Ed Bryant (not to be con­fused with the Ten­nessee politi­cian of the same name), is a savoured taste, one of those “minor” sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers, like Chad Oliv­er or Lloyd Big­gle, Jr., who make explor­ing the genre such a plea­sure. A read­er trea­sures an old copy of Cinnabar, with its moody, ele­gantly writ­ten sto­ries, with much more affec­tion than they can usu­ally sum­mon for any­thing by the big shots of the field. In the same way, a music fan will trea­sure vinyls of Tom Wait’s Rain Dogs, George Thoro­good & the Destroy­ers, or John Hyatt’s Rid­ing With the King. Ed Bryant may have been some­what influ­enced by Har­lan Elli­son, of whom he was some­thing of a pro­tegé, and with whom he some­times col­lab­o­rated, but I think his real styl­is­tic affin­ity is with Cord­wainer Smith. Raised on a Wyoming cat­tle ranch, he does not share Ellison’s urban aes­thetic, and his prose is not “con­tem­po­rary” and slangy in the way Ellison’s always was. Any­way, if you can dig up a copy of Cinnabar (pub­lished in 1975), not nec­es­sar­i­ly an easy task, you will be reward­ed with a series of inter­con­nected sto­ries, none of which seems to have an obvi­ous point, but which togeth­er cre­ate an atmos­phere which will cling in your mem­ory for decades. Read more »