Reading List

 From Roderick, by John Sladek (1980)

Most nights he simply read one book after another; he might before dawn get through two or three like Call Me Pig, Doc Bovary’s Wife, The Ego Diet, Ratstar II, God Was My Co-conspirator, Dream New Hair, Sink the Titanic!, Dragons of Darkwound, or Aversion for Happiness. He could shift easily from a spy thriller like The Pisces Perplex to a guide to courtroom-drama therapy, Make a Federal Case Out of It; and on to an unusual medical theory in Your Eyes: Do They Leak Light?

In the Style of...

 The opening scene of Neuromancer in the style of... who?

The flickering neon signs of Chiba City bled into the rain-streaked windows of the bar, each letter a distorted glyph in some alien language. Case nursed his drink, a synthetic concoction that tasted vaguely of regret and stale electricity. The sky outside wasn't a sky at all, just a dead channel, a static hum of nothingness that mirrored the emptiness in his gut. He felt eyes on him, not the usual predatory gazes of the Sprawl, but something colder, more calculating. Were they real, or just echoes of his own fractured psyche? He blinked, and the bartender's face seemed to shift, the familiar features replaced by something subtly inhuman. "You looking for something, cowboy?" the voice rasped, a digitized whisper that seemed to crawl directly into his brain. Case swallowed hard, the synthetic liquor burning a trail down his throat. "Just a way out," he muttered, knowing even as he said it that there was no escape, not in this city, not in this life. The matrix shimmered at the edge of his vision, a promise and a threat, a world where reality itself was a negotiable commodity. And somewhere, in the tangled web of data and delusion, he knew they were waiting.

Early mention of cryonics (1865)

 From Guy Deverell (1865) by Sheridan Le Fanu - an early mention of cryonics:

“But there’s another process, my uncle, Monsieur Varbarriere, says, by slow refrigeration: you are first put to sleep, and in that state frozen; and once frozen, without having suffered death, you may be kept in a state of suspended life for twenty or thirty years, neither conscious, nor growing old; arrested precisely at the point of your existence at which the process was applied, and at the same point restored again whenever for any purpose it may be expedient to recall you to consciousness and activity.”

Eclectic editing

From Patrick S. Tomlinson's book "In the Black", an actual published book edited by an actual editor and published by an actual publisher (namely Macmillan):

The Citogenesis of Adam Roberts

A while back I noticed that the Amazon listing for "The Compelled" by Adam Roberts and François Schuiten had something of an oddity in the "About the authors" section, in reference to Mr Roberts:

His science fiction has been praised by many critics both inside and outside the genre, with some comparing him to genre authors such as Pel Torro, John E. Muller, and Karl Zeigfreid.

[Pel Torro, John E. Muller, and Karl Zeigfreid were some of the many pen-names used by super-prolific British author Lionel Fanthorpe for his 1950s pulp sci-fi novels, some of which were famously churned out at a high rate, sometimes one per week... someone was clearly having a laugh at Adam Roberts' expense - but who, and how did it make it on to Amazon?]

A little research (read: Googling) revealed that the text seemed to have been copied and pasted from an earlier version of Wikipedia's Adam Roberts page, which bizarrely enough had a genuine citation.

Delving into the history of the Wikipedia page, it appeared that the text was first inserted by a mischevious Wikipedian in December 2017, naturally without any citation. It lingered until November 2018 when it was removed by a passing editor who recognised it for the limp attempt at humour that it was.

However, the offending sentence was later reinstated in September 2019, this time with an actual citation from a real book, the Portuguese Verdadeira História Da Ficção Científica (The True History of Science Fiction). However, the book in question appears to have merely copied & pasted the original sentence from the mischevious earlier Wikipedia entry.... Needless to say there's a name for this sort of circular reference generation, and that is citogenesis. Wikipedia naturally has a list of such incidents.

Edit: It received a mention in the April 2023 edition of Dave Langford's Ansible newsletter:

Adam Roberts’s Amazon blurb for Stealing for the Sky has an ‘About the author’ coda that after the mention of his being a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature ends: ‘His science fiction has been praised by many critics both inside and outside the genre, with some comparing him to genre authors such as Pel Torro, John E. Muller, and Karl Zeigfreid.’ [JB]

"Sci-Fi" : a definition

 As seen in the Guardian's comment section:

Steampunkopedia

 From the Steampunkopedia (link to PDF), my entire bibliography (click to embiggen):

"The Best of All Possible Worlds" is a stand-alone alternate history SF story which isn't part of the "Barrington Smythe" series. But then again, there's nothing to rule it out being set in the future of the Smythe sequence.... hmm!

Also, The Great Race, The Great Airship Scare, and The Man Who Knew Too Much, while set in the same sort-of steampunk Edwardian milieu as the Barrington Smythe stories, do not actually feature Mr Smythe; they are a series of connected stories featuring one Dr Kilmarnock and Bart Smythe, Barrington Smythe's smarter brother (or is he?). The Man Who Knew Too Much ended on something of a cliffhanger, and the projected sequel, The Mancunian Candidate, was never published.