What We Read

Second hand bookshops remind us of what we used to read and regard as important. James Bond has endured whereas his TV spin-offs, the Man and Girl from UNCLE have not. In the 1960's, I read sf paperbacks because I had graduated from comic strips to prose fiction about people in spaceships and on other planets with robots and aliens. Nowadays, an sf novel has to contain much more than these sf trappings to hold my attention. As we know, Poul Anderson and James Blish do offer much more than that.

A fictional universe can expand in different directions, incorporating different kinds of fiction, e.g.:

Poul Anderson

James Ching attends school in San Francisco Integrate in the period of the Solar Commonwealth and the Polesotechnic League.

James Blish

The energy beings called Angels who appear in two juvenile novels also form part of the background of an adult short story with a very different tone and theme.

Ian Fleming

Dexter Smythe committed murder in 1945 and must face the consequences two decades later. It is a minor detail that the man sent from London to interview him is called James Bond - although we also learn an extra biographical detail about Bond.

Dornford Yates

The Berry books are (supposed) humour although Berry Pleydell's cousin, Jonathan Mansel, tracks down criminals in the Chandos books and The Stolen March, belonging to neither series but sharing some characters with them, is a fantasy.

Read them all.

(I bought the book shown today.)