Book Review: The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: 60th Anniversary Anthology, ed. by Gordon Van Gelder

Some of the finest short stories of the past sixty years in any genre are collected in The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: 60th Anniversary Anthology, edited by The Magazine of Fantasy &Science Fiction editor Gordon Van Gelder.

I haven't gone back to check the overlap with previous F&SF collections, but many of the stories have been new to me. One item of particular interest to me was the inclusion of several short stories from the last ten years that hold up very well against their older bookmates. It seems short sci-fi and fantasy is still alive and well, indeed.

The one downside to this book? I felt like a bit of a doofus when I read Peter S. Beagle's award-winning short story "Two Hearts" just two days after sharing the same dealer room for three days at the ConFusion convention. A reviewer who is less of a doofus would've read the table of contents, instead of being happy to just peruse these gems in the order they appear. Then I might've been able to say something relevant when I met him like, "Hey, I just read that 'Two Hearts' story and really enjoyed it," instead of just, "Nice to meet you." I suppose we should just be glad that my doofus-ness has limits and I didn't make a remark about owning a beagle.

But that's the way it is on the ol' Patio Boat, gentle reader. You're stuck with a reviewer who's a moderate doofus. But who's the bigger doofus? The doofus reviewer, or the doofus blog reader who's reading the reviews of a doofus?

Summary: This doofus says this is one of the best short-story collections he's read in quite some time.

Reviewing Bonus: For reviews of some of the stories herein, you can check out the short story reviews that I'm posting occasionally over on Dwarf Planet Press's blogsite.

Tachyon Publications: The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: 60th Anniversary Anthology, ed. by Gordon Van Gelder

Where and How Acquired: Science Fiction Book Club.

Book Review: Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines by Robert Lesser

Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines by Robert Lesser is a fun read or browse for anybody with an interest in classic covert art, or anybody who just likes cool paintings. It's a slightly oversized (9x12) coffee table book that's not all that long (~180 pages), but is filled with lots of cool images of classic pulp magazine paintings, including a couple-dozen full-page plates of the original paintings. It's also filled with interesting bits of history from the pulp magazine rack.

Summary: If you're strolling through a bookstore and see one among the discount books, give it a browse. You might find yourself putting it on the sales counter with whatever it was you came in for.

Amazon: Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines

Where and How Acquired: I picked it up at off a pile of Christmas discount gift books at Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago because I'm interested in cover art, it was only $9.98, and it had ... yeah, you guessed it, an eye-catching cover.

The Facebook version of my continued rant about the Menifee USD pulling dictionaries out of classrooms

As Arsen put it in one Facebook comment about my ranting, "Hell hath no fury like a reference publisher scorned!"

I'm pretty sure the several posts I put up on this in Facebook generated more comments than anything else I've posted in ages. I'll leave the others' comments there, but here, gentle reader, is the fruit of my scorned fury:

5:35 pm Tuesday -- I've seen "Idiocracy", but I thought it was a documentary. I'd look it up in the dictionary, but somebody might be offended.

6:29 pm Tuesday -- This is why I don't write much satire any more. It used to be that when I made up stuff this dumb, it wasn't true!

8:00 pm Tuesday -- I'm reminded of "A Christmas Story" when Ralphie blames his knowledge of all the bad words he heard from his father on his friend "Schwartz". In the modern version, I suppose he'd say he came across them while perusing the dictionary.

8:06 pm Tuesday -- I have no idea why I just put quotemarks around Schwartz's name. I would look up the usage rules in my copy of Strunk & White, but I just threw that out because it contained the word "gratuitous," which sounded like it might be kinda dirty.

7:58 pm Tuesday (re: my misspelling of Menifee as Menifree) -- Yeah, "Menifee". I would haved checked the spelling ... if I'd had a freaking dictionary.

8:08 pm Tuesday -- You're wondering what happened to the big Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary I keep at my desk? I chucked it because it contained the place name "Sodom."

Better safe than sorry. I can now go about my business, pure and ignorant.

10:50 am today -- You can have my dictionary when you can pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

10:55 am today -- I'm mostly done ranting about the Menifee school district. However, I did want to note that Monique pointed out that the "offensive" dictionaries they pulled were the edition published in 1994, which means that they've been corrupting little children in that community for more than a decade.

Forrest Gump was right: "Stupid is as stupid does."

This Week's AFC Championship MC-D Colts/Beagle Haiku.

Priorities

Colts to the Super
Bowl, but Katie the Beagle
To the supper bowl!

--Mary Campbell-Droze

The Dumbing of America continues apace

I Twittered about it, I linked to it on Facebook, and now I think I shall inflict this upon you in a Mr. Crankypants blog post, gentle reader. Here's the headline and a couple of paragraphs from the Southwest Riverside News Network:


Menifee USD pulls dictionaries due to explicit word.

School officials in the Menifee Union School District pulled all copies of the book from its fourth and fifth grade classrooms last week.

A parent complaint that a dictionary in her son’s classroom at Oak Meadows Elementary contained the term and definition for “oral sex” prompted school officials in the Menifee Union School District to pull all copies of the book from its fourth and fifth grade classrooms last week.

Copies of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition (published in 1994), were taken from a recommended reading list and put into use in district classrooms a few years ago to accommodate higher level readers, said Betti Cadmus, spokeswoman for the district.


Oh, sure, I could spend the rest of this post ranting about ridiculous levels of prurience. Or I could rant about the bizarre insistence that our society seems to have in exposing children to vast oceans of violence while insisting that the slightest hint of sexuality will corrupt them forever. I could discuss the salacious seas of sexuality that flood our media, even our purported children's programming, and examine whether therein lies a much greater threat to our nation's collective innocence.

Perhaps I could segue into a diatribe about the utter failure of abstinence-only sex education programs -- I use the phrase "sex education" loosely here, since as near as I can tell those programs are designed to inculcate"sex ignorance" -- in preventing pregnancy, preventing the transmission of STDs, or in encouraging any actual abstinence. That might perhaps indicate the effect, or lack thereof, that removing dictionaries with the objectionable phrase may have on the behavior of these children in the future.

Heck, I could just rant about the fact that shortly before these current fourth- and fifth-graders were born every newspaper in America seemed to carry the phrase "oral sex" on its front page. But I like to think we shan't go through that sort of thing again.

However, I won't rant about any of those things, gentle reader. Instead, I shall simply point out that the editor who wrote the headline for that story in the Southwest Riverside News Network used the word "word" to describe a two-word phrase.

Alas, that there are no longer any dictionaries in Menifee, so that we could see whether his usage of the word "word" was correct.

As We Fend Off Winter Together

January snow
Outside, while inside I pet
The beagle's warm ears.

Live Blogging from ConFusion 2010

In honor of Arsen's participation on the "Trends in Supernatural Romance" panel, I present the world's first romantic zombie haiku:

Zombie Love

I love your BRAAAAIIINNNS! BRAAAAIIINNNS!

BRAAAAIIINNNS! BRAAAAIIINNNS! BRAAAAIIINNNS! BRAAAAIIINNNS! BRAAAAIIINNNS! BRAAAAIIINNNS!BRAAAAIIINNNS!

BRAAAAIIINNNS! BRAAAAIIINNNS! BRAAAAIIINNNS! BRAAAAIIINNNS! BRAAAAIIINNNS!