Fun Stuff > ENJOY

Let's talk about science fiction short stories

<< < (4/4)

Nodaisho:
I feel obliged to throw a recommendation of Roadside Picnic out there. It is Russian (Soviet Russian, at that), though, so it is somewhat depressing and morally ambiguous. That seems to be a common trend in fiction that comes out of there, I don't know why. It is a long short story, but not anywhere near long enough to count as a novel. And you can find a lot of e-book copies online, including one with side-by-side English and Russian text. Not sure if the online copies are legal, I don't understand how copyright of soviet-era stuff works. It is hard to find a print copy in the US, though, and the ones on Amazon are going for well over $100 for a used copy, which is ridiculous.

Orbert:

--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 24 Jun 2010, 18:42 ---Isaac Asimov – Nightfall
Alfred Bester – Fondly Fahrenheit
James Blish – Common Time
Phil K. Dick – We Can Remember it For You Wholesale
Thomas M. Disch – Problems of Creativeness
E.M. Forster – The Machine Stops
William Gibson – Burning Chrome
Tom Godwin - The Cold Equations
Damon Knight - The Country of the Kind
Walter M. Miller, Jr. - Crucifixus Etiam
Frederik Pohl - The Tunnel Under the World
Raccoona Sheldon - The Screwfly Solution
Cordwainer Smith – The Game of Rat and Dragon
Bruce Sterling - Swarm

--- End quote ---

Great list!

I first read "Nightfall" in an Asimov collection called (get this) "Nightfall and Other Stories" and thought it was pretty long for a short story.  It was really a novella, and I think Asimov eventually padded it out to novel-length later, but I never read it because... well, I really didn't think he could improve on the original, and every time I got to any new material, it would stick out and annoy me.

I read "The Machine Stops" in an English class in college and immediately grabbed a collection of E. M. Forster, only to discover that "The Machine Stops" was very much an anomoly in Forster's work.  Turns out he'd tried his hand at sci fi specifically to show how lame it is (or something like that) but he inadvertantly ended up writing one of my favorite shorts of all time.

"The Cold Equations" -- wow.  I think I might have cried the first time I read this.

"We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" is one I've always meant to read, because I thought the movie presented some really interesting questions about memory and identity and stuff.  Yeah, it was also a ridiculous action movie (and I won't name it here) but honestly, I loved the sci-fi premise most of all.

a pack of wolves:
Italo Calvino - Cosmicomics

I should really read this again, but I remember particularly liking The Form Of Space and The Distance of the Moon. There's an excellent comic touch to it all, as you might expect with Calvino. Rather wistful and I always thought of the stories as being somehow very Italian. There's definitely a strong influence from Calvino's interest in Italian folk tales, which works well with science fiction. Both are often concerned with one central idea.

Primo Levi - The Sixth Day and Other Tales

In Man’s Friend tapeworms compose beautiful poems to their human hosts. All the rest are great too, what with Levi being pretty much the greatest writer who ever lived. One's an excellent homage/pastiche of Calvino's style, particularly in Cosmicomics. As usual with Levi all the prose is stunning and it's actually worth reading Cosmicomics first just to see how incredibly he gets Calvino's style right.

Stanislaw Lem - Tales Of Pirx The Pilot and More Tales Of Pirx The Pilot

The dude wrote Solaris, if that doesn't make someone's sci-fi output essential I don't know what would. These are much funnier though, more like his excellent novella The Futurological Congress. Pirx is one of the great ordinary blokes of science fiction.

Garry Kilworth - Hogfoot Right And Bird Hands and Surfing Spanish Style

Both appear in In The Country Of Tattooed Men, which varies between science fiction and, er, generally odd short stories. Hogfoot Right And Bird Hands is a well executed tale describing the practice of forming pets from the amputated limbs of people so idle and machine-reliant they no longer need them. Surfing Spanish Style is a good dystopian Britain story about kids riding on top of trains due to having nothing else to do and no prospect of anything either. You can tell it was written under Thatcher, and it's all the better for it.

Dimmukane:

--- Quote from: Nodaisho on 25 Jun 2010, 00:02 ---I feel obliged to throw a recommendation of Roadside Picnic out there. It is Russian (Soviet Russian, at that), though, so it is somewhat depressing and morally ambiguous. That seems to be a common trend in fiction that comes out of there, I don't know why. It is a long short story, but not anywhere near long enough to count as a novel. And you can find a lot of e-book copies online, including one with side-by-side English and Russian text. Not sure if the online copies are legal, I don't understand how copyright of soviet-era stuff works. It is hard to find a print copy in the US, though, and the ones on Amazon are going for well over $100 for a used copy, which is ridiculous.

--- End quote ---


This is also the book that all things Stalker are based on (that is, the brilliant Tarkovsky film and a few solid, if not buggy PC games).


I do know that George R.R. Martin has done a few short stories that could fall under this label.  There were two of his that came in the same paperback, except that one side was upside down from the other.  Can't be arsed to remember the name, though.  It's definitely not on his Wikipedia page.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page