Reprint: The End

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Alfred Bester, Brian Aldiss, Carolyn See, Clifford D. Simak, Douglas Adams, Edgar Pangborn, Elizabeth Hand, George R. Stewart, Greg Bear, H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, Jack London, James Morrow, John Wyndham, Keith Roberts, Lucius Shepard, Mary Shelley, Nevil Shute, Octavia Butler, Peter George, Philip Latham, Piers Anthony, Raymond Briggs, Richard Jefferies, Ronald Wright, Russell Hoban, Stephen Baxter, Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I had great plans for my Cognitive Mapping series that ran in Vector between 1995 and 2001. At one point I envisaged producing 100 of the columns, which could then be gathered together as a decent-sized book. But at some point the project ran out of steam. I had maybe another half-dozen columns started but never completed. Apart from a parody piece (written by another hand, not naming names Mr B****r), the column was over. But at the end of 2005 I produced one last hurrah, appropriately enough on how science fiction deals with the end of things. This last column was published in Vector 244, November-December 2005.

Reprint: Transhumanity

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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: Helen O’Loy

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Arthur C Clarke, C.L. Moore, Daniel Keyes, Henry Kuttner, Isaac Asimov, Judith Merril, Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Stanley Weinbaum, Theodore Sturgeon

And this is the companion piece to yesterday’s article. Lester Del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” is, I am sure, the story that inspired C.L. Moore’s far superior “No Woman Born”. This column appeared in Vector 279, Spring 2015.

Reprint: The Golden Transcendence

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Isaac Asimov, John C. Wright, Olaf Stapledon, Roger Corman, Ursula K. Le Guin

Given the furore about the latest Hugo list, I thought I would post here my one and only review of a book by John C. Wright. The review appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction 188, April 2004.

Reprint: Let’s Go to Golgotha

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Aldous Huxley, Ann Vandermeer, Chris Boyce, Chris Morgan, Daphne Castell, Garry Kilworth, Ian Watson, Isaac Asimov, Jeff Vandermeer, John Crowley, Karen Joy Fowler, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury

This column, on ‘Let’s Go to Golgotha’ by Garry Kilworth, was intended as a companion piece to the column on ‘Standing Room Only’ by Karen Joy Fowler that had appeared in the previous issue. This was first published in Vector 277, Autumn 2014:

Reprint: Humanity

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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: Gormenghast

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Brian Aldiss, Carter Scholz, Cordwainer Smith, Daniel Defoe, Elizabeth Hand, Greg Egan, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Isaac Asimov, J.G. Ballard, James Lovegrove, Jorge Luis Borges, Lucius Shepard, Mervyn Peake, Michael Marshall Smith, Robert Silverberg, Steven Millhauser

It is, I promise you, pure coincidence that today’s reprint begins with the same writer featured in the last one, Steven Millhauser. But then, it is time to come to another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one was first published in Vector 213 (September-October 2000).

Reprint: Conformity

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Bruce Sterling, Dean Ing, E.M. Forster, Elizabeth Hand, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison, Ian Watson, Isaac Asimov, J.G. Ballard, John Brunner, Margaret Atwood, Michael Marshall Smith, R.A. Lafferty, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Thomas Jefferson, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Woody Allen

Here is another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one first appeared in Vector 205 (May-June 1999).

Hard SF Redux

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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: Hard Right

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Arthur C Clarke, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Greg Egan, Hal Clement, Iain Banks, Isaac Asimov, John W. Campbell, Robert Heinlein, Tom Godwin

My discussion of ‘The Cold Equations’ yesterday seemed to generate quite a bit of interest, so I thought I’d follow it up with this article, in which I consider why I characterise hard sf as intrinsically right wing. ‘Hard Right’ was first published in Argentus 8, December 2008.