On the mailing list for my Clarion West class, we've been having great fun with the "Which SF Writer are You?" quiz. According to the quiz, I am Cordwainer Smith, unless I indulge my impish side a bit, and then I turn out to be Ursula LeGuin. (Far too many of you are probably going, "Cordwainer Who?" Check out this neat Cordwainer Smith page.)

That's pretty cool. I like Smith's work quite a lot, though now that I come to think about it, I haven't read very much of it. I've read "Scanners Live in Vain" about a gazillion times. I'm not sure if I've read much of his other work.

Actually, this illustrates one of the problems that readers face in trying to get a grasp on older SF. The easiest way to find short stories by older authors is through reprint anthologies of classic SF. But a great many authors are known principally for one or two famous short stories that get anthologized over and over again. It's hard to get a broader picture of an author's work. Thank god for NESFA press.

One thing that I'm enjoying quite a bit about Gardner Dozois's anthology The Good Old Stuff is that, because it focuses specifically on adventure fiction, it has some kind of offbeat choices by authors who aren't primarily known for pulp adventure. I mean, who'd have thunk that Cyril Kornbluth would write great space adventure?

I've been reading lots of short fiction lately. I've been steadily working my way through the Berkeley Public Library's collection of assorted Year's Best Anthologies (both the Dozois and the Datlow and Windling). I've actually been thinking that it would be interesting to read through all the introductory "state of the genre" essays in these books, and try to spot long term trends, and correct and incorrect predictions. It's very funny to read the essays from the late eighties/early nineties, which keep saying things like "the predicted collapse of horror did not happen this year." I guess it happened eventually.

On my last trip to the library, I picked up Harwell and Cramer's The Ascent of Wonder, an anthology covering the evolution of hard SF. The introductory essays of the anthology make a lot of claims about hard SF being "central" to the SF genre, while the anthology itself appears to include a whole lot of stories that rarely show up on most people's lists of hard SF. No matter. I'm more interested in reading a bunch of good stories than in arranging them on some kind of science fictional Moh's scale.

Speaking of which, I think I'm going to go read a few of those stories.