ORBIT – Otherworldly Reads, Bold Ideas, and Tales. SF & F Short Stories and Novelettes discussion

Why I made this thread - - I could not find a place to talk about random short stories we are reading independently.

I keep saying I am going to get back to the Hugo winners. And I don't. No time and I have kinda lost track of where I am with that.

But all is not lost. I have the two Frederic Brown Megapacks on a Kindle and I read part of a story the other day. I will go back. I just have too many things to read. I need to try to find a time to read short stories instead of novels.

I do expect to get through the Frederic Brown books, though. His short stories are good and sometimes great.

Kateblue wrote: "Why I made this thread - - I could not find a place to talk about random short stories we are reading independently…"

Good idea.

Great idea, thanks Kate!

I'm currently listening to Derelict (1955) by Alan E. Nourse from If magazine on a YouTube site I mentioned elsewhere.

i have a copy of The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 7, edited by Allan Kaster, which collects stories originally published in 2022. I’ve been dipping into it from time to time and this morning in a coffee shop I read “The Ploughshare and the Storm” by Gwyneth Jones. The story concerns posthuman entities engaged in making a kind of art who stumble upon an ancient artifact of a sort on Europa.

An interesting, sophisticated piece that I enjoyed. The feelings of these powerful far future “sentient AIs” regarding “naturally occurring organic life forms” are central to the story.

I plan to read more of these newer anthologies, but yet to get to them

I spent about two and a half hours in a crowded Service Ontario office this afternoon waiting to renew my driver’s licence. A few minutes of that time was spent reading a moderately entertaining crime story by Ray Bradbury called “I’m Not So Dumb!”, originally published in 1944 in Detective Tales, a pulp magazine, and reprinted by Hard Case Crime in a collection entitled Killer, Come Back To Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury. I have a kindle copy of the collection and from time to time i read one of the stories. Some of them have sff elements. Certainly worth reading if you are a Bradbury fan. I’m not, particularly, but I think most of these that I’ve read are at least decent 3-star stories.

I've read Asimov's crime stories, but not Bradbury, at least I cannot recall

I'm currently reading Frostpunk. Antologia - shorter works (I guess novelette/novella in size) set in this peculiar universe of this strategy game (Frostpunk is the first society survival game. As the ruler of the last city on Earth, it is your duty to manage both its citizens and infrastructure. What decisions will you make to ensure your society's survival? What will you do when pushed to breaking point? Who will you become in the process?) The game is interesting because there are no 'right' choices, with dilemmas like whether you will eat your dead or have 25% of the colony die from hunger. The stories are written by well-known Polish SFF writers, they are ok but not wow

Andrew just sent me a recommendation . . . I never knew we could even do this . . . anyway, it was for Convergent Series which I know I have read but it reminded me how much I love Larry Niven's short stories. He is a much better short story writer than novel writer IMHO.

So, if you guy want to read some Larry Niven (or Frederick Brown) short stories, I would love to join, even though I have probably read them all previously

Good choice for me, Andrew

Kateblue wrote: "So, if you guy want to read some Larry Niven (or Frederick Brown) short stories, I would love to join, even though I have probably read them all previously
"

me too :)

This morning I read another story from The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 7, “The Wine-Dark Deep” by Sheila Finch, about a discovery in an underwater Greek cave that is brought to the attention of a specialist in octopus intelligence. I thought the story was one of those in which the execution doesn’t quite live up to the conception; slightly disappointing. Still an interesting 3-star story.

Ooh, shout out to Fredric Brown. I've collected all his work in paper over the years and could stand to read them again. I even read his crime fiction, though I'm not a fan of that genre at all.

Also Alan Nourse - what little I heard on librivox, years ago, was good enough that I still remember the name and want more.

Cheryl wrote: "Ooh, shout out to Fredric Brown. I've collected all his work in paper over the years and could stand to read them again. I even read his crime fiction, though I'm not a fan of that genre at all.

..."

Yes, well, here's a good place for 2 collections of Frederik Brown stories (which I think includes ALL of them) and cheap, also. 99 cents each. I think you pay through amazon, but you download from the website.
https://wildsidepress.com/authors-b/b...

