Author: Brian J. Noggle

After reading Ancient, My Enemy, I was in the mood for some more science fiction short stories from the silver age of science fiction. This collection, apparently the 14th from the heydey of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine (now back in print, apparently).

Okay, the book collects 17 short stories into 251 pages of reading, not counting the introduction that explains why it’s all relevant. It’s good enough short stories, and as I look over the titles, I can remember them after a week. Only one, “The House by the Crab Apple Tree” by S.S. Johnson, will stick with me at all.

Each story also includes what I suspect is the original intro bio bit from the magazine. It’s interesting how many of the writers really were journeymen, dashing off short stories for a tolerable existence. A couple of them are remembered today, but most aren’t. Probably only one or two of them made a really comfortable life of it. Such is the life of a real writer who has to do it for a living and not some dilettante writing short stories for fun. Today, those journeymen are working as business writers, copy writers, and technical writers, so their fame and recognition will be far more fleeting than the sales circulars and software manuals they’re producing as their life’s work.

Don’t get me started on the life of backwater bloggers whose daily hit totals have dipped under 100 again.

Thanks for reading, and come back tomorrow for more Christmas cheer the MfBJN way!

Through some strange quirk of fate or ill-done packing when we moved, this book ended up on my to read shelves even though it became clear when I started it that I’d read it before. That didn’t stop me from reading it again, though, so that counts as a testament to my enjoyment of Gordon R. Dickson’s short fiction.

This book collects some of Dickson’s work from the 1950s and the 1960s, including:

• “Ancient, My Enemy”: A prospector on a distant planet who finds that one of the primitive members of the regressed native civilization has found him to be an ancient enemy.
• “The Odd Ones”: A pair of intergalactic observers and philosophers who try to glean the meaning and morality of a pair of humans they encounter.
• “The Monkey Wrench”: A Venutian ne’er do well hides from his socialite wife in a remote meteorological outpost and enters a risky bet with a former classmate.
• “Tiger Green”: A ship and its crew become ensnared by a jungle and confounded by the natives who live in it. The four who resist a strange madness struggle to understand its source and save themselves.
• “The Friendly Man”: A time traveller from the past reaches a distant future and finds a friendly man awaiting him. Suspiciously friendly.
• “Love Me True”: A soldier faces trouble when he brings back a ferret-like pet from a distant planet. As he should.
• “Our First Death”: The first death in a colony threatens to destroy it.
• “To the Bone”: A human explorer finds an extraterrestrial vehicle on an outlying planet, only to have that vehicle destroy his ship and survival gear. The extraterrestrial intelligence underestimates the nature and ability of man at his most primitive.
• “The Bleak and Barren Land”: A Colonial Representative, banished from earth and sent to a backwater planet, must handle the conflict between an advanced and inscrutable native race and the first shipload of authorized colonists on the planet.

A quick and interesting read, these stories remind me of my youth when I ate up simple science fiction stories like this. Again, like the last Andy Rooney book I read, this reminds me of the kinds of things that inspired me to become a writer. Perhaps if I spend more time with them, they’ll inspire me to keep writing.