User:Allynh
What I'm doing here
In August of 2008 I posted a question on Tor.com about a short story I was looking for, and because of the power of L-Space I got an answer right away.
In my quest to rediscover the books I read in my high school library I used isfdb on many occasions. As I mentioned in the Tor post:
- It was only anthologized once in a retrospective of Amazing Stories, in the mid 80s, so I never stumbled across it again. What is strange, is that I've been searching on key words for years, "chrysalis" included, and I never saw the Bradbury story listed until now. I have all the "chrysalis" short stories published in book form before the 70s, the ones that would have been in my high school library.
I never found Bradbury's "Chrysalis" when I searched isfdb in the past because "S is for Space" had not been broken down by contents until recently. At least that is what I guess happened. Over the years I bought every anthology or collection that had "Chrysalis" as a short story title trying to find my story, so now I'm trying to update what I can on isfdb so that other people can find those missing stories that they are looking for without having to buy large numbers of books. (Not that there is anything wrong with buying large numbers of books, but I digress.)
- There are a number of collections/anthologies I hope to add/update that I have found along the way as well.
- I need to look at ways of adding tags or description to the story entries to help on the search.
For example, I did not know about "The People Stories" by Zenna Henderson until NESFA and SFBC reprinted them. I would have loved her stuff as a kid. At present there is nothing on her isfdb entries to help find her stories if I searched on psychic powers, etc...
I usually locate older books by buying books that I do remember and then using the ads on the dust cover or back pages to track down other books. As an example, I found the A. M. Lightner books when I bought the Sutton books. I could not remember author or title so this is what I searched on over the decades until I stumbled on the Lightner books:
- I remembered a novel where there was an alien planet in orbit around a white dwarf star. The star would nova on a regular basis increasing the carbon content of the soil. There was a primate on the planet that only became sentient when the soil could grow a specific berry that increased their intelligence. A space patrol was tasked with determining if the primates were sentient and one guy found carved golden horns from the local unicorn equivalent. The unicorn's horn only grew out golden because of eating the berries that also made the primates sentient. The space patrol guy loaded up his ship with primates and unicorns to protect them from the settlers who might wipe them out before their status as sentient was confirmed.
That's all that I remembered and I searched for decades on key words like "white dwarf" and "unicorn", the trouble is when I finally found the books they didn't list the story that way. Just as with "Chrysalis" and "Some words with a Mummy", I remembered the story I "read" not what was on the page.
BTW, the book was "The Space Ark", and I ended up finding most of her books a few years back.
Someone mentioned Ray Brown in passing, that he wrote about the Reformed Sufi Church--Panshin is the only SF author I know who clearly writes Sufi style stories--so I had to track them down. Looking at the Lightner books now, the Bradbury, and the others that fill my library, I realized that there is a wonderfully subversive thread running through all the books I have. I love that. I want more.
I hope that by making a list of authors and stories that I'm trying to track down--or am working on--that people will see a common thread and suggest the odd author that no one is reprinting that I've missed along the way. Feel free to drop a note on my talk page if you know some author I should track down. Thanks...--Allynh 03:35, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
Authors I'm working on
- Ray Brown
- Donald Keith
- Jean and Jeff Sutton
- A. M. Lightner