David Gill - In Time's Empire, They Were All Slaves (2015)

 

David Gill served as one of a number of editors and annotators to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's 2011 collation of Philip K. Dick's Exegesis, and his name stuck with me as one of those yielding the more interesting and insightful annotations to what may have been an otherwise near impenetrable text. By association I therefore expected short stories owing much to Dick, but hopefully done better than the usual recycled Phil which somehow misses the whole fucking point, Ridley. I wasn't disappointed because not only can Gill write, but he very much writes his own thing, and which seems distinctively his own thing, the only comparison coming to mind being that the warmth and humanity of his tone seems comparable to that occasionally achieved by Ray Bradbury, who doesn't otherwise seem an obvious influence.

Time's Empire comprises short stories - mostly very short at just a couple of pages - comprising tiny, fleeting glimpses through the window of human experience, with the occasional android or spacecraft serving to fast-track an understanding which might otherwise be weighed down by the baggage of its own explanation (and I swear that sentence will make sense if you catch it on the right day). The sheer brevity is astonishing and often a delight in its contrast to the emotional charge of many of these stories - no twists, no fuss, no ostentatious tech fixation, just tiny poems caught in the moment revealing emotional nuance so fragile that it would be lost to a more robust description. Spoiled for choice, my favourite is possibly the title track, In Time's Empire, They Were All Slaves which accordingly takes place at a drive-in as young lovers divide their attention between Spartacus and each other, their fumblings taking on an allegorical dimension as the moment unfolds across its scant two and a half pages, and the question of whether or not we can really call this science-fiction seems ridiculous, even irrelevant.

Or a transporter accident involving A.E. van Vogt and Ivor Cutler, if that works better for you.

August Derleth (editor) - The Other Side of the Moon (1948)

 

This was originally a hardback collection, of which - due to the limitations of bookbinding at the time - it was possible to fit only half the stories in the paperback version, which is what I have here. So I'm missing material from H.G. Wells, Lord Dunsany, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury amongst others, although mostly stuff I've read elsewhere from what I can tell. Those selections which made the cut seem to have been less established names at the time of publication, but Derleth knew what he was doing and there's no particularly weak link in the resulting chain.

That said, this is golden age science-fiction as distinct from any modern variant, so there's not much point getting pissy over the absence of lengthy discussions about the properties of photons. The genre was still evolving, John W. Campbell was just beginning to make a name for himself, and even if everyone was familiar with Wells, Gernsback, and the rest, a lot of what we have here is more or less weird fiction with a few sciencey touches stirred in for flavour, and Donald Wandrei's Something from Above typifies the form as a marginally less purple Lovecraft-style yarn about flying saucers; and where contributions may not quite tick all the recognised weird fiction boxes, they're fucking weird nonetheless.

A.E. van Vogt's Resurrection, for example, teaches us that human beings brought back to life by aliens following the extinction of the human race will have superpowers for no adequately explained reason. The lad was firing on all four cylinders with that one. Elsewhere we find Original Sin in which S. Fowler Wright predicts that philosophy will eventually advance to such a degree as to inspire the entire human race to commit to a surprisingly cheery form of mass suicide, because the purpose of life is the evolution of its own destruction or summink; and Eric Frank Russell's Spiro recruits a shape-shifting alien refugee to the London music hall of the day thus allowing us to imagine what a Tommy Trinder version of Campbell's Who Goes There? might look like.

The rest are mostly cut from the same strange cloth; which you might call dated, but I'd prefer to regard as simply consistent with a particular style and mood associated with the forties, blending deco stylings with post-bomb paranoia and all of our ideas about supermen beginning to look a bit shaky; and, as ever, Derleth brought us the cream of the crop.

Other Worlds of Clifford Simak

Clifford D. Simak Other Worlds of Clifford Simak (1960)
This was originally a twelve story hardback collection by the name of The Worlds of Clifford Simak, divided in half and reprinted as two individual collections due to the limitations of paperback book binding in the sixties. The six stories which didn't make it into this one were also printed in paperback form as The Worlds of Clifford Simak, which seems confusing but never mind.

It's been a while since I read any full length Simak, meaning cover to cover as distinct from stories appearing in the digests, and I somehow forgot what a pleasure it can be when he's firing on all four cylinders. Well, I didn't forget, but merely recalling having enjoyed a Simak or two isn't really the same as what you get from actually reading; and this one has been a real pleasure.

