pre-"2001" space travel psychodramas - SLUGS IN SPACE and donald malcolm

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it's a fair point that we haven't exactly been turning over any obscure rocks with the first three stories but next week it's:

"beyond the reach of storms" by donald malcolm

which i pretty much would bet $ that no one here has read

Tracer Hand, Thursday, 17 April 2008 16:23 (sixteen years ago) link

oh yeah, what's your website again?

Jordan, Thursday, 17 April 2008 17:03 (sixteen years ago) link

"which i pretty much would bet $ that no one here has read" - start discussing it now folx!

thomp, Thursday, 17 April 2008 21:27 (sixteen years ago) link

p.s. i think this is available in the anthology 'lambda 1', ed. john carnell, if anyone wants to grab a cheap second hand copy off've amazon.

thomp, Thursday, 17 April 2008 21:27 (sixteen years ago) link

and then ocr and post it here :)

ledge, Thursday, 17 April 2008 21:45 (sixteen years ago) link

"lambda 1" is indeed the source

Jordan you're joking right? i feel like i've been spamming the boards with it -- in any case: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/slugoftime

Tracer Hand, Thursday, 17 April 2008 23:22 (sixteen years ago) link

Certainly a much bigger presence on the boards than your Go-go thread.

James Redd and the Blecchs, Friday, 18 April 2008 01:42 (sixteen years ago) link

hahahaha

Tracer Hand, Friday, 18 April 2008 09:59 (sixteen years ago) link

ha, no, i remember seeing something about it once and then i forgot about it. i just need to remember to subscribe to the podcast.

Jordan, Friday, 18 April 2008 19:09 (sixteen years ago) link

I wanted to start a standalone thread to communicate with you guys, but I couldn't decide on the title. I had

Bug The Sluglords
Sluglords Live In Vain
The Slugs My Destination

and a few others but nothing really clicked.

James Redd and the Blecchs, Monday, 21 April 2008 17:46 (sixteen years ago) link

tracer are you guys gonna do any theodore sturgeon?

J.D., Monday, 21 April 2008 23:33 (sixteen years ago) link

nope! would have liked to though - if we were gonna do one, which one would you have chosen?

James those are all excellent!

Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 22 April 2008 07:14 (sixteen years ago) link

cordwainer smith?

thomp, Tuesday, 22 April 2008 09:07 (sixteen years ago) link

Haha, I just got a library copy of this book yestterday.

James Redd and the Blecchs, Tuesday, 22 April 2008 12:47 (sixteen years ago) link

who reads the stories??

Jordan, Tuesday, 22 April 2008 16:05 (sixteen years ago) link

Tracer does, don't you recognize his voice?

James Redd and the Blecchs, Tuesday, 22 April 2008 16:53 (sixteen years ago) link

haha now i want to know what the TWO question marks mean Jordan.. c'mon tell the truth

Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 22 April 2008 16:54 (sixteen years ago) link

this thread is all one big chain-pull from Jordan isn't it - i am 1,000,000,000x gullible

Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 22 April 2008 16:56 (sixteen years ago) link

I was inspired by the series to reread some of the classics that I cast aside many years ago. If Tracer says they are doing Cordwainer Smith next week then I'll put the book aside until after the podcast.

James Redd and the Blecchs, Tuesday, 22 April 2008 17:41 (sixteen years ago) link

haha no cordwainer smith i'm afraid - next up is THE RED BRAIN and our guest is... dave q!!!

Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 22 April 2008 20:11 (sixteen years ago) link

Tracer, you have a gift for accents rivaled only by that of the late James Doohan.

James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 23 April 2008 00:07 (sixteen years ago) link

haha dude my "spanish" accent is atrocious in this one - it's really hard doing it so close up next to an indian accent!!

Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 23 April 2008 00:39 (sixteen years ago) link

Cordwainer Smith so good. If some sci-fi aims for that moment when the Wizard of Oz is debunked, he evokes the pre-debunked Oz.

James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 23 April 2008 01:42 (sixteen years ago) link

take out the first "(of) Oz," change first debunked to "unmasked."

tracer are you guys gonna do any theodore sturgeon?

-- J.D., Monday, April 21, 2008 7:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

nope! would have liked to though
No Killdozer, no credibility.

James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 23 April 2008 02:41 (sixteen years ago) link

my fav sturgeons (easily my fav golden-age SF guy):

"and now the news...": a guy goes crazy and becomes a comatose hermit after overdosing on the news. then a psychiatrist cures him by convincing him not to care about anyone, with predictable consequences...

"the professor's teddy bear": utterly traumatizing story (espec if you're young when you read it) that flashes back and forth between a little kid conversing with his teddy bear (which likes to suck blood out of his neck, giving him scary visions of the future where people die) and an old professor realizing that HE was the kid and now HE'S about to die...

"mr costello, hero": a mysterious, charismatic stranger goes from planet to planet getting people terrified of "people who like to be alone." utterly brilliant satire of mccarthyism, because mr costello is only shown in the best possible light throughout the story and the narrator adores him.

