Speaking of columns

[petrea_mitchell]

james_davis_nicoll starts his latest listicle for Tor thus:

I’m always looking for new works to review for Because My Tears Are Delicious To You, an ongoing series on my own website. There I revisit some of the books I loved as a teen. Recently I put out a request on social media for readers to suggest authors and works now obscure that deserve mention. To my surprise, someone suggested Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart.

Reader, that person was me.

I already knew my sense of what's obscure is skewed compared to most people's, but I don't think it's ever provoked an entire column before.

Comments

[athenais]

That book is as old as I am! Of course it's obscure now.

[delosharriman]

The Osmotic Bomb is a classic, though! And the one with the bees…

I think it was probably more difficult for older material to become "obscure" in the days when the main way SF circulated was magazines. When Tales from the White Hart came out, not only was Wells' Time Machine (to use Nicoll's own example) about to be adapted into a Major Motion Picture, it was being reprinted (according to ISFDb) by Berkeley in paperback, & I should imagine it had recently been serialized somewhere.

Today, in addition to having such an enormous mass of back-catalogue, the distribution mechanism is optimized for new material to a greater extent, I think.

[melita66]

I read it in the early 80s but only because it was in my...high school's library. I don't think I would have picked it up in a bookstore if I saw it and at that point, didn't have a used bookstore within easy access. I've never bothered to get my own copy.

[darkoshi]

Well, I don't remember ever hearing about, reading, or seeing it before, and I'm 48. And I spent a whole lot of time in libraries in my first few decades. Though I'm not sure if that speaks to the book's obscurity, or to my memory not being what it used to.