Reading

After finishing Erikson's Midnight Tides (and I really should offer some general comments on the Malazan series), I decided to read a couple of the books I bought at the NESFA table at Renovation: A Star Above It, the first of two volumes of short stories by Chad Oliver, and Ingathering, the complete set of stories of The People by Zenna Henderson. The Henderson... I thought I'd read most of the The People stories, but absolutely no bells rang. On reconsideration, it's a nice series, but nothing really special. The Oliver collection impressed me more. The first Chad Oliver story I read in the knowledge that it was Chad Oliver was "Blood's a Rover" (also indirectly responsible for my liking for Housman), in an Author's Choice collection from the '70s, and it impressed me deeply. I should also do a full or semi-full review of that book, but I'd like to pose a question. If anyone has read both "Blood's a Rover" and "Transfusion", or has the opportunity to read the two of them back to back, does it strike anyone that they're kind of the same story? (In the sense that, say, Cherryh's Serpent's Reach and 40,000 in Gehenna are kind of the same story....)

Anyway, I've decided to go ahead with the Dunnett reread; I started on Niccolo Rising tonight. Knowing what's to come, I'm catching a bit more of what's going on, I think.

Moving Out of the Ghetto

The Library of America has been tipping its cap to F/SF for a while now, with volumes of Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. But the next offering on the plate looks especially tempting - a two volume set containing nine SF novels from the 1950s: Pohl/Kornbluth, The Space Merchants; Sturgeon, More Than Human; Brackett, The Long Tomorrow; Matheson, The Shrinking Man; Heinlein, Double Star; Bester, The Stars My Destination; Blish, A Case of Conscience; Budrys, Who?; and Leiber, The Big Time.

Looking forward to that. I already have four of them (Sturgeon, Heinlein, Bester, Leiber), and I've also read the Matheson, but having them (and the rest) in a nice hardcover edition will be very good indeed.