Let me know when you are starting the first I and I will try to join, Though I am reading too many things and will be slow

Yesterday I read “The Weed of Time” by Norman Spinrad in The Time Traveler's Almanac, another anthology I have in kindle form and dip into from time to time. The story was originally published in Vertex magazine in 1973. It’s an interesting new wavey piece. A plant brought back to earth from another planet escapes into the wild. Anyone who eats it has their time sense changed. The form of the story reflects this altered perspective. It’s quite readable and, I think, a successful story. I haven’t read much Spinrad, I should read more.

Stephen wrote: "Yesterday I read “The Weed of Time” by Norman Spinrad in The Time Traveler's Almanac, another anthology I have in kindle form and dip into from time to time. The story was originall..."

It looks like an interesting anthology and while Amazon doesn't list an audiobook version, one of my libraries has it. Gonna add to my TBR

Today I read “The Mother Hive”, a short story by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling wrote a variety of stories that might be considered SFF, from children’s fantasies to adult stories with apparently supernatural elements to actual technological extrapolation of a science fictional kind. “The Mother Hive” is something else, a political allegory set in a beehive, with talking bees. Kipling apparently was a keen beekeeper and displays a thorough knowledge of the subject, as understood by an Edwardian British gentleman amateur. In the story a parasitic wasp enters the hive and with vaguely liberal talk deceives some of the naive worker bees into accepting her. The story proceeds with egalitarian and progressive rhetoric accompanied by degeneration and eventual destruction of the hive. At the end a young queen leads a desperate swarm fo found a new hive.

"The Big Black and White Game" by Ray Bradbury. A non-genre story about a baseball game between the black servants and the white men in a Wisconsin resort town, told from the point of view of a white child. The black men are unselfconsciously graceful and at home in their bodies and effortlessly superior as athletes. The white men have a hard time dealing with it and the game degenerates.

I read this many years ago, probably in the collection The Golden Apples of the Sun which I believe I had a copy of. I remembered it as an extremely obvious story about American race relations, not very interesting. But it did stick in my mind. Recently I was wondering if maybe it was more subtle than I remembered, and Bradbury had done subtle things to contrast the physicality of the black and white athletes. I realized the story was included in Classic Stories 1: From the Golden Apples of the Sun and R Is for Rocket so I decided to reread it. No, it's not subtle, it's just as obvious as I remembered. However given the state of race relations in the USA at the time, subtlety probably wasn't particularly important.

The story was originally published in the August 1945 issue of American Mercury, a high profile nongenre magazine. August 1945, 80 years ago, was of course a big month in history. Bradbury's story shared the magazine with a tribute to Churchill by historian Henry Steele Commager, and another article entitled "Can We Do Business With Stalin?"

Stephen wrote: "August 1945 issue of American Mercury, ... article entitled "Can We Do Business With Stalin?""

I accessed the issue at Archive.org to read it. I like to see how people in the past guessed the future. After making a prediction of a two-polar world (he assumes a three-polar world with the British) and saying that Germany and Japan will never recover, he says we never warred with each other, the trade will be beneficial, but Stalin should keep his promises about free Eastern and Central Europe. Not a word about purges and quite a light touch on Molotov-Ribbentrop act, with let's bygones be bygones... this attitude stays in the USA thru the ages, from yesterday's meeting on Alaska, to Obama's reset button to this piece

A few weeks ago I bought a used copy of the 1972 Ace Double Technos / A Scatter of Stardust by E. C. Tubb. I think we discussed Tubb’s work briefly in this group or a related one earlier this year. He was a stalwart of the 1950s British sf magazines under his own name and a number of others, then became well known in the 60s and 70s for a long running series of novels about Dumarest of Terra, a character who has adventures on various planets while searching for the lost planet earth. I haven’t read much of his work.

“A Scatter of Stardust” collects eight stories originally published between the mid-50s and late 60s, mainly in British magazines. (The exception appeared in the American magazine Infinity in 1957.) So far I’ve read the first two stories.

The Bells of Acheron, from a 1957 issue of the British magazine Science Fantasy, concerns a spaceship carrying generally wealthy tourists from planet to planet. The attraction of the planet Acheron is flowers that produce beautiful, enthralling bell-like music. The viewpoint character, the ship’s steward, can’t resist returning again and again to the planet to hear it. We eventually find out why. There’s a little too much plot for my taste in the end, but I enjoyed this old fashioned 1950s story and thought it was well written.

