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So I've been slowly savoring An Informal History of the Hugos -- which I've now finally finished and am definitively going to vote for to win Best Related Work, because it is basically THE VERY BEST thing about the Hugos this year, period -- one of the things that is so wonderful about it is that practically every year she talks about I came out thinking "gosh, I want to (re)read those stories/books she's talking about." (I have more to say about it but this will have to wait.)
So last time we went to the library I plucked off the shelf the first suitable SF anthology I found, which was this one. It's divided into three sections: The Golden Age; The New Wave, and The Media Generation.
I'd read a lot of these stories (significantly more than half), and the ones I hadn't read were still familiar (e.g., Niven's "Inconstant Moon," which I'd seen in a lot of anthologies and just hadn't actually read). Interestingly, I had read the highest proportion of stories from The Media Generation, mostly because Card had previously put almost all of them in the anthologies Future on Ice and Future on Fire, which I had read as an adolescent when I was reading anything that had Card's name on it. (They are also very good anthologies, though I'm not sure I appreciated that at all then. Most of the stories I was not nearly old enough for.)
The introductions to the stories are weirdly craptastic -- I remember that in the Future anthologies Card had much better introductions talking about what he himself thought of the stories. Here's it's just a resume. I dunno.
Some thoughts I had:
-In general: wow, I was WAY too young for many of these stories, although I'm glad I was exposed to them
-While most Asimov has kind of been subject to the Suck Fairy, I actually really like "Robot Dreams"
-"A Work of Art" is much, MUCH more resonant now that I've actually listened to Strauss. Wow, I really liked this.
-Yesterday was not the greatest day to have (re)read "A Clean Escape." It's probably good I'm not particularly subject to anxiety. I wish this one had aged worse.
-"Snow," on the other hand, has unfortunately aged very badly. It's a good story, all about memory and loss, but the whole conceit is completely nonsensical in 2019, and I may have sniggered a bit at the conversation that goes "That would be over eight thousand hours of video!! Where would you store it all????"
-"Pots" was one of the few stories I didn't actually read this time around, in this case not because I don't like it but because I love it so much I worry about diluting it with too much rereading. (Does anyone else do that?)
So last time we went to the library I plucked off the shelf the first suitable SF anthology I found, which was this one. It's divided into three sections: The Golden Age; The New Wave, and The Media Generation.
I'd read a lot of these stories (significantly more than half), and the ones I hadn't read were still familiar (e.g., Niven's "Inconstant Moon," which I'd seen in a lot of anthologies and just hadn't actually read). Interestingly, I had read the highest proportion of stories from The Media Generation, mostly because Card had previously put almost all of them in the anthologies Future on Ice and Future on Fire, which I had read as an adolescent when I was reading anything that had Card's name on it. (They are also very good anthologies, though I'm not sure I appreciated that at all then. Most of the stories I was not nearly old enough for.)
The introductions to the stories are weirdly craptastic -- I remember that in the Future anthologies Card had much better introductions talking about what he himself thought of the stories. Here's it's just a resume. I dunno.
Some thoughts I had:
-In general: wow, I was WAY too young for many of these stories, although I'm glad I was exposed to them
-While most Asimov has kind of been subject to the Suck Fairy, I actually really like "Robot Dreams"
-"A Work of Art" is much, MUCH more resonant now that I've actually listened to Strauss. Wow, I really liked this.
-Yesterday was not the greatest day to have (re)read "A Clean Escape." It's probably good I'm not particularly subject to anxiety. I wish this one had aged worse.
-"Snow," on the other hand, has unfortunately aged very badly. It's a good story, all about memory and loss, but the whole conceit is completely nonsensical in 2019, and I may have sniggered a bit at the conversation that goes "That would be over eight thousand hours of video!! Where would you store it all????"
-"Pots" was one of the few stories I didn't actually read this time around, in this case not because I don't like it but because I love it so much I worry about diluting it with too much rereading. (Does anyone else do that?)
