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2011 Reading #60: The Perfect Host: Volume V: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon


Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
51. What I Didn't See and Other Stories by Karen Joy Fowler.
52. Thunder and Roses: Volume IV: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.
53. Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler.
54. Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison.
55. Angela Davis: An Autobiography.
56. Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin.
57. Shadow Man by Melissa Scott.
58. The Dead Girls by Jorge Ibargüengoitia.
59. Couch by Benjamin Parzybok.

60. The Perfect Host: Volume V: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon. This volume covers late 1947 through 1949. One of the things that I love about Sturgeon is his openings, like this one, to "One Foot and the Grave": "I was out in Fulgey Wood trying to find out what had happened to my foot, and I all but walked on her. Claire, I mean. Not Luana. You wouldn't catch Luana rolled up in a nylon sleeping bag, a moonbeam bright on her face." Actually, his beginnings remind me of the way a lot of "Farscape" episodes just hurl you into the middle of a story with no explanation and then trust that you will catch up. One of the things I like less about Sturgeon is that he is sometimes excessively clever; sometimes his stories become about themselves and the idiosyncratic worlds or ideas that they are built on rather than about anything that I actually care about. "What Dead Men Tell" is a good example of this. There are some great stories here, though; the title story is creepy, with a meaty metafictional element, and "Die, Maestro, Die!" and "The Dark Goddess" are excellent non-SF tales.

Comments

( 4 comments — Leave a comment )
tim_pratt
Jul. 12th, 2011 05:26 pm (UTC)
I love "Die, Maestro, Die!" I had a character listening to a CD of Lutch Crawford and his Gone Geese in my first novel.

We should talk Sturgeon sometime. He's my favorite short story writer (which isn't to say I don't sometimes find his work problematic in various ways).
snurri
Jul. 12th, 2011 05:29 pm (UTC)
We should! Overall I really like his stuff; I think it's just that reading ALL the stories in this way rather than in more of a greatest-hits-collection sort of way makes the varied quality of his work more apparent. I have a lot more of him to read, too.
tim_pratt
Jul. 12th, 2011 05:36 pm (UTC)
I'd read most of his collections before I started in on the big Collected Stories, but yeah, it's interesting in those to see how he returns again and again to certain themes and subjects, and how some stories are like try-outs for ideas he did much better later. (The whole notion of the gestalt in "Die, Maestro, Die!" prefigures his classic novel/fix-up "More than Human", for instance.)
snurri
Jul. 12th, 2011 05:39 pm (UTC)
I read More Than Human quite some time ago and loved it; it's one of the reasons that I revere Sturgeon. I should read it again.
( 4 comments — Leave a comment )

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snurri
David J. Schwartz
Mumble Herder

Recent and Forthcoming

Novels:

Superpowers:


US Edition


UK Edition

Novellas:

"The Sun Inside," part of the Electrum Novella Series from Rabit Transit Press



Short Stories:

"Escape to Bird Island" at The King's English, Winter 2008-9 Issue

"Bear In Contradicting Landscape" in Polyphony 7, Coming Soon

"MonstroCities" in Tumbarumba: A Frolic of Intrusions

"Mike's Place" in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #22

"Proof of Zero" in Spicy Slipstream Stories, Out Now!!

"The Somnambulist" in Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, Out Now!!

"Oma Dortchen and the Pillar of Story" in Farrago's Wainscot, Summer 2007

"The Ichthyomancer Writes His Friend with an Account of the Yeti's Birthday Party" in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet Number 13, Fall 2003 (Honorable Mention, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collecion); Reprinted in The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet

Criticism:

""Stardust" at Strange Horizons

Essay:

"On Making Noise: Confessions of a Quiet Kid" in Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales edited by Kate Bernheimer

FULL BIBLIOGRAPHY

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