worldly remains floating through networks. shut down most incoming stuff several weeks ago. mailing lists, discussion lists. too much input. material purging via ebay. helping Uncle Al get rid of all his sci-fi ‘zines from the 40’s and 50’s — he was expecting to get a dime for each copy. so far, I’m averaging $5 for each one. seems to be a market. we’ll split the profits. it’s a hell of a lot of work, scanning in the (often VERY interesting) covers, and getting it all ready for auction, but fascinating as well. wishing to have all the stories as digital pdf’s but that would require the destruction of the volume (staple bindings and fragile paper). Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Damon Knight, Lester del Rey, John Christopher, Clifford Simak, Fritz Leiber, Cyril Judd, Willie Ley, and on and on. each volume with several of these and other luminaries, cranking out their visions of the future of the burgeoning post-war science-driven society. strange planets, but familiar problems. heroes and half-naked (or half-space-suited) ladies. but always a clean future with simple solvable problems, that is, if science is brought to bear as a passive-but-dominant element of the social situation. the stories are less timeless than some works of fiction because of this expansive naivete of that time and its specific vision, but reading deeper than that, a few have substance that holds up to the 60 years fallen away from Imperial cowboy beginnings.
He had no way of knowing that just as there are winds that blow through space, so there are winds that blow through time. Such winds may be strong or weak. The strong ones are rare and seldom blow for short distances, or more of us would know about them. What they pick up is almost always whirled far into the future or the past. …
… Sometimes we may be blown about by whimsical time winds without realizing it. Memory, for example, is a tiny time breeze, so weak that it can ripple only the mind. … — Fritz Leiber