"Try and Change the Past" by Fritz Leiber (1958)

TITLE: "Try and Change the Past" (1958)
AUTHOR: Fritz Leiber
CATEGORY: Short Story
SUB-CATEGORY: Time Travel, Temporal Paradox
SOURCE: TRIPS IN TIME edited by Robert Silverberg (Wildside Press, 1977)
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: Astounding, March 1958

Okay, I'll just start picking stories at random from the two Robert Silverberg edited anthologies that I've been reading. The first one is from TRIPS IN TIME, and is "Try and Change the Past" by Fritz Leiber.

In the never-ending temporal conflict between the Snakes and the Spiders, one particularly shifty member of the Snakes (a well-deserved description, in the case of this dude) gets the bright idea of illicitly using his side's time travel facilities to go back and change his own personal history, so that he doesn't die and end up fighting in this damned war. Unfortunately for him, he ends up finding out the hard way that the four-dimensional spacetime universe has its own Law of the Conservation of Reality, and doesn't like things to be changed, no siree.

"Try and Change the Past" is a clever and quite amusing story set during the Change War milieu of Leiber's classic time travel/temporal paradox novel THE BIG TIME. The story was first published in the March 1958 edition of Astounding, at the same time that THE BIG TIME was being serialized in the March and April 1958 editions of Galaxy magazine.

I've always enjoyed Leiber's writing, both SF and fantasy (despite the fact that I'm not a huge fan of fantasy in general), and THE BIG TIME and its Change War setting has always been a favourite of mine. This particular short story, while I certainly wouldn't rank it among my "most favourite short stories of all time", is still an enjoyable and worthy addition to the Change War universe.

Rated: 3.0 out of 5.0

TRIPS IN TIME edited by Robert Silverberg

Recently I bought a couple of nice old SF anthologies from Amazon UK. For my first proper post, I've decided to recommend one of those classic SF anthologies and list the contents. The first of the two is:

TITLE: TRIPS IN TIME - Nine Stories of Science Fiction
EDITED BY: Robert Silverberg
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Anthology
PUBLISHER: Wildside Press, 1977
FORMAT: Trade paperback, 152 pages.

The anthology is a collection of quirky time travel stories, which span a thirty-five year period, the earliest being originally published in 1941, and the last in 1976. Here's a listing of the contents:

• An Infinite Summer by Christopher Priest (1976)
• The King's Wishes by Robert Sheckley (1953)
• Manna by Peter Phillips (1949)
• The Long Remembering by Poul Anderson (1957)
• Try and Change the Past by Fritz Leiber (1958)
• Divine Madness by Roger Zelazny (1966)
• Mugwump 4 by Robert Silverberg (1959)
• Secret Rider by Marta Randall (1976)
• The Seesaw by A. E. van Vogt (1941)

This looks like a very interesting anthology of short fiction. Some of these stories I remember well as old favourites (the Priest and Leiber), others I vaguely remember (Sheckley, Anderson, Zelazny, van Vogt, Silverberg), and the rest I'm not familiar with at all (Phillips, Randall).

Apparently this is a kinda/sorta "sister" anthology to an earlier one, VOYAGERS IN TIME (1967), which is a more traditional/typical collection of time travel tales. That's the other paper book I mentioned, and I'll get to that anthology once I've finished with this one. It will be nice to compare the two collections of short stories.

I'm looking forward to working my way through TRIPS IN TIME (however slowly, and most likely not in order of the contents listing), and will make a short progress report here on the blog as I finish each story.

Welcome to Science Fiction Reader

Welcome to the new Science Fiction Reader blog.

This blog is focused solely on science fiction literature, and is intended to be a review and recommendations showcase for the best SF stories that I've come across over the years, as well as any new material that I happen to read. As such, the nature of the blog posts will be very subjective, focused on what I like, rather than made up from lists of mainstream "Best-Sellers".

I see this as a Very Good Thing. There are numerous blogs and websites "out there" reviewing the best of mainstream SF&F, and I intend this site to be something completely different. My own tastes in SF are heavily biased towards short fiction and older/classic SF, so those tastes will be reflected in the posts that I make here. I'm very widely read in older SF, and have an enormous collection of SF novels, individual author short story collections, and anthologies of short fiction by a range of authors, some of them very old and remembered only by a few of the "wrinklies" out there. So there will be no shortage of material to review.

I also have some truly eclectic and obscure tastes when it comes to older SF, so there will be quite a few posts spotlighting "forgotten" gems from the earlier days of the genre, as I attempt to bring them not only to the attention of the younger generation of SF readers who have never seen these stories before, but also to jog the memories of older readers who might have read some of these stories way back at the dawn of time.

As for more modern SF, I'm a huge fan of Hard SF, Classic Space Opera, and their modern offspring, New Space Opera. I absolutely LOVE New Space Opera! It's easily my favourite sub-genre of modern SF. So there will be quite a few posts featuring some of the best new releases in New Space Opera novels and short fiction.

Okay, I'm off now to do some reading. I'll not be making many reviews if I sit around here all day yapping. :)