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The Playboy Book of SF collects a lot of big names Bradbury, Le Guin, Niven, Vonnegut, PKD, Ellison...
The collection comes from 1998, and some of the stories date back to the 50s. But not every author is a household name, and while most of these were *somebody* at the time, many of them were not yet undying giants of SF. Like most jumbled anthologies, the quality varies, and some age better than others. I will not approvingly one of my favorite shorts of all time, "Gianni" by Bob Silverberg. They use a time machine to resurrect Pergolesi and he gets pulled into the world of dubstep (more or less). The Apotheosis of Myra is pleasantly wwird. PKD's "I hope I shall Arrive Soon" was sadly retitled "Frozen Journey" for Playboy. Many of the authors take the license Playboy offers to add some sex, but not all.
Of Sound Mind by Nina Kraus
How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World
Kraus is a researcher with a penchant for interdisciplinary looks at sound and the mind. There's a lot of great research on how the brain processes sound in terms of hearing and music and speech. But her penchant for everything leaves especially the latter half of the book more scattershot. Less a cohesive picture than a list of experimental outcomes.
The Rim of Morning by William Sloane collects two weird novels from the 1930s that feel like they dropped out of a parallel universe. The New York Review of Books resurrected them with an added intro by Stephen King. Both have science fictiony, horrory elements, but their general outline and shape is more akin to straight fiction. The closest comparison to the mood that leaps to my mind is something like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. A story of romantic, but possibly ill-considered, love. Manners and insults. But brooding dread and death lurking here and there. As for content, the first novel, To Walk the Night, is basically Lovecraft's Thing on the Doorstep, crossed with Lovecraft's Beyond the Wall of Sleep. And then written by du Maurier. Some of the similarities make me hard to think it coincidence, but Sloane had the good fortune to have Lovecraft die before he published it. I keed. The second, The Edge of Running Water, is less interesting and even more ploddingly paced. Somehow, it's the one that was made into a movie with Karloff -- The Devil Commands (1941).
The collection comes from 1998, and some of the stories date back to the 50s. But not every author is a household name, and while most of these were *somebody* at the time, many of them were not yet undying giants of SF. Like most jumbled anthologies, the quality varies, and some age better than others. I will not approvingly one of my favorite shorts of all time, "Gianni" by Bob Silverberg. They use a time machine to resurrect Pergolesi and he gets pulled into the world of dubstep (more or less). The Apotheosis of Myra is pleasantly wwird. PKD's "I hope I shall Arrive Soon" was sadly retitled "Frozen Journey" for Playboy. Many of the authors take the license Playboy offers to add some sex, but not all.
Of Sound Mind by Nina Kraus
How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World
Kraus is a researcher with a penchant for interdisciplinary looks at sound and the mind. There's a lot of great research on how the brain processes sound in terms of hearing and music and speech. But her penchant for everything leaves especially the latter half of the book more scattershot. Less a cohesive picture than a list of experimental outcomes.
The Rim of Morning by William Sloane collects two weird novels from the 1930s that feel like they dropped out of a parallel universe. The New York Review of Books resurrected them with an added intro by Stephen King. Both have science fictiony, horrory elements, but their general outline and shape is more akin to straight fiction. The closest comparison to the mood that leaps to my mind is something like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. A story of romantic, but possibly ill-considered, love. Manners and insults. But brooding dread and death lurking here and there. As for content, the first novel, To Walk the Night, is basically Lovecraft's Thing on the Doorstep, crossed with Lovecraft's Beyond the Wall of Sleep. And then written by du Maurier. Some of the similarities make me hard to think it coincidence, but Sloane had the good fortune to have Lovecraft die before he published it. I keed. The second, The Edge of Running Water, is less interesting and even more ploddingly paced. Somehow, it's the one that was made into a movie with Karloff -- The Devil Commands (1941).
