Fire Up the Gat Signal!

Typos of the day, from trying to type Batgirl in a hurry on a small screen: Vatgirl and Gatgirl. Both of these sound like they belong to the Legion of Regrettable Supervillains.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

Worlds on Worlds Are Rolling Ever…

I realized this weekend that one of the pleasures of inventing a Martian language was coining new names for all the planets. (Including ones that don’t really exist, like Vulcan, Antichthon, and the Lost Planet that was once supposed to be the precursor for the asteroids.)

I think this version of the Solar System will have 12 planets, including Pluto & a trans-Plutonian planet. 12 is a magic number & if I end up wanting to add a 13th or even a 14th planet, that’s still a dozen (cf the baker’s dozen, the “12” Olympians, tribes of Israel, apostles, Labors of Herc, etc).

This made me nostalgic to read Rocklynne’s The Men and the Mirror (Ace, 1973), which includes one of the few stories written about Vulcan (not Spock’s planet, but the planet that was briefly believed to exist closer to the sun than Mercury). My sword-and-planet version of Vulcan will have to be different–possibly an invisible and/or dirigible planet.

The cover for the 1973 Ace edition of The Men in the Mirror; artist unknown.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

Call Him Poul (if you can pronounce it)

A judicious review by Paul Weimer of a great NESFA volume linked below.

Paul Weimer Review: Call Me Joe: Volume 1 of the Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson

I liked this book a lot, but for me the most distinctive feature of this series is the one that I like least: the stories are a mixture of early & late. I’d prefer a chronological ordering, or an ordering by series, or some kind of order. (The ebook only edition of the complete short fiction of Clifford Simak had the same unprinciple, and I didn’t like it there, either.)

On the other hand, you could get hold of all the volumes and use ISFDb to go through them in your preferred order. The “Collected Poul Anderson” volumes are all available pretty cheaply as ebooks from NESFA, so that’s not as flippant a suggestion as it may seem.

https://www.nesfa.org/press/available-books/?ebooks=e

I’ve often wished for a single volume “Best of Poul Anderson” I could hand to or recommend to people. But The old Pocket Book “Best of PA” didn’t really fit the bill; the DAW “BOOK of PA” was a little closer, but was light on fantasy as I recall. And of course they’ve all been out of print forever.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.