The Blogging Life – My Experiences With WordPress, Part Two

In Part One, I recounted the rise and demise of my first blog, SFreaders.com, between 2007 and 2009. I made the first post to that blog on May 3rd, 2007, and the final post on October 29th, 2007, so I was actually only posting for a few days short of six months. The blog itself lasted for almost two years before being taken permanently offline by the collapse of the webhost, Centrica Hosting, in early 2009. So, for the last year and a half of its life, it was actually inactive, with no posts being made to it at all.

In stark contrast to SFreaders.com, I\’d set up this blog (originally titled the GrumpyOldGeek blog – it\’s had a couple of different names over the years before settling finally on its current title Tales of Time & Space back in 2012) on WordPress.com at the exact same time as SFreaders.com, but solely for the purpose of getting the API key for the self-hosted blog. Once that was done, the WordPress.com blog became pretty much irrelevant, as I was focusing on my much more powerful, more flexible SFreaders.com blog, my only real (blogging) concern at that time. So I walked off and left the WordPress.com blog without so much as making a post.

Actually, that\’s not entirely true. I did make a couple of posts to the blog, the first one on June 3rd, 2007, exactly a month after my first post to SFreaders.com, and a second six days later, on June 9th. But these posts were insubstantial, silly, lame, half-assed, basically just ANY old rubbish to get something up on this blog. Then I walked off again, and didn\’t come back to my WordPress.com blog for nearly three years.

When I did come back to blogging again, it had been almost exactly four years since my son had died, and I thought that I\’d take another crack at it. However, I was unwilling (luckily, as it turned out) to go down the self-hosted route again. But I had this old blog sitting there on WordPress.com, totally unused for almost three years. Why not make use of it? So I made one post in February 2010, two posts in March and one in April, the last three all part of the lengthy \”It\’s A Geek\’s Life\” trilogy, and certainly far more substantial and interesting efforts than the two pieces of fluff that I\’d posted back in June 2007. Certainly the fact that those three posts were far superior to the first two indicated favourable things about my improving state of mind. But I was still suffering badly from depression, and having major problems focusing and committing myself to anything. It was obvious that I was still deep in the bereavement phase (still am today, more than nine years after his death – I just handle it much better these days), and it was still too soon after the death of my son to commit myself to something like this.

So I disappeared AGAIN, this time not returning to my WordPress.com blog until more than two and a half years later, in December 2012. This time I was stronger, I was ready for it, and I was back to stay. I renamed and refocused the blog, and started posting regularly (I haven\’t missed posting at least once a month since December 2012), and effectively turned Tales of Time & Space into my main blog, despite running a number of other blogs \”on the side\”. I have one other blog on WordPress.com, three on Blogger, and my second self-hosted WordPress blog, SF Universe, which I started around the same time as I relaunched this one, back at the end of 2012.

Tales of Time & Space and SF Universe are multitopic blogs, and all posts made to one are also made to the other, essentially providing a back-up of the blog posts. The other four blogs are all single-topic blogs. I STILL don\’t trust self-hosted blogs, after what happened to SFreaders.com back in 2009, so I regard this one to be my main blog, rather than SF Universe, which I can experiment with at my leisure. That\’s quite a change from the rather dismissive way that I used to regard this blog, but I\’ve learned from my past mistakes, and I won\’t repeat them again. This blog is now my main blog because it provides security, and will always be here, even if the unthinkable happens again, and history repeats itself with my second self-hosted blog also vanishing without warning. A blog on a big platform like WordPress.com is highly unlikely to just up and disappear on me someday, the way some self-hosted blogs do, although Dreamhost, the ISP with whom I have my hosting plan, is a reputable company who have been around a few years. No more cowboy resellers for me! I\’ve learned a LOT over the past few years.

All of which now brings me back full circle, to the first paragraph of Part One, where I said that I had found all the back-up files and databases from my old SFreaders.com blog. Well, the good news is that I\’ve decided to import all of the posts from SFreaders.com, rather than leaving them to gather cobwebs on my hard drive. These posts really should see the light of day again, despite the fact that they are quite different in look and feel to the other posts on this blog – the posts to SFreaders.com during those early days tended to be short, snappy, single subject posts, often just casual throwaway observations and comments, and totally unlike the much longer, more detailed posts that I tend to make these days. It\’ll be interesting to compare them.