The other story I’ve read so far is Anne which was published in 1966 by the British New Worlds magazine. Anne is about a seriously wounded warrior space pilot who somehow finds himself in a kind of heaven. Vivid descriptive writing.

Tubb seems to have the reputation of a solid, fairly unambitious journeyman writer who produced a lot of good but not great work. These two stories are consistent with that. I enjoyed them both as good 3-star stories, of their time.

Stephen wrote: "A few weeks ago I bought a used copy of the 1972 Ace Double Technos / A Scatter of Stardust by E. C. Tubb. I think we discussed Tubb’s work briefly in this group or a related one ear..."

Yes, I discovered Tubb for myself and shared from Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations - he seems largely forgotten now, say only one audiobook by him on Audible. I plan to read more by him

I finished Bears Discover Fire (1990) by Terry Bisson - the winner of six genre awards, including Hugo and Nebula. It is both original and strange - a group of relatives has to stop their truck because of a flat tire. While the narrator replaced it (and there is a lot about tires!) they witness two bears coming out from the woods with torches in their hands... later there are more and more news about bears using fire but it isn't an explosion of research, just news like "x witnessed bears sitting around a fire and now to the weather" 3.5*
There is online and audio here https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fi...

Thanks, I’ll revisit the Joachim Boaz blog post on Tubb.

“Bears Discover Fire” is a classic.

Stephen wrote: "“Bears Discover Fire” is a classic."

I like it unusual story, but honestly, I wanted more answers, but there were even questions left unasked, like can mankind coexist with another sentient species

Oleksandr wrote: "Stephen wrote: "“Bears Discover Fire” is a classic."

I like it unusual story, but honestly, I wanted more answers, but there were even questions left unasked, like can mankind coexist with another..."

Bisson wouldn’t have been interested in those questions. There was a good profile in the New Yorker not long ago:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...

I reread the Joachim Boaz blog post on E.C. Tubb. He frames it as part of a series on stories “critical in some capacity of space agencies, astronauts, and the culture which produced them.” The stories he focuses on concern the colonization of Mars. None of the stories he discusses, or others named in a footnote, are included in Technos / A Scatter of Stardust.

Looking at the two stories I’ve read in the light of “Boaz’s” comments, I will say that there is an element of bleak realism in the portrait of the space pilot and his plight in Anne that I didn’t mention in my brief description. He is in pain, in a broken ship, blood everywhere, and he sees himself as a coward.

Stephen wrote: "There was a good profile in the New Yorker not long ago:."

Thanks, interesting

I’ve read 3 more of the stories in A Scatter of Stardust. They really aren’t very good in my opinion. The prose is readable and the stories are formally ok, they develop and come to an end and they aren’t too long, but I find the substance of the stories lacking. I’m sure it’s at least partly a matter of datedness and the expectations of the genre magazine readers of the day.

I’ll read the remaining 3 stories and also the Dumarest novel on the other side of the Ace Double, but at this point the book is looking like a lowish 3-star read.

Stephen wrote: "I reread the Joachim Boaz blog post on E.C. Tubb. He frames it as part of a series on stories “critical in some capacity of space agencies, astronauts, and the culture which produced them.”"

Just a note: the series of stories by different authors, not that E.C. Tubb was writing only such stories or only he wrote them

Stephen wrote: "I’ve read 3 more of the stories in A Scatter of Stardust. They really aren’t very good in my opinion."

Maybe he is largely forgotten for a reason. I meanwhile finished But the Patient Lived (1956) Harry Warner, a story where people live too long and doctors help them die, but one goes against the trend

My comments on Tubb last night were perhaps a shade too negative. I’ll add brief descriptions of the other stories I’ve read from A Scatter of Stardust here.

Return Visit from Science Fantasy magazine, 1958. Humorous story about a modern (mid-20th century) character who summons a demon. There’s quite a bit of chat from both of them about the foolish superstition of old time magicians and alchemists who summoned the demon in earlier times. The main character is a disagreeable greedy type with a “scientific” explanation for everything. There is a twist at the end. A fairly clever conception, but the story didn’t quite work for me. Sounds better as I write this summary than I thought it was as I read it.

