Reprint: Transhumanity

Tags

Arthur C Clarke, Bruce Sterling, Charles Darwin, Christopher Evans, Frederik Pohl, Greg Egan, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Isaac Asimov, Jack Finney, James Tiptree Jr, John W. Campbell, Martin Caidin, Olaf Stapledon, Robert Silverberg, S Fowler Wright, T.H. Huxley

We’re getting close to the end of the series of Cognitive Mapping columns I wrote for Vector. This one first appeared in Vector 194, July-August 1997.

Reprint: Transformation

Tags

Algis Budrys, F. Anstey, Frederik Pohl, Gene Wolfe, H.G. Wells, James Tiptree Jr, Kevin Anderson, m john harrison, Martin Caidin, P.G. Wodehouse, Philip K. Dick, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Silverberg, Samuel R. Delany, Thorne Smith

And while I’m thinking about my Vector columns, here’s another from my Cognitive Mapping series. This was first published in Vector 203, January-February 1999.

Reprint: Humanity

Tags

Algis Budrys, Anne McCaffrey, Frederik Pohl, Greg Bear, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, James Tiptree Jr, Mary Shelley, Michael Bishop, N. Lee Wood, R.A. Lafferty, Robert Louis Stevenson

Another of my Cognitive Mapping series. This one first appeared in Vector 198, March-April 1998.

Reprint: Aliens

Tags

Andrew M. Butler, Arthur C Clarke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Frederik Pohl, Gwyneth Jones, H.G. Wells, Jack Finney, John Wyndham, Keith Roberts, Olaf Stapledon, S Fowler Wright, Vernor Vinge

Back in 1995 (good heavens!) I began a series of columns for Vector in which I would explore various standard tropes of science fiction. The series lasted until 2001, with an extra piece added in 2005. Not a bad run. They all had pretty much the same format: a couple of illustrative quotations, then a very broad historical survey of the trope leading back to the works from which my opening quotes had been taken (it was based on a series by David Lodge that had been running in the Guardian at that time. Andrew Butler gave me a title for the series, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, and this was one of the earliest of them. It first appeared in Vector 188, August 1996.

Hard SF Redux

Tags

Alfred Bester, Clifford Simak, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, F. Orlin Tremaine, Frederik Pohl, Ian Sales, Isaac Asimov, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Ted Chiang, Theodore Sturgeon, Thomas M. Disch, Tom Godwin, Ursula K. Le Guin

In 1937, John Wood Campbell, Jr, who had held a variety of dead-end jobs up to that point, was hired as an assistant editor at Street & Smith working on Astounding. Within the year, the then editor of Astounding, F. Orlin Tremaine, moved up in the Street & Smith hierarchy and Campbell, with next to no editorial experience, found himself running the magazine, which he continued to do for the next several decades.

Campbell was a reasonably proficient writer of ‘superscience’ stories, the sort of over-the-top extravaganzas that had come to dominate pulp science fiction in the 20s and 30s; but he achieved more under the pseudonym ‘Don A. Stuart’ with stories that were rather more restrained in their invention and melancholy in their affect. When he took on the editorial role at Astounding, he stopped writing; that creativity was instead channelled into the ideas he fed to his favoured stable of writers. One of the peculiarities of Campbell’s editorship of Astounding, at least during his first decade or so in that role (you don’t hear these stories attached to the magazine by the time he was changing its name to Analog), was the extent to which he fed ideas to his authors. I am sure any editor worth their salt is likely to suggest an idea to an author now and then, but the mythology attached to Campbell would have us believe that most of the great stories that appeared in Astounding during its heyday came directly from Campbell himself. And there is enough commonality in these stories, enough sense that they are the children of Don A. Stuart, to lend some credence to the myth.

Reprint: Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

Tags

A.E. Van Vogt, Adam-Troy Castro, Alexei Panshin, Allen Steele, Anna Kavan, Anthony Boucher, Arthur Sellings, Bob Shaw, Brian Aldiss, Carol Emshwiller, Charles Stross, Damon Knight, Darko Suvin, Frederik Pohl, Groff Conklin, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, Jack McDevitt, Jerry Oltion, John Wyndham, Katherine MacLean, Lesley What, Megan Lindholm, Mervyn Peake, Michael Swanwick, Molly Gloss, Neil Gaiman, Peter Jackson, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Richard Chwedyk, Sharon Lee, Ted Chiang, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Willis E. McNelly, Willy Ley

I haven’t actually included any anthologies in my reprints so far, even though I have reviewed an awful lot of them. So I thought I should include one today. This review of Nebula Awards Showcase 2004 edited by Vonda N. McIntyre was, I think, written for The New York Review of Science Fiction, but I can’t find a record of it being published. So this may be its first appearance.

Reprint: Jennifer Government

Tags

C.M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, Kingsley Amis, Max Barry, Philip Bobbitt

In his groundbreaking study of science fiction, New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis devoted much of his attention and praise to what he called the ‘comic inferno’, and in particular to The Space Merchants by C.M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl, who sadly died just the other day. So this time around I’ve picked a book that references the Pohl and Kornbluth classic, even if it doesn’t come close to matching it. This review of Jennifer Government by Max Barry first appeared in Foundation 90, Spring 2004.