I\’ve already tried importing the database, but that didn\’t work – those old WordPress databases are .sql format, and incompatible with the modern .xml databases – so the only way now is to import all of the posts, one at a time (there\’s only forty-two of them), and altering the dates so they are archived with the same dates that they originally appeared on SFreaders.com (I\’ve already started on this). If this works, I might even start digging out posts from other defunct blogs that I\’ve had over the years, and import those as well. Tales of Time & Space will become the \”One Blog to Rule Them All\”. 🙂

After all these years, it\’ll be extremely gratifying to see the posts from SFreaders.com resurrected and integrated as part of Tales of Time & Space. And one thing\’s for sure – the archives for 2007 will definitely become a lot more interesting and overcrowded than they are at present. 🙂

The Blogging Life – My Experiences With WordPress, Part One

I was rooting through the archives the other night, looking at stuff I have squirrelled away in old folders on my hard drive, and I came upon some long-forgotten, but very interesting bits \’n\’ bobs. One folder in particular stood out, a big one, with multiple sub-folders, containing all the back-up material that I\’d saved from my very first, original, self-hosted WordPress blog, SFreaders.com.

These brought back lots of memories of my initial stuttering beginnings with blogging, and as it\’s been a long time since I\’ve done any kind of personal history posts, I thought I\’d cook up a lengthy two-parter about my experiences with blogging on the WordPress platform, both on my self-hosted sites and here on WordPress.com. Here we go with Part One of Two…

Once upon a time, way back in the Jurassic era (beginning of May 2007), I started up SFreaders.com, my first blog. It was the first time I\’d ever had a proper presence online that wasn\’t merely a collection of three or four naff web pages on a free webhosting service. I\’d had a couple of those in the previous five years or so, but they never went anywhere, certainly never more than a tiny website with a handful of drab, linked pages. The lack of webspace and options on those sites didn\’t allow for very much more.

So, I decided to go looking for something a bit more serious, not that I had the slightest clue what I was supposed to be looking for or what to do with it when I found it. All I knew was that I needed something a lot more substantial, one of those paid hosting plans with all the bells and whistles. Purely by chance, during April 2006, I managed to buy a ridiculously cheap hosting plan on Ebay.co.uk, from some outfit called Centrica Hosting, who were resellers leasing server space from Heart Internet, one of the UK\’s bigger ISPs. This was to lead to the very start of my first blogging experience.

Unlike the previous free ISPs I\’d been with, which only gave you a tiny amount of webspace, to which you could ftp a few web pages and pictures, this new, paid hosting plan delivered the full range of services that these packages usually offer. To say that I was a bit overwhelmed would be a complete understatement. At that time, I only knew a smattering of basic HTML and CSS, picked up almost accidentally over several years of pottering around on the free websites. All of this new-fangled stuff about PHP, MySQL databases and dynamic webpages was total greek to me.

My initial intention had been to ignore all of that stuff altogether and just continue as before, sticking up a few static webpages and making use only of the unlimited webspace and unlimited bandwidth, which would allow the static website to expand and develop slowly, growing over a long period of time, without fear of running out of space. But I was no expert at HTML or CSS, just a competent beginner, learning as I went along, and coding all those pages by hand was pretty darned slow. It was taking me forever to get even a relatively small website together on my hard drive, to upload to the webhost\’s server.

In addition, it did seem to be an awful waste not to use at least some of the multitude of extras included in the new hosting plan. So I began exploring the options on the webhost, although I really didn\’t understand too much at first. But a bit of searching around the web and reading up of various computer magazines, and I was starting to get up to speed on things. Just by coincidence, at the very same time, I was reading an article in a computer magazine about something called \”blogging\” and something else called \”WordPress\”, which was supposed to be easy to install and maintain, and apparently a much easier and more automatic way of getting online and maintaining a site than coding by hand. This article changed everything for me.

