An Embarrassment of Riches

Indeed, we do stumble into quite the bevy of delights as we delve farther and farther into the past with this particular issue of Astounding Stories. Sure, it's already quite the delight to discover a new saga in the tale we've heard previously in Earth, the Marauder, but in addition to that, we're well on our way to finding other short stories that boggle the mind! 

As an aside, I mention a more modern short story collection out front, and I would love to stress to authors: I am more than willing to discuss featuring your work on the show! Guarding Gus, our first episode of the third season, is far from a fluke in terms of the stories I'm hoping to feature on the show going forward. If you've got some writing you feel would be a particularly good fit, feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected], and we can talk about what that might look like for you! 

Back on topic, though, I really do believe that short story collections can contain startling volumes of incredibly compelling work. I'm not sure I've mentioned it on the show, but there's a particular short story that I've been chasing for YEARS, that I first read in high school, and didn't write down the title of, and cannot find for the LIFE of me. In short, it was in a black-covered science fiction anthology that was about to be weeded out of the school library, and the only two major stories I remember have stuck with me ever since: one set in a society where time is used as currency, which opens with a scene of a group of street buskers doing some performance art, wherein they set their internal clocks to tick down simultaneously, such that the mob they were standing in instead causes them to fall, spelling out MEMENTO MORI in a town square. The other swings a bit more horriffic, as a young woman struggles against the thrall of a claude glass, each time she stares, finding herself more and more strongly compelled to never look at anything else. There's a particularly vivid passage of her describing how a lizard that wandered into the house looks after staring into the claude glass, her perception of color forced into eye-popping contrast in comparison to life as it was before. 

The sheer vividity of these two stories as they impressed themselves into my then-younger mind has really instilled in me a drive to check out these short story collections, there's some real gems in there! Not just the yearly anthology issues, either, there's great stuff in the monthlies, too. Remind me to talk about Optopia on the live stream, sometime, you'll hear about some fantastic solarpunk yarns. 

Also of note, our content disclaimer:

TL;DR up front: Paper Cuts is almost all public domain stuff, and some of it hasn't aged well. I'll be doing my best to warn you, but I'm not changing any of it, I don't believe censorship is the path forward here.

Paper Cuts, by necessity, has to be a majority books that are in the US public domain. That means it's almost exclusively going to be content produced in the 1920s, or earlier. These works may have aspects that have not aged well to a modern viewer/listener. Now, I'm never one for censorship, but I do believe we are entitled to being able to filter the leisure content we don't want to see. So, this results in the following policy:

    I'll do my level best to warn you, the viewer, at the beginning of the episode, what's likely to come up.
    A great example is something like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which had some passages describing natives of various places in a fashion I'd charitably describe as unkindly.
    In cases where something sneaks up on me unwarned, I will be reading the content unedited, with my sincerest apologies for the lack of active warning.

All that said, I'm gonna cover my bases with some common warnings that have come up often in books I've read before:

    Descriptions of "savage natives"
    Various racial slurs, unkind terms, and/or Descriptions of groups that have taken on a worse connotation
    General mistreatment and misrepresentation of cultures

Generally speaking, if something I'm reading is on the page? Don't expect me to have opinions aligning with it. We're here to have fun, not disparage people!

Want to grab the book to read along with us? check it out here, free of charge!

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29768 (Astounding Stories, August 1930)

Have a book to request? Maybe some chats to chit? Finally interested in that bread I bake? drop by the discord!

https://www.discord.gg/PBZNsjn

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https://www.twitch.tv/glacier_nester/