Speculative Fiction reading group and other stuff.

So the Chicago Speculative Fiction http://www.chicago-sf.org area reading group's September selection is Her Smoke Rose Up Forever an anthology of short stories written by James Tiptree, Jr. (pseudonym for Alice Sheldon). It might be considered that this collection is the essential collection of Tiptree's fiction; for your information the anthology includes: The Last Flight of Dr. Ain, The Screwfly Solution, And I Awoke and Found me here on the Cold Hill's Side, The Girl Who Was Plugged in, The Man Who Walked Home, And I Have Come Upon this Place by Lost Ways, The Women that Men Don't See, Your Faces, Oh My Sisters! Your Faces Filled with Light, Houston, Houston. Do You Read?, With Delicate Mad Hands, A Momentary Taste of Being, We Who Stole the Dream, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, Love is the Plan, The Plan is Death, On the Last Afternoon, She Waits for all Men Born, Slow Music, And So On, and So On. The collection covers her fiction from the very early 1970s until 1981, there are some pretty well known stories in the collection and many of them are to be found in other anthologies. As can be remembered it was around 1975 and 1976 that it became know that the science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr. was really Alice Sheldon and at the time it was quite the scandal. Examples, there were many who demanded that awards she won to that time (example, the Nebula and Hugo for Houston, Houston! Do You Read?) would be returned, on the basis that she had fraudulently represented herself to the science fiction community. James Tiptree, Jr. WWW page is at http://davidlavery.net/Tiptree/ .

I've just started reading the Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji (1015?) by Shikibu Murasaki (973? - 1025?), translated and introduction by Edward Seidensticker. Unlike many of the classics in the western tradition, examples, Homeric hymn and epic, eddas, sagas, medieval romance (Song of Roland, as an example), Tale of the Genji was written in prose and not verse, and many scholars consider this the first novel ever written. The edition I have is fifty four chapters and very long. Wiki on Shikibu Murasaki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murasaki_Shikibu .