How are you doing?

I wish I could say the past month has been better for me, but it has not. A big thing is happening in my life, in that today is actually the move-in date for my first apartment. Wow, imagine, at 28, my first apartment. Been taking care of the practical side of things, with assistance: furniture, stuff for the kitchen and bathroom, and of course signing up with utilities. This has been a long time coming, and truth be told I’ve become immensely tired of living with my parents. And yet I’m not happy. Moving into my own place might prove only marginally better than my previous living situation. I don’t make enough to pay for rent so I’ll be bleeding my savings for the following months. The only reason my application even got accepted is my credit score is good. I’ll be living by myself in this one-bedroom apartment. It’ll be very lonely here, as none of my partners live close enough to move in with me, and anyway, with one exception we don’t know each other that well yet. Surely the lack of my parents breathing down my neck will do me some good, but this will be a solitary existence.

Honestly I’ve been tired all the time as of late. My work schedule as of right now is erratic and I find myself going to sleep at six in the morning and waking up after noon. As you may know I have anxiety and depression, and while the former has not been as bad lately, the latter has been worse, or rather more persistent. I’m tired of everything. I’m tired of my job. I’m tired of my imperfect body, and the fact that I can barely sleep. I’m tired of being tired. The US election is in less than a week and honestly I’m sick of this fucking immoral country, and its authorities who have been spending the past couple centuries murdering socialists, queer people, ethnic minority groups, etc. We’re only a quarter into the 21st century but already I feel like almost everything that could go wrong has already gone wrong. And will get worse. I’m normally a pessimist, so take all this with a grain of salt, but I don’t see conditions improving much.

So, go backward or forward, but don’t stay here. I hate it here. I do this blog for fun, and according to stats have written 186,000 words (or about equivalent to Great Expectations in word count) this year alone; but I also do it as a coping mechanism. I don’t do it for readers, or money, because not enough people read this blog or even know about it, despite my spreading word on a few social media platforms. Maybe when I hit 200 subscribers I’ll start a Patreon. Just know I’ve been going at this for two years now because it gives me some degree of emotional security. If not for all these words I would surely have given up a minute ago.

Now, what do we have for reviewing? We have two stories from the ’40s, three from the ’60s, one from the ’80s, one from the ’90s, and one from the 2010s.

For the novellas:

1. “Attitude” by Hal Clement. From the September 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novella. Feels like it’s been a while since we last talked about Clement, who was one of the first hard SF authors as we now think of the term. Not only was Clement a pioneer, he had a pretty long life and career, remaining active into the beginning of the 21st century. His prose is workmanlike and his human characters tend to be little more than abstractions, but his lectures-as-stories can be enthralling.
2. “Last Summer at Mars Hill” by Elizabeth Hand. From the August 1994 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Nebula and World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novella. Over the past four decades Hand has taken a kind of jack-of-all-trades approach to writing, tackling SF, fantasy, and horror seemingly with equal relish, with even the occasional movie novelization to her credit. (She wrote the novelization of the infamous 2003 Catwoman movie.) “Last Summer at Mars Hill” is one of her most decorated stories.

For the short stories:

1. “Beyond the Threshold” by August Derleth. From the September 1941 issue of Weird Tales. Derleth was correspondents with H. P. Lovecraft and could be argued as the person most responsible for preserving Lovecraft’s legacy, as he co-founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei in 1939 firstly to reprint his mentor’s fiction. He also wrote quite a bit of fiction in his own right.
2. “The Scar” by Ramsey Campbell. From the Summer 1969 issue of Startling Suspense Stories. One of August Derleth’s biggest discoveries as editor was Ramsey Campbell, whose work Derleth had discovered when he was but a teenager. Campbell’s first collection was published when he was only 18, so that he got his start in weird fiction very early. He would later become a prolific horror novelist.
3. “Nomansland” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the April 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Aldiss debuted in the 1950s and would remain active pretty much until his death, which was not too long ago. He would win a Short Fiction Hugo for Hothouse, which is sort of a novel but also a collection of linked stories. We already covered the first story, and now we’re on the second.
4. “Flowers of Edo” by Bruce Sterling. From the May 1987 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Sterling debuted in 1977 when he was barely out of his teens, but he would become one of the defining SF writers of the ’80s. While typically labeled as cyberpunk, Sterling has a surprising versatility, with even early novels like Schismatrix and Islands in the Net being very different from each other.
5. “Soft Clocks” by Yoshio Aramaki. From the January-February 1989 issue of Interzone. First published in 1968. Translated by Kazuko Behrens and Lewis Shiner. Seeing as how the Sterling story takes from Japanese culture, I thought it only right (and perhaps a neat gimmick) to follow up with a story from a Japanese writer. Yoshio Aramaki has been active since the ’60s as an author and critic.
6. “Checkerboard Planet” by Eleanor Arnason. From the December 2016 issue of Clarkesworld. Judging from her rate of output you might think Arnason a more recent author, but in fact she was born in 1942 and made her debut back in 1973. She’s been an activist for left-liberal causes since the ’60s but did not start writing full-time until 2009, hence her recent uptick in productivity.

Won’t you read with me?