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What are you reading in September?
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dustydigger
Posted 2012-09-21 12:55 PM (#4169 - in reply to #4081)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in September?



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Location: UK		This is what I have read so far this month;

1. Pauline Ashwell - Unwillingly to School - SF
2 Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes were Watching God - general fiction
3 Margery Allingham- Look to the Lady - vintage crime
4 Jaye Wells - Blue Blooded Vamp - urban fantasy
5 Nora Roberts - Born in Ice - romance
6 Roger Zelazny - Nine Princes in Amber - fantasy
7 Roger Zelazny - The Hand of Oberon - fantasy
8 Mary Norton - The Borrowers - junior classic
9 Eloisa James - A kiss at Midnight - historical romance
10 Dodoie Smith - I Capture the Castle - general fiction
11 Stephen Leather - Nightmare - horror
12 Katie fforde - Restoring Grace - women's fiction
13 Keri Arthur - Darkness Unbound - urban fantasy
14 Joan Aiken - The Wolves of Willoughby Chase - junior classic
15 Laura Ingalls Wilder - The Little House in the Big Woods - junior classic
Oh dear,all these books and only Ashwell and Zelazny qualify for this site.Anyway,I am already happily sorting out my SF reads for next year,hopefully about one a week.That will help pad out my woefully inadequate shelf!

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Scott Laz
Posted 2012-09-21 3:40 PM (#4170 - in reply to #4081)
Subject: Re: What are you reading in September?



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Location: Gunnison, Colorado		<p>Finished Ring Around the Sun by Clifford Simak (review forthcoming), and the November 1952 issue of Galaxy. I've been reading through issues of Galaxy from the beginning of the magazine in late 1950, and this may be the best issue so far. Two stories that are still considered classics: "The Martian Way" by Asimov, which combines a cool hard SF scenario (bringing a giant chunk of ice from Saturn's rings back to Mars to provide water to colonists) with a pretty contemporary-seeming political scenario, in which an Earth politician exaggerates the cost to Earth of the relatively miniscule amount of water being taken off-planet by the Martian colonists, in order to create outraged resentment and drum up votes. The combined plotlines makes for a very satisfying ending. In contrast to Asimov's upbeat novella is Walter M. Miller, Jr.' s "Command Performance," which looks at the dark side of telepathy. Telepathic contact is seen as analogous to rape, in a story that leads up to an actual (potential) attempted rape by a disturbed young telepath who becomes convinced of the need to propogate the new telepathic mutation in humanity, upon discovering that a beautiful socialite shares his mental powers, and that they are in contact telepathically. She is just beginning to face the reality of her powers, and ends up using them to manipulate the man into a situation that ends in his death. If you know for certain that someone is going to assault you, but it hasn't happened yet, do you have the right to stop that person by any means necessary, in order to prevent it? Another standout in this issue is "The Altar at Midnight" by C. M. Kornbluth, which looks at a near-future scenario in which, due to the physical hardships of working in space, the labor force that takes on these tasks is subject to exploitation, and asks the question of to what extent the inventor of an otherwise useful technology is responsible for the hardships imposed on those who do the work needed to maintain it. Also, humorous stories from early in the careers of Robert Sheckley, Reginald Bretnor, and James Gunn. The sexism of the Bretnor story--"Sugar Plum"--is hard to take, but it's well done if that can be overlooked, while the Gunn story--"The Misogynist"--is either one of the most sexist stories ever (women are literally aliens, justifying men's complaints about the "quirks" of the opposite sex) or a brilliant satire on those male attitudes. I think it's the latter, but these stories, and others in earlier issues, indicate that editor H. L. Gold liked to extend his magazine's focus on social and satirical SF (as opposed to hard SF) into stories that take on the "battle of the sexes" in society, and these can be a weak point for the magazine when read now.

I ran out of time for the "Outside the Norm" book last month, but am getting started on Saramago's "Blindness," which is fascinating so far. We'll see if he was worthy of that Nobel Prize!

Edited by Scott Laz 2012-09-21 3:44 PM
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