What are you reading right now?

Just finished the 2 part series of "The Space Merchants" (1951) and "The Merchant War" (1981). It was very funny. Frederik Pohl's prescience is almost anxiety-provoking because it will remind you of unpleasant experiences you've probably had in your own life, and all you can do is laugh. If we only listened to this author's warnings from 70 years ago. Pour a cup of addictive (but harmless!) alkaloid infused Coffiest(TM) and get ready for a roller-coaster of absurd neurotic satire.

Here's the blurb: It is the 22nd Century, an advertisement-drenched world in which the big ad agencies dominate governments and everything else. Now Schoken Associates, one of the big players, has a new challenge for star copywriter Mitch Courtenay. Volunteers are needed to colonise Venus. It’s a hellhole, and nobody who knew anything about it would dream of signing up. But by the time Mitch has finished, they will be queuing to get on board the spaceships.
 
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I got Little, Big by John Crowley for Christmas. I'm kinda torn because the author is amazing. He really knows how to sculpt poetry out of a sentence but sometimes he's going on in this admittedly beautiful way about a fucking picnic table, describing the crushed bug remains on it and I'm impatient and want him to get going because I like plot but then he'll move to a 600 word paragraph on how the pie lady knows when rain is coming because her elbow gets sore or something. I guess it fits the theme of the book. It's very enchanting. Sometimes it feels sinister somehow.
 
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done with Tartar Steppes. Summary:
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What a book. The way he returned to a town full of friends and love prospects, only to feel a deeply rooted sense of disconnection hits hard. I've never really tried reconnecting with friends but I've had experiences of when you can just tell "yeah this ain't gonna happen". I re-added a friend 8 years later when we both were unemployed and post-uni, all the time in the world to talk. And it just didn't happen.

Guess it's time for Morbius Dick and the funky fisherman.
 
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Reddit is Malding said:
sf, collection of short stories, title is une étoile m'a dit, french edition of space on my hands

yeah, i loved arena, good stuff
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I have a copy of the "Best of Fredric Brown" collection from the '70s. NESFA Press has collected all of Brown's Sci-Fi in 2 volumes. One for short fiction and one for novels. Pretty easy to find second-hand. Gollancz also put out some of Browns work in their SF Gateway stuff too.

He's one of a handful of SF humorists/satirists that worked well. It wasn't his main focus, but he was pretty good at it. William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, Harry Harrison, and Douglas Adams were also known for their satirical/humorous SF. There weren't a ton of these guys, but I like how they're all remembered and kept in print.

Brown's mysteries are also preserved too. Think Otto Penzler put some of his crime fiction in his imprint. Haffner Press puts out Browns crime fiction in volumes but I just wanna wait for them to go on the second-hand market for reasonable prices.
glass_houses said:
Awesome book. Zombie apocalypse without the zombies.
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Yeah, the '50s really had the proto-type for modern zombie apocalypses coming together. Day of the Triffids, I am Legend, and arguably other horror SF works from the era. Nothing like cold war paranoia to get that kinda stuff going.

That being said, If I do read more wyndham, it'll probably be whatever I can get. He deserves to be called one of the all time Great SF authors. (Matheson's good too!)
 
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Claimed! by Gertrude Barrows Bennet.

Penguin have released a bunch of paperbacks collecting some weird vintage literature, including stuff by William Hope Hodgson and some compilations including the usual suspects. HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe and the like.

I’ve also been gifted a couple of old ass hardback horror/thriller compilations by an old Russian lady I work with that have a few bangers in there. Including one of Bram Stoker’s shorts about how a cat gets revenge on a guy for killing her kitten by releasing the safety mechanism on an iron maiden. Read it before but I’m happy to give it a revisit. They belonged to her dead husband so I’m trying to figure out if they’re cursed or not.
 
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Feeling even more prescient these days with the talk of AI being used to "create" "art", Connie Willis' 1994 novel Remake, written during the early days of CG being used for tricks like having Tom Hanks meet JFK in Forrest Gump. In a future Hollywood, all moviemaking's been completely computerized. Live-action films are a thing of the past. Revamps and remakes are more common than ever. You can catch, say, a remake of A Star is Born featuring the digitized likenesses of Marylin Monroe and Humphrey Bogart in the lead roles. If you don't like the ending, just change it with the tap of a key. The massive megacorps that produce the remakes make sure to remove any instances of problematic content, like smoking and drinking alcohol, not only from the remakes but all available modern copies of seminal films of the 20th century. Meanwhile, an cynical F/X technician (whose talents are later called upon to help with the editorial purge of all "Addictive Substances" references in said films), meets a naive young woman whose dream is to dance on the big screen, even though nobody uses actual dancers to perform in films anymore...

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The Awakening (Kate Chopin 1899)

I love the setting and how it's written. Lothe the main character, Edna.

Early feminism is celebrated. She's not like the other girls, she's got thicker arms! Two kids deep into a marriage with a pleasant, generous, providing man Edna decides experience a feeling for the first time. Learning to swim gives her independence. She remembers how the grass in Kentucky felt as a girl. This somehow makes her lust after a younger man who makes it a habit to take up with married women for a season while on vacation.

Her husband bought her a large new house. While he was away on business she moves into a smaller house without telling him as an act of rebellion or ingratitude. She describes how she does not care much for her children. Her new beach boyfriend hightails it down to Mexico and she is heartbroken. She gets the Big Sad and walks into the ocean killing herself.
 
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I thought I'd try some light fiction for once:

Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi, in which he sets out to definitively prove that Lee Harvey Oswald did the deed. Not a fan of how he hurls insults at the people who disagree with his conclusions (and I've heard bad things about him on here), but he's done a good job so far of holding my interest (but that's pretty easy to do when you're writing about something as interesting as this). I hope it keeps up for the next 1k pages, since it's the largest book I've ever read by far.
 
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Alexander Thaut said:
Harrison seems to be a very entertaining writer. I like him. Wonder what his other work's like.
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One of them is Make Room! Make Room!

You might not know that name but you know the movie version: Soylent Green.

Also trashy != trash.

Another of my favorites is Bill, the Galactic Hero, allegedly a satirical response to Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
 
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