Generations
Just took time out from reading subs to finish Le Guin's "Paradises Lost," the novella that rounds out the collection The Birthday of the World and Other Stories. Despite a little too much religion-bashing, it's as gorgeous as one might expect. I would never have expected that there was anything interesting left to say about generation starships, after the explorations that've been done of the well-worn trope (which I nonetheless quite like) of the people on the ship not knowing they're on a ship; but then, it never occurred to me that I hadn't seen a story about the middle generations of the people on a generation ship who do know they're on one. Many insights and new ways of looking at things; rich and complex. Really good stuff.
In her Introduction, Le Guin mentions Molly Gloss's The Dazzle of Day, which I've heard lots of good things about but haven't read, and Harry Martinson's Aniara, which I'd never heard of. (The ISFDB says it's a "collection of 102 poems about the runaway spaceship Aniara.") Reading the books on my to-read stack isn't supposed to generate more books to be read!
I still have one story to go in this collection, "Old Music and the Slave Women"; I've held off on it because it apparently goes with the stories in Four Ways to Forgiveness, and I've only read one of those four stories because I've never seen a copy of that book and it's out of print. Oh, hey, Powells has it! Cool. Okay, time to order more books, sigh.
