15105. (Joseph-Charles Taché) Des provinces de l’Amérique du Nord et d’une union fédérale 
(Stephen Lea­cock) Non­sense Novels:
. . . . 15106. (Ross Behar­riell) Intro­duc­tion [pref­ace]
. . . . 15107. (Stephen Lea­cock) Author’s Pref­ace [pref­ace]
. . . . 15108. [2] (Stephen Lea­cock) Mad­dened by Mystery:or the Defec­tive Detec­tive [sto­ry] Read more »

As the num­bers in brack­ets indi­cates, I’ve read all the sto­ries in this book sev­eral times. I read Cord­wainer Smith when­ever I want to be remind­ed of what Sci­ence Fic­tion once was: a field in which intel­lect, imag­i­na­tion, and artis­tic integri­ty com­bined to tran­scend the lim­i­ta­tions of con­tem­po­rary cul­ture. Nobody was bet­ter equipped to think uncon­ven­tion­ally than was “Cord­wainer Smith”, who was real­ly Paul Myron Antho­ny Linebarg­er. Amer­i­can born, but raised in Chi­na (where he was known as 林白楽 [Lin Bai-lo] ), France and Ger­many, Linebarg­er was at var­i­ous times a spy, expert in psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare, aca­d­e­mic, and advis­er to the White House on Asian affairs (though refus­ing to be involved in the Viet­nam War). He was, odd as it seems, Sun Yat-sen’s god­son, and nego­ti­ated inter­na­tional treaties when he was teenag­er. Yet his iden­tity remained a secret to the sci­ence fic­tion com­mu­nity when his sto­ries appeared in the magazines.

The sto­ries he wrote were far in advance of their time. In 1945, these words appeared at the begin­ning of “Scan­ners Live In Vain”: Mar­tel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. Read more »

This fas­ci­nat­ing book dates from 1989, when the Gay Rights move­ment was in con­fu­sion and trans­for­ma­tion. The authors, who came from a back­ground of neu­ropsy­chol­ogy and math­e­mat­ics (Kirk), pub­lic rela­tions and adver­tis­ing (Mad­sen), where among the minor­ity of gay intel­lec­tu­als who felt that the stag­na­tion that their cause had suf­fered dur­ing the resur­gence of reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ism in the U.S. owed more to flaws and fail­ures in the gay com­mu­nity than to the strength of its ene­mies. They felt that there was a clear­ly trod­den path by which despised minori­ties had his­tor­i­cally won a place in Amer­i­can soci­ety, and that their gen­er­a­tion of gay activists had failed to fol­low that path, and become their own worst ene­mies. In ret­ro­spect, much of their argu­ment now seems com­mon sense. Con­sid­er­able progress has been made in this area (though much more in Cana­da than in the Unit­ed States), and it has been made large­ly by the growth of a new mind­set among gays. Kirk and Mad­sen pre­saged this new mind­set. Read more »

This is a minor work by Jules Verne, but it enter­tained me great­ly because it’s set in Tran­syl­va­nia, where I have just been hik­ing and tour­ing. In fact, the main action takes place pre­cisely in the place I was explor­ing on foot with my friend Isaac White ― the moun­tains of Hune­doara. Here he places a mys­te­ri­ous cas­tle, and a mad sci­en­tist who has invent­ed tele­vi­sion. The book was writ­ten in 1893, and counts as one of the first fic­tional spec­u­la­tions on this idea that did not involve the super­nat­ural. How­ever, the sto­ry is pedes­trian by Verne’s stan­dards, and con­sists most­ly of dis­ser­ta­tions on the flo­ra, fau­na, geol­ogy, and his­tory of the region, in the style that Verne fell back on when he wrote on autopilot.

illus­tra­tions by
Léon Benett

James Gunn was writ­ing “hard sci­ence fic­tion” in the 1950’s, and was in some ways the pre­cur­sor of peo­ple like Ben Bova and Lar­ry Niv­en. The con­nected sto­ries in this book are Gunn’s attempt to envi­sion the con­struc­tion of an orbit­ing space sta­tion, at a time when “seri­ous” sci­en­tists still dis­missed talk of space explo­ration as mere fan­tasy. Unlike many who had writ­ten sto­ries in which eccen­tric sci­en­tists built space ships in their back yards, Gunn under­stood that such a project would require engi­neer­ing and financ­ing on a mam­moth scale, and would involve polit­i­cal com­plex­i­ties. The sto­ries are quaint, now, but will inter­est any­one who reads fic­tion with a his­tor­i­cal perspective.

con­tents:

15119. (James E. Gunn) The Cave of Night [sto­ry]
15120. (James E. Gunn) Hoax [sto­ry]
15121. (James E. Gunn) The Big Wheel [sto­ry]
15122. (James E. Gunn) Pow­der Keg [sto­ry]
15123. (James E. Gunn) Space Is a Lone­ly Place [sto­ry]

