The Seeds of Time: Classic Science Fiction

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Pillar to Post": a future scientists' experiment results in a legless man from the present to be teleported in to a healthy body far in to the future. Understandably, the man from our time does not want to return. Does (assumed) low intelligence ever justify secondary treatment, especially if the individual is not human? Pillar to Post: Other fave - a physically disabled war veteran has his consciousness transferred via body swap to a future society as part of an experiment by said future scientist, then decides he doesn't want to leave. Funny and sad in equal measure. First published in 1956 this book brings together a collection of ten short stories that features comedy, horror, romance and even occasionally social commentary. There's no real common theme, however three of the stories are based on Mars and time travel also features heavily as does a warning for men not to under-estimate women especially the quiet ones. Each story is individual rather than being part of a whole. Time to rest - the earth has blown up and a loner wanders, not ready to settle on mars - I could feel the loneliness of the character

Meteor – a threatened species sends explorers out into space to find a new home, and the planet they find is Earth. Comedy and tragedy all rolled into one – a beautifully imaginative story, this one. Survival - a meek woman accompanies her husband into space. Everyone underestimates her, considering her to be too soft and unable to survive, but she 'showed them' - just goes to show how you cannot judge by outer appearances, people can find inner determination when they have no choice - loved the ending.

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Survival” is a brutal story that I was not expecting. Precision machined deconstruction of humanity. “Dumb Martian” is also a brutal little piece of revenge, and much like “Survival” gives us another woman who will not be cowed. “Wild Flower” is poetic and melancholy. The Seeds of Time is a collection of science fiction short stories by British writer John Wyndham, published in 1956 by Michael Joseph. The title is presumably from Macbeth, Act I Scene III. Survival: terrifying in its spare approach to unspooling a conventional thriller scenario (a disabled spacecraft is running out of food and on the edge of social collapse - then they find out the one female passenger is pregnant)

Dumb Martian": an Earthman and his Martian wife take a temporary job isolated on a moon of Jupiter. Themes are equality and (interplanetary) racism. Great story. This seems like a cliché, but it predates most of the sci-fi it brings to mind. It contrasts some very misogynistic characters with a woman who is unafraid to make and defend her choices. As it’s a survival story, she’s not the only one with difficult decisions about priorities. The punchline is humorous horror. The Seeds of Time is an expanded version of Fredric Jameson’s 1991 Wellek Library Lecture series at the University of California, Irvine. In it, he takes current discussions of postmodernity to the cutting edge. Moving on from his definitive study Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson in this next book surveys the limits in our current thinking about what Utopia, totality, innovation, feasible socialism, Second-World culture, architectural incommensurability, and Critical Regionalism might mean in the 1990s and beyond. Wyndham often (not just here) relies rather heavily on a character writing a report, diary, or letters as a handy way to explain things. Dumb Martain - a man buys a companion for his work on Jupiters moon. Just goes to show that people do not forget being mistreated and with a bit of patience we can get what we want in the end.This collection, originally published in 1956, brings together ten stories, ranging from comedy to horror, with touches of romance and occasionally social commentary built in. There’s no real common theme – this is a collection where each story is individual rather than being part of a greater whole. But most of the stories are more than strong enough to stand alone and even the weaker ones are well worth reading. Wyndham is a great storyteller and the variety in this book allows him to show off his impressive versatility. There’s a natural dumbness about Marts… They kind of non-register… Kind of like a half-robot, and dumb at that; certainly no fun.” urn:lcp:seedsoftime0000jame:epub:2f6d6aa2-b835-4ad9-8aa7-b7805fa8c4c0 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier seedsoftime0000jame Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s240bfkn2hm Invoice 1652 Isbn 023108059X Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.15 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-1300236 Openlibrary_edition

This story is another time travel piece but is much more lighthearted than Chronoclasm. What would happen if people from the future decided to turn the past into one giant theme park? How would the citizens of the past react? What I look for in sci-fi is interesting ideas (language, character development, and even plot are secondary). Wyndham delivers. A strong anti-racist, anti-slavery, pro-education, feminist story, with a battle of wits towards the end that makes it more fun than my preachy-sounding description. Cecilia Flores: found it! I asked in this group : " https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/..." and it's a short story by John Wyndham that is included in "The Seeds of Time")It becomes more existential as we learn how long Bert has been doing this and why. Is Bert still an Earthman, and if not, what is he - what can he be? Meteor plays on the notions of perception and assumption as it follows the disasterous attempt of a slow ship to colonize a far away world.

A good many of the books that feature in this weekly Friday column are found in charity shops while I’m looking for something else. So it was with this week’s featured book, or rather pile of books, by John Wyndham, who has been called the most successful British science-fiction writer after H. G. Wells. In his lifetime, Wyndham was a bestselling novelist. How many people read his novels and short stories now, I wonder?Fawleys peepholes - tourists from the future make people feel like they are living in a goldfish bowl. What can you do when you cannot touch physically? loved how they turned the tables in the end. Pillar to Post" An amputee gets body swapped with an explorer from a future and decides he likes having legs. How much of your uniqueness is in your mind? If transferred to another entity, would you still be you? There are serious, satirical, and outright comic examples of travelling to another place or time, sometimes with the intention of settling there. Wyndham is clearly against the historical human pattern of dominating and enslaving or obliterating those already there and was perhaps a multiculturalist before the word was coined: