Projections by Stephen Robinett

[james_davis_nicoll]

Projections by Stephen Robinett

Comments

I loved Hellbent 4

[rpresser]

Read it in some other anthology, but it's a favorite. I don't recognize any of the other stories here though. I'll have to look for a copy of this.

"The bookseller would have had to shoot me to stop me from buying this."

That would make for a very very dark alternate history.

[jbwoodford]

From your description, "Tomus" may have some similarity to a recent popular movie whose name I will forebear mentioning due to spoilers.

[(Anonymous)]

"Tak Hallus” reminds me very much of a character name in Allen Steele's recent Arkwright, about a Golden Age SF writer, who wrote about a Kimball Kinnison-type hero called "Hak Tallus." It seems like to be deliberate, don't you think?

[james_davis_nicoll]

It does indeed.

[(Anonymous)]

For that matter, "Jenson's Folly" is not unlike the opening act of "Iron Man" - weapon-inventing genius is captured by bad people and ordered to construct something unpleasant. At least, that's what happened to Tony Stark - I think originally during the war in Vietnam.

Robert Carnegie

[austin_dern]

I have a recollection of some other author (Joe Haldeman?) where a character earns some scratch by selling off his mathematical talent. I assume this is all derivative of those flatworms that could supposedly learn by eating the RNA of other flatworms. But I'm curious if this was coincidence or there were something in the air of the 70s that made selling-off-with-loss-of-skills a thing. And if it were what other authors doing the same trick were.

[ba_munronoe]

Alas, humorous rape is still with us. See Family Guy. (Or better, don't see it).

[beamjockey]

I hadn’t realized that embittered SF stories about the state of the US space program had been published quite this early. After all, Apollo 17 was only three years in the past when this story came out.

The loss of the promised Apollos 18, 19, and 20 may have embittered some observers even before Apollo 17 landed. So the resentment had a few years to get going before Niven and Robinett published their respective stories.

[beamjockey]

A nice higher-resolution of Dean Ellis's cover painting may be found here. POW!

[mmcirvin]

My thought precisely.

[(Anonymous)]

Is is me or has James decided to focus on authors who died too soon?

I'm thinking of this because of a comment Darrell Schweitzer makes in the forthcoming Alexiad, about "post-novelists", writers who have sold three or four novels, and because they haven't become the next Stephen King or J. K. Rowling, are unpublishable at that length.

[james_davis_nicoll]

Just coincidence but it would be way too easy.

[scott_sanford]

Focusing on authors who didn't die early enough would be depressing in several ways.