Reading for January, 2006

The Wanderer by Fritz Lieber. Won the Hugo Award in 1965. The story is pretty much a template plot for a disaster movie, complete with handfuls of oddball/nonintellectual characters who get killed as the disaster worsens.
Gateway by Frederik Pohl. 1978 Hugo Award. The first copy I had (checked out from library) was missing a signature, and had actually been stamped “Withdrawn”, but they sent it to me anyway.

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak. 1964 Hugo Award. One of the few Simak novels I had not read until now.
I finished the last three chapters of Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay. I suppose there was a kind of poignant message behind Finlay’s travels around the world in search of historic dyes and pigments — chemistry has filled out so much of the contemporary palette that we’ve lost track of the old pigment technology, yet the new chemical pigments have yet to prove their durability.
Reefs of Space and Starchild by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson. I enjoyed Gateway enough to try some other work by Pohl. These stories are kind of pulp-y, but fun.
Attempted read: Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. 1993 Hugo Award, tied with Vernor Vinge’s vastly superior A Fire Upon the Deep. I read the first part of this boring, procedural story, during which the protagonist calls his office at least a dozen times, in excruciating detail.