Wednesday, January 25, 2012

3 stories

None particularly strong. I liked "The Beautiful People" best among this lot.
  1. Robert Bloch's "The Beautiful People" (B); download; Best-Seller Mystery Magazine, July 1960; non-genre: An "ugly" but rich woman with serious inferiority complex contrives to get a handsome playboy & childhood love in marriage. But the man cannot stop looking at other women, eventually bringing in the wife's wrath...

    A lot of story text is devoted to the beauty of a human face, & social advantage or disadvantage it brings.

    Among the stories in the classics section of Ellen Datlow's Sci Fiction.
  2. [ss] L Sprague de Camp's "The Reluctant Shaman" (B); Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1947; humor: Some "stone throwing" sprites normally found near some native American tribes are "helping" a businessman & his neighbors. Chaos reins.

    Collected in: "The Best of L Sprague de Camp".
  3. [novelette] Seth Dickinson's "The Immaculate Conception of Private Ritter" (B); download; Asimov's web site (2012?): A human army unit, on a genocide mission to other human inhabited worlds, comprises of confused zombies. This is the story of one of the zombies, Private Keshaun Ritter, learning some of her personal history.

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