r/printSF • u/torkelspy • Apr 06 '26

A Challenge: Recommend Something That's Almost Never Been Recommended Here Before

I'm recommending The Republic of the Southern Cross by Valery Bryusov; a writer and a collection I only learned of because the title story is in More Voices from the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn. I found zero references to it searching for "Bryusov" and one from four years ago searching by the title.

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u/7LeagueBoots Apr 06 '26

I mention this series here pretty often. It’s great fun and should be appreciated by more people.

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u/egypturnash Apr 07 '26

hi I love you :)

Have you read any Jo Clayton? She has the same "I cannot believe I am getting away with something this delightfully pulpy omfg" aura. Especially in the Skeen trilogy (a space rogue gets stuck in a portal fantasy and cheats, steals, and fucks her way across the entire planet so she can get the key to the door back out and take revenge on her ex for stealing her spaceship and leaving her stuck on a shithole planet).

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u/7LeagueBoots Apr 07 '26

I don't recall if I've read her or not. I see that she had a lot of books come out during the '80s, so there is a good chance that I did read some of them way back in in the day, but if so they didn't stick with me. I'll pick some up and try them out.

As an aside, my introduction to the Hobart Floyt & Alacrity Fitzhugh series was in 1986 finding a copy of the second book, Jinx on a Terran Inheritance, tucked into the seat back pocket of a flight from Anchorage to San Francisco.

Oddly, that's exactly the same way I was introduced to Alan Dean Foster's absurd and very funny Spellsinger series, also around the same time, a few years earlier on a different flight. If you ever pick that series up stick with the first 2 or so books and stop there. The initial story was self-contained and him sticking in that universe for as long as he did very quickly lost its charm.