Given the number of short stories he churned out over the years, it's inevitable that they can't all be The Big Front Yard - which is amazing although it isn't in this collection - but this is nevertheless an impressively solid set with only Green Thumb representing any sort of dip in focus or standard, albeit not actually much of one. Of those authors who have achieved escape velocity from the science-fiction ghetto - here assuming such a shift is even desirable purely for the sake of argument - it seems increasingly strange that Simak remains yet to join Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury and others on the shelves of persons who otherwise wouldn't be seen dead reading anything with a picture of a rocket on the cover. His stories explore what it is to be human, or more accurately to belong to something bigger than ourselves, which he does by means of strange and fantastic ideas we tend to identify as either science-fiction, or science-fiction by virtue of their not really belonging anywhere else; and the warmth and humanity of his stories is both powerful and profoundly moving, yet without eschewing realism at the expense of the dunderhead positivity which often blights the work of authors going for the same sort of effect. He doesn't always get the balance quite right, but he shines bright in this lot with homespun tales of seemingly familiar people in weird or jagged situations unlike anything I've noticed anywhere else in fiction. Dusty Zebra, Carbon Copy, Founding Father and Idiot's Crusade are in particular amongst the best Simak I've read, and I've read a lot.

Amazing Stories (October 1965)

Joseph Ross (editor) Amazing Stories (October 1965)
I picked this up because of Murray Leinster. The first installment of his Killer Ship is dry but approximately readable, transposing traditional nautical escapades to deep space, complete with salty sea captains who enjoy punch-ups in dockside taverns. Leinster breaks the usual supposedly golden rule by telling as well as showing, to the extent that two thirds of the text have the cadence of a synopsis for something he'd been thinking about writing. The narrative reads like Asimov minus that vaguely creepy sensation which heralds the arrival of a token female character - here the beautiful daughter of a space shipping magnate. Killer Ship does okay for something so obviously traditional and sort of foreshadows The Expanse in certain respects, but is pretty much doomed by the uninviting style in which it was written, assuming here that Ross didn't just print the initial pitch by accident.

Ray Bradbury's, Chrysalis is an early effort dating from 1946, and which presumably predates our man developing the characteristic style which made him so readable. It's okay, but falls short of delivering anything consistent with Bradbury's reputation.

Actually, a lot of these seem to be early efforts, because Amazing was seemingly all about the unit shifting big name reprints by 1965, although apparently it wasn't all about paying the authors of those reprinted stories. That being said, I'm beginning to wonder if they retained the rights to any of the good stuff. John Wyndham's The Eternal Eve, for example, is okay, and streets ahead of shite such as his Pawley's Peepholes; but it's still massively underwhelming considering this is the guy who wrote Triffids, Kraken, and Dumb Martian. Along similarly underwhelming lines, Jack Williamson's The Metal Man reprints his first published story, which was notable for being so basic that the title not only gives away the not really much of a twist ending, but almost counts as a synopsis. We open with a letter - a literary device I've really grown to loathe as the last resort of scoundrels - in which our man, already introduced as having mysteriously turned into a man quite literally made of metal, tells the narrator about some mysterious force which turns things into metal, and fuck it, he's going in. I won't spoil the ending for you.

The Time Jumpers was apparently Phil Nowlan's third sale to Amazing back in the dawn of time, with the first two being Buck Rogers tales, so that's where the character originated. Even were some of the same magic to be found in this story, I'm not sure I'd know what to look for, although it's still more engaging than anything else in this issue. The Time Jumpers features a man who invents a time car, leading to historical encounters with faintly racist Red Indian stereotypes and George Washington - who helpfully introduces himself as such, thus providing an uncanny foreshadowing of Hartnell era Who; but it's nicely told and is not without some charm.

Every time I read something by Robert Silverberg, I seem to find I like him just a little less than before. The Kensington Stone is an article rather than an example of his fiction, one examining a detail of that whole Vikings discovered America thing by means of a massive Nordically engraved stone which has since been unfortunately mislaid but definitely existed, probably. I don't know whether Vikings discovered America but, honestly, I've never really cared given that we already have a substantial wealth of information about the people who got here first and stuck around long enough to develop complex indigenous cultures. Silverberg maintains a degree of scepticism, although this in itself begs the question of why he bothered to cover the subject in the first place.

