Saturday, August 24, 2013

Celebrating the Births . . . James Tiptree, Jr. and Stanton A. Coblentz

Alice Bradley Sheldon (AKA James Tiptree, Jr. August 24, 1915 – May 19, 1987)
      An outstanding writer who won two Hugos and three Nebulas (one as Raccoona Sheldon) and was nominated for many more.  She was also inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and received other prestigious awards.  She is remembered for her many, and rather varied, short and medium length stories, which covered a variety of themes.  Unfortunately, very little of her excellent fiction is freely available.






 
Fiction
• At Baen: "The Man who Walked Home" [via Free speculative Fiction Online]
     "Transgressíon! Terror! And he thrust and lost there—punched into impossibility, abandoned, never to be known now, the wrong man in the most wrong of all wrong places in that unimaginable collapse of never-to-be-reimagined mechanism—he stranded, undone, his lifeline severed, he in that nanosecond knowing his only tether parting, going away, the longest line to life withdrawing, winking out, disappearing forever beyond his grasp—telescoping away from him into the closing vortex beyond which lay his home, his life, his only possibility of being; seeing it sucked back into the deepest maw, melting, leaving him orphaned on what never-to-be-known shore of total wrongness—of beauty beyond joy, perhaps?"

Old Time Radio
At More Words, Deeper Hole:
• "Yanqui Doodle" - Sci-Fi Radio.
     "American 'supersoldiers' whose skills and endurance have been enhanced by drugs struggle through detox as they recover from battle wounds in a field hospital." - OTR Plot Spot.


• "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" - Sci-Fi Radio.
     "This is based on the Hugo and Nebula-winning novella of the same name by James Tiptree, Jr. This is a first contact story of sorts, between men from a society of a form we would be familiar with and a branch of humanity that has not had contact with persons like those on the ship for longer than living memory."


Stanton Arthur Coblentz (August 24, 1896 – September 6, 1982)
      A Science Fiction writer, and poet, whose first science fiction story was published 1928 and whose apparently last non-posthumous sf story was published in 1971.  Though not especially well remembered, Coblentz did help develop the genre we all love.


Fiction
At Project Gutenberg::
• "Flight Through Tomorrow" first published in  Fantasy Book Vol. 1 number 1 (1947)
      "It has long been my theory that there is in man a psychic entity which can exist for at least brief periods apart from the body, and have perceptions which are not those of the physical senses. In accordance with these views, I had been developing various drugs, compounded of morphine and adrenalin, whose object was to shock the psychic entity loose for limited periods and so to widen the range and powers of the personality."

• "The Cosmic Deflector" first published in Amazing Stories January 1943
     "It's one thing to force the Earth out of its orbit, and another to force it back in again!"

Audio Fiction
• At SFFaudio: "The Wonder Stick"
     "A prehistorical science fiction novel that does everything but invent the wheel. The “wonder-stick” of the title, is a real invention which provided an unparalleled quantum leap in human technology."

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