Up until that point, I had settled firmly on starting up a static website. I was literally only minutes away from doing so when I read this article. I was actually on my webhost, looking at all the options, getting ready to start setting up the file structure and ftp the HTML pages and images to the site, when I spotted something that was pretty much what we now call \”One-Click Installs\”, or, at least, the 2007 equivalent. And one of the options was to install this WordPress thingy that I\’d just been reading about. So right out of the blue, at the very last minute, I changed my mind and decided to try this instead.

Following all the (admittedly simple) instructions, in a mere few minutes, I had a shiny new blog installed and up-and-running. This was the evening of May 3rd, 2007, and within the following half hour, I had my first post and an About page up on SFreaders.com. I was well chuffed, and totally gobsmacked at how easy it was. During the next few days, I set up a few more Pages on my blog, and I began posting frequently and regularly from that point onwards. Over the next six months, from May 2007 up until October 2007, I put up a total of forty-two posts and a bunch of pages. I had my first serious and (relatively) long-lasting online presence at last.

Why did I make the last minute switch to a blog, when I had been for so long set on having a static website? Aside from the obvious fact, of course, that I hadn\’t known anything about blogging or WordPress right up until I read that article? Well, I wanted a site up online fast and easily, and the article had convinced me that I could do just that with WordPress, which proved to be definitely true. It would\’ve taken me months to get up a decent static site, at the snail\’s pace that I was handcoding pages. Likewise, the article had convinced me that I could post content and maintain my blog much more easily than I could a static website. Again, this was (sorta) true, at least on the posting side of things. Thirdly, I wanted something a bit more interactive than a static site, so the idea of comments also attracted me, and they seemed to be a major plus, at least in theory, but didn\’t exactly work out that way in reality.

It wasn\’t all plain sailing. Firstly, my big hopes for comments and interactivity ended up a huge disappointment. Despite a half-dozen replies to posts over the six months, there was virtually zero interactivity with others on my blog. The comments thing proved to have been a complete waste of time. The blog might as well have been a static site. A secondary drawback was that I simply could not resist the obsessive urge to tinker with the appearance of my blog – the themes, the CSS, everything – and I often spent far more time tinkering than I did actually posting content. In many cases, I just could not leave well enough alone, and ended up making a mess of things on quite a few occasions. I knew just enough to be dangerous.

Thirdly, and most seriously, once I started blogging, I simply stopped learning about web design. Back when I was hand-coding web pages, I was constantly learning more about HTML and CSS, picking up something new with each new page that I coded. But I\’m essentially a lazy git, and once I started using WordPress, with the exception of occasionally fiddling with the CSS of a theme, my hand-coding experience came to a grinding halt. Why bother with all that learning code carry-on when WordPress did everything for me pretty much automatically? Seemed like a great idea at the time, but in the long run, it was extremely detrimental to my learning web design, as I\’ve advanced very little in all the years I\’ve been blogging. I often think of how far along I\’d be now if I\’d stuck with designing static webpages instead of switching to WordPress.

Overall, however, installing WordPress had proven to be a positive experience, and had kick-started my first serious, regular, online presence. As I\’ve already said, for six months I posted regularly, very regularly at first, sometimes five or six times a week. But the frequency decreased as time went on, down to once or twice a week, until, at almost forty posts, I hit a brick wall. I didn\’t make a single post for three weeks, just seemed to lose interest, run out of juice. I came back after the three week break and made three more posts and then gave up on blogging completely.

Why? Well, I think the main reason for this happening was simply bad timing. I simply should not have started a blog when I did. I could not have chosen a worse time. My teenage son had died in April 2006, slightly more than a year before I started my self-hosted blog. I really was in no fit state to run a blog or anything else at that time in my life, and it was remarkable that I was even able to get one started at all, let alone keep it running for six months. It was completely the wrong time to attempt such a venture. My mental state was very fragile indeed, and I was completely numb with grief after the death of my son. I was almost a zombie, totally at sea and basically existing day-to-day on autopilot. Everything that I did during that period was pretty much automatic, and I was in a permanent daze, as though I was seeing everything through a dense fog. I really don\’t remember very clearly much of what happened in the first year or so after my son\’s death.

