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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 - ?

old s.f. story about people who let their brains run free, and kept their bodies in a shed?

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Happy Sluglord Singularity!

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.

🪐🚀👽

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

See also: old s.f. story about people who let their brains run free, and kept their bodies in a shed?

And: a brief history of the giant disembodied brain

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