Finally we have Dusty Answer by Arthur Porges, which I read this morning but about which I don't remember anything. I think some guys in a spaceship landed on a planet. Maybe the December issue will be better...

Without Absolution

Amy Sterling Casil Without Absolution (2000)
This came into my possession because I'd added it to an Amazon wishlist and somebody felt like buying me a birthday present, which was initially puzzling as I couldn't remember who Amy Sterling Casil might be or why I'd been drawn to the book. Eventually I recalled having read Casil's Mad for Mints in a back issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which only presented further confusion because while I remember thinking it was sort of entertaining…

Well, whatever the case - I'm glad to have read this, not least when considering the alternate realities in which I might not have bothered. Casil's introduction mentions her having been influenced by Ray Bradbury, which I'm definitely feeling, although I think maybe I prefer her writing in an admittedly general sense. It's been a while since I read Bradbury, and I remember a few crackers, but Casil's people seem less at the mercy of the sort of borderline cloying sentiment to which Bradbury occasionally succumbed. That said, Casil's emphasis on evocative image rich detail seems very Bradbury, and she treads a fine line in supporting the narrative on a flow of sensations without formally spelling everything out. In a few cases, it doesn't quite work, and I found An Officer of the Faith a little too abstract for its own good, but mostly it's powerfully effective once you've cottoned on to what's happening.

Without Absolution is mostly science-fiction, or speculative, or whatever you want to call it - that ambiguous literary hinterland inhabited by the aforementioned Ray Bradbury, Ursula LeGuin and others - a non-genre of girth sufficient to encompass both the future of plastic surgery and a sequel to Beowulf - which must have taken some balls to write, never mind pull off, as us rootin' tootin' folk say. There's also some poetry, and I'm afraid I still don't really get poetry, although it's clear that it's very closely related to Casil's gorgeous, if occasionally slightly disturbing prose; and The Renascence of Memory is a masterpiece.

If You Have Ghosts

Douglas Payne If You Have Ghosts (2019)
Here's another coming of age narrative - as I'm sure some idiot will eventually call it - from Amphetamine Sulphate - very much its own thing, but likely to strike chords with anyone who enjoyed their books from Meg McCarville or Josh Peterson; so we're dealing with childhood, memory, emerging sexuality, and often in terms of the details most writers tend to excise, the parts which don't fit. Despite any reputations which may still be lingering, I'd say Philip Best is right to harbour a certain ambivalence regarding the transgressive tag. If You Have Ghosts isn't the Waltons, and Hollywood would leave out all the elements which make the story what it is, but this is only outsider when you consider that most of us are outsiders by some definition, at least anyone worth talking to. We all have ghosts.

This one had me hooked from the first page, upon which I read.

Aside from Barney and his space exploration, I loved a Sesame Street video where Big Bird and Snuffleupagus are in ancient Egypt. Big Bird dies and he is judged by Osiris in preparation for the afterlife, his heart weighed against one of his own plucked feathers.

As with the best of the imprint, Ghosts keeps hold of its sense of humour without feeling the need to crack jokes and renders emotion without resorting to sentiment, limiting itself to just the stuff you need. Weirdly, and it may be due simply to the amber tint of south-west geography, Payne's writing reminds me of Ray Bradbury of all people, except where Dandelion Wine all but chokes on its own syrup, this one is clear, uncongested, and rich in flavour. It may even be the most powerful, convincing and confident piece of writing that Amphetamine Sulphate have published since the New Juche books.

I know literature is supposedly a dying art, but it doesn't much look like it from here.

Amazing Stories (February 1946)

Raymond A. Palmer (editor) - Amazing Stories February 1946 (1946)
I found this in a comic book store. It was falling apart, missing the final three pages and back cover - although I don't get the impression they featured anything vital - and flakes of yellowing paper came away each time I read it; but it was three dollars and the cover promising material by both Richard Shaver and Robert Moore Williams made it an essential purchase.

