Myths of the Spaceways: Poul Anderson s World Without Stars tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
THE NEXT GENERATION. James Davis Nicoll’s
Young People Read Old SFF panel took a look at “’No Trading Voyage’ by Doris Pitkin Buck”. What did they think of this 1963 poem?
This month’s entry is from Doris Pitkin Buck, a Science Fiction Writers of America founder. Buck was mainly associated with
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which for various stupid reason was not a magazine I followed closely back in the day. Accordingly, I was not familiar with her work when I encountered this example of it way, way back in 2019. I see I carefully side-stepped my issues with poetry in my review. Let’s see what my Young People made of her poem.
Grand Master James Gunn, 97, died December 23, 2020. Gunn was one of the field’s true polymaths, excelling as an SF author, editor, and scholar. Gunn served as President of Science Fiction Writers of America in 1971-1972 and the organization honored him with a Damon Knight Grand Master Award in 2006. He was inducted into the SF Hall of Fame in 2015.
James Edwin Gunn was born July 12, 1923 in Kansas City MO. He attended the University of Kansas, where he earned a BA in journalism and a master’s in English, though his education was interrupted by three years serving in the US Navy during WWII. He briefly worked at Western Printing in Racine WI on the Dell paperback line. After attending the 1952 Worldcon in Chicago, where he met Mack Reynolds, Clifford D. Simak, Jack Williamson, and his agent Frederik Pohl, among others, he began writing SF more seriously.
Starfog
The introduction is not quite correct, in that the reader can find resonances between stories, sometimes in stories back-to-back. There are plenty of threads, and a fan of Anderson and his Nordic viewpoint might call it a skein, a tangled skein of fictional ideas, themes, ideas and characters. The same introduction notes that a lot of the furniture of science fiction can be found in early forms here, as Anderson being one of those authors who have made them what they were for successive writers. In many cases, then, it is not the freshness of the ideas that one reads these stories for, but the deep writing, themes, characters and language that put Anderson in a class of his own.
Starfog
The introduction is not quite correct, in that the reader can find resonances between stories, sometimes in stories back-to-back. There are plenty of threads, and a fan of Anderson and his Nordic viewpoint might call it a skein, a tangled skein of fictional ideas, themes, ideas and characters. The same introduction notes that a lot of the furniture of science fiction can be found in early forms here, as Anderson being one of those authors who have made them what they were for successive writers. In many cases, then, it is not the freshness of the ideas that one reads these stories for, but the deep writing, themes, characters and language that put Anderson in a class of his own.