But as the months went on, the nature of my grief and mental state changed. Instead of being numb and in a permanent daze, my head began to clear, and the pain flooded in. The raw grief was indescribable. The waves of severe depression began to hit me, one after another after another, and I felt as though I was drowning. My mental health crumbled, and with it my physical health also deteriorated markedly. I had stopped looking after myself, and I lost interest in pretty much everything, both offline and online, including blogging. It was a truly dark time in my life, and it was during these months that I drifted away from blogging, at first gradually, and then totally.

So I backed away from the blog, fully intending the break to be temporary, with the intention of returning to it when my mental and physical health had improved. For the next year or more, I did absolutely nothing with it, aside from coming online occasionally to check for any new comments. Then, one day early in 2009, I came online and SFreaders.com was gone, disappeared completely. The reseller that I had bought my hosting package from had gone bust (I should\’ve guessed that it was too good to be true), and taken my blog (and I dare say quite a few others) with it. All gone, disappeared, kaput, without so much as an email or any kind of prior warning.

I was gutted that my lovely blog and all that hard work had just disappeared into the aether without warning, but was fortunate that I\’d had the foresight to backup the database files and pretty much everything else on my hard drive several months before. Still, it left a thoroughly unpleasant taste in my mouth regarding self-hosted blogs, a distrust that persists to this very day.

So ended SFreaders.com, and my very first experience with blogging or running any kind of online site for a prolonged period. Next time out, my return to blogging on WordPress.com…

To Be Continued…

EMPIRE by H. Beam Piper

TITLE: EMPIRE
AUTHOR: H. Beam Piper
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Collection
FORMAT: Paperback
PUBLISHER: Ace Books, New York, 1981 (ISBN: 0-441-20557-7-250)

CONTENTS:

  • Terro-Human Future History Chronology
  • Introduction, by John F. Carr
  • The Edge of the Knife
  • A Slave is a Slave
  • Ministry of Disturbance
  • The Return (with John J. McGuire)
  • The Keeper

Last time out, I featured FEDERATION, the first of two collections gathering together the short fiction of H. Beam Piper\’s classic Terro-Human Future History cycle. This time it\’s the turn of EMPIRE, the second collection of stories set in that future history.

The book starts with an excellent three-page chronology of Piper\’s Terro-Human Future History, put together from dates, events and other data spread over all of Piper\’s short fiction and novels. This is followed by yet another fascinating and detailed ten-page Introduction by Piper scholar John F. Carr, which gives a lot of useful additional details on the future history as related in the five stories in this collection.

The five stories in the FEDERATION collection are from the earlier phase of Piper\’s Future History, whereas the five stories in EMPIRE cover the later stages of that Future History, with the exception of The Edge of the Knife, which is unique in that it is set in the more contemporary timeframe of the early 1970s, pre-dating the formation of the Federation, and thus placing the story effectively outside of the future history itself.

I haven\’t read this collection for years, but I have fond memories of The Keeper, Ministry of Disturbance, and The Edge of the Knife, although I remember very little about either A Slave is a Slave or The Return (which are lined up for a much-needed re-read in the not-too-distant future). If they turn out to be even half as good as the other stories, that will be the cream on top of the cake, as far as I\’m concerned.

The Keeper, in particular, is very moody and atmospheric, and is one of my favourite Piper stories, in my opinion bettered by only Omnilingual (I\’ve always found it funny that my two favourite stories in Piper\’s Future History chronology are, by their positions in that future history, the very first, Omnilingual, and the very last, The Keeper). The Keeper allows us the only available brief and tantalizing glimpses into the mysterious far future of the Fifth Empire, and is also the only known story written by Piper which is set beyond the end of the First Empire. The rest of the existing Terro-Human Future History Chronology doesn\’t go beyond the First Empire, which makes The Keeper seem strange and out of place compared to the other stories, until we accept that it is the only surviving proof that Piper intended to write other stories extending his future history far into the distant future.

Aside from the few snippets of background information contained in The Keeper, we know absolutely nothing about Piper\’s plans for developing the details of these distant far-future eras of his chronology. According to Jerry Pournelle, who had a lot of contact with Piper back in the day, he had certainly planned something much bigger. Pournelle has always asserted that he had seen Piper\’s folders full of extensive notes and details of a much longer and more complex future history chronology. Tragically, those notes were lost after Piper\’s suicide, and all that we\’re left with is a big bunch of \”maybes\” and \”what-might-have-beens\”, only too aware that the future history material which (fortunately) still exists in print, as good as it is, gives us only a tiny portion of the greatness that might have been.