Palmer is credited only as managing editor - Bernard George Davis being listed as the actual editor - but his influence seems overpowering, this influence being expressed as a carnival barker's huckster enthusiasm for scientifiction and the idea that if we are able to imagine it, then one day it will happen - a position I recall having been taken by Bez of Happy Mondays during some television interview wherein he described what he liked about Star Trek. Palmer's editorial accordingly suggests that the contents of the magazine should be read as prediction as much as fiction, giving as an example the notion that readers of Amazing would not have been too surprised by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, having encountered such weaponry in the magazine many years earlier. Palmer, in true pseudoscientific spirit, actually seems to have regarded Einstein as merely a fellow visionary, and suggests that many of his theories were obviously wrong, as demonstrated by tales published in previous issues because if you can imagine faster than light travel, then one day it will happen.

The divide between imagination and reality was clearly an issue with Richard S. Shaver, arguably the star of the magazine at this point. Shaver's I Remember Lemuria had already been rapturously received and Palmer was quite happy to capitalise on its success. The protagonist of the story tells of his being kidnapped by a race of degenerate subterranean beings called the Dero, whereupon he learns how the Dero have influenced human history by use of special rays which cause people to act with evil intent. It's a paranoid fantasy which seems fairly typical of certain types of schizophrenia, and Shaver seems to have related what he believes to have been actual events as fiction, so as not to cause panic as the legend has it.

While Shaver's tales weren't the revelation claimed by Palmer and others in mythology-building articles featured elsewhere in this issue, and nor did they necessarily constitute classic material, neither were they quite the incomprehensible pulp turds recalled by more stringent critics. The worlds and beings described are patently those of a man with mental health issues, and the plot of Invasion of the Micro-Men in this issue is as prone to absent-minded swerves as any of Shaver's fiction, but there's nevertheless something fascinating and compelling here - plus I suppose it could be argued that he foresaw nanotechnology ahead of the curve. This issue transposes the author's usual concerns to outer space with the Dero replaced by their interplanetary equivalent, the Jotun, degenerate inhabitants of abandoned caverns on a myriad of worlds, but tolerated by the utopian Nortan race, who are elevated and therefore almost certainly white. As with the Dero, the Jotun aren't so much evil as simply irresponsible and prone to mischief. Naturally they have a tendency to kidnap Nortan women for their wives, transforming them - so it is primly hinted - into freaks, which I take to mean that they give them comically massive tits by means of special enlargement rays. Even as we read, we can sort of sense Shaver wrestling with thoughts he doubtless regarded as dirty and therefore part of whatever was wrong with his head, itself expressed as the dominant theme of malevolent, invisible influence - whether it's those special rays or tiny men in the bloodstream.

Robert Moore Williams' The Huntress of Akkan is, roughly speaking, Abraham Merritt's The Face in the Abyss but with its team of plucky, hard-boiled adventurers mysteriously transported to another world. It's pleasant enough, and although it hints at some of the strangeness of Williams' later efforts, it lacks their ponderous and peculiar allegorical quality.

The rest of the magazine is competent but about what you would expect of its kind - pulpy and sort of predictable but not actually offensive; and Final Victim by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse isn't anything special. The pseudo-factual articles are more speculative than scientific, pretty much Charles Fort with a few grudging nods towards Einstein and the like; and there's The Bearded White Prophet by L. Taylor Hansen which suggests that Quetzalcoatl was almost certainly Caucasian, which is pure bollocks. If anyone familiar with this idea should still, in 2019, be wondering why it's all bollocks, it's because 1) the native records from which this legend derives were all written half a century after the conquest and represent an after the fact attempt to rationalise it, and b) some indigenous Mexicans actually could grow beards.

So it's underwhelming, but fascinating as an historical document, dating from before science-fiction was really a thing in the same way as it is now, even before the advent of the science-fiction paperback. Amazing Stories inhabited a world in which its genre was H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, a few other bits and pieces here and there, and then these generally frowned upon magazines with their lurid covers and arguably more in common with the trashier end of Hollywood than all that fancy book learnin'. Yet, there's worth here, even imagination, and if it amounts to compost in literary terms, then we should keep in mind that things grow very well in compost.

The Shape of Things

Damon Knight (editor) The Shape of Things (1965)
I still find it hard to leave one of these on the shelf, which is partially nostalgia for anthologies such as this more or less having been my introduction to science-fiction which wasn't based on a TV show or else written by Philip K. Dick. Also, there's the exciting promise of getting something you didn't expect, of not really knowing quite what the fuck will happen once you get between the covers. I really don't know how anyone can resist.

