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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 Mousersto­ries 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 »