While I'm thinking of it

[jwgh]

I recently finished reading a crappy science fiction novelette called The Purloined Planet by Lin Carter. It's a silly hardboiled detective story knockoff, but it did have one passage that caught my eye:

So voluminous had records become in this distant era, and so pressing a problem had their retention grown into, that in the age of the great Quicksilver entire planets were given over to their storage. This was true, even taking into consideration the latest advances in the fine art of micro-filming, which had by this time become so extremely sophisticated that it was, incredible as it may seem, quite possible to record the entire literary works of Isaac Asimov on the molecules contained in a single flake of mica.

See, now, if this story had been written in the past five or ten years, I would think that the author was making fun of the fact that in the Foundation series Asimov thought that in the future microfilm would be the highest form of information storage and that the best way to transmit a lot of information quickly would be to put it on microfilm and mail it. The mica thing could even be some sort of joke about semiconductors!

But in fact I think Lin Carter just thought it would be funny to mention that Asimov wrote a lot of stuff. Ah well.

Comments

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

Lin Carter is not exactly the brightest Silmaril in Middle-Earth, if you know what I mean. ok, he did do some good bios of Lovecraft and Tolkein, and was also personally responsible for pressuring several book editors to reprint classics of swords&sorcery and high fantasy, people like Clark Ashton Smith, James Branch Cabell, Robert E. Howard, &c.

however, the price we had to pay for this was that Lin Carter also got to publish a bunch of his stories, such as his own contribution to swords&sorcery, Strongbad the Mighty. err, make that Thongor the Mighty. not really very good stuff, and it ultimately set back s&s for decades. also, he was the first person to use "lich" to refer to an undead sorcerer, I think, so we have him to blame for all those liches that kick our asses in games like Nethack.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

He really, really badly wanted to be Edgar Rice Burroughs and was born in the wrong decade for it.