Of course, these days there's also the appeal of revisiting what have become old favourites, but it's the surprises which keep me coming back, and not least because there are still surprises to be had. In this case one big one turns out to be The New Reality by Charles L. Harness. I don't recall having heard of the guy and I know nothing about him, but The New Reality is absolutely top shelf material, notable as a version of reality as construct within the eye of the beholder of some vintage, predating all those recent revisitations of the theme, and even predating the likes of Dick's Eye in the Sky. I'm sure Harness himself was only riffing on some previous telling of the story, one I've probably read and forgotten, but nevertheless he makes the convention his own.

As with any anthology, there are a couple which don't quite make the grade, but with this one the good stuff is of such quality as to render the duds forgiveable; and the good stuff from Henry Kuttner, Murray Leinster, Theodore Sturgeon, and Ray Bradbury are all very good indeed. Also, it's nice to read Knight's introduction to van Vogt's Dormant and to find that he did, on occasion, have a good word for the guy after all; so, very satisfying, all round.

New Worlds 157

Michael Moorcock (editor) New Worlds 157 (1965)
Here's another oddity, specifically a magazine, albeit a magazine published as a standard paperback - as I guess were other issues of Moorcock's New Worlds. Someone sent me this through the post, I made a mental note to read it at some point and it went onto the shelves, there to remain unread because I rarely bother with periodicals - which is an explanation of how my brain works rather than some sort of manifesto. I know Fantasy & Science Fiction to be wonderful, and Asimov's and Analog have their moments, but if I read the magazines I'd never find time to read books, and there's so much I still want to read and I don't even know if I'll be alive long enough to get through all of it.

Anyway, New Worlds ran for a long, long time, and was pretty much the English magazine of new science fiction. It had a reputation for innovation, for taking risks on weirdos, and as such is probably directly responsible for at least some degrees of the fame enjoyed by Brian Aldiss, Moorcock himself, Harry Harrison, J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, and others. There's nothing historically remarkable about this particular issue beyond that it seems typically solid. Colin Fry's Ernie and Langdon Jones' Transient sort of make you wish that at least one of them had gone on to bigger, better publicised things, whoever they were; and Moorcock contributes something which ended up in one of the Jerry Cornelius books, but mostly this serves as a fascinating snapshot of its milieu, an era when science-fiction was something you read, nine times out of ten, which seems a more civilised state of affairs than is presently the case. Being a periodical, there's an editorial concerned mostly with a convention at which fancy dress was still termed fancy dress, and there's a review of Ray Bradbury's newie - Dandelion Wine apparently, and very good it sounds too - and, best of all, a terse advice column written by one Dr. Peristyle, apparently Brian Aldiss in stealth mode.

All I ask of a story is that it tells a story. Why do writers insist on trying to give me more? asks Betty Pierce of Diss, Norfolk.

I suppose the answer is that there are writers who write for the likes of you, madam, Aldiss responds, but the good ones hope to avoid you.

Excellent.

I might have to hunt down a few more of these.

Dandelion Wine

Ray Bradbury Dandelion Wine (1957)
I think I started this one three or four times before I really began to get into it, on each occasion rapidly losing enthusiasm and switching to The Coming Race, or Earth Abides, or The Mind Parasites. Dandelion Wine is loosely autobiographical, constituting an attempt to recapture not only childhood, but to recapture childhood as perceived through the eyes of youth with all colours and sounds brighter and so much more meaningful than they appear in later years when rods, cones, and brain cells have turned to semolina. It does this exceptionally well with a richly evocative prose bordering on - I suppose - a sort of magic realism. In fact it does it so well that the honeyed tone of the text takes some getting used to, or at least it did for me, never quite turning into narrative Thomas Kinkade, but at times making your average episode of The Waltons seem like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Nevertheless, at last getting beyond the first twenty pages, Dandelion Wine proves itself worth the effort as the warmly orange glow of nostalgia is contrasted with a well drawn measure of childhood terror:

There were a million small towns like this all over the world. Each as dark, as lonely, each as removed, as full of shuddering and wonder. The reedy playing of minor-key violins was the small towns' music, with no lights, but many shadows. Oh, the vast swelling loneliness of them. The secret damp ravines of them. Life was a horror lived in them at night, when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, were threatened by an ogre called Death.

