![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaThe Particular
Over on the Locus Roundtable,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
grahamsleight (under his transparent pseudonym "Graham Sleight") has posted his proposed table of contents for a collection of the best stories Theodore Sturgeon stories. It's a fine list and the comments have additional excellent suggestions.
He suggests that his collection could be called The Great Emo Stories of Theodore Sturgeon:
That friend is me, and Graham has inspired me to actually post about the stories I would put in such a collection.
In chronological order, I would select without hesitation these:
"Liar" (1941)
"The Fun They Had" (1951)
"Satisfaction Guaranteed" (1951) *
"It's Such a Beautiful Day" (1954)
"Dreaming Is a Private Thing" (1955)
"The Dead Past" (1956)
"Galley Slave" (1957)
"The Ugly Little Boy" (1958)
"Eyes Do More than See" (1965)**
"The Bicentennial Man" (1976)
*Added on suggestion from commenter books@thrillingwonder, and it replaces my earlier choice of "Galley Slave".
**Added on suggestion fromsturgeonslawyer--I had never read it before, but it obviously belongs.
Although most of the these stories could, fairly, be described as "idea" or "gadget" stories, the focus of each of them is not on the novum itself but on the emotional impact of the novum on its characters. As a time-travel story, or even as anthropology, there's nothing in "The Ugly Little Boy" that wasn't in a hundred thousand stories before; and "The Bicentennial Man" adds nothing to the idea framework of the Three Laws stories. But the love for humanity in each story overflows them.
More borderline are "Franchise" (1955), which hovers between emotion and gimmick, and the Black Widowers story "Early Sunday Morning" (1973), which skillfully undermines the very distant, very cozy framework Asimov created for those otherwise very mannered stories.
It's tempting to include "The Last Question", because the story itself has such a strong emotional impact, but the story really isn't about the emotional impact of technological innovations or events.
The last short piece I'd include, and the least obvious, would be "The Mule" (1945), the novella which became the second half of Foundation and Empire. "The Mule" is noteworthy for its emphasis on chaotic emotion--fear, loss, regret, and inadequacy--in the middle of probably the archetypal science-fiction novel of the triumph of pure reason. Also, of all the Foundation stories it's the one that most directly confronts the impact on the characters of the knowledge that they are characters, caught in a story written by a long-dead author--by showing what happens to them when the story goes off the rails.
Then I would fill this volume out with The End of Eternity, in the manner of the classic Viking Portable Library volumes, which often include a short novel along with the wide selection of shorter stories to present an author or period. And there you'd have it--a collection of Asimov stories, all of them right at the heart of the sf canon, which show the emotional range available even in sf's early days. If Asimov had never written another word of prose beyond these stories, I think he'd still be remembered as a major figure in the field. His reputation would be very different, but still a major figure.
The Pattern
Decades ago, I conceived that the science fiction field would benefit from Viking Portable-style collections of major and even some minor writers. My primary inspiration was The Portable Faulkner, which was our story text in the class that converted me to an English major at the end of my junior year in college. At 728 pages, containing 19 pieces--none of them a full novel, though several are quite sizable chunks of larger works--it provides a fine model for introductions to an author or an era: by collecting a wide variety of stories and even longer works, the collection editor can display the author or period in depth, with, you know, facets. There's room for little asides as well as the milestones in Big Fat Books like those.
The modern sf collections most like the Viking Portables are, I would say, Tor Books's three-volume survey of Larry Niven's career--N-Space, Playgrounds of the Mind, and Scatterbrain. With their career-spanning range of stories and novel excerpts, and with thoughtful interstital material by the author, they are very much in the Viking Portable tradition.
It's a great parlor game, too. A discussion I had with Mark Olsen of my idea of such a volume for Roger Zelazny--the first such volume I conceived--appears to have been an impetus for the NESFA Complete Zelanzy project, So, hey, you might change the world for the better.