As it stands, EMPIRE is a strong collection, and already contains at least three of my favourite Piper stories, plus the excellent chronology and introduction. And as such, it\’s definitely well worth adding to any aspiring SF reader\’s bookshelf.

Yet another very good H. Beam Piper collection.

CLASSIC TUNES: \”Tighten Up\” by Archie Bell & the Drells

I\’ve been sitting back on a quiet Saturday evening, chillin\’ out and listening to some good music. Playing right now, all the way from 1968, it\’s one of the great funk classics, \”Tighten Up\”, by another of my favourite groups, Archie Bell & the Drells.

This is one of the early true funk masterpieces, with some great grooves and incredible dance rhythms. Aside from Bell\’s voice, the one thing that really stands out for me in the tune is the fantastic bass rhythm, followed closely by the funky lead. Everything that makes funk great is present in this song. I defy anybody with an ounce of rhythm in their body not to start tapping their feet or shaking their booty when \”Tighten Up\” comes on the radio.

I usually associate the emergence of funk with the early-1970s, but there was a period in the late 1960s where the soul music of the earlier era was beginning to give rise to a more up-tempo funky sound, epitomised my the likes of Archie and his Drells, James Brown and others. The end of the Sixties and start of the Seventies saw the evolution of soul into funk, and then into a funky disco sound that was to be the vanguard for the coming disco movement of the next decade. It was an incredible era for music.

The version that I am listening to now is the LP version, which is just over three minutes long. There are two different versions of the song, Parts 1 and 2, which are the first and last tracks respectively on the album that I\’m listening to now, ARCHIE BELL & THE DRELLS: THE PLATINUM COLLECTION. This one features twenty of the Drell\’s best tracks, and \”Tighten Up\” is by no means the only good track on it. The album can be found here on Amazon.com, and here on Amazon.uk.

Here also is a link to a YouTube video of a combined version of Archie Bell & the Drells – \”Tighten Up\” Parts 1 & 2. At about six minutes long, it\’s well worth listening to.

CLASSIC TUNES: \”Tighten Up\” by Archie Bell & the Drells

I\’ve been sitting back on a quiet Saturday evening, chillin\’ out and listening to some good music. Playing right now, all the way from 1968, it\’s one of the great funk classics, \”Tighten Up\”, by another of my favourite groups, Archie Bell & the Drells.

This is one of the early true funk masterpieces, with some great grooves and incredible dance rhythms. Aside from Bell\’s voice, the one thing that really stands out for me in the tune is the fantastic bass rhythm, followed closely by the funky lead. Everything that makes funk great is present in this song. I defy anybody with an ounce of rhythm in their body not to start tapping their feet or shaking their booty when \”Tighten Up\” comes on the radio.

I usually associate the emergence of funk with the early-1970s, but there was a period in the late 1960s where the soul music of the earlier era was beginning to give rise to a more up-tempo funky sound, epitomised my the likes of Archie and his Drells, James Brown and others. The end of the Sixties and start of the Seventies saw the evolution of soul into funk, and then into a funky disco sound that was to be the vanguard for the coming disco movement of the next decade. It was an incredible era for music.

The version that I am listening to now is the LP version, which is just over three minutes long. There are two different versions of the song, Parts 1 and 2, which are the first and last tracks respectively on the album that I\’m listening to now, ARCHIE BELL & THE DRELLS: THE PLATINUM COLLECTION. This one features twenty of the Drell\’s best tracks, and \”Tighten Up\” is by no means the only good track on it. The album can be found here on Amazon.com, and here on Amazon.uk.

Here also is a link to a YouTube video of a combined version of Archie Bell & the Drells – \”Tighten Up\” Parts 1 & 2. At about six minutes long, it\’s well worth listening to.

Classic Tunes: \”Separate Ways\” by Journey

I\’m sitting back at the moment, relaxing, and listening to one of the greatest arena rock albums of all time, the classic 1983 six-times platinum masterpiece, FRONTIERS, by US band Journey, which came out on the Columbia Records label.

