The writers hook you with the setting, with the gadgets and the ‘what ifs’, but then all the best stories end up being about the human condition. That’s one of the things I find irresistible about science fiction. When they go down to investigate a particular planet, things start to get weird.įrom that point on, the story is a purely about human nature and drama, with the space-faring backdrop becoming fairly unimportant. In this story three men in a space ship survey new planets, looking for new homes for the humans from the chronically overcrowded Earth. Clarke, who also had a hand in inventing Radar, so he’s a bit of a special case.) (You know, unless they were written by Arthur C. Some of the assumptions in the story are suspect by today’s scientific standards, but that was never what these early sci-fi stories were about. It comes from the early days of space exploration, when ideas were big and facts in short supply. This story was adapted into an early Twilight Zone episode. His stories contain big ideas, thoughtfully dealt with in crisp prose that I could read until the end of time. It’s tough to read Matheson’s stories now because his are the quintessential Twilight Zone type story (they were turned into several of the best TZ episodes) and have been ripped off, parodied and lovingly copied so many times that they feel cliched.īut concentrating on that takes away from the exquisite, concise, clear writing, characterization and big ideas of the original material. Author Julie Duffy Posted on JCategories Reading Room Tags Reading Room, robert silverberg, time travel Leave a comment on Needle In A Timestack by Robert Silverberg Ripples In The Dirac Sea by Geoffrey A. Read this story in The Time Traveler’s Almanacĭo you worry about reader or posterity when you write? How do you feel about stores that have aged badly in one respect, while still having other features to recommend them? Join the discussion in the comments. But me? I’m certainly becoming less likely to read and praise them just because somebody tells me I should. The writers were working with what they had. I’m not willing to cut myself off from a world of literary history, just because the writers weren’t inclusive (or not-horribly-racist), but I can’t seem to help having a niggling, deep down dissatisfaction when a good writer excludes half the population or is clueless about basic human dignity.Īgain, I’m glad these stories were written, and I won’t not read them because they aren’t inclusive. I don’t know if I should curse Alison Bechdel for bringing it to my attention, or simply shrug and accept that there’s so much good writing out there no that DOESN’T fail the Bechdel test, that it’s OK for me to be more picky. I’ve never worried too much about older social attitudes that we have, thankfully, left behind, showing up in stories where we couldn’t expect the author to have a more modern outlook.īut in spite of not going around looking for these nits to pick, I am increasingly impatient with stories in which the women are cardboard cut outs. And that’s OK.Īs something of a side note, it’s interesting to go back and read older short stories and find things I wasn’t expecting.įor example, I’ve never worried too much about the sex (or gender) of the person who wrote a story or of the main character. We just have to write the best stories we can, and keep writing them as we change and age. I guess we can’t worry too much about that. Not sure how I feel about that, being an upbeat and optimistic person who likes a laugh, but felt a little cheated by this story.
It did seem a little shallow at times, though, because I’m so used to ‘realistic’ takes on doomsday technologies in current stories. It was nice to read a story with potentially disastrous technology that wasn’t completely dystopian. Similarly, these characters simply mention the significance of the sensation the first time and then use it in the story to signal to the reader that someone’s been time-traveling again. It did that every time a friend send what we called a ‘text message’ from a similar device, over the wireless cell network…” No, we’d just say, “My phone buzzed. Silverberg does a great job of creating signposts for readers that make the effects of time travel seem almost mundane (one character tastes cotton in his mouth when the past has been changed, another gets a persistent twitch under the left eye…).Īs writers today, we wouldn’t have a character stop to explain why the gadget in their pocket was buzzing (We wouldn’t write, “My phone buzzed again. (Compare this to Geoffrey A Landis’s story where nothing the time-traveler did in the past could affect the future in any way.) Cute and slightly terrifying story of two men competing for the same woman, but this time they have the power to go back and change the past.
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