I learned so much today it's absolutely insane. Alright, I've got $4 in complimentary Amazon credit which I can use to purchase a book. I buy an ebook on Amazon, I get discounted $4, right? It goes away at the end of the month, so I've only got a few days to decide what I want to do with it. Obviously I want the best deal for myself, since the $4 only goes toward one purchase, so $4 and up is perfect; at the same time, I'm basically broke, so it shouldn't be more than that by, almost any degree of money. So I'm looking for a book of exactly $4, or $3.99 or something. Dead Alligator Lizard is $2.99, but I already own it. There's a book on my wishlist at $4.99, which, heck I'm probably going to do that.
But the next time I'm at a library I'm definitely checking out (because hypothetically I also have the ability to make checkouts from this library) at least one book by Cordwainer Smith; also, why have I not heard of this guy before? Alright, I've definitely heard of him, but, why is he not more famous? I don't know. Golden-age SFF tends to be undervalued anymore, is my best guess.
The gist of his work is, it's mostly all in this one shared setting, but spanning thousands of years, and not connected by a story arch or anything; everything just, happens to take place in the same universe. Just researching his stories though, it's the most crazy imaginative stuff I've read since Osamu Tezuka.
Like, who needs death lasers or nukes in your killsat when you can have genetically engineered bloodthirsty minks who have to be kept sedated otherwise they'll kill themselves and each other? There is absolutely no excuse or need to be cliche in science fiction.
But also, like his prose is supposed to be really interesting too, and the way he constructs his stories...
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