David Dyer-Bennet writes: "bonham15" <bonham15 at cox.net> writes: > i actually came to lord of light rather late. i think last year it was that > i picked it up for something like fifty cents from a used book store. it > has held up amazingly well for a 40 year old story, as good ones will imho That's an attitude that continues to catch me by surprise -- that you expect new stories to be *better* than old stories. I expect exactly the reverse; we're living with the cream skimmed off a few thousand years of literary history, and the best stuff from that much time is mostly incomparably better than nearly anything created this year. It takes something really fantastic like _A Fire Upon the Deep_, say, to even look like a *candidate* for that sort of status in the long run. A story sometimes exists in the context of the time it was written, though, and many stories don't age very well. rone -- Crap's Law: 90% of fish cytogenics is sturgeon. - Kibo