J.D., Wednesday, 23 April 2008 04:54 (sixteen years ago) link

theodore sturgeon and cordwainer smith have the best names in golden age sf by a nautical mile

thomp, Wednesday, 23 April 2008 09:11 (sixteen years ago) link

speaking of good names, i just realized that vernor vinge is from smalltown wisconsin (waukesha, same place les paul is from).

Jordan, Wednesday, 23 April 2008 14:42 (sixteen years ago) link

yeah i don't like 'vernor vinge' much; 'les paul' has always been cool though

thomp, Wednesday, 23 April 2008 17:17 (sixteen years ago) link

i actually did order a copy of lambda-1, by the way. mine has a much awesomer marber grid 60s penguin cover. the titular story - by colin kapp - seems to be similarly on the kind of outer space/inner space line: it's about ships that travel via vibrating their particles into another dimensional mode, or something; but once the narrator (and his psychiatrist) go into said dimensional mode themselves there's a deal of talk about their own perceptional filters — like, that's almost but not quite what the story's set up to explore, i guess. (it also suffers from the weird tales problem of saying that there's STUFF which happens to be INEFFABLY TERRIFYING STUFF in a way that THE RATIONAL MIND CANNOT FOLLOW and then it just turns out to be MILDLY SCARY STUFF instead.)

is the delany crit stuff with the outer space / inner space / cyberspace in the 'shorter views'/'longer views' collections?

also, whence the red brane thread - ?

thomp, Wednesday, 23 April 2008 17:24 (sixteen years ago) link

i've only tried a short story collection from "'vernor vinge'" and i couldn't get through it.

Jordan, Wednesday, 23 April 2008 17:56 (sixteen years ago) link

Bug The Sluglords
Hey, according to The Black Box Containing All KnowledgeWikipedia, the Parliamentary words aboutNew Worlds had to do with the serialization of Bug Jack Barron.

James Redd and the Blecchs, Thursday, 24 April 2008 12:33 (sixteen years ago) link

Here's the story, from the horse's mouth: http://www.theedge.abelgratis.co.uk/bugjackbarron.htm

James Redd and the Blecchs, Thursday, 24 April 2008 12:42 (sixteen years ago) link

re colin kapp and "lambda one" -- yeah, i had this in mind at one point but its first eight pages is doggedly hyper-clumsy exposition (person a: "so, person b, remind me again of the nature of yr work and the state of yr marriage and how exactly the bogus science we will bve macking on this story works again"), whereas the donald malcolm at least mentions the doughnut star on like page one!

also martin and i get to hate on kubrick yay!

the follow-up to "lambda one" = "the imagination trap" is also excellent once it gets going, but its exposition (largely rekapping hoho the plot of "lambda one" is even clumsier: viz person A embrakrs on vast paragraph covering everything, capp reliaes this is a bit much and breaks it up via the device of turning it into TWO paragraphs w.person B saying "go on" in the middle!

these two stories and the tau-space stuff became a novel -- "the transfinite man' -- but i never read it

mark s, Thursday, 24 April 2008 12:42 (sixteen years ago) link

haha re spinrad: when i first went to germany, aged 11, to visit a friend (whose dad wz in nato) i bought a copy of THE IRON DREAM at the airport -- ie the counterhistory novel which imagines that hitler went to ameirca after wwi and became an SF writer: THE IRON DREAM bein the novel he wd have written...

anyway it is all swastikas and hitler moustaches on the v.lurid cover and i TOTALLY DID NOT THINK THIS THRU unti i wz approaching customs at the hamburg end of the flight and massively got the ph34r i wd be deported for reading literature likely to deprave and subvert, or similar -- or at the very least be sarcastically commented at

but i wz 11 obv and they didn't even bother looking in my bag

mark s, Thursday, 24 April 2008 12:47 (sixteen years ago) link

I used to feel a little weird at the age of 16 reading that book on the subway. You had reason to be fearful, Mark, The Black Box told me a little while ago that the book was banned in Germany for eight years and after its unbanning its cover could not be displayed.

James Redd and the Blecchs, Thursday, 24 April 2008 13:11 (sixteen years ago) link

Never knew or forgot that Spinrad went to my high school. He seems to be doing historical fiction now. I have come across lots of recently-translated-into-Spanish copies his latest, Mexica.

James Redd and the Blecchs, Thursday, 24 April 2008 13:18 (sixteen years ago) link

fourteen years pass...

Happy Sluglord Singularity!

Double Elvis on the Dime (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 7 June 2022 10:12 (two years ago) link

Here is the original thread: threadment for rolling discussion of Slug of Time
Seems that Zirn is still unguarded and Jon Westerley is still dead.

Double Elvis on the Dime (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 7 June 2022 10:15 (two years ago) link

🪐🚀👽

mark s, Tuesday, 7 June 2022 10:17 (two years ago) link

I’ve been a huge fan of theirs since day one and not just because of their retrofuturistic fealty to TEH REDD BRANE.

Double Elvis on the Dime (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 7 June 2022 10:23 (two years ago) link

Third cortex different from the rest: disembodied brains as cover art

Double Elvis on the Dime (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 7 June 2022 10:31 (two years ago) link


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