Deal Me In Update: April

Here are the stories I read in April!

Hearts: Stories on Audio

"Snow" by John Crowley -- Lightspeed podcast. The link goes to the magazine where you can either read it or listen or both. The author discussed the story with Lightspeed here, and I had a hard time figuring out what else to say about it, but I thought it was really interesting.

Clubs: Classic SF

"Occam's Scalpel" -- my first Theodore Sturgeon story. The introduction says:  
Although his stories made clever use of science, he was never known as an hard sf writer, but rather as the finest literary craftsman of his day in the genre… “Occam’s Scalpel” is on the edge of being not sf at all.

Which makes me wonder why this is included in an anthology of hard sf. Anyway, I didn't like this one & didn't feel like writing about it. If Sturgeon is as good as his reputation has it,  I'm sure he's written better than this!

"Atomic Power" by Don A Stuart -- Another disappointing story.

Spades: Contemporary SF

"All the Hues of Hell" Gene Wolfe -- I have previously read Latro in the Mist by this author, and I have The Fifth Head of Cerberus on my TBR list. Wolfe passed away earlier this month, and this is the first short story I have read by him. The editors' introduction says: Gene Wolfe’s body of work in the science fiction field, along with that Delany, Dick, and Le Guin, is perhaps the most influential of any writer f the past two decades. Of them all, Wolfe is perhaps the least interested in the use of pure science in his fiction... Wolfe’s fiction is so rich and evocative, his style s precise and complex, that much f his influence has been stylistic. "All the Hues of Hell" is a story in which theoretical physics and metaphysics combine. It has, initially, the ring of a hard sf situation: three characters on a ship in space approaching an alien planet, one of them mad, or dead. Quickly the story becomes mysterious,  ambiguous, and disturbing... 

I liked this one, but it was weird.