![]() (An exception might be the SFBC.) The conclusion I’ve come to is that SF went mainstream with STAR WARS in 1977, and mainstream American culture always focuses on what’s hot right now. I’ve often wondered why contemporary American readers and publishers have so little interest in the genre’s past. (When I wanted a hardcover copy of Bob Shaw’s SHADOW OF HEAVEN for my library, my local second-hand bookstore had to order it from the UK.) ![]() I’ve never seen a Gollancz volume in a bookstore here. Gollancz primarily serves readers across the pond, at least as far as ink-and-paper books go. Though our tastes differ (only somewhat – we’d probably agree on Ballard), I think you’re one of the good guys, keeping interest in old SF alive. The same thing goes with confronting the metafictional labyrinth of his most widely read novel Beyond Apollo (1972) whose 67 chapters could be the ramblings of an insane astronaut, or a deliberate novelistic construct of said astronaut, or… There is humor here among the implanted memories, deconstructions, and proclamations of artifice, I promise. There is something profoundly daunting about opening a book, Guernica Night (1974), where the spectacle begins with JFK, now a plastic manikin in Disney Land/Disney World, stumbling across a stage delivering fragments of his famous addresses. Each novel, each short story is a carefully wrought existential trap. His work plays with us, with storytelling. It is a future where the newly insane will stumble into a priapic wilderness where meaningful connections are dulled, where our passions are now perfunctory monstrosities. In the last two years there is not an author I have read and enjoyed more than Barry N. Robert Silverberg might shift entirely, as if on whim, from old-fashioned SF adventure where young Heinlein-esque space boys look for those “cool artifacts that do great things” in Across a Billion Years (1969) to The Man in the Maze (1969), a restless and uneasy rumination on pariahism and filled with delusions of self-martyrdom and all those other uncomfortable emotions we try so desperately to hide. Simak might produce a Cosmic Engineers (1950), he also invoked a most extraordinary allegorical worldscape in Why Call Them Back from Heaven? (1967) where the promise of immortality (undelivered) causes irrevocable transformations-the living live through life without living waiting for a resurrection where they can finally live. Like the vibrations of residual sounds that gather across the urban landscape in Ballard’s “The Sound-Sweep” (1960), the lists themselves resonate both discordant and dulcet-a deluge of aborted passions, financial desires, experimental tendencies not yet crystalline. Here’s a refresher.Backlists can be unnerving places. You know that TNG theme music you love so much? The Jerry Goldsmith score? Well, that comes from The Motion Picture, and in that film - get ready - a super intelligent machine contacts Spock’s brain from across the entire galaxy. Wetware is not hardware, so whatever magic brain energy necessary to do the mind meld, shouldn’t work with a robot, right? Well, that would be a reasonable argument, assuming, you’d never seen Star Trek: The Motion Picture. ![]() Then again, some might argue that intelligent machines shouldn’t be able to possess the pseudo-telepathy from a Vulcan mind-meld. (We’re told in Episode 8 that Oh is half-Vulcan, half-Romulan.) So if Vulcan hybrids can do a skill normally reserved to Vulcans, the door is already open to other species figuring it out. Like Commodore Oh in Star Trek: Picard, Spock is only half-Vulcan. So, from its very inception the idea of who can do the Vulcan mind-meld was already loosey-goosey. Notably, Spock is only half-Vulcan since his mom, Amanda Grayson is a human. The Vulcan mind-meld originates in the TOS episode “Dagger of the Mind,” in which Spock probes the tortured mind of a prison inmate in order to get to the bottom of a confounding mystery all about people going crazy from a machine that is supposed to be healing them.
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