SFDG Illicit Library
by Alias Undercover
A possible prequel
to Primary Inversion
- NEW!!
Aurora in Four
Voices
by Catherine Asaro . The opening and
closing comments are taken from the December 1998 issue of
Analog, where this novella was
first published. The closing comment notes that the story is
set about 16 years before Primary
Inversion, and that one of the main characters here is
the narrator of the novel.
A prequel
to The
Dispossessed
- NEW!! The
Day Before the Revolution by
Ursula K. Le Guin. This story (which won the Nebula award
for Best Short Story of 1974) was written after the
novel but is set about 200 years before; it gives us a
glimpse of Laia Asieo Odo, founder of Odonianism.
The introduction is by Le Guin, from her book The
Wind's Twelve Quarters.
Many thanks to a mathematician for help bringing the story
here!
An earlier Clarke story related to The Light of
Other Days
- The
Parasite by Arthur C. Clarke.
In The Collected Stories of Arthur C.
Clarke, he introduces this by saying
This
may have been the subconscious basis for the novel
The Light of Other Days which I
have just published with Stephen Baxter.
Two classics about viewing the past
- Light of
Other Days by Bob Shaw.
(Note: The opening comment is from the
anthology I used to OCR the story.) Personally, I wouldn't
classify this story with other
pastwatching
stories
(such as Kuttner's Private
Eye or Asimov's The
Dead Past or Knight's tour-de-force
below), but Baxter and Clarke do, and named their novel
after it, so who am I to argue? It was nominated for a
Nebula, but lost to a story that is rather less well known
today. It is also included in Shaw's novel Other
Days, Other Eyes, one of my picks for the Ten
Best SF Books of all time.
- I See
You by Damon Knight. A brilliant
short work that (IMHO) compresses an SF novel's worth of
ideas into a fairly small number of pages. As of this
writing, I haven't finished Baxter & Clarke's novel yet,
so I don't know how it compares. (Note: The
text here is a combination of the version printed in Donald
Wollheim's The 1977 Annual World's Best
SF and the version from Knight's relatively
recent collection One Side Laughing.
The introductory comment is Knight's.)
Just for fun….
Five short-shorts from Fredric Brown. For $29 you can get
these, and every other SF & Fantasy short Fredric
Brown wrote; the book is NESFA Press's
just-released From These Ashes.
- Answer
— probably his best-known
- Imagine
— NESFA used this as the rear-cover blurb of
From These Ashes
- Naturally
— about the dangers of too much studying
- Voodoo
— about a quick alternative to a messy divorce
- The
End — the title says it
all!