Classic science fiction

Walter M Miller Jnr. has secured his reputation as one of the finest writers of the genre by virtue of his science fiction masterpiece ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’. Having just listened to ‘Canticle’ again and enjoyed it enormously, it seemed appropriate to turn to a collection of his ‘best’ short stories.

All but one of these were new to me, and with two or three exceptions this collection is as good as anything Arthur C Clarke or Isaac Asimov have produced. Several of these stories are more than two hours long and as such are really novellas. The story that won the 1955 Hugo award, ‘The Darfsteller’, I found to be far too long (over three hours) and frankly tedious. Another story, ‘The Lineman’ (nearly three hours), I got bored with and did not finish. But there are some real gems here: my favourites were ‘The Will’, ‘Anybody Else Like Me?’, ‘I, Dreamer’, ‘Dumb Waiter’, ‘Blood Bank’, ‘Big Joe and the Nth Generation’, ‘Dark Benediction’, and ‘Vengeance for Nikolai’. Familiar themes are explored: telepathy, post-apocalypse, alien invasion, rogue robots, and time travel.

Miller is not only very good at character and dialogue, but his imagination mostly stays within the realms of what is credible. If you like ‘classic’ science fiction, this is for you. David Bendena did a good job of narration, and only occasionally did his American pronunciation jar against my English ear—the author was, after all, an American.

Helpfully, and unlike some short story anthologies, the chapter headings are the story titles. There is, unfortunately, an editing error between two of the stories, making it quite difficult to locate the beginning of ‘Conditionally Human’. Since the story list does not appear elsewhere, I have included it here, with a note on how to navigate the error.

I swithered between four and five stars because of the two disappointing stories together with the most annoying editing fault. I decided that the good stories were so good that five stars was appropriate.

Story list. Times are in hrs:mins:secs. Note that ‘The Big Hunger’ is 0:48:44 long; ‘Conditionally Human’ starts 0:48:50 into the ‘Big Hunger’ track. The ‘Conditionally Human’ track on the second part of the download shows as only 1:18:52 long but starts well into the story.

Titles:
You Triflin’ Skunk, 0:35:03
The Will, 0:42:38
Anybody Else Like Me?, 0:51:39
Cucifixus Etiam, 0:59.14
I, Dreamer, 0:35:25
Dumb Waiter, 1:41:20
Blood Bank, 2:26:27
Big Joe and the Nth Generation, 0:59:58
The Big Hunger, 0:48:44
Conditionally Human, 2:36:08
The Darfsteller, 3:10:22
Dark Benediction, 2:43:58
The Lineman, 2:49:03
Vengeance for Nikolai, 1:03:08

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