By Daniel Dern: A monthish ago, I’d re-topped-off my LBFSTBR (Library-Borrows-Foothill-Stack-To-Be-Read) from the public library with, among other books, The Avram Davidson Treasury, Steven King’s new collection You Like It Darker, Barry Malzberg’s The Bend at the End of the Road essay collection, and (digitally) Leigh Ronald Grossman’s meganthology Sense of Wonder — with the intention of diving into them in a timely fashion.

Those good intentions got waylaid, or at least delayed, by the decision (and schedule opportunity) to, having just binge-watched the twenty-episode (24 minutes each) Season 2 of the animated Star Trek: Prodigy[1], to power-binge/re-watch The Magicians (based on Lev Grossman’s book trilogy[2]) — five seasons of 13 ~45-minute episodes.

And then I went back to my LBFSTBR, which, even though our library recently went fineless (I don’t know whether that can be called, ahem, “a fine idea”), leading to a re-learning of this helpful lesson/advice: When you’ve got a borrowed collection/anthology, start reading it Immediately (same or next day as getting the book), as, in many cases, unlike (many/most novels), you can’t or won’t want to read more than one or two stories at a time, perhaps averaging one, maybe two a day.

Herewith some info-notes&thoughts, not quite as brief as I might have thought they would be, but nowhere near as long as they could be:

• The Avram Davidson Treasury: A Tribute Collection, edited by Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis, hardcover by Tor, 1998 (448 pp.) (also available in paperback and audiobook).

I’ve been long-familiar with some of Avram Davidson’s work (see the Avram Davidson website and the Wikipedia’s Avram Davidson article), from seeing his stories (in F&SF, IIRC) and numerous anthologies (and I think I’ve got a paperback of The Phoenix and the Mirror), but until reading this Treasury plus doing brief research, I hadn’t realize how much more he’d written.

Davidson wrote 19 novels and over 200 short stories, ranging from sf to fantasy to crime (some being in two genres), garnering him one Hugo, three World Fantasy and one Edgar awards, and as many or more additional nominations.

Despite it having been printed a quarter-century ago, I don’t think I was aware of this 1998 Tor collection, until I spotted it in, IIRC, my library’s new/(“recently added”) sf shelves. It followed me home.

Odds are good that most Filers are familiar with Davidson stories like “The Golem,” “Help! I Am Dr. Morris Culpepper,” “Or All The Seas with Oysters.” (You can read the last one here on the Davidson site.)

Treasury contains 28 of Davidson’s stories (including the three I just named), plus forwards by the book editors, and afterwords by Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, plus story intros and outros from, to name a few (slightly more than half), Forrest J. Ackerman, Poul Anderson, Peter S. Beagle, John Clute, Thomas Disch, Gardner Dozois, Ed Ferman, Damon Knight Ursula K. LeGuin, Fred Pohl, Spider Robinson, Martha Soukup, Michael Swanwick, Darrell Schweitzer, Kate Wilhelm, and Gene Wolfe, giving a mix of their personal friendships and interactions with Davidson, to the stories themselves.

Davidson’s prose is dense, erudite and rich, to be read attentively rather than skimmed.

You (like I) may not finish reading each of the stories, intros or outros — but it’s worth taking the plunge to find out.

Looking for more Davidson? Here’s two suggestions:

• The Avram Davidson Science Fiction & Fantasy Megapack (Wildside Press, 2016, 275 Print Pages) (digitally, including as library e-loan on Hoopla🙂  This Megapack collects twenty Davidson stories, with what looks like only four-ish duplicates to the Tribute anthology. I’ll be e-borrowing that soon.

• Podcast!: The Avram Davidson Universe (57 episodes so far, includes readings, lectures, discussions, etc.)

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• You Like It Darker, by Stephen King, Scribner (2024) 512 pages

Per this collection’s title, most of the twelve stories (five not previously published!)[3] [1] are, indeed, dark — dark enough that if you, like me, have a limited threshold for horror (or certain types of), you, too, may find a few that you decide not to finish. That said, I found more than enough that I did finish and don’t regret doing so; notably, “Two Talented Bastids,” “The Turbulence Expert,” and “The Answer Man” — certainly more than enough to recommend the book. There’s also end-of-book closing remarks by King — backstory on some of the stories and his process, as it were.

