Galactic Empires, Volume One & Volume Two edited by Brian W. Aldiss

[james_davis_nicoll]

Two disco-era anthologies with a unifying theme made clear by the title.

Galactic Empires, Volume One & Volume Two edited by Brian W. Aldiss

Comments

[thewayne]

Could these be about empires that span, dare I say it, galaxies?

[patrick_morris_miller]

I have the suspicion that more than one of these stories ends with a Tomato Surprise.

[oh6]

I'm pretty sure I read Immigrant in one Simak anthology or another. I definitely read "The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal", "The Possessed", "Been a Long, Long time" (not sure how it fit Aldiss' criteria), "Beep", and "The Bounty Hunter" (though I don't remember much, if any, of it.)

Thanks to the mention of Hugh Laurie in the context of Sector General, I now know one role he's played, as opposed to my previous understanding of him as "some actor or other."

[patrick_morris_miller]

My neurologist has never watched House. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

[agharta75]

And Noah Wyle plays Conway.

[patrick_morris_miller]

ER or The Pitt? (Not that there's much difference.)

[agharta75]

Is there much difference? :-)

Now we need a Murchison (maybe we can downplay the physical attributes and give her a first name :-) ) and a lot of voice actors ...

[patrick_morris_miller]

The Crichton estate smells money, so they're saying there isn't.

[agharta75]

They'd probably have problems with the "ER In Space" pitch, too.

[(Anonymous)]

Specifically "Emergency Ward 10" I think, at the time - a British TV soap-opera show. Started in 1957, like "Sector General". "Dr Kildare" was in print much earlier, on television much later (1960).

I only now thought "Is an emergency ward a thing?" And in fact, the words seem to lead chiefly to "Emergency Ward 10" - and to some indications that it was meant to be "Emergency - (in) Ward 10". And originally conceived as "Calling Nurse Roberts". But later such as in film "Life in Emergency Ward 10", it's treated as the name of the place.

A current (up to 2025) Australian documentary series also popped up. "The Royal Melbourne Hospital's busy trauma centre" is covered in show "The Emergency Ward". (At least, that's the title on British "Channel 4".) but surely it's "The Trauma Centre".

Robert Carnegie

[estrevan]

Homophobic and transphobic though it is, I’ve always thought The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal was one of the better Instrumentality stories. It feels authentically strange, and the the way the story’s framed and told is interesting. And I guess there’s at least some interest in seeing anything about gender in that period of American SF

[philrm]

It feels authentically strange, and the the way the story’s framed and told is interesting.

This. I've found it unforgettable, despite the aspects of the story that make me wince. "Authentically strange" I think sums up (for me) what Smith's stories achieve at their best.

Plus it has the sentence, "This is the day of the year of the promised age. And now come cats."

[estrevan]

“That’s the story. Furthermore it isn’t true.”

It’s a surprisingly queer story if you look at it right, for all that it’s not intended as a positive depiction. Consider Suzdal: stoically masculine on the surface but he cares more for family than for sex, which codes as feminine in 1950s America. And why does he tell the cats to harry the klopts but not kill them all? There’s something womblike, too, about his ship with its cargo of embryos ready to birth a new cat civilisation.

Even the little we get about the society of the klops is interesting - shaped by trauma, with a complicated love-hate attachment to their human parents/ancestors

[philrm]

That's a really interesting reading.

I think one of the reasons Smith's fiction continues to be worth engaging with - despite its problematic elements - in a way that that of many of his contemporaries is not is because his viewpoint steadfastly refuses to be simple.

[elysdir]

Neat! Thank you for this reading of the story.

(It was one of my favorite stories in the world when I was a kid, because of the metafiction aspects—“That’s the story. Furthermore, it isn’t true.”—but I was horrified when I re-read it as an adult. So I really appreciate this queering of it.)

[chrysostom]

All I remember is a terrible joke in a Poul Anderson story.

[(Anonymous)]

I was outraged to find out that many of the stories in Galactic Empires did not include Galactic Empires! :)

I have at least one of these in my library. I still have fond memories of "Voyage of the Space Beagle" and a number of van Vogt short stories, which perhaps indicates I shouldn't reread them.

[jsburbidge]

Because it takes place in space and away from other human societies, it has fewer potential problems than many if Van Vogt's stories. It reads well as long as one ignores the fact that Nexialism Does Not Work in the real world, where it rapidly becomes "interdisciplinary studies".