Status Updates From 100 Years of Science Fiction

Finished the last story, The Voices of Time, by JG Ballard. It's hard to believe, but I think this might be the first Ballard I've ever read. This short story was ambitious. I think there might have been a few more ideas crammed into 31 pages than would really fit, but I can't bring myself to dislike it. Fascinating, hallucinatory, philosophical, and weird.

The penultimate story is Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God. I really haven't read much Clarke. Only The Sentinel, which is the short story that became 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is ... y'know, fine. It definitely had that '1960's anthology sci-fi' feel. Not the most original story, and I didn't love it, but I really haven't sampled this author's work enough to get a true feel.

Finished The Quest for St. Aquin, by Thomas Boucher. This one's interesting. A somber story about religion, soul, faith, human frailty, & AI, its smartly written. However, it has a character that's a robot donkey, & they call it the 'robass', and that's so ridiculous it's hard to concentrate. Unintentional hilarity hurts the tone. Wasn't 'ass' in use to mean butt by the 60s? This was thought, and chuckle, provoking.

Got through the next story, Business as Usual, During Alterations, by Ralph Williams. Alarmingly prophetic. Like a lot of these. This is a great example of science-fiction-as-economic-philosophy, and will be of particular interest to Star Trek fans, because it discusses the implications of one of their most signature pieces of technology, the replicator.

Finished the next story, Splice of Life, by Sonya Dorman. A pretty forward-thinking 1964 story about medical science. This is a really interesting anthology.

The next story is 'The Equalizer', by Norman Spinrad, whose bio painted him as a decidedly utopian storyteller. I almost wish I hadn't known that going in, but it didn't hamper my enjoyment of the story. A fine little tale about the morality of war.

The section I just began, on new inventions, is kicked off by a little story by Ambrose Bierce, a humorist/philosopher/author I keep TRYING to get into but never getting around to it (which is a great thing about anthologies), and it's barely a story. It reads like a joke. Clocking in at less than 2 pages, it's a fun little think-piece.

Finished the 13th story, 'Nobody Bothers Gus,' by Algis Budrys. This, coming out in 1955, is arguably an early example of that most favorite of my favored micro-genres, the post-modern superhero story.

The next story is 'The Mindworm', by CM Kornbluth, a grisly little spook story that does a great job of straddling the line between modernist sci-fi and gothic horror. Reminds me of Neil Gaiman at his best, blending folklore with a straightforward, comic-book-style supervillain. Great fun.

Just read the story I grabbed this analogy for, What Ever Happened to Cpl. Cuckoo, by Gerald Kersh (1954). Apparently, it finds its way into League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I can see how, Cpl. Cuckoo IS a superhero, of sorts. The writing style reminded me a little of Roald Dahl's short subject work.

Read the story 'The Other Now,' by Murray Leinster (1951). A poignant little story that serves as a reminder that sometimes, all you need for a compelling story is to back your gimmicky sci-fi conceit with a base of relatable human longing. The old motivations are the best ones.

Finished story #9 of 10. First thing I ever read by Poul Anderson. Which is crazy, given how much sci-fi I read, but here we are. Great, fun little story. If I explained the premise, it would sound laughably stupid, but he pulled it off well! Suffice it to say this blended low fantasy and sci-fi in a fun way, drawing on well-worn tropes, but executed competently.

The next story begins the section entitled 'Other Dimensions'. This 1950 story, by A.J. Deutsch, is called 'A Subway Called Mobius', and falls into the category of math-based sci-fi. Fun, trippy, lightweight, and likely not much fun to people without any knowledge of mobius strips. I think if I'd been a physics major, I'd have enjoyed it more.

Finished the seventh story, the last in the section about Aliens. This one's by Gordon R. Dickson, an author I know next to nothing about. It was the first really disposable story of the bunch. At least, it didn't particularly speak to ME. But it was still thought-provoking, and certainly enjoyable enough.

Great little 1957 story by Theodore Sturgeon, most famous for giving us the most important piece of cultural philosophy of the 20th century, Sturgeon's Law (80% of everything is crap). The fact that this book divided its stories by topic (aliens, in this case) does this story a disservice, because it's not immediately apparent that the character in question isn't human, and it spoils an otherwise fun reveal,

Story #5, by French author JH Rosny Aine, published in 1888. This was great! It was about a prehistoric tribe of fertile crescent nomads taking on aliens. It was science fiction in the truest sense, even though spears, arrows, and fire were the most advanced technology around. The main character used the scientific method to attempt to ward off an alien invasion! Fascinating.

The 4th story, Sanity, by Fritz Lieber, explores a society where mental illness is a major factor in how things run. You know, like our society, now. This concludes the section of the book centered around realistic futurism, and is the most whimsical, and most thought-provoking, of that section. Sci fi used to be about extrapolating the possibilities of modernity, and that's more interesting than aliens and lasers.

Finished the third story, New Apples in the Garden, 1963, by Kris Neville. ANOTHER mundane-as-fantastical story, this one a futurist observation about the viral nature of, and eventual decay of, modern society. So far, this dusty old anthology has really interesting thematic grouping. The first three stories were written 30 years apart, but all feel so well-grouped. Looking forward to the next 17 stories.

Second story: Mr. Murphy of New York, by an author named McMorrow, who I googled, and who hasn't seemed to do much else. Another 'mundane-as-fantastical' story, this time written in 1930, about skyscrapers. Kinda crazy to read sci-fi written during the early days of a thing, about the ramifications of that totally normal and mundane thing. Interesting, but too dated and one-dimensional to be entertaining.

Anthology of British scifi. First story's called With the Night Mail, by Kipling.

This is in the fantastical-as-mundane category. It's a long, dense account of life on board a high-speed mail plane as it runs its global route, that is nothing but 1908's idea of 2000AD techno-jargon. Hard to follow, but fun. Then, following, other articles and ads from the same fictitious publication the original article 'ran' in.