I have recently moved to a new neighborhood and I was slightly put off by the local bookstore...
Both of these lapses are unfortunate and have been corrected!!!
I found this gem in their recent arrivals section (sitting on the counter waiting to be shelved). I had hoped that it would be a cool collection of some old dead white guy that I needed to read to complete my conquest of all sci-fi before I die.
What I found was infinitely more wonderful and complex.
If you don't know anything about the author I suggest you Wiki him. Suffice it to say his life was fascinating.
The fiction that I have read so far has been forward-looking and the science cool and intuitive.
The majority of his Sci-Fi stories take place in his Instrumentality of Man Universe. It is a cool dystopian utopia where FTL has been conquered, no one has to work and can live four hundred years. All work is done by robots and the underpeople, who are a slave class genetically engineered from earth animals.
Suffice it to say the world is complex and amazing. I was even surprised how his female protagonists had agency and really kicked ass.
His most famous stories are; Scanners Live in Vain, The Game of Rat and Dragon, and the Dead Lady of Clown Town. (The Game features Cats that kill aliens).
I have ordered his complete collection and some related lit-crit and will be updating my progress in this space. Stay Tuned.
