SF/Horror

[sean]

Sparked off by the the other thread, what stories would any of you guys put in a SF/Horror anthology?

[sean]

Had a little think about this and came up with these for starters:

Stephen King - The Jaunt
Thomas Disch - Come to Venus Melancholy
Robert Sheckley - Warm
Jeremy Bixby - Its a Good Life!
John Wyndham - Survival
Brian Aldiss - Three's a Cloud
Joe L Henshing - And Not Quite Human
Ray Bradbury - Mars is Heaven (aka The Third Expedition)
Richard Matheson - Dance of the Dead
J G Ballard - Now Zero
Greg Bear - Scrodinger's Plague
Fritz Leiber - Ship of Shadows
Charles Beaumont - The Crooked Man
Harlan Ellison - I Have no Mouth but I Must Scream
Alfred Bester - Star Light Star Bright

[dem bones]

I'm not sure I'm the right person to comment but you'd get a great book out of this little lot:

John Burke - The Tourists
Ray Bradbury - Pillar Of Fire
Donald Glut - Count Karnstein's Creation
Fritz Leiber - Spider Mansion
Joe L. Hensley - And Not Quite Human
E. C. Tubb - Fresh Guy
Paul S. Powers - Monsters Of The Pit
David Conyers - Subtle Invasion
David Riley - The Lurkers At The Abyss
Philip K. Dick - Upon The Dull Earth
Robert Bloch - A Toy For Juliette
Richard Matheson - I Am Legend (it's a very short novel)
Micheal Marshall Smith - To Receive Is Better

and, seeing as virtually every post-Romero zombie story is SF ...

Joe R. Lansdale - On The Far Side Of The Cadillac Desert With Dead Folks

As it happens, it's high time we brought back the 'Anthologies that should have been' thread ...

[Calenture]

Justin made the interesting distinction that horror fiction tends to be emotionally charged, while SF is more logical - can't find the exact quote but it was in the latest Paperback Fanatic. I suppose this goes some way to explaining why I could never get the hang of writing pure SF.

I do love those old stories where mad scientists rather than logic seem to be in control. Man-eating plants are good, too!


Here are some of my choices for The Best of Creepy Green SF Horror:

Gaylord Sabatini - Vortex of Horror
Vernon Routh - Black Creator
A Hyatt Verill - Plague of the Living Dead
Basset Morgan - Laocoon
H P Lovecraft - Herbert West: Reanimator
H P Lovecraft - The Colour Out of Space
W C Morrow - The Monster Maker
Frederick C Davis - The Mole Men Want Your Eyes
"Simon" - The Flying Worm
Craig Herbertson - Strange Fruit
Rog Pile - Almost Love
Rog Pile - Cords
Rog Pile - Sam and Angie at the Sagebrush Hotel

[Craig Herbertson]

Gosh, how do you guys remember all these names and titles!

I'll have to content myself with saying that Tenn was always superbly horrific and Ray Bradbury wrote tons of horror but you would get into distinctions about which was horror, fantasy etcetera.

Ballard and Dick are both basically horrific most of the time - partly because they deal with psychological motivations but Ballard would always say he was writing speculative fiction.

Does Dem know we are sneaking this in here?

[Craig Herbertson]

Oh, I see he does...

[dem bones]

Indeed he does! And in celebration of being outed as the UK's greatest living authority on all things SF, here's Vol 2 (the first having gone universal overnight)

C. M. Kornbluth - The Mind Worm
Joseph Payne Brennan - Slime
Gerald W. Page - The Tree
Theodore Sturgeon - It
Manly Wade Wellman - Back To The Beast
Margaret St. Clair - Horrer Howce
Ramsey Campbell - Cold Print
Robert Leslie Bellem - Labyrinth Of Monsters
Harold Ward - House Of The Living Dead
Robert Bloch - Almost Human
Arthur Porges - The Fanatic
Richard Matheson - Witch War
Marc Laidlaw - Mars Will Have Blood!
Ray Bradbury - The Exiles
Norman Kaufman - Lady On Display

[sean]

'Witch War' always made me think of Stephen King's 'Firestarter' for some reason.

It would probably be possible to put an entire SF / Horror collection together featuring Richard Matheson alone!

And a couple more...

Richard Matheson (!) - Death Ship
Ramsey Campbell - Slow
H.P Lovecraft - The Whisperer in Darkness
H.G Wells - The Time Machine (for the Morlocks! - His 'Island of Doctor Moreau' is also a perfect example of early SF / Horror)

[randy]

I'll try not to duplicate what others have already mentioned. I think a lot of s.f. is also horror, especially early s.f., so much so that almost half the contents of the S.F. Hall of Fame volumes seems to me to be horror. Anyway, here goes:

H.G. Wells, "The Invisible Man" (add me as another reader partial to The Island of Dr. Moreau)
H. P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"
John W. Campbell, Jr., "Who Goes There?"
A. E. Van Vogt, "Black Destroyer"
Theodore Sturgeon, "Microcosmic God"
Jack Williamson, "With Folded Hands"
Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore, "Mimsy Were the Borogroves"
C. M. Kornbluth, "The Little Black Bag"
Tom Godwin, "The Cold Equations" (I'll admit this choice might be idiosyncratic, but I add it because of the way it plays against expectations)
Alfred Bester, "Fondly Fahrenheit"
Avram Davidson, "The House the Blakeney's Built"
Robert Silverberg, "Passengers" (I suspect that a fair collection of horror stories could be extracted from his works, though I haven't read all that much of his work)
James Tiptree, Jr. "The Screwfly Solution" & "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain"
George R. R. Martin, "Sandkings" & "Nightflier"
Michael Shea, "The Autopsy"
Bob Leman, "Window" & "Instructions"
Michael Blumlein, "The Brains of Rats" & "Tissue Ablation and Varient Regeneration: A Case Report"
Geoffrey Landis, "The Singular Habits of Wasps"




Randy M.