A Song for Lya (SF) - George R. R. Martin ****

Venturing into my old SF books I discovered this classic 70s short story collection from what's described on the back as 'a new breed of science fiction writer' - though, of course, George R. R. Martin would really make his name in the field of fantasy.

There are some excellent stories here. Some are pure mood pieces, notably the opener 'With Morning Comes Mistfall' which is rather like a Somerset Maugham short story, set on a distant planet. Others have the classic twist in the tail, such as the short short 'fta' that gives a kick to the gut for that SF classic concept, hyperspace. Although the collection has very much a feel of the period - nuclear war hovers in the distant past in 'Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels', for example, and two separate stories reference Simon and Garfunkel songs - there's nothing here that doesn't hold up very well, other than a lack of female main characters. Only the closing title story, which won a Hugo Award, the wistfully thoughtful 'A Song for Lya', has a female main character, and she is not the narrator.

It says a lot for Martin's writing skills that even 'Run to Starlight', which despite being written in 1974 has the most 50s feeling characters of any story here, and centres on American football - a topic in which I have zero interest - manages to be entertaining, with the nice thought of a future Earth in contact with several intelligent alien species having to deal with the difficulties that arise from an alien team wanting to join an American football league.

All in all, a collection that has stood the passage of 40 years remarkably well.

Somewhat surprisingly, given the popularity of Game of Thrones, the book is out of print and there's no Kindle version. The cover shown here is my 1978 Coronet edition.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Search This Blog