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jhall1 December 1 2015, 22:21:25 UTC
"Quest of the Star Stone" is in the collection of Catherine Moore stories that I was inspired to buy a year of so ago after your last post about Jirel. Its rather on the short and perfunctory side.

At this early point, C.L. Moore was writing on her own; after her partnership and marriage with Henry Kuttner began, it's pretty much guesswork as to which author contributed what in their stories, even when the byline went to one of them.

I think I'd be able to tell in which stories Moore was a major contributor. Her sensual style is very distinctive.

The collection I mentioned above was this one:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0575119322?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o09_s00

One thing that I found reading all the of Jirel stories one after the other is that, though they are all excellent taken individually, they come to seem a bit formulaic and repetitive if you OD on them. The same applies to the Northwest Smith stories. The best story in the collection is "Judgment Night", a stand-alone novella of 100 or so pages that is a tour de force. The collection doesn't include a couple of her best-known short stories: "No Woman Born" and "Vintage Season".

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dochermes December 2 2015, 17:29:54 UTC
According to the team, they themselves had trouble figuring out who had contributed what. A lot of plotting assists, I expect, plus Kuttner was a bit more versatile and could vary his style a bit according to the genre. Her biggest flaw (in my opinion) is that her stories tend to get bogged down at some point in a swirl of lovely images and word choices where you're not really sure what is supposed to be going on.

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