Vintage Sci-Fi Month in January!

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Yep, it's my favorite January event, the Vintage Sci-Fi Not-A-Challenge at Little Red Reviewer!   I'm pretty sure this will be my fourth year participating, and I always have fun with it.  Red says:


If you could ask your great grandparents what their life was like when they were growing up, you would, right?  If you could go back in time and see what your country and your family were like before social media took over the universe, you’d be interesting in seeing what the world was like, right?

This January,  you can.  This January, I invite you to travel through time with me.  Travel into the past,  look into the youthful eyes of your great grandparents. See what came before so we could have what we have now.
Ok, maybe not time travel exactly. . .  but sort of.
Everything comes from somewhere. You came from your parents, duh.  But who are the parents of your favorite science fiction books? I’ll tell you:  the parents of your favorite science fiction books are the books that author read to be inspired and to dream.  And those books have parents too.  If you don’t like me using the word “book parents” here, how about “the author’s influences”?  Something they were influenced and inspired by to create something new and modern.
By reading older fiction, you get to see how that fiction progressed to get to where it is today. You get to experience the family tree, as it were, of speculative fiction.
To learn more, click on “Vintage Sci-Fi Not-A-Challenge” tab up top.  This is not a reading challenge. You do not have to do anything.  You can read one book or ten. You can listen to a radio broadcast, you can watch and old movie or old TV shows.  You can post a comment, a few sentences, a full on book review, a video blog post, you can just lurk if you want.  There is one rule:  what you read/listen to/view/ discuss should be older than me.  If it was born before 1979 it’s fair game for Vintage Month.

I've been collecting a few books to read for this event.  I know I want to read Clifford Simak's They Walked Like Men, and after I read Leigh Brackett's Black Amazon of Mars last year, my brother lent me a couple of Brackett collections.  Then, the other day I went to the library, and may have gone a little overboard.  I found a volume of three early Heinlein stories, a collection of pre-Fahrenheit 451 stories by Bradbury that show him working on the ideas, and a collection of Philip K. Dick that includes Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik--so one re-read and one new.  (I also found Octavia Butler's Dawn, which looks pretty good, but is not officially 'vintage.')

So dig through your piles of old SF books and join me for a month of fun!

Comments

  1. Andrea JohnsonDecember 2, 2016 at 7:03 PM

    Thrilled you'll be along for the ride again! I'm not familiar with Simak's "The Walked Like Men", but I adore his novel "Waystation". I keep hearing great things about "Ubik", I'm looking forward to your thoughts on that one.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanDecember 2, 2016 at 9:14 PM

    I loved Waystation last year! And I have no idea what Ubik is like at all--I only know that it's one of the more famous titles. Looking forward to it!

    ReplyDelete

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