The Shrine, from New Worlds, 1960. In the far future, humans are known throughout the galaxy as unhappy people without a planet of their own, having somehow destroyed Earth at some point. The story concerns a spaceship carrying human pilgrims to an obscure remote planet where they visit the shrine of the title and somehow experience a “miracle”, restoration of their self-respect. The story is told from the point of view of nonhuman crew members, who observe the humans before and after this transformation. The reader isn’t shown what the humans saw, but overheard snatches of dialogue suggest that it’s some kind of image or relic of a human being from millions of years ago. It wasn’t clear to me how this effect, the change in the humans’ morale, happens.

Survival Demands, New Worlds, 1960. Humans are the only intelligent race that are restricted to language for communication; others are all telepathic. There are however a few human telepaths. One of them, Tolsen, was sent to the planet of the Frenzha to determine their intentions toward humans. He reports back that they intend to kill all the humans, so the humans exterminate them. Tolsen goes mad from both the telepathic experience of their deaths and knowledge that he was responsible. The narrator seems to think that it will be possible to do better nxt time, that humans can develop their telepathic powers better and need to both reform their destructive proclivities and communicate better with aliens, so the need for genocide won’t arise again. I think I’ve described this accurately. It seems a somewhat confused story in that the need for genocide is never really justified.

Little Girl Lost from New Worlds, 1955. A brilliant scientist has gone mad after his little daughter was killed by a hit-and-run driver. He believes she has survived, and he brushes her imaginary hair, talks to her, etc. He is doing incredibly important work, coming up with a way to “create fission in nonradioactive materials”, so the authorities humour his delusion in order to keep him working. He is refusing to stay in a government facility so the main character in the story is recruited to accompany him out into the world. He seems to succeed in playing along with the scientist’s belief that the daughter is there with them. But the scientist’s behaviour changes. At the end,
(view spoiler)[
The main character is afraid that “…the professor wants the world to go up in atomic flame so as to revenge himself on the killer of his daughter and at the same time be with her in the only way he can.” (hide spoiler)]

Another from A Scatter of Stardust by E.C. Tubb: The Eyes of Silence, from Infinity magazine, 1957. A prisoner serving a 7-year sentence in solitary confinement in a tiny cell agrees to serve his sentence out as the sole occupant of an isolated space station, ostensibly to perform “general maintenance” on the equipment. But things apparently aren’t exactly as he was told… Another psychological story. It’s relatively low-key and straightforward and I rather liked it.

EC Tubb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_C...
I remember pretty much HATING the couple of Dumarest books I tried, back in the day. I vaguely recall "The Eyes of Silence" ( or another story like it) as being pretty good.

Enchanter’s Encounter from Science Fantasy magazine, 1959. A modern psychologist finds his fiancée is under the influence of a magician, whom he considers a charlatan. He confronts the magician. The story ends ironically. The psychologist’s argument is somewhat interesting. He concedes that the magician’s “hexes” may have their desired effects, but contends they aren’t “magic”, only phenomena that science hasn’t figured out yet. He’s a difficult, wilful, not particularly sympathetic character. I didn’t actually find any of the characters very sympathetic and the story wasn’t compelling but it did hang together pretty well, I thought.

This was the last of the eight short stories in A Scatter of Stardust. I don’t regret reading the collection but I don’t think it should be of much interest to most readers. If you are going to read 1950s science fiction (or “science fantasy”) stories it’s easy to find better stuff. I would say “Anne” and “The Eyes of Silence” are probably the best of these, to my taste.

I intend to flip the book over and read the Dumarest novel soon. I’m getting a sense of Tubb as a writer and I haven’t given up on him on the basis of these stories. Not really getting my hopes up either, though.

Brief additional comment on the E.C. Tubb stories Return Visit and Enchanter’s Encounter : They have in common the idea that old fashioned magic may work, but only because it’s based on solid science that the magicians don’t understand. A lot of the ritual, incantation and other apparatus is irrelevant.

I just read Livesuit which I think was novella length. But it felt very padded by extraneous battle scenes with details not needed to move the plot forward, so I'm telling you about it. Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Today I read Stitched to Skin Like Family Is by Nghi Vo, which recently won the Hugo Award as the best Short Story published in 2024. An interesting story.

