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

• “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!