I’m always looking for new works to review for Because My Tears Are Delicious To You, an ongoing series on my own website. There I revisit some of the books I loved as a teen. Recently I put out a request on social media for readers to suggest authors and works now obscure that deserve mention. To my surprise, someone suggested Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart.
…How on Earth could Tales from the White Hart be considered obscure? Well…for one thing, the author has been dead for over a decade. The collection is an astounding ten twenty thirty forty fifty sixty-three years old, which is to say it’s as ancient to a new SF reader in 2020 as H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine was for the new SF reader in 1957, when Tales first came out.
Tales from the White Hart is also an example of a genre once popular that seems to have fallen into comparative obscurity: The genre assumes a beloved old bar filled with regulars, one or more of whom is a talented raconteur. It’s a form made to order for SF magazines, the publications that once ruled the SF world. It’s also a form easily anthologized, as it was in Tales. As it also was for several other series of bar stories. Settle down, my friends, and nurse your beers or non-alcoholic beverages as I tell you of bar tale collections of the past…
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