Stephen wrote: "Today I read Stitched to Skin Like Family Is by Nghi Vo, which recently won the Hugo Award as the best Short Story published in 2024. An interesting story."

I plan to read it too - I was negligent this year and haven't completed all the shorter prose of Hugo/Nebula

I read Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole, which won the Nebula and Locus awards for best short story of 2024, and was a finalist for the Hugo. The story takes as its starting point the famous Le Guin story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Someone murders the child/scapegoat whose suffering enables the existence of the utopian society in the Le Guin story. Various results ensue including subsequent murders of replacement children. There are satirical references to various aspects of the contemporary world. The tone is informal and sarcastic, consistent with the title.

I’ve been avoiding the story because I didn’t like the idea of it. It’s a smart story but I still didn’t like it.

Stephen wrote: "I read Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole, "

I wrote about it in another thread in this group. I disliked it too, because the original was our happiness is bought by pain of an innocent child, while this story from the start says they are guilty... in the first two parapgraphs 'true' enemies are highlighted: (a different “they,” these were the “they” in charge, the “they” who lived in the nice houses in Omelas [okay, every house in Omelas was a nice house, but these were Nice Houses]) got another kid and put it in the hole. While 'we' are: Or they (the general “they,” the “they” that meant you and me and the janitors and the newscasters) just working people, not guilty

Five Views of the Planet Tartarus by Rachael K. Jones. Another 2025 Hugo finalist. Very short, only 549 words, and depends on its last sentence. What Oleksandr would call a “punch line” story. Nicely done, but makes me wonder if there should be a minimum word count for Hugo short story nominees.

Stephen wrote: "Five Views of the Planet Tartarus by Rachael K. Jones. "

I read it before it was nominated (I planned to read all Lightspeed's issues, but managed only the 1st) and I liked it, not a wow but above average. I think that there are rare punchline shorts that stay with the reader, chiefly Fredric Brown's ones and they are award-worthy

A “punchline” story, by which I mean a story that depends for much of its impact on a final reveal, is one thing; “flash fiction” that is also a punchline story is another, it seems to me.

Yes, I agree, but flash-fic is more often a punchline story than 'usual' short story in SFF.

Yesterday I read On the Gem Planet, a good rich late Cordwainer Smith story. At this point there are only about three or four stories by “Smith” I haven’t read, plus the novel Norstrilia, which I hope to read this year.

I’ll pick up the March/April Analog next.

Stephen wrote: "but makes me wonder if there should be a minimum word count for Hugo short story nominees."

super shorts like that are all that my brain can write, so I vote for super shorts being nominee-worthy

I just read Lady Killer by Chad Oliver. I am reading probably a couple more before the end of the month for a challenge in another group that wants you to read a book by somebody with your name. Well, his name was Symmes Chadwick Oliver and my maiden name was Symmes. And yes, we are related. Somehow, anyway. All the Symmes are. My mom said so. And there's a book.

This one was a kind of silly short story from 1952, about a frantic quest to Mars looking for human women, since Earth's women are all sterile because of a war. I enjoyed it--4*

I also have Shadow in the Sun and Unearthly Neighbors, which are short, maybe novella length, and Mists if Dawn, which is not short. I will keep you posted about the short ones if I get to them

I read Technos, the novella on the flip side of the Ace Double Technos / A Scatter of Stardust that I was describing in this thread. The novella is a fairly routine science fiction adventure with an effectively superpowered protagonist (Earl Dumarest) and a plot that depends heavily on coincidence and a highly convenient man-sized ventilation system. A lowish 3-star story.

Circus by Alan E. Nourse, included in The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack. I got a copy of this “Megapack” recently for the sake of Avram Davidson’s famous, award winning Or All the Seas with Oysters, another of the stories it includes. I was interested in “Circus” because its original publication was in a collection by Nourse called The Counterfeit Man and Other Science Fiction Stories, which I had when I was very young, ordered through Scholastic Book Services at school. I wondered if I would remember the story.

I didn’t remember the story. A man is talking to a doctor; he seems to be indistinguishable from an ordinary human being but he insists he is an alien, stranded on earth. There’s a trick ending. It’s a smoothly written, mildly interesting story. Certainly a harmless thing to market to schoolkids, good clean fun and not bad in its way. 3 stars.