Well, I sporadically keep track of my SF purchases via twitter, which I use as a lazy man's diary of cool stuff he's seen as much as a "social media platform," so let's look at a not-quite-complete list of the SF books I purchased in the second half of 2013, and see how many of them I have actually read over the nearly five years I have owned them.
We're off to a decent start; not only am I indulging in nostalgia for the wooden floor of the century-old house we rented in Indianola, Iowa (I abhor the hideous carpet we have here in the upper half of a century-old house we are renting in central Maryland), but I have actually read from all three of these books purchased in the college town of Ames, IA. The anthology Triax, edited by Robert Silverberg, presents three original novellas, James Gunn's "If I Forget Thee," which I have not read, Keith Roberts's "Molly Zero," which I tweeted was "OK, not great...too gimmicky" and Jack Vance's "Frietzke's Turn," the second of the two Miro Hetzel stories, which I judged on Twitter to be "good, reminiscent of the Demon Princes books...." Unlike those Triax pieces, Trader to the Stars and The Trouble Twisters were read after the birth of this blog and received full blog posts. Each contains three stories from Poul Anderson's Technic History, starring space merchants Nicholas van Rijn and David Falkyn. I gave them moderately positive reviews; in 1985 the people at the Libertarian Futurist Society inducted Trader to the Stars into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, so if Nicolas Maduro is your homeboy these books are probably not for you.
October 12: MissouriI think my wife had a conference at the University of Missouri or something and I took the opportunity to go to art museums and book stores. On the 12th I got these four volumes at a used bookstore. I haven't read The Flying Sorcerers by David Gerrold and Larry Niven yet, but I have read and blogged about Gerrold's
over-the-top novel about time travellers hunting a tyrannosaur, Deathbeast, and the 1983 printing of Doc Smith's 1931 paean to science and technology, Spacehounds of IPC. When social justice types carp that old SF is just evil aliens and damsels in distress I think of Spacehounds, which features plenty of friendly aliens and a woman scientist.
I blogged about the Barry Malzberg intro to The Best of Jack Vance, calling it the "best introduction of all time." I have read all six stories in The Best of Jack Vance, but several of them I read in other places and I have only blogged about four of them: "Rummfuddle," and "Abercrombie Station," which I read in The Best of Jack Vance, "Ullward's Retreat," which I read in a later volume with a more author-approved text, and "Sail 25," which I read in When the Five Moons Rise where it appears under the title "Dust of Far Suns."
October 14: MissouriIn a flea market I found Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg's anthology Epoch, which contains two dozen pieces of fiction, including five which I have read and blogged about: R. A. Lafferty's "For All Poor Folks at Picketwire," Michael Bishop's "Blooded on Arachne," Barry Malzberg's "Leviticus: In the Ark," Clifford Simak's "The Ghost of a Model T," and Jack Vance's "The Dogtown Tourist Agency," the first of the two Miro Hetzel stories. All these stories are actually worth the time it took to read them, each being entertaining and/or thought-provoking.
November 20: Des Moines, IowaThe Central Library in Des Moines was unloading lots of books and I snatched up many bargains. That huge Dying Earth omnibus contains the collections The Dying Earth and the two Cugel books, all three of which I have read twice, and the collection Rhialto the Marvelous, which I have read once. I did all this reading in this edition, but before I started this blog. I love the two Cugel books, but I think most of the stories in the two collections are just OK.
Ancient of Days by Michael Bishop I read within a week of buying it--I thought it a little boring and rather like a conventional novel that addresses the hot button issues of the day. Winter in Eden by Harry Harrison I read almost a year later, and thought was very good, a satisfying adventure story.
Martian Quest is a collection of twenty early Leigh Brackett stories with a good essay by Michael Moorcock, full of his idiosyncratic opinions, as an intro. Besides the intro, I think I've only read one story from this volume, "The Citadel of Lost Ships." I'm a Brackett fan, but mostly I have read her later work, like the things that appear in The Best of Leigh Brackett.
1998's Year's Best SF 3, edited by David Hartwell, and 2000's The Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, contain stories by people I am interested in like Tanith Lee, Hal Clement, Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, and Michael Moorcock, but I haven't read them yet. (These books are a little outside the period I'm primarily interested in.) The Hartwell includes Gene Wolfe's "Petting Zoo," but that story also appears in the collection Starwater Strains, and I think I read it there before this blog crawled out of its bubbling vat to begin its furtive skulking in the dimmer passageways of the internet SF community.
Lo and behold, I have actually read all five of these books I acquired at the Half Price Books across University Ave from Whole Foods. We've got three novels by one of the most unique SF writers, R. A. Lafferty, Reefs of Earth, Past Master, and The Devil is Dead, A. E. van Vogt's novel about sex and a guy whose disembodied brain has been installed in a robot body, Earth Factor X (AKA The Secret Galactics), and our man Van's collection Pendulum. Pendulum includes seven pieces of fiction and an essay; I wrote about three of the stories here, three more here, and alluded to the essay, "The Launch of Apollo XVII," in a discussion of Poul Anderson's story "The Voortrekkers" here. The seventh bit of fiction, "The First Rull," I read during my New York life (a life which haunts my dreams--last night I dreamnt I was lost in Grand Central Terminal) in a copy of the 1999 edition of The War Against the Rull that I borrowed from the NYPL.
On Route 69 in Des Moines, in the same shopping center as a Hy-Vee ("A helpful smile in every aisle"), is Jay's CD and Hobby, and there back in 2013 I purchased three Edmond Hamilton paperbacks. I haven't actually read any of them, but I just recently read The Closed Worlds and Planet of the Starwolves in a later, omnibus edition.
The Elfstones of Shannara I read in the 1980s when I was an AD&D obsessed teen, and loved it, and I bought this copy in 2013 thinking it would be fun to read again, but I have yet to take the plunge. I have read The Misenchanted Sword, Podkayne of Mars, and The Weapon Shops of Isher, and enjoyed all three; the van Vogt and Heinlein are classics of science fiction, full of high technology and speculations on what future societies might be like (and what the author thinks they should be like.)
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Well, there's a little trip down memory lane (it turns out I've read more of the books I bought in late 2013 than I had expected.) Maybe we'll do this again, mining my twitter feed to see what I bought in early 2014 and tracking down what I have read and what has languished on the shelves of the MPorcius Library.
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