Something Old, Something New

The Not Free SF Reader chimes in with some thoughts on my anthology, Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge.They “definitely” recommend the book, and say “The stories are good, the average rating being 3.53, which is a bit over what you hope for from a book, and is rather well done in a new original project as opposed to some sort of reprint… it is a book that is well worth looking at.”

Meanwhile, Michael Swanwick reprints an essay he originally ran in the NYRSF called “A Nettlesome Term That Has Outlived its Welcome.” The essay is about the way the term “fix-up”, originally created to mean a novel assembled out of previously published material and which covers some of the greatest works in the field (as in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, for example) is now perhaps a derogatory term that does more harm than good. Along the way, he discusses Jack Dann’s marvelous The Man Who Melted,a novel which “didn’t make it big, the way later Dann novels such as The Memory Cathedral and The Silent would. It was much too intensely personal for that. But it’s one of those neglected books that nevertheless contain a great deal to interest the intelligent reader.”