As followers of this blog know, I've been a subscriber to Easton Press' Masterpieces of Science Fiction Series.  Sadly, this one has been discontinued, and I am no longer receiving my monthly book.  I say sadly because, although I had already read a number of the books I received (albeit, obviously, in editions nowhere near as beautiful as the EP ones), there are a number of books I never, ever would have purchased had they not been in this series (The Dispossessed and The Snow Queen being the two that jump to mind).  

Another book that would have slipped through my net is Clifford D. Simak's City.  This one is a compendium of stories that give us a future timeline based on the premise that the city, as a unit of human habitation, is inherently obsolete, and will disappear...  Where he goes from there is both amazing and logical, and makes me happy that I read this one - and reminds me of what I will be missing.  Fortunately, I still have about a year's worth of these books still in my TBR pile, and I've also signed up for the Horror Classics collection.  I know I can get most of this stuff for free online...  but I happen to like books as physical objects, so I'll get them while I can!


Flying to Brazil tomorrow for a convention (I'll give details on tomorrow's post), so bloggage may be intermittent for a few days...

My Borges binge, at least the reading portion of it, came to a close with a book called El hacedor, a collection of short-shorts and poems that is not among my favorite Borgesian work - I feel that he works best in a slightly longer prose, or in essays, where his erudition can be used to make a lasting point, as opposed to simply creating a mood which doesn't stick in one's memory much more than a few hours.

So, having little to say about the book itself, I find myself musing how Borges has been linked with the beginnings of literary postmodernism.  Now, as someone who is enormously happy that postmodernism seems to be dead (and looking forward to whatever replaces it, which could never be worse), I was surprised by this.  How could a rationalist of Borges' extreme conviction, and a strong conservative as well, be accused of such a thing?  The answer is simply that he was imaginative, and his education allowed him to identify the borders and transcend them... and in many cases, the postmodernists are perfectly correct in claiming him for their own.  Sigh.

Anyway, this space will be Borges-free for a while, but I will definitely be looking for some more interesting philosophical texts to peruse every once in a while (although I will probably dedicate myself to older tracts, as modern philosophy seems to have disappeared up a deep, dark cavity thanks to both deconstruction and the related agenda-specific nonsense).  So we'll have a lot of genre stuff here in the coming days.