Book editors don’t add glosses or footnotes to the old SF stories they reprint, but many of those stories require cultural references that modern readers are not likely to recognize, because the references come from mid-century (i.e. the last century) popular culture. How many people under seventy will recognize that Philip K. Dick’s “Oh, to Be a Blobel!” is a reference to Marianne Moore’s poem, “Oh, to Be a Dragon”? Or that his “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” riffs o

By anybody’s standards, this was a beautiful place. The folded, rolling hills were covered with clover, or they were covered with grapes. Everywhere the three explorers walked the air was pleasantly noisy with bees. There were a dozen heavy white cattle grazing belly-deep in clover, there were exposed rock strata of shale and slate and chalk. There were beech groves. “I have never seen time piled up so deep in a place,” Ethan Farquharson said. “Not insufferably ancient time,

Henry Clarke (1889-1931) They fight! There is a duality in the fight itself. There are things seen, and there are things visceral that cannot be seen. There is blood spilled that is more ornately red (violet-flecked and shimmering it is) than is the blood of Earth-Woomagoo. This is blood as seen by the light of the sun that shines through the green-and-copper atmosphere of Venus-Noga. It is slippery blood, blood smelling of tincture of iron, blood that one gathers in the