Anyone read Gateways or Darwin's Bastards?

Robert Brown

Definitely on my Top Ten SF Stories set on Trains list.

There's another anthology by our own Dario coming up.

Fortunately I've preordered new McDonald, Egan and Rajaniemi novels more than two months ago, so they are fairly sure (on bookdepository.com you could preorder these for 50% of the full price).

Far be it from me to discourage you from using SF in FANTASY. In fact, I like it. And all of the SF you've run to date has been excellent.

Yes, this is the story that Broderick was referring to as his "Ballard story," one of a line of homages he's been writing recently about writers such as Cordwainer Smith and Roger Zelazny. I think this is the most successful of the lot, though, since he's succeeded in making into its own story with its own strengths, and not just a pastiche of J.G. Ballard. Ballard would not have written this--but it's clear that Broderick wouldn't have written it without reading Ballard.

Anybody read the short Ballard story "THE ASSASSINATION OF JOHN FITGERALD KENNEDY CONSIDERED AS A DOWNHILL MOTOR RACE" from the Sixties?

Anybody read the short Ballard story "THE ASSASSINATION OF JOHN FITGERALD KENNEDY CONSIDERED AS A DOWNHILL MOTOR RACE" from the Sixties?

John, there was a collection of Vermilion Sands stories, called, I think, VERMILION SANDS, done by Carroll and Graf in 1988. Might still be able to find it on abebooks.com.

I really liked Ballard's "Vermilion Sands" stories, which are the stories that Broderick's story seems most influenced by. Ballard lost me with the "condensed novels," which I was too dumb to parse, and which were not at all to my taste. Nor was a lot of his later stuff like CRASH.

John: Ballard's sixties short stories are excellent . Of his novels, the first - The Wind from Nowhere - is considered a minor work - but his subsequent sixties novels The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World are classics (though considered by some to be When The Rot Set In to SF). His next couple of novels are also classics, but less reader friendly - The Atrocity Exhibition (aka Love & Napalm) is more a collection of short stories ("compressed novels" I think Ballard called them) but was published as a novel . . . .

then came Crash, which has stuff like this:

“Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.”

For some reason one Publisher's Reader remarked after reading the draft "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!".

John, I've read only a handful of short stories by Ballard myself, but about half of them are outstanding.

There are few stories that I can truly call "unforgettable", but Ballard's "The Drowned Giant" is one of them.

Yes, I was trying to avoid spoiling the Ballard connection, though to my mind it was clear enough.

Just read UNDER THE MOONS OF VENUS by Damien Broderick, in the Spring 2010 issue of Subterranean.
Blackett's closing references to the drawings of his "mad patients" worried me.

I can repeat Gardner’s recommendation of the Spring issue of Subterranean magazine: I didn’t really get the ending of Damien Broderick’s “Under the Moons of Venus” (unless what the narrator thought had happened really happened), but I enjoyed the rest of the story; also good was Peter S Beagle’s “Return: An Innkeeper’s World Story”; but the best, for me, was “Elegy for a Young Elk” by Hannu Rajaniemi, which I have to admit I hadn’t bothered to read as I thought it was a ‘hunter in the woods’ fantasy, but following Gardner’s praise I read it and found it to be SF.

SONGS OF LOVE AND DEATH: TALES OF STAR-CROSSED LOVE is not a dragon anthology, though, but exactly what it sounds like it is: romance/fantasy/SF crosses.

Jonathan tells me that the Book Club assures him that GODLIKE MACHINES is really, no foolin', I really mean it, going to come out this time. Let's keep our fingers crossed.