Collections And Individual Stories

Space Folk is a collection of which I had read some of its contents though not others. I tend to think of short stories, not collections, as units of an author's work. Thus, Space Folk, as its title suggests, is united by the theme of space travel and could be read through from cover to cover on that basis, the point being to compare how each of the collected stories addresses this common theme.

In fact, the second last item in the volume, "Commentary", is not fiction but is instead a three page article or essay in which the author comments on the immediately preceding and succeeding stories and addresses the real world issue of space exploration.

In some similarly themed collections, like Conquests, though not in others, like Conflict, the author adds before each story a brief introduction that is specific to this volume, although even these short pieces deserve to be preserved somewhere in a Complete Works. Even recognizable installments of well-known series can be re-packaged and re-presented because they represent a particular theme. For example, "A Little Knowledge" from the Technic Civilization History is in The Gods Laughed because it features human contact with superior aliens - and there are several other examples of this.

Despite all this, I never read a collection as a unit. A glance at the contents page tells me which of the stories I have read before. A glance at a story is usually enough to tell me whether I want to read it straightaway. Thus, by a double process of elimination, a few stories to be read immediately are identified, except in The Armies Of Elfland, where they had all been read before.

Reassessing collections in order to blog about them has been a voyage of discovery. First, it has revealed how many of the collected stories I had not read. Some of these have indeed been difficult, but worth reading for that reason. Secondly, I do not know what I am going to find. I had no idea that reading Space Folk would lead to a partial discussion of both the Medea series and the Berserker series. And this can take us right outside the Anderson canon:

comparing an Anderson Jupiter story with a Blish Jupiter story led to a month mainly spent blogging about Blish instead of about Anderson;
getting interested in the berserkers led to rereading Niven's berserker story before returning to Anderson - both of these stories address the important issue of Artificial Intelligence, which I suppose is fundamental to the berserker series.