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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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.

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)