The stories range from short to novella-long) including “Rattlesnakes”, which where (not a spoiler!) the main character is the father from King’s 1981 novel Cujo. (Spoiler alert: In case you haven’t yet read Cujo and plan to, be advised “Rattlesnakes” does include spoilers for the novel.)

If you’re already a King fan, you’ll like this book. If you haven’t yet read any Stephen King, and aren’t sure how dark you do or don’t like it, this isn’t where I would necessarily start — which leaves lots of good starting places. The first King that I recall reading was his short-short “Quitters Inc.” Other good places to start, IMHO: Firestarter; Different Seasons (four stories, including “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”, the basis for the movie); and On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

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• Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction, ed. Leigh Ronald Grossman (Wildside Press)

Weighing in at over a million words[4], so manymany pages the Wildside paperback is 992 pages, weighs nearly 5 pounds, and is 8.25″x2″x10.75″, Sense of Wonder, according to the book’s home page, is “a broad, inexpensive, single-volume anthology designed to give students a sense both of literature and history; the book includes canonical works, stories written in response to those works, and essays on major themes and topics in the field.”

(Note, the book’s home-page link (above) includes the book’s Table of Contents.)

I’ll let Sense of Wonder’s online listings (FantasticFiction.com, OverDrive, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. save me from doing some of the summary deets:

“A survey of the last 100 years of science fiction, with representative stories and illuminating essays by the top writers, poets, and scholars, from Edgar Rice Burroughs and Samuel Butler to Robert A. Heinlein and Jack Vance, from E.E. “Doc” Smith and Clifford D. Simak to Ted Chiang and Charles Stross– and everyone in between. More than one million words[5] of classic fiction and essays!”

And, from (Grossman’s) SwordSmith Productions, “The collection includes more than 200 stories, poems, and bibliographic essays (contributed by professors who teach science fiction and by professionals), with an emphasis on the roots of modern SF. Each story author is given a biographical introduction as well.”

While there’s lots to (re)read and (re)enjoy, I want to call out three pieces in particular:

• Joanna Russ’ novella “Souls” (which first appeared in F&SF in 1982). I’m sure I’ve read this before, but it was like I hadn’t. This novella alone made e-picking up this book worthwhile.
• Betsy Wollheim’s essay about her father Donald A. Wollheim, and how and why he started DAW books.
• Terry Bisson’s “60 Rules for Writing Short SF” (part of the aspiring-SF-oriented appendix, including overviews on submitting manuscripts, literary agents, avoiding publishing scams, and writers workshops. For example, Bisson’s rule #3: “The SF reader is a gamer who brings a problem-solving intelligence to the story. This is the SF writer’s one great advantage. Use it.”

Here’s a few specific author/work examples:

• short-shorts like Fred Pohl’s “Day Million”,
• stories like Avram Davidson’s “Or All The Sea With Oysters”, Gordon Dickson’s “Soldier, Ask Not”, James L. Schmitz’s “The Witches Of Karres”
• novels like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Capek’s R.U.R., Jules Verne’s Off On A Comet, Zamyatin’s We, HP Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness.

 And some included-authors namedropping: John Brunner, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Brian Aldiss, Joe Haldeman, Kit Reed, Keith Roberts, Joanna Russ, Vernor Vinge, Lois McMaster Bujold, C.J. Cherryh, James Patrick Kelly, Connie Willis, Gene Wolfe, Ted Chiang, Cory Doctorow, Andrea Hairston, Nalo Hopkinson, Charles Stross.

Budget- and shlep-conveniently, Sense of Wonder is available not just as a physical book but also digitally for purchase or library-loan (depending on your library), including:

• Hoopla
• Libby
• Amazon/Kindle.

If you’re headed on a long trip and only want to bring one, ahem, book (ideally digitally, on a tablet, this would be a good choice.