Over on the Locus Roundtable,
grahamsleight (under his transparent pseudonym "Graham Sleight") has posted his proposed table of contents for a collection of the best stories Theodore Sturgeon stories. It's a fine list and the comments have additional excellent suggestions. He suggests that his collection could be called The Great Emo Stories of Theodore Sturgeon:
A friend of mine keeps saying that one day he's going to compile a book called Great Emo Stories of Isaac Asimov--containing the one percent of Asimov stories where he puts gadgets and ideas to the back of his mind and talks about emotions instead. (Of the novels, The End of Eternity is the one that goes furthest down this track.)
That friend is me, and Graham has inspired me to actually post about the stories I would put in such a collection.
In chronological order, I would select without hesitation these:
"Liar" (1941)
"The Fun They Had" (1951)
"Satisfaction Guaranteed" (1951) *
"It's Such a Beautiful Day" (1954)
"Dreaming Is a Private Thing" (1955)
"The Dead Past" (1956)
"The Ugly Little Boy" (1958)
"Eyes Do More than See" (1965)**
"The Bicentennial Man" (1976)
*Added on suggestion from commenter books@thrillingwonder, and it replaces my earlier choice of "Galley Slave".
**Added on suggestion from
sturgeonslawyer--I had never read it before, but it obviously belongs. Although most of the these stories could, fairly, be described as "idea" or "gadget" stories, the focus of each of them is not on the novum itself but on the emotional impact of the novum on its characters. As a time-travel story, or even as anthropology, there's nothing in "The Ugly Little Boy" that wasn't in a hundred thousand stories before; and "The Bicentennial Man" adds nothing to the idea framework of the Three Laws stories. But the love for humanity in each story overflows them.
More borderline are "Franchise" (1955), which hovers between emotion and gimmick, and the Black Widowers story "Early Sunday Morning" (1973), which skillfully undermines the very distant, very cozy framework Asimov created for those otherwise very mannered stories.
It's tempting to include "The Last Question", because the story itself has such a strong emotional impact, but the story really isn't about the emotional impact of technological innovations or events.
The last short piece I'd include, and the least obvious, would be "The Mule" (1945), the novella which became the second half of Foundation and Empire. "The Mule" is noteworthy for its emphasis on chaotic emotion--fear, loss, regret, and inadequacy--in the middle of probably the archetypal science-fiction novel of the triumph of pure reason. Also, of all the Foundation stories it's the one that most directly confronts the impact on the characters of the knowledge that they are characters, caught in a story written by a long-dead author--by showing what happens to them when the story goes off the rails.
Then I would fill this volume out with The End of Eternity, in the manner of the classic Viking Portable Library volumes, which often include a short novel along with the wide selection of shorter stories to present an author or period. And there you'd have it--a collection of Asimov stories, all of them right at the heart of the sf canon, which show the emotional range available even in sf's early days. If Asimov had never written another word of prose beyond these stories, I think he'd still be remembered as a major figure in the field. His reputation would be very different, but still a major figure.
The Pattern
Decades ago, I conceived that the science fiction field would benefit from Viking Portable-style collections of major and even some minor writers. My primary inspiration was The Portable Faulkner, which was our story text in the class that converted me to an English major at the end of my junior year in college. At 728 pages, containing 19 pieces--none of them a full novel, though several are quite sizable chunks of larger works--it provides a fine model for introductions to an author or an era: by collecting a wide variety of stories and even longer works, the collection editor can display the author or period in depth, with, you know, facets. There's room for little asides as well as the milestones in Big Fat Books like those.
The modern sf collections most like the Viking Portables are, I would say, Tor Books's three-volume survey of Larry Niven's career--N-Space, Playgrounds of the Mind, and Scatterbrain. With their career-spanning range of stories and novel excerpts, and with thoughtful interstital material by the author, they are very much in the Viking Portable tradition.
It's a great parlor game, too. A discussion I had with Mark Olsen of my idea of such a volume for Roger Zelazny--the first such volume I conceived--appears to have been an impetus for the NESFA Complete Zelanzy project, So, hey, you might change the world for the better.
