RE: RARA-AVIS: Recent reading

From: Todd Mason ( Todd.Mason@tvguide.com)
Date: 09 Jun 2004


From: Bill Crider I just finished China Mieville's KING RAT, which isn't exactly a crime novel, but then it isn't exactly not a crime novel, either.

--While Bill is reading good new speculative fiction (and Bill Denton good old SF, Fredric Brown's WHAT MAD UNIVERSE), I've been delving into a couple of 55yo magazines, issues of PLANET STORIES and ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, and thus coming across Leigh Brackett's past mastery of intelligent space opera (the first Eric John Stark story I've read--hb, but definitely not in the lean prose Hammett pioneered and Brackett could also write), problem stories by WV Athanas and Raymond F. Jones (the sf equivalent of pure-detection mysteries), Stanley Mullen's childish idea of tough-guy action (I wonder if, along with his trailing-off SF career in the '50s, if he ever attempted to join the throng of CF Spillane-imitators in that decade or later), among other items of tangential importance.

TM

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