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newnumber6Finished: The Visitors, by Clifford D. Simak
Started: The Best of Fritz Leiber (short story collection)
Thoughts and minor spoilers beyond the cut tag.
The visitors was a bit of an enjoyable read, probably not as enjoyable as some of Simak's short stories, or Way Station, but it had some nice points. I liked that he resisted the temptation to make the aliens comprehensible at some point... although we get some good speculations about why they're doing what they're doing, none are 100% confirmed. The visitors are alien. My main complaint is that the story didn't seem to reach an end point so much as a 'okay, I don't think I'm going to write any more' point. It ended on a conversation much like others in the book, and could easily have gone on from there, there was no sense of closure in any sense. Still, I got it for $1 at a used book store, so for that money it's high value. ;)
Fritz Leiber I know mainly from 'Coming Attractions', a short story that is widely considered one of the classics of the genre, but which I was lukewarm to, and from the Big Time, a book about an eternal time travelling war between two sides, the Spiders and the Snakes, both using humans as their pawns to control history. Entire timelines are constantly being written, erased, rewritten, and so on, and so the soldiers in the fight may no longer have a home to go to, as it could have easily been wiped out in an operation. That was pretty entertaining, and apparently this collection contains a few other short stories in the same universe, so I look forward to them. I've read a few of the short stories so far, and they're not bad, they've got a little quirky taste to them... there is, however, one ending line I just love, which I'll spoil because it has nothing in it which would indicate _which_ story it's from, and it's evocative on its own:
"Then he turned and headed straight for home, but he took the long way, around the world."
I just love that. Maybe because someday I see myself heading straight for home, but taking the long way.
Started: The Best of Fritz Leiber (short story collection)
Thoughts and minor spoilers beyond the cut tag.
The visitors was a bit of an enjoyable read, probably not as enjoyable as some of Simak's short stories, or Way Station, but it had some nice points. I liked that he resisted the temptation to make the aliens comprehensible at some point... although we get some good speculations about why they're doing what they're doing, none are 100% confirmed. The visitors are alien. My main complaint is that the story didn't seem to reach an end point so much as a 'okay, I don't think I'm going to write any more' point. It ended on a conversation much like others in the book, and could easily have gone on from there, there was no sense of closure in any sense. Still, I got it for $1 at a used book store, so for that money it's high value. ;)
Fritz Leiber I know mainly from 'Coming Attractions', a short story that is widely considered one of the classics of the genre, but which I was lukewarm to, and from the Big Time, a book about an eternal time travelling war between two sides, the Spiders and the Snakes, both using humans as their pawns to control history. Entire timelines are constantly being written, erased, rewritten, and so on, and so the soldiers in the fight may no longer have a home to go to, as it could have easily been wiped out in an operation. That was pretty entertaining, and apparently this collection contains a few other short stories in the same universe, so I look forward to them. I've read a few of the short stories so far, and they're not bad, they've got a little quirky taste to them... there is, however, one ending line I just love, which I'll spoil because it has nothing in it which would indicate _which_ story it's from, and it's evocative on its own:
"Then he turned and headed straight for home, but he took the long way, around the world."
I just love that. Maybe because someday I see myself heading straight for home, but taking the long way.
