Welcome to Litsy!

This is a great read: not only the Nebula award story that gives the title to this book but also the article, essay, interview and poems. The story itself is what I think science fiction literature and art should be: a story that despite taking place in a non-familiar setting or an alien world it is still populated with people that live a life which happy moments, problems, life and death, and more, a story that has a meaning beyond the setting.

And last one:

Because they‘ve put something of themselves into books, many people who read for pleasure have a particular, often passionate sense of connection to them. A book is a thing, an artifact, not showy in its technology but complex... If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you‘re fifty, though of course you may understand it so differently that it seems you‘re reading a whole new book.

Also:

...you have to give a book your attention. You bring it alive. You can hear it only in your head. A book won‘t move your eyes for you... It won‘t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won‘t do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation.

Along the main story in this edition, there is an article titled “Staying Awake While We Read" with thoughts on corporate publishing. If we agree or not with the views expressed in it, there are some paragraphs that I loved. Here‘s one of them.

Nothing in the media provides pleasure as reliably as books do—if you like reading... And readers recognize their pleasure as different from that of simply being entertained... reading is always an act.

Just started this story and noticed the kindle edition includes some poems as well, the first of which is this one that I had to share:

The Next War

It will take place,
it will take time,
it will take life,
and waste them.

@Quasifesto found this awesome PM press deal! Get it at: https://secure.pmpress.org

https://secure.pmpress.org/ Mostly know for their (fantastic) radical titles, PM press has something for everyone, especially at a $1 a pop. I dropped $30 myself. If nothing else, the have the tagged Ursula K. Le Guin title, and a few SF anthologies containing more of her work. Also, a couple of the graphic novels I posted earlier this week. I‘m not affiliated with PM press in any way, this is just me sharing a great deal with the Littens.

The single finest, most perceptive, most gut-wrenching incandescent fucking piece of prose ever not written by somebody called Jonathan something.

"The only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving toward genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my argument by writing well."

OBF swag