Second paragraph of third section:It begins in childhood. Play is necessary to an immature mammal, a means of learning to handle the body, the perceptions, and the outside world. The young human plays, must play, with its brain too. The more intelligent the child, the more its imagination needs exercise. There are degrees of activity, from the ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third story ("Silent in Gehenna", by Harlan Ellison):Years later, the matron who discovered him on the porch remarked, looking into his eyes was like staring down a hall with empty mirrors.
I came across this when researching science fiction visions of the year 2020. It is a 1974 anthology of eight stories, six very big names on ( Read more... )

Third paragraph:Elsewhere the ridges around me are wooded, alive with scarlets and brasses and bronzes. The sky is huge, the westering sun wanbright. The valley is filling with a deeper blue, a haze whose slight smokiness touches my nostrils. This is Indian summer, the funeral pyre of the year.
I wrote about this story back in 2004:
"Goat Song" is at ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third section:Thus voyages from sun to sun will always be few. Colonists will be those who have extremely special reasons for going. They will take along germ plasm for exogenetic cultivation of domestic plants and animals-and of human infants, in order that population can grow fast enough to escape death through genetic drift. ( Read more... )

I had read this as a teenager, and was very interested to find out how it stood up on rereading. It remains rather good - the protagonist is a mid-century American kid with the innate gift of time-travel, which he controls rather better than the husband in The Time-Traveller's Wife. There's a lot of politics here, as a white supremacist time- ( Read more... )

15) Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson (.co.uk, .com)

Another of my reading resolutions, one of those sf classics I had never got around to. The fifty-strong crew of a colonisation starship hit a technical problem - they can't shut the drive off, so the ship will keep accelerating towards lightspeed, where the relativistic factor τ approaches zero (hence ( Read more... )

5) Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

Tried emailing this to LJ as well, but no sign of it. Meantime I posted the gist of it also to a relevant thread on RASFW.

I've bought and reread this because the next story on my list of joint Hugo and Nebula winners is in it, and also in the name of my continuing sfnal education. It's a great collection ( Read more... )

Way way back four years ago I decided to compile a list of the stories which have won both Hugo and Nebula awards. Then I decided it wasn't enough to list them, I should buy them and read them again, or for the first time if I hadn't already. This took a good eight months, with Poul Anderson's "Goat Song" the last story I was able to track down. ( Read more... )