The point of this is of course that you can't really have the good stuff without the more nightmarish elements. The detail of the book is wonderfully gauged, presenting a child's typically obsessive focus on the minutiae of ritual, and a juvenile associative understanding of a world in which old people may well have lived forever and you really can build such a thing as a happiness machine if you know how to go about it. Even more impressive is the simultaneous contrast of a seemingly endless summer experienced with the urgent childhood awareness of running out of time, and that everything must either cease or change.

That said, or at least acknowledged, I did feel that Dandelion Wine rambled somewhat, and possibly could have done a better job with a lower page count; but then I've met people who regard this as an essentially perfect novel, so I'm fairly sure it's just me, as suggested by the difficulty I had getting started with it in the first place.

The Synthetic Man

Theodore  Sturgeon The Synthetic Man (1950)
This being the second novel I've read by Sturgeon, I must conclude that biology, mutation, and outsiders were common preoccupations of his writing as this one also features a group of freaks trying to make their way in the world. It's been a while since I read More Than Human, and I can't actually recall much of it beyond this distinguishing feature and the fact of it being extremely well written, but the freaks of The Synthetic Man - the earlier novel for what it may be worth - have banded together for safety as part of a travelling side show. The pseudo-gothic freak show has become something of a cliché, and without really caring enough to look anything up, I suspect it's probably been trotted out by Clive Barker, Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman and others with some frequency - although I personally thought Lawrence Miles used it very well in Interference - but Sturgeon writes with such lively confidence that it feels like a new idea, which is pretty good going for something published over half a century ago.

Kiddo, as he is known, turns out to be something much stranger than the robot implied by the title - at least to me - as Sturgeon asks us to consider the possibility of there being another form of life here on Earth unlike anything with which we are familiar, thus far undetected because it has no effect on us, nor we on it. Further to this we get Kiddo growing up as female in order to elude the wrath of its misanthropic sideshow owner - not simply the bold use of a transgendered main character at a time when this would have appeared quite shocking to at least a few of the readers, but a main character who is transgendered for reasons of narrative and theme rather than as a simple example of the freakish.

Sturgeon writes well with the warmth and authority of someone who weaves tales, as opposed to simply filling pages and making a living from the pulps. For want of a better description it's van Vogtian surrealism communicated with the simple clarity of Ray Bradbury, and The Synthetic Man has been a real find. I really need to keep an eye open for more by this guy.

The Outer Reaches

August Derleth (editor) The Outer Reaches (1951)
It feels like an age since I picked up one of these satisfaction-pretty-much-guaranteed vintage collections, possibly because whilst it seems like every other English charity shop has a box of these things stashed away somewhere, their like has proven more elusive here in the States. Therefore I'm re-reading The Outer Reaches, presented to me along with Derleth's Beachheads in Space some years ago by Glenn Wallis who told me here, you might be able to get some ideas from these; these collections represented the inaugural dip of my symbolic toe into the golden age bath tub, the first stories I read out of sheer curiosity without prior knowledge of their authors, my first voyage out beyond the orbit of Philip K. Dick to the older worlds of Astounding Science-Fiction, Amazing Stories, and so on. August Derleth had been chums with H.P. Lovecraft, I reasoned, so that seemed like a recommendation.

The stories collected in The Outer Reaches represent the personal favourite of each author from amongst his own body of work, at least as of 1951. Whilst, in this respect, there's a couple of slightly puzzling submissions - notably Leon Sprague de Camp's Git Along!, an oddly disappointing effort from a generally solid author; and David H. Keller's Service First which had me wondering whether his might be another of John Wyndham's myriad pseudonames, it being so close in tone to the dreaded Pawley's Peepholes; but, these aside, it's a predictably satisfying collection with cracking stuff from Poul Anderson, Nelson Bond, Ray Bradbury and others. With the past being something of a foreign country, the appeal of short stories of this form must surely increase as years go by, and so I'm inclined to dispute the general accusation of it being less than great literature. This was shamelessly populist science-fiction written without anything like the number of unspoken literary rules of today: stupid, wacky, and mostly wonderful.

Considering how much of this stuff I've read since Glenn first sent this book my way, it's probably fair to say that The Outer Reaches did indeed give me some ideas.