This is one of my all-time favourite rock albums, and is, in my opinion, Journey\’s strongest album, surpassing even their previous album, the 1981 classic nine-times platinum ESCAPE.

There isn\’t a single bad song on FRONTIERS (even the \”weaker\” songs are good), but one of the best is the song that is currently playing, the first track on the album, \”Separate Ways\”. This is a truly powerful rock song, pounding drums, driving keyboards and guitars, and above it all, Steve Perry\’s gorgeous, soaring vocals. Sheer bliss!

This is an excellent, strong intro to a fantastic rock album. It\’s also gratifying to know that it ISN\’T all downhill from here, and that the rest of the album is just as good.

FEDERATION by H. Beam Piper

TITLE: FEDERATION
AUTHOR: H. Beam Piper
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Collection
FORMAT: Paperback
PUBLISHER: Ace Books, New York, 1981, ISBN: 0-441-23189-6-295)

Contents:

  • Preface, by Jerry Pournelle
  • Introduction, by John F. Carr
  • Omnilingual
  • Naudsonce
  • Oomphel in the Sky
  • Graveyard of Dreams
  • When in the Course-

The book starts with the brief Preface by Jerry Pournelle, a short but fitting tribute to Piper and his writing. This is followed by the lengthy twenty-page Introduction by John Carr, which is a much more detailed and even more fascinating essay on the life and writings of Piper.

The five stories themselves are from H. Beam Piper\’s acclaimed TerroHuman Future History cycle, one of the most complex and detailed future histories in science fiction literature. This collection, Federation, is made up of stories from the earlier stages of that Future History, and a later collection, Empire, completes the stories from the later part of the cycle.

There are certainly some very good stories in this collection, but the stand-out for me is definitely Omnilingual, which I first read a long time ago, way back in my teens. Along with He Walked Around the Horses (which isn\’t in this collection, and isn\’t part of the Future History), this has always been one of my favourite pieces of SF short fiction, and I regard both Omnilingual and He Walked Around the Horses as his two best short stories.

As far as I\’m concerned, the collection is worth buying just for Omnilingual alone. But the other four stories are nothing to turn your nose up at either. This is H. Beam Piper we\’re talking about here, and he simply did not write bad SF stories.

Very good collection.

Classic Tunes: \”Disorder\” by Joy Division

I\’m sitting here on New Year\’s Eve, with barely ten minutes to go before 2014 is upon us, listening to some excellent music. At the moment, it\’s Joy Division\’s classic post-punk anthem 1979 debut album, Unknown Pleasures, released on the fledgling Factory Records indie label.

Playing right now is the first track, and one of my favourite tracks on the album, \”Disorder\”. This one sets the tone perfectly for the rest of the album. It\’s fast and emotionally charged, with Bernard Sumner\’s aggressive, distorted guitars assaulting us in powerful, short riffs, Peter Hook\’s driving, pulsating base providing the rhythm, backed up by Stephen Morris\’ rhythmic, almost robotic, pounding drums. And over everything, Ian Curtis\’ powerful, monotone baratone voice driving the song forward.

This deliciously chaotic tune is a great way to begin such an innovative, classic album. Joy Division, despite their tragically short career (only two studio albums, a live album and a handful of singles), are one of my favourite groups of all time, true pioneers of the post-punk/proto-goth scene. I can listen to this song (and the whole album) over and over again without ever getting fed up with it.

I feel a review of Unknown Pleasures coming up!

VOYAGERS IN TIME edited by Robert Silverberg

In my last post I commented that I\’d recently bought a couple of nice old SF anthologies from Amazon UK. I made a few comments about one of the anthologies, TRIPS IN TIME and gave a contents listing for it. Here\’s the same routine for the other anthology, which was published ten years earlier, but can be considered a \”companion\” anthology, from a thematic viewpoint, since both books contain short stories about time travel. The second of the two anthologies is:

TITLE: VOYAGERS IN TIME – Twelve Stories of Science Fiction
EDITED BY: Robert Silverberg
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Anthology
PUBLISHER: Meredith Press, New York, 1967
FORMAT: Hardcover, 243 pages.

