Dialogue With Darkness
The Dark Between The Stars
Kinship With The Stars
Homeward And Beyond?
I have presented these titles in a proposed conceptual order instead of, e.g., their publication order. But now let's consider the latter:
Homeward And Beyond (Berkley Medallion Books, New York, July 1976)
The Dark Between The Stars (Berkley Books, New York, December 1981)
Dialogue With Darkness (TOR, New York, February 1985)
Kinship With The Stars (TOR, New York, October 1991)
There is a certain amount of information summarized there.
A 1991 collection can include stories published later than 1976 but might include earlier stories as well. Kinship's FOREWORD informs us that it presents "...tales told decades ago..."
As usual, we find stories that we know are in other collections although none of the volumes listed here overlap. It is now my task to pick one story from one of these collections. It will be either "Time Heals" in Dialogue With Darkness in accordance with our recent focus on time travel or "Conversation in Arcady," also in Dialogue..., in accordance with our recent focus on interstellar travel, but, as I often say, not tonight.
Good night.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I have three of these four collections, but not KINSHIP WITH THE STARS. Their contents, in order of book publication, are:
HOMEWARD AND BEYOND (Doubleday, 1975)
Wings of Victory
The Long Remembering
Peek! I See You!
Murphy's Hall
The Pirate
Goat Song
The Visitor
Wolfram
The Peat Bog
Of these stories I was esp. amused by "Peek!" focusing as it did on an unlikely but determined hero and UFO enthusiasts. "Murphy's Hall," of course, is one of Anderson's grimmer stories, on how people can make increasingly worse choices. The other stories I should leave to you to comment on first.
THE DARK BETWEEN THE STARS (Berkley, 1981)
The Sharing of Flesh
Fortune Hunter
Eutopia
The Pugilist
Night Piece
The Voortrekkers
Gibraltar Falls
Windmill
Call Me Joe
"The Sharing of Flesh" is, of course, one of Anderson's best stories ever and deserved the Hugo it got. I purchased this particular collection because Anderson recommended "The Pugilist" to me as his latest take on what a Soviet/Maoist conquered world might be like (and it was grim!). And "Call Me Joe" has to be one of the earliest stories dealing with the idea of somehow downloading human personalities into other bodies.
DIALOGUE WITH DARKNESS (TOR, 1985)
A Chapter of Revelation
Sister Planet
The Life of Your Time
Time Heals
SOS
Conversation in Arcady
Dialogue
The Communicators
It's my belief that "Chapter" and "Sister" alone makes DIALOGUE an unusually rich Anderson collection. And "Communicators" warns us not to be too overconfident of the first visitors from other stars necessarily being benign and friendly.
Ad astra! Sean
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