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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