This anthology is a collection of more traditional (but still fun) time travel stories than those in TRIPS IN TIME. The stories in this one span a thirty year period, the earliest originally published in 1937, and the last in 1967. Here\’s a listing of the contents:

  • The Sands of Time by P. Schuyler Miller (1937)
  • …And It Comes Out Here by Lester del Rey (1950)
  • Brooklyn Project by William Tenn (1948)
  • The Men Who Murdered Mohammed by Alfred Bester (1964)
  • Time Heals by Poul Anderson (1949)
  • Wrong-Way Street by Larry Niven (1965)
  • Flux by Michael Moorcock (1963)
  • Dominoes by C. M. Kornbluth (1953)
  • A Bulletin from the Trustees by Wilma Shore (1964)
  • Traveler\’s Rest by David I. Masson (1965)
  • Absolutely Inflexible by Robert Silverberg (1956, revised version 1967)
  • THE TIME MACHINE [Chapter XI, XII – part] by H. G. Wells (1895)

This looks like another very interesting anthology of short fiction. Silverbob certainly does know how to put together a good anthology of stories. Again, some of them I remember well (Wells, Bester, Tenn, and Moorcock), others I vaguely remember (Miller, del Rey, Anderson, Niven, Kornbluth and Silverberg), and the last two I\’m not familiar with at all (Shore, Masson).

As I\’ve already said, this is a kinda/sorta \”sister\” anthology to the later TRIPS IN TIME (1977), which is a more unusual and quirky collection of time travel tales. I\’ve already read several of the stories in TRIPS IN TIME, but now I\’ve started reading some of the stories in VOYAGERS IN TIME as well. I\’m dipping in and out of both books, and it will be nice to compare the two anthologies when I\’ve finished both of them.

As usual, I\’m working my way through the stories in both books slowly, as and when I get free time to do so, and not in any kind of order. I\’ll just pick stories at random, usually with favourite authors first and working my way to least favourite or least familiar. Once I\’ve finished I\’ll start posting comments on individual stories (with the exception of the excerpts from The Time Machine, as I\’ll be reviewing the novel at some point), and comments on the two anthologies as a whole.

Classic Tunes: \”Damaged Goods\” by Gang of Four

I\’m listening to this one right now on a various artists double-CD compilation of indie music, FEAR OF MUSIC.

Damaged Goods is one of my absolute favourite Gang of Four tracks, from their first classic 1979 album ENTERTAINMENT, although it had actually appeared previously as the A-side of their legendary first single, the 1978 Damaged Goods EP, which was released on the Fast Product record label. This EP also featured the equally legendary tracks Love Like Anthrax and Armalite Rifle.

Gang of Four incorporated various other genres such as funk, reggae and dub into their stylistic repertoire, which gave a lot of added \”oomph!\” to their music. Damaged Goods is like all good punk and post-punk – angry, short, and to the point – but it is also more sophisticated than many of its punk predecessors. This track is undoubtedly one of the pivotal post-punk anthems, and had a huge impact and influence on everything that came afterwards. The sheer simplicity of the best punk and post-punk classics like this reminds me so much of the great three chord/sub three minute garage tracks of the mid-to-late 1960s, albeit with large added dollops of anger and social awareness.

My tastes in music are pretty wide-ranging and eclectic, and on occasion I like some overproduced rock, disco and dance music as much of the next guy. But there are times that I just want to have it short, raw and punchy, like Damaged Goods, New Rose, Public Image, Ever Fallen In Love or Pretty Vacant. Heady company, that, and Damaged Goods is deservedly up there among these other classic tracks.

The version I\’m listening to right now is the later re-recorded version of Damaged Goods, and the purists would undoubtedly groan and roll their eyes, and assert that the original version, and only the original version on the EP is the real Damaged Goods. And when it comes to music, I have to admit that I\’m almost always a purist myself. So I invariably hate most cover versions of classic tunes. But not on this occasion.

I actually prefer this re-recorded version, which is faster and snappier than the slower original EP version. It just seems to be that bit more angry and aggressive, a searing indictment of love and lust. And angry and aggressive is how I feel a good punk or post-punk song should be. Both versions are classic, but the newer one just edges it for me.

Like I said, the purists will surely disagree with me strongly (most of them probably foaming at the mouth), but I don\’t care! 🙂