Book thread! So what's everyone been reading? I've finished Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, and The Stars My Destination. These are both early 1950's novels, and emerging from the horrors of WW2 are full of worries and hopes for a future of limitless scope or complete destruction, by men of rationality and inner rage. Bester's use of 'typeset painting' (I just made that up) to describe character's thoughts or sensations is quite unique -- the only similar example I can think of is Tristram Shandy -- and you can sense the thoughts struggling to leap off the page.
But I wanted to put a spotlight on this 50's decade of science-fiction, which I haven't paid special attention to myself, by directing you to
https://sciencefiction.loa.org/
and the articles there talking of how important this decade is to the genre, the history and context, and authors to look for. In particular the importance of novellas & short stories, which I also tend to ignore. I'll quote from one of the articles:
"...science fiction, unlike any other category of literature, lives in the short forms. The short story or novelette seem perfectly available to the articulation and enactment of a single speculative conceit which, one could insist, is the task for which science fiction itself is most suited. The level of short-story writing during the [50's] decade in technical expertise and inventiveness has never been equaled nor have any short stories published within the last fifteen years had the impact upon the field and its audience of what was appearing routinely ... the short stories of Damon Knight and Alfred Bester, in their technical ease and ambition, struck not only readers but professionals of their own and the previous generation as miraculous—miraculous that such work could be both recognizably genre science fiction and of indisputable artistic quality."
This is exciting to me as another avenue to explore, and I'll be looking for short story collections, many of which though OOPrint are on https://archive.org/details/inlibrary such as this Alfred Bester short story collection:
https://archive.org/details/starlightgreatsh0000alfr
https://archive.org/details/starlightstarbri0000best
These are best read on a tablet like an iPad, the bigger the better. There are tons of other classic SF authors there to borrow and read.
