As break from another book I am reading I read the short story collection De laatste dag (with stories from The Shores of Space and Shock!) by Richard Matheson. The stories are science fiction and horror stories. Most of them seem pretty normal, taking place in the nineteen-fifties on earth, and then take a turn for the weird, horrific or futuristic.
The stories range from weird aliens on earth, strange space-travel, a 2003-way of dealing with over-population, stories dealing with identity and straight-up horror stories. The book doesn’t really show it’s age (if you ignore the smoking going on in the future). Most stories seem familiar because they have been done many times, but those were original back then.
It is a great read, a classic collection. Four out of five stars.

Another one of the writers that I know I’ll like most of the time is Ursula Le Guin. This book is not part of one of her series, but stand-alone.
The main character in this book, George Orr has noticed that some of his dreams come true. They are not predictive dreams, but they come true retroactively, changing the world to fit the dream. He gets desperate to stop the dreams and uses drugs illegally, using other people’s medical cards. The world he lives in is a dystopian future (in the 1980′s) of pollution, over-population, food- and space-shortages. He gets caught and forced into voluntary therapy. The therapist, Haber, has a machine that can force Orr to have the vivid dreams that change the world, and he uses them for his own goals. Orr wants to fight back, because the changes, while usually made in good faith, make the world a very different and not necessarily better place to live in.
I really liked this book, which was short but sweet. It explored the ethical question about knowingly changing the world, and how balance must always exist. A good, short read. Four out of five stars.

When I want to read something I am sure to enjoy, Isaac Asimov is one of the writers I can always turn to. Last year I read the first Foundation trilogy, and I found the second trilogy in my dad’s old collection (from which the first also came). I saved it, and decided to start on it this week, with Foundation’s Edge (De hoeksteen van de Foundation).
It is 498 years into Seldon’s Plan, and about a 150 years after the events of ‘Second Foundation’ and The Mule. The First Foundation has convinced itself that the Second Foundation is destroyed or nothing more than a myth. But people are getting suspicious, both in the First and Second Foundation. The Plan is going a little too well. While they are expecting more deviations because of the time-distance between Seldon and now, there are in fact nearly none. Slowly the First Foundation turns its eye to the Second Foundation. And the Second Foundation turns its eye to… To whom?
Like the previous Foundation books, I really liked this one. I like the premise of this universe,of the Seldon Plan, of the mental power of the Second Foundation, and the added bonus in this book, a link between The Foundation and the Robot stories Asimov also wrote (with the Three Laws at its base). For me, this was four out of five stars.

This year one of the writers I have ‘discovered’ in my mission to read more old science fiction is Ursula Le Guin. Her books can be fantasy or science fiction, and usually a mixture of both.
This story takes us to Victoria, an Earth like planet. There are two groups of humans on the planets, the ruling group, once exiled from Earth for being too violent and warmongering, and the peaceful group, exiled because they were part of a passive resistance group marching from Russia to Vancouver. When the peaceful group want to move on to a new piece of land it soon comes out that while the peaceful group thinks they are on even ground with the ‘Bosses’, the ‘Bosses’ feel they rule over them. This leads to conflict where the peaceful resistance is put to the test.
In the middle of all this is Luz, the daughter of one of the ‘Bosses’. She has the privileged life, but feels wrong about all that is happening. She has to choose how to live her life, and live with the consequences.
There was not much science fiction, almost all of it was ideology, passive resistance against forcible enforcement. The story was ok, but not what I expected or liked. I have read more enjoyable stories by Le Guin. This one gets three out of five stars.