering --- er, researching S.T. Joshi's introduction.) But early on he stayed closer to home. In "Dagon", Lovecraft's first foray into the printed landscape of WEIRD TALES, the supercargo of a passenger boat is captured by a German warship, deftly escapes in a small lifeboat and is set adrift in the middle of the ocean with no navigational aid. While asleep he is washed ashore a vast expanse of "black slime...putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish and other less describle things...protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain." This is no fifth dimension he has been tossed into, no alternate earth shooting up at right angles to our own, but a national park size chunk of ocean floor "innumerable millions of years" old risen to the surface. To the horizon and beyond, "monotonous undulations" of Stygian scope, reminiscent "of Satan's hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness" claim him as their own. But as any good explorer with no hope in sight, he sets "out boldly for an unknown goal." Eventually he comes across a monolithic piece of rock, not the work of Nature, however, but "of living and thinking creatures."

Then Dagon, the Fish-God appears, but rather than preemptively squashing the human interloper out of existence, it runs to the aid of the "Cyclopean monolith", protectively wrapping it's arms around it and hurling verbally grotesque admonishments like a wild animal staking out it's territory. Evidently Lovecraft does not hold his gods in very high esteem. Still, its enough to drive our hero into morphine addiction and eventual suicide.

Well written and creepy, I can't think of a better way to kick off a career in weird tale telling.

[Fried Egg]

Originally Posted by dask

"Dagon" from THE CALL OF CTHULHU AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES edited by S.T. Joshi.
...
Well written and creepy, I can't think of a better way to kick off a career in weird tale telling.

That was my first Lovecraft tale. I quite enjoyed it but, looking back, I think he far surpassed it later on...

I've just finished a collection by Theodore Sturgeon and the highlight for me was "The Pod and the Barrier" about a hotch potch array of scientists on a space expedition to try to penetrate an inpenetratable barrier that is inhibiting mankind's galactic expansion. Quintisential Sturgeon in that it is well written, thought provoking and never quite unfolds as you might expect...