I'm currently reading The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction edited by Gordon Van Gelder and, thinking about this in connection with the books I've been sorting through in my loft, it's a bit of a nostalgia trip, because some of the stories are quite old. All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury is lyrical, enjoyable, but you can't help but titter a little at a depiction of Venus covered in jungle when we now know the reality. Later I read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, which has to be somewhere up in the list of the best short stories I've ever read. It still chokes me up a little even after all this time.
But short stories. If anyone here wants to read some superb short SF stories, if there is one short story collection I would recommend way above any other, then that has to be Stories of your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. I've mentioned it before - brilliant collection.
6 comments:
It is strange reading sci fi that was written in the fifties about the eighties. A time when we were all going to waited on by personal robots, no one would work and dinner was a pill.
Chaing dunno him...
wheres my goddam robot here in 2009? fuk.
You don't know Chiang? You really should, as Neal writes this collection is really superb.
You can try him out by reading Understand (for free via this link), really blew me away when I read it the first time. And there are many stories of that quality.
thanks for that!
Giant68, SF only seems to get odd details right. Loads of people now have Star Trek communicators!
Vaude, get to know him.
Martin, thanks for the link.
Thanks for your post about the book. I agree that it's interesting to see which old stories hold up well nowadays and which ones don't. I found the matter even more striking when I was reading for the book of Mars stories from F&SF, FOURTH PLANET. The narrow scope of that book made it fairly easy to see how people's views of Mars had evolved over half a century.
By the way, I think I should point out that one of Ted Chiang's stories---his only F&SF story to date---is reprinted in the VERY BEST anthology. It's a fairly recent story (from 2007) so it's not in STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS.
---Gordon Van Gelder
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