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• The Bend at the End of the Road, by Barry Malzberg. Fantastic Books 174 pages (2018)

In addition to his many (sf and other) novels and stories (most recently, Collecting Myself: The Uncollected Stories of Barry N. Malzberg, and prior to that,  Ready When You Are and Other Stories, Barry Malzberg has, over the decades, chronicled (and opined) on science fiction: authors, editors, publishers, readers and fans, conventions, trends, challenges, secret and non-secret history, through the frazzled lenses of his own experiences as a writer, reader, fan, and editor (I’m probably missing a few hats here).

The Bend at the End of the Road is the latest collection: 26 short essays that originally appeared in Baen’s Universe (2007-10) and Galaxy’s Edge (2013-17).

Bend thematically and chronologically follows the previous collection(s) of Malzberg’s essays: The engines of the night: Science fiction in the eighties (Doubleday, 198 pages, 1982) and Breakfast in the Ruins (Baen, 400 pages, 2007). (Breakfast includes the Engines and adds an equal amount of new material.) Also, Malzberg and Michael Resnick co-wrote The Business of Science Fiction (McFarland, 275 pages, 2010).

Malzberg’s essays in these books are, give or take by turns and often simultaneously, informational, instructive, acerbic, sad, nostalgic, critical, analytical, opinionated, authoritative, impressive, and (depending on what you the reader do and where you are or aren’t in your career arc) depressive.

The prose itself is compelling and sui generis, arguably even often more so than Malzberg’s fiction, combining Malzberg’s literary/culture knowledge (e.g., of classical music, history), an unmistakable, unique voice of vocabulary, phraseology, timing and structure. You may not agree with — or be familiar enough with to have an opinion[6] — Malzberg’s premises or conclusions, but you’ll know you were on a hellofa ride. And you’ll have learned some SF history.

You’ll also, as you read Malzberg’s essays, potentially build up a recommended-sf-reading list, pre-Gernsback through a decade or so ago — making Malzberg’s books an interesting companion book to Leigh Grossman’s mega-anthology, and vice versa.

And, like the Avram Davidson and Stephen King books that I talked about up above, you probably don’t want to read Malzberg’s essays too many in a row. Or even read just these books in rotation; I don’t have specific recommendations for cleansing the gray cell palate, probably just about anything else will do. For example, Anne Leckie’s Translation State (ideally assuming you’ve already read her Ancillary trilogy. Or Kelly Link’s “Magic For Beginners” (the title novella, or the eponymous collection). Or a Terry Pratchett.

Or something else from your MTBR or LBFSTBR.

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[1] Quick non-spoiler micronotes for Prodigy Season 2: (1) includes a fair number of familiar Star Trek characters and plot elements, (2) like Season 1, satisfactory (IMHO) plot arc resolution by final episode, while leaving obvious starting points for any further season(s).

[2] Well worth the re-watch (to me, at least). Binging helped make various connections and plot twists more powerful, because I hadn’t had time to lose track of What Had Gone Before, Who’d Done What With/To Whom, etc. Like other book-based series, say, The Expanse, The Golden Compass (and books two and three of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy) and that show with dragons and thrones, The Magicians is (IMHO) faithful to the characters and other key aspects of Grossman’s trilogy, while re-mixing (and perhaps also tweaking) plot sequences and directions enough to keep us guessing.

[3] See Wikipedia entry You Like It Darker for story titles, length-category, and where the published stories were first published. Note: According to this Wikipedia page, “In July 2024, King noted that his 2016 short story “The Music Room” had been omitted from the collection due to him forgetting about it, but that it would “probably” be included in the paperback edition.”

[4] Grossman’s introduction in the book says “two-million-word book.”

[5] Grossman’s introduction in the book says “two-million-word book.”

[6] In particular, Malzberg is addressing, in large part, science fiction, particularly “hard” sf, the “True Quill” (per, according to Barry, if I’ve parsed correctly, James Blish.” There’s inevitable overlap and mention of adjacent/Venn’d genres, notably fantasy, and detective/mystery (I dunno whether ‘mainstream’ and/or ‘literary fiction’ are “genres”). Related note: there’s a good author’s-mentioned index in the back of Bend.