Monday, January 23, 2012

Factoid of the day

Sun Yat Sen was the godfather of Cordwainer Smith.

Some of his science fiction short stories are found at Baen:

Link when the people fell

Link We the underpeople.

Ironically, I found part two of the Nostrillia novel, the Planet buyer, here in our used book kiosk. Luckily I had read part one.

My favorite story is the Dead lady of Clown Town

But the one most poignant to today's world is the warning of utopian in Under Old Earth...

This story concerns three of them: the gambler who took the name Sun-boy, who dared to go down to the Gebiet, who confronted himself before he died; the girl Santuna, who was fulfilled in a thousand ways before she died; and the Lord Sto Odin, a most ancient of days, who knew it all and never dreamed of preventing any of it.

Music runs through this story. The soft sweet music of the Earth Government and the Instrumentality, bland as honey and sickening in the end. The wild illegal pulsations of the Gebiet, where most men were forbidden to enter. Worst of all, the crazy fugues and improper melodies of the Bezirk, closed to men for fifty-seven centuries—opened by accident, found, trespassed in! And with it our story begins...

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