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

[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.)