MPorcius Flashback: Late 2014

If you've been exposed to that Marie Kondo show, you are aware that America is full of people who buy huge stacks of clothes and never wear them.  It would be easy for me to laugh at such people, but instead I wonder--am I a brother under the skin of these poor naifs?  Am I buying huge stacks of science fiction books and never reading them?  In an MPorcius Flashback post we use the magic of my twitter feed to look back at my book purchases and then we measure how many of these literary relationships have actually been consummated.  And I crack the whip, enjoining the MPorcius staff to compile links to my blog posts on those items that I have seen fit to read and opine on, providing you an easy avenue to experience, among other grotesqueries and delights, a 2015 MPorcius bitching and moaning with the venom of a betrayed lover who knows that all too soon he will be crawling back to the source of his pain about the politics of a 1981 Tanith Lee story, should you have missed that the first time.

Today we look at the second half of the year 2014, when I lived in Iowa and took road trips to the NYC area and to the Carolinas.

July 20: Indiana and Pennsylvania.  In July the wife and I went to New Jersey and New York, and on the way back home to Iowa we stopped at various antique malls and stores, at which I purchased several books.  Of the five I bought on this day, I have read from four.  We read The Far-Out Worlds of A. E. van Vogt entire, and blogged about it over the course of four posts, one, two, three, four.  (I liked eight of the twelve stories, and only disliked one.  Call me a van Vogt fan-boy.)  From Groff Conklin's 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction I read three stories by relatively obscure SF writers, and three stories by famous and important SF writers.   I haven't read The Sun Destroyers, but that Ross Rocklynne collection is half of an Ace Double, and I have read the other half, Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla.  I also have read Louis Charbonneau's Down to Earth, which I did not like.  (Joachim Boaz didn't like it either.)

July 21: Illinois.  Illinois antique malls yielded these two anthologies.  From Seven Come Infinity, edited by Groff Conklin, I read Chad Oliver's "Rite of Passage" and Clifford Simak's "The Golden Bugs."  From Damon Knight's Orbit 12 I read Ed Bryant's "Shark" and "Pinup."

September 19: Indianola, Iowa.  Near Simpson College was a Goodwill I would visit that had a large selection of books, and on this occasion I bought a pile of Robert Heinlein paperbacks, some of which I have since read entire or in part: I Will Fear No Evil, Stranger in a Strange Land, and three stories from 6 x H, a wacky retitling of The Unpleasant Profession of Johnathan Hoag, "The Man Who Traveled in Elephants," "They," and "'--And He Built a Crooked House--.'"  "All You Zombies...." appears in 6 x H, but I read it in another book.  I have read all the fiction in The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein, and blogged about those five stories over two blog posts: one, two.

November 6: Des Moines, Iowa.  Right on the main highway I would often take to, from or through Des Moines, was a Salvation Army store, and I would occasionally venture in to look at their big collection of books.  On this trip I got a nice copy of John Christopher's No Blade of Grass, which I have read, and a 1992 anthology from which I have read 1991 stories by Kathe Koja, Robert Silverberg, and Brian Aldiss.

November 19: Des Moines, Iowa.  In Des Moines there is a vast antique mall called Brass Armadillo, and the wife and I used to spend lots of time there.  On this trip I bought two books.  I read and blogged (over two posts, one, two) Five Fates, an anthology of stories by five different prominent SF authors, all based on the same premise, and from Judith Merril's 10th Annual Edition The Year's Best S-F I have read David R. Bunch's "Training Talk."  10th Annual Edition The Year's Best S-F includes Mack Reynolds's "Pacifist," which I read in a different book, and Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," which I also read in another place, and I suspect I have read other stories from Merril's anthology, such as Thomas Disch's "Descending," but done so in other volumes before I started this blog.

December 7: Des Moines, Iowa.  At the flea market in Des Moines I bought a big stack of digest-sized magazines; this was before I started reading magazines at the internet archive.  I became interested in Ted White and his tenure as editor of Fantastic and read extensively from the five issues of that magazine I picked up on this day:

August 1972 (de Camp & Carter, Malzberg, Shaw, Tiptree)
July 1973 (de Camp & Carter, Eklund, Haldeman, Boutellier)
January 1974 (Malzberg, Bunch, Myers)   January 1974 (White, Effinger, Russ, Fox)
March 1974 (Bunch)   March 1974 (Malzberg)
July 1974  (de Camp & Carter, Geston)  July 1974 (Malzberg)

I have also read from at least four of the pictured issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction: the 40th anniversary issue, from which I read the Malzberg story, the January 1982 issue, from which I read the Monteleone story, and, for another blog post, the Russ, Ellison, Effinger and Platt & McCarthy stories, as well as two issues I mined for Tanith Lee stories.

December 23: Lexington, South Carolina.  The wife and I spent the 2014 Christmas season in the South.  I think I got all twenty of these paperbacks at Rainy Day Pal Books in Lexington, SC.  Over the last five and a half years I have read most of them and trumpeted their virtues and decried their faults to the world through the medium of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Novels (9)
Sandworld by Richard A. Lupoff
Orbitsville by Bob Shaw
Night Walk by Bob Shaw
Mirkheim by Poul Anderson
The House That Stood Still by A. E. van Vogt
Gender Genocide by Edmund Cooper
Universe Day by Barry Malzberg
Day of the Beasts by John E. Muller
Diabolus by David St. John

A Single-Author Collection (1)
The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind-Benders by A. E. van Vogt (I blogged about "The Star-Saint," "Rebirth: Earth," "The Invisibility Gambit" and "The Problem Professor")

Anthologies (7)
Future Corruption edited by Roger Elwood (Lupoff, Gloeckner, Goldin, Lafferty), (Russ, Malzberg, Pronzini), (Elwood, Goldsmith, Sohl, Dozois)
The Liberated Future edited by Robert Hoskins (Malzberg)
Infinity Two edited by Robert Hoskins (Bryant), (Nolan), (Malzberg)
The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. (van Vogt, Kuttner & Moore, Neville)
Special Wonder: Volume 2 edited by J. Francis McComas (Neville), (Nolan)
Seven Trips Through Time and Space edited by Groff Conklin (Neville)
On Our Way to the Future edited by Terry Carr (Neville), (Pangborn, Budrys, Latham),

December 29: Madison, Tennessee.  Near Nashville I went to Book Attic and left with 11 paperbacks.  I've read Dave Wolverton's Serpent Catch and Path of the Hero.  (I actually drew my own illustrations for Path of the Hero; seeing them for the first time in a few years, I'm pleased with them.)  I've read Lawrence Watt-Evans's With a Single Spell.  From the two DAW Year's Best Fantasy Stories anthologies edited by Lin Carter (volumes 2 and 6), I've read stories by Tanith Lee, but I think that is it.  (Tarbandu has read every story from both volumes, volume 2 and volume 6.  I find tarbandu's harsh criticism to be provocative and amusing, even when I disagree.)  From the Frank Belknap Long collection Night Fear I have read "The Were-Snake."  The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II, edited by Richard Davis, I read entire over the course of three blog posts: one, two, three.  (Tarbandu also read the entire thing--check out his much more succinct take!)

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With the possible exception of all those magazines, I feel like my late 2014 purchases have been justified by the proportion of them I have read.  And now that so many of these anthologies have been brought to mind, maybe I'll read more from them.  Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log and see!