Tag: #scifi

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INVISIBLE PLANETS – Ken Liu, editor and translator

susanbassmarcus1

Having read Ken Liu’s PAPER MENAGERIE, a collection of his short stories, plus his bio and credits, I felt I’d had the good fortune to ‘stumble’ upon an excellent writer and translator whose work gave me a new perspective on speculative and ‘science’ fiction. So, I eagerly read his collection of Chinese scifi short stories he translated and compiled in the anthology INVISIBLE PLANETS. The included works vary in context, level of optimism/despair, characters, plots [of course], and themes, but they all expose the frailty of our species–self-absorption, self-destructive tendencies, depression, and greed. The tales’ settings may be “out there,” … Continue reading INVISIBLE PLANETS – Ken Liu, editor and translator

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Reading Time and Again, by Clifford D. Simak

susanbassmarcus1

Clifford D. Simak was an award-winning American science fiction writer, born in 1904 in Millville, Wisconsin.  Setting a story like Time and Again (1951) in rural Wisconsin characterizes much of Simak’s fiction. For example, he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in Time and Again Simak imagines a University of North America, located a short distance from the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. Another pervasive theme in this novel and other Simak fiction is time travel, in his view rarely a good strategy for escaping contemporary woes. Asher Sutton, a human transformed by his deep-space planetary encounter with ‘symbiotic … Continue reading Reading Time and Again, by Clifford D. Simak