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Friday, July 26, 2024

Weekly Book Recommendations (July 26)

This week's reads: 

The Collected Fantasies, Vol 1: The End of the Story by Clark Ashton Smith: I have been wanting to read this for a long time and it finally popped as a birthday present from my denuded Amazon list. So good. From the first sentence of the first story he had published Smith is revealed as a singular voice in weird fiction. Not everything in this is a banger, and there's a decent amount of casual racism in the first half of the 20th century mold (mostly of someone having the distinctive physical characteristics of x or y "race" as a means of personality shorthand) but offhand I (as cis het white guy) didn't see anything too egregious. Yes, the queen of the hidden African tribe immediately falls for the white explorer who enters their confines, but he also falls for her and it does appear to be a love match of equals for their time together so; and yes, he repeats the trope in another story but there the white explorer counts upon his natural superiority to the locals and the women and gets a delightful comeuppance from it. Many of these tales end in the classic Weird Tales fashion of shocking reveal sudden stop, while others come to more traditional endings and even some narrator codas; he switches up perspectives from first to third person, his narrators feel distinct enough to not come to a sense of sameness... it's all solid stuff. Good enough that I'm pulling concepts from it for my upcoming parallel to New Salem: Renaissance view of how to do supers in an ACAB world

The 1983 Annual Worlds Best SF edited by Donald A Wollheim: Earlier this year I read the 1981 volume and there wasn't enough in it for me to recommend it. This one, however, has enough solid stories to justify a recommendation. I'm never sure on these because SF is always as much about the "now" as it is the future or past, and at 1983 it's an almost unbridgeable gulf in zeitgeist - and I lived through it! in this volume the Scourge (James White), Pawn's Gambit (Timothy Zahn) and Swarm (Bruce Sterling) are solid tales of first contact puzzles approached in very different ways; A Letter from the Clearys is a good enough tale from Connie Willis about families post the apocalypse hanging over us all in the 80's that felt a little Eudora Welty to me (compliment!), and Written in Water (Tanith Lee) and Souls (Joanna Russ) are powerfully emotionally evocative, and the latter kept me up much too late so I could finish it before turning off the light. I don't think I've read enough Russ and need to rectify that. Since I only say positive things on this here blog (most days) I'll say the rest are fine to meh, but there's more good than bad in this one. 

Astro City Volume 1 and Volume 2: Potato chips, team. Once you start you have to keep going till there ain't no more. Volume 2, Confession, is just outstanding. And I have a signed issue in that run!

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