The Sep­a­ratist move­ment in Québec has man­aged to train an entire gen­er­a­tion into think­ing that Québec’s entry into Con­fed­er­a­tion was some sort of con­spir­a­to­r­i­al swin­dle, but the truth of the mat­ter is that the very idea of Con­fed­er­a­tion orig­i­nat­ed in that province, and was large­ly pro­mot­ed by French Cana­di­an intel­lec­tu­als seek­ing a strat­e­gy to defend and pre­serve their cul­ture. The fact is that the prin­ci­ple threat to the lan­guage and dis­tinct cul­ture of French Cana­da was, in the 19th cen­tu­ry, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the absorp­tion of Cana­da by the Unit­ed States. The first detailed and sys­tem­at­ic pro­pos­al for a Cana­di­an Con­fed­er­a­tion was this trea­tise by Taché, pub­lished in 1858. Taché was a doc­tor prac­tic­ing in the lum­ber camps of the wilder parts of the Gaspé penin­su­la, where he became enam­ored with abo­rig­i­nal cul­ture, and col­lect­ed folk­lore. His lat­er career in jour­nal­ism focused on the devel­op­ment of a strong and dis­tinct French Cana­di­an lit­er­a­ture, prefer­ably one that “ven­tured into the unknown.” As a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple, he refused to wear any arti­cle of cloth­ing not man­u­fac­tured in Cana­da. He was, in effect, a roman­tic nation­al­ist of the 19th cen­tu­ry mode. Not alto­geth­er pro­gres­sive, he pre­ferred a timid reform of the archa­ic sys­tem of seignio­r­i­al land tenure, rather than the com­plete abo­li­tion that the pub­lic clam­ored for. This lost him sup­port in his polit­i­cal career, though in oth­er issues he remained high­ly pop­u­lar. Read more »

(Fritz Leiber) Swords and Deviltry:
. . . . 15064. (Fritz Leiber) Intro­duc­tion [pref­ace]
. . . . 15065. (Fritz Leiber) Induc­tion [sto­ry]
. . . . 15066. (Fritz Leiber) The Snow Women [sto­ry]
. . . . 15067. (Fritz Leiber) The Unholy Grail [sto­ry]
. . . . 15068. [2] (Fritz Leiber) Ill Met In Lankhmar [sto­ry]
15069. (Robert Bench­ley) Hap­py Child­hood Tales [sto­ry] Read more »

Psy­chol­o­gist Philip Zim­bardo devised and super­vised one of the most famous exper­i­ments in social dynam­ics, the Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment. A group of col­lege stu­dents were cast in the roles of “guards” and “inmates” in a mock prison. Intense abus­es spon­ta­neously devel­oped, as the “guards” quick­ly evolved into sadis­tic monsters.

But this book is not just about his land­mark exper­i­ment. Zim­bardo was asked to tes­tify as an expert wit­ness in abuse of pow­er and the psy­chol­ogy of tur­ture dur­ing the inves­ti­ga­tions of the abus­es in Abu Ghraib. It was this expe­ri­ence that prompt­ed him to put togeth­er a com­pre­hen­sive study of all the social psy­chol­ogy exper­i­ments, such as Mil­gram Exper­i­ment, which led up to his own work, and to blend it with a detailed analy­sis of Abu Ghraib. Read more »

God only knows how much “sword & sor­cery” type fan­tasy is in print. But if, like me, you find very lit­tle of it appeal­ing to either your imag­i­na­tion or your intel­li­gence, then it’s nice to be remind­ed that some of the clas­sics of the field remain fresh and sat­is­fy­ing. Few peo­ple can claim to have writ­ten bet­ter hero­ic fan­tasy than Fritz Leiber, whose Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sto­ries where writ­ten with wit and sophis­ti­ca­tion. He wrote with an adult sen­si­bil­ity, avoid­ing the prissi­ness and infan­tile repres­sion that were com­mon in the field. These sto­ries, which were writ­ten over sev­eral decades, were col­lected in sev­eral vol­umes, of which this is the first. The last sto­ry, “Ill Met In Lankhmar”, is just about as good as a sto­ry about a mus­cu­lar bar­bar­ian hero can get. Read more »

15055. (Cap­tain Mar­ry­at) The Set­tlers In Canada
15056. (P. G. Wode­house) Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen
15057. (Agatha Christie) Three-Act Tragedy
15058. [6] (Edgar Pang­born) A Mir­ror for Observers
15059. (P. G. Wode­house) The Inim­itable Jeeves
15060. (Gyu­la Kristó) Ear­ly Tran­syl­va­nia, 895–13245
15062. (Jan Kulich) Kut­ná Hora, St. Bar­bara Cathe­dral and the Town
15063. (P. G. Wode­house) Jeeves in the Offing