Philip Athans > Recent Status Updates

I'm finishing books much faster than I can make 100-book challenge videos for them. Let's see if I can get caught up with episodes 16, 17, and 18 this week!

If you're one of the few people in the known universe who doesn't understand how complicated it can be to transport smags, firgels, and queels through space, you'll want to study "Milk Run" (1954).

I need to adapt this into a Traveller adventure!

Sad to say I only have one of the books in this chapter--but at least it's Conan the Buccaneer!

“The Academy” (1954)

“Good Lord, man, don’t you understand anything about Social Sanity, Responsibility, and Stasis? I was on my way to becoming wealthy. From there, I would have founded a financial empire. … After that, who knows where I would have gone? Into indirect control of the government, eventually. I’d want to change the psychological policies to conform to my own abnormalities…"

I have a copy of none of the books in this chapter--all the Conan's!

In "Deadhead" (1955) we get a look at the early days of a Mars colony, not yet self-sufficient, dealing with a "deadhead"--a stowaway from Earth not qualified for a place on Mars… and then a surprisingly weird ending! This was another good one.

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

Hmmm…

"Earth, Air, Fire, and Water" (1955) is a tight little survival tale based on a wildly inaccurate imagining of what it's like on the surface of Venus. Our hero is caught out in the snow…?

Our boy Ludwig goes off the rails in section 4 with a pointless endeavor to approach language and meaning via tortured mathematics. I'm starting to see why people tend to warn others away from this book. Here it's not "difficult," which pre-supposes a point is made that the reader is too dense to understand, but is better described by words like "meandering," "repetitious," or "inconsequential."

Everyone says this book is impossibly "difficult," but I fear no philosopher!

Says the author: "What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent."

"Protection" (1956) begins with the question: What if an alien intelligence made itself known to a random human, and that guy just did not give a fraction of a fuck?

I own eight of the Ace ERB books featured in this chapter!

"Bad Medicine" (1956) is an entertaining tale of AI psychotherapy gone terribly wrong, set in a future controlled by old economy corporations like General Motors and IBM. But if you sub in social media for these therapy machines and Meta and Google for GM and IBM, Sheckley is accurately predicting the current tendency to act on bad advice from ill-conceived bots.

"Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance."

IMMEDIATELY drawn deeply into this book.

Favorites from this reading…

"Rat Song" in the section "Songs of the Transformed," and
the untitled poem on page 207 in "Circe/Mud Poems."

The short but effective psychological horror story “Fear in the Night” is completely out of place amongst the snarky, sometimes silly SF tales that have have dominated the collection so far. But it’s also my favorite story so far. I’d like to read more horror from Mr. Sheckley!

My favorite poem from the section "Power Politics" is the untitled poem on page 150 that begins:

You did it
it was you who started the countdown

The story "Human Man's Burden" is so hopelessly steeped in the rigid gender roles of its day (originally published in 1956) that it's maybe THE example of SF authors of that era easily imagining changes in technology but gleefully ignoring the possibility of changes in social customs. Younger readers will struggle (thankfully) to understand what these people are even talking about.