We the Underpeople by Cordwainer Smith

There were 9 people present at the discussion of We The Underpeople by Cordwainer Smith. Everybody read some portion of the book. A lot of people have read some of the stories that make up We The Underpeople, and other Cordwainer Smith’s stories before, sometimes decades ago. So the discussion revolved not so much around We The Underpeople, as around Cordwainer Smith’s writing in general.

Most people in the group loved it. What they liked about Smith’s stories was their political subtext and his manner of storytelling. The latter, everybody agreed, is unusual. It seems as if Smith wasn’t so much writing novels and stories in the traditional Western sense, as creating a set of myths. People familiar with Paul

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Blood and Iron by Elizabeth Bear

Our discussion of Blood and Iron by Elizabeth Bear, held at Charles and Willie’s home, had two attendees, the smallest attendance ever. (At one meeting in the mid-90s, every single attendee apologized for skipping the previous discussion of Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories by Terry Bisson. So it is possible that we had a meeting with zero attendees, but there is no way to prove it.) Only one of us at the meeting had read the book, with the other having been too busy with a crunch situation at work. Two others in the group had read the book, including the person who recommended it, but were prevented from attending due to illness. One of these absentees emailed in comments. Blood and Iron is a contemporary urban fantasy, and the author is a recent winner of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

The following impressions of the book are distilled from emailed comments and the spoken words of the one person present at the meeting who had read the book …

“I like that it is set in the present. I like the grittiness. Best of all, NO FUZZY

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Accelerando by Charles Stross

On January 23, 2007 the FACT reading group discussed Accelerando by Charles Stross. Everybody in the reading group has read at least some part of Accelerando. About 2/3 of the people finished it. Others were planning to finish. Everybody has read Charles Stross before.

The common opinion is that Accelerando is too discontinuous to be called a novel. The stories that make up Accelerando revolve around the same set of characters, but there is no plot arch to unify them. Some readers didn’t like this. Others found unexpected advantages in this structure: it made the novel as a whole not predictable. A reader said “You had no idea where Stross was going

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Cross Plains Universe edited by Scott A. Cupp & Joe R. Lansdale

Six people gathered at Charles and Willie’s home for this meeting. Our topic was Cross Plains Universe, an anthology of stories that honor the work of Robert E. Howard. All of the authors in the book are Texans. The book was co-published by FACT and Monkeybrain and released at the 2006 World Fantasy Convention in Austin. All of us had read Robert E. Howard before, and most had read at least some of the authors whose work appears here.

The stories in the book mostly fell into a few categories: Heroic Fantasy, Westerns, and stories featuring Robert E. Howard himself. We were surprised that there were no stories about boxers or sailors, who were featured prominently in Howard’s fiction.

Three stories by relatively little-known authors were mentioned favorably by everyone at the meeting. “A Penny a Word” by Rick Klaw and Paul O. Miles is a

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