JOURNAL ENTRY #63April 15, 2010
While at ICON on Long Island, I wandered into the dealer’s room and picked up a copy of Sherlock Holmes: The American Years, edited by Michael Kurland. I‘ve had a lifelong passion for Holmes. Nevertheless I tried to resist buying the book because I didn’t want anything not absolutely necessary to carry onto the plane. (If you’ve traveled by air recently you know what I mean.) But I knew I’d get home and go looking for the book, so I picked it up. It’s a collection of ten stories, positing Holmes as a 22-year-old visitor to the USA in 1875, where he encounters luminaries like William Gillette and Mark Twain. I’ve only read the first three stories, but so far they’re thoroughly enjoyable.
Stephen Antczak is preparing a book to be titled The Heart and Soul of 20th Century Science Fiction, to be published by Rocket Ride Press. (Love the name!) If we were putting together a collection of the twenty books that best illustrate what the field had been about since --I guess-- H. G. Wells strolled onto the scene, here is what we should have. Steve has it down to a hundred titles at the moment. I’m not sure how he’ll decide what the final twenty are, or how the book will be set up. But I’ve agreed to write commentaries on three: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol 1 (edited by Robert Silverberg), The Best of Damon Knight, and The Martian Chronicles.
I’ve finished the first of the three, and am now well into the Knight collection. It’s been an odd experience: Often, I can still remember quite clearly where I was, and what I was doing when I originally read a given story. I can recall being, for example, in the armchair at home, and having just finished lunch, when I read Anthony in Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life.” I will always associate Bradbury’s “Mars Is Heaven” with the front steps I was sitting on outside our house on Myrtlewood Street during an early summer evening. I was in grade school at the time. Why the nuns didn’t use Bradbury to turn on the kids in our eighth grade I’ll never understand.
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I developed a passion for chess while I was in grade school. I wish there’d been a Dan Heisman in my life then. Dan is a chess master, based in Philadelphia. He’s a columnist for the Chess Café, and has also written several books on strategy and tactics. The fourth edition of his first book, Elements of Positional Evaluation, has just become available. I have his Looking for Trouble, and I wish I’d known some of this stuff when I was first starting tournament play. If you‘re interested, pop by the café.
http://shop.chesscafe.com/item.asp?cID