Talk:James H. Schmitz

To do. Please write a brief definition or description of this article at James H. Schmitz/Definition.

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Notes, things to work into the article somehow

Need to add his birth/death dates, and republication year range (1980's by Baen books).Pat Palmer (talk) 05:00, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

• Maybe discuss the technology in the Federation of the Hub universe that turned out to be predictive, such as everyone having personal communicators. Schmitz wrote that before Star Trek depicted it.

• Say something about Schmitz' "monsters" essay.

• Talk about the 2 universes, and suggested order of reading them.

• The effort to scan the books back in the 1990's.

• German translation of Demon Breed (and other stories?) published in 2019:

GALAXIS SCIENCE FICTION, Band 21: DÄMONENBRUT: Geschichten aus der Welt von Morgen - wie man sie sich gestern vorgestellt hat. (German Edition) by James H. Schmitz | Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC | Nov 3, 2019

• Amazon also selling 4-book series based on Witches of Karres (books 2-4 by other authors) for $30+; whereas, Princeton Public Library has zero copies, either physical or electronic, of Schmitz works

• Probably deserves a separate section about the accuracy of his technology predictions

• Is there a linkage to be drawn from Schmitz' world view as expressed in the Pride of Monsters essay, along with the fact that his family just barely escaped Germany in time to avoid having to live through Hitler? Hitler was just such a monster, in many ways, brought down in the end by the fact that he became too awful and got enough good people ranged against him all at once.Pat Palmer (talk) 01:42, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

There probably is, but I dunno how you could plausibly bring it into the article.Hayford Peirce (talk) 22:03, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Is there a James Schmitz cult, along the lines of Jack Vance?

Could easily be -- I don't follow the field much anymore except having a lifetime subscription to Locus, which I paid a hundred dollars for, I believe, around 1980, and which I have long since amortized. An issue today is $8.99 cover price, I think, so $100 covers 11 issues! Hayford Peirce (talk) 01:19, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

I don't follow the field these days either. I collected Schmitz out of print books back in the 80's, then Baen books republished most of his works so I didn't need to, and then I eventually got them all on Kindle. Which is another thing I should mention here, the effort that resulted in them all being scanned. Then Amazon made it possible to find almost anything, and I don't have the physical books any more at all. But have them all electronically. Some of these are still fun to read, surprisingly, decades later. I'm hoping to reread some of them and spruce up my familiarity.Pat Palmer (talk) 01:46, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

There is a ton of info about these works already out on the web. I just thought it would be useful to provide an updated view of them, 2020 style, and based on my life-long experience I now see them a little differently that I once did.Pat Palmer (talk) 01:54, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Yes, let's have YOUR appraisal. Our views do change over the years. (And I'm bad enough to believe that MY views are generally better than others, hehe!) Just looked at my bookshelves, and I only have Witches there. Which, as I said, I reread and enjoyed a couple of years ago. I know that years ago I had many more of his on my shelves, but at one point in San Francisco, when my French wife and I had 5000 books in our house and we were about to move to a somewhat smaller flat, I got rid of THOUSANDS of books -- although, of course, it broke my heart to do. Apparently all the other Schmitz must have been among them.... Hayford Peirce (talk) 02:00, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Just checked, and the Princeton, NJ, public library now has zero Schmitz books. They used to have 8 or 10. This is a sad loss, a step in the wrong direction by wrong-headed management, and all the more reason to write about them here.Pat Palmer (talk)

If Karres lost to Mistress, that's a pretty honorable defeat!

I wonder if someone (not I!) would want to do an article about how seriously crazy and biased John Campbell was? I adored him for many years, as the inventor of modern SF etc etc and discoverer of Heinlein and all the others. But as time passes, I see that how his critics of 50 years ago, like Kingsley Amis were right about him, and I was wrong. He was, really, a crackpot. For instance, and this is why I bring it up, HE was the guy who essentially invented "psionics" -- and then pushed it onto ALL of his writers, as least as much as he could. And using Scottish names, for instance, and basically The White Man's Burden, in story after story after story. RAH and Asimov rebelled, and left. Schmitz and Poul Anderson and others (there's one VERY profilic one whose name I forget at the moment) stayed and wrote story after story after story tailored to his peculiar demands. I put SOME of this info in the WP article about Analog, or Campbell, or Alfie Bester, but I don't know how much of it remains. There's a wonderful bit from Bester returning to the sanity of NYC from a lunch with Campbell in NJ.... Hayford Peirce (talk) 01:29, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Alas my intro to sci-fi did not take place until the early 1980's, so all this took place before I had any awareness of anything, and I never knew much about that. But Analog had an outsized influence at the time; it was one of the few ways for writers to get their works out there, until later on, when publishers realized there was a market. It's fun hearing your perspective, Hayford!Pat Palmer (talk) 01:37, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Just tracked down what I added from Alfie Bester about Campbell in the OLD WP article about Campbell. It stayed there for a while, and then was mostly removed by the vandals and cretins.

The noted science-fiction writer Alfred Bester, an editor of Holiday Magazine and a sophisticated Manhattanite, recounts at some length his "one demented meeting" with Campbell, a man he imagined from afar to be "a combination of Bertrand Russell and Ernest Rutherford, across the river in Newark.[14] The first thing Campbell said to him was that Freud was dead, destroyed by the new discovery of Dianetics, which, he predicted, would win L. Ron Hubbard the Nobel Peace Prize. Over a sandwich in a dingy New Jersey lunchroom Campbell ordered the bemused Bester to "think back. Clear yourself. Remember! You can remember when your mother tried to abort you with a button hook. You've never stopped hating her for it." Shaking, Bester eventually made his escape and, he says, "returned to civilization where I had three double gibsons." He adds: "It reinforced my private opinion that a majority of the science-fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their marbles."

I always found that most amusing....Hayford Peirce (talk) 21:18, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

Place to go to get ALL the info about the stuff that Schmitz published

Go here, and then you can search within his page in various ways, such as chronologically, etc. A very useful resource: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?394

Thanks, Hayford! The detail on that site just goes to show how popular Schmitz still is. This will be useful.Pat Palmer (talk) 01:14, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Great, I took a look at the schmitz stuff but didn't really go into it. As I said, I used to read him a lot. And it may be that he is like Jack Vance and van Vogh, great popularity overseas in certain countries. Jack apparently derived a LOT of income from Holland and France in his later years....Hayford Peirce (talk) 01:32, 16 October 2020 (UTC)