Dreamwaver’s Dilemma (1996)
by Lois McMaster Bujold
A neat collection of stories and essays by Lois McMaster Bujold that shows that she’s even good at the short form. There’s an excellent Sherlock Holmes pastiche, an excellent Miles Vorkosigan story and some other good pieces. There’s a unobtrusive, but warm humor in many of them, a kindness that pervades most of Bujold’s fiction. Even her non-fiction pieces give you the image of someone who enjoys life, enjoys writing and communicating with other people. She’s a writer who makes reading easy and fun.
This collection is also an image of Bujold’s growth as a writer. If you compare the last fiction piece in the collection, The Mountains of Mourning to the other stories, you can see how she has retained all the enjoyable elements of her earlier stories and yet has gained a depth previously unseen. Most writers seem to lose a certain lightness in their fiction when they try themselves on heavier topics. Bujold hasn’t, which might explain her great success.
Rating: 5/5
The Engine of Recall (2005)
by Karl Schroeder
This is a bit of a ho-hum collection for me. I expected it to be much more mindblowing, than what I got in the end, which was a collection of okay pieces that felt just a bit too generic and formulaic for my taste. Schroeder is known for his cool, cutting edge ideas and fascinating world building, but this seems mostly absent here.
The most interesting concept was the alien in Solitaire and even that story telegraphed the ending nearly from the first paragraph. That’s one of the problems I had with the stories, they felt like variations of the same old stuff I’ve read for years and I almost always knew what would happen. Best example, The Engine of Recall, which used the old and stale plot of an mysterious alien device that revels that the aliens are just like us in one major aspect. Richard Morgan did something similar in his novel Broken Angels, yet there it felt fresh and really like a revelation. It’s not that the ideas are nothing new, its how they are delivered. Schroeder’s prose is lacking.
For example in his introductions to the stories he talks about the unifying theme of his collection, the inaccessible places humans normally don’t visit. As can be expected, these place get visited in the stories, yet Schroeder’s writing makes these strange and alien places look quite boring and mundane. Another problem are characters and their motivations. Sometimes I felt like he used a checklist for every story ([x] explained the main trauma that motivates the character to the reader, [x] trauma rears its head and characters acts on it), which made most of his characters one-dimensional and simplistic.
All that makes it look worse than it really is. If you don’t expect mindblowing ideas or excellent prose, but just some reading material to pass the time, TEoR might do it.
Rating: 3/5
Embracing the Starlight (2003)
by Dave Smeds
This is nearly a flawless collection of short stories by an author I’ve never read before. The writing is excellent and couldn’t be much better, but not all of the stories were equally of interest to me. The two Vietnam inspired stories that close the collection, the alternate history about the aging musician and some of the others just didn’t capture me. And sometimes the endings felt too simplistic and convenient, for example the otherwise brilliant Suicidal Tendencies had a solution that just felt emotional unrealistic, the sudden revelation of the daughter not quite believable. The high point of the collection was IMHO Fearless, mixing virtual reality and karate in an interesting way. It somehow reminded me of the movie Best of the Best, because like it, instead of emphasizing the action aspect, it showed karate as a force of personal growth. For this story alone it was worth reading this collection. Another highpoint of the collection are the extensive introductions to each story, I’d like to see other authors follow Smeds’s example. Overall, well worth reading.
Rating: 4/5
The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (1989)
by Eric Brown
It’s not often that a writer bursts onto the scene with a short story collection. James Tiptree, Jr did it and some others, but it’s a rare occurrence. One of the others was Eric Brown. The first thing I read by him was exactly this collection “The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories”, and it was like reading a complete astonishing collection of puzzles pieces that, combined, made for an fascinating future, on one side a classical sf setting but with a very dark edge. Every story is composed of an interesting SFnal idea intersecting human drama. It’s like reading a mix of Wolfe and Egan. I’ve read some other novels by Brown since, but while some are really good, nothing really reached the level of this collection. I’m still reading Brown, because he’s an excellent writer despite my misgivings, even if I think there’s still something better to get out of him than his output so far.
Rating: 5/5
Phase Space (2002)
by Stephen Baxter
4th Manifold book (collection)
Twenty-five stories that take place in some of the realities of the Manifold (the eponymous Phase Space of our universe). Some explore different outcomes of the events described in Time, Space and Origin, others explore completely different realities of the Manifold. Some stories explore different explanations of Fermi’s Paradox, the driving force of the whole Manifold series. Many stories sport Baxter’s pet themes: space travel, the fate of mankind, our place in the universe.
Reading this I experienced the same effect like I did when reading other collections by Baxter in the past. Many of his stories, read alone in anthologies, feel like well written stories that still never reach true brilliance. But read together in such a hefty volume, they somehow reach critical mass and make the collection feel more than just the sum of it’s parts, a brilliant, mind expanding meditation on our role in the universe, of why some people care whether we are all alone in the universe or not, what the ultimate destiny of our race and intelligence and mind in the universe is. The appeal of this book does hinge on whether you actually care about these questions. But if you do, it’s quite the treat.
Rating: 5/5
Righteous Blood (2002)
by Cliff Burns
Righteous Blood is a sort of mini-collection, bundling two of Cliff Burns’s novellas into one package. While I thought the first one lacked a bit of narrative resolution in the end, I prefer it over the second story. Kept has a tight plot with a good resolution, but I thought Phil was the better realized main character. Both Maxine and Phil do nasty things, but in Phil’s case these naturally evolved out of the context of the story, while in Maxine’s case they are just established from the get go with a thin explanation.
Living with the Foleys (5/5)
A homeless man, Phil, is living in the garage of the Foley family, something the Foley’s aren’t aware of. Through the venting systems, sounds travel easy there, Phil has intimate knowledge of the going ons of every family member. And so he is the only one who can see the slow unraveling of the Foley family. But Phil has taken a liking to them, and especially to his place in the garage, and isn’t going to let the family go kaput.
Living with the Foley’s has a truly original and weird set-up, presenting a completely normal situation from a truly strange viewpoint. And all that is just a playground to trace the life of a man who has withdrawn from his former life, only to realize that until you’re dead you’ll always hurting, always caring for others, even if you live at the bottom. But there’s good stuff too. What’s the meaning of life? That’s a hard one. Or not at all.
Kept (4/5)
Maxine is the caretaker of a house where strange people dwell. Her job is to make the house secure and, well, take care of everything, from plumbing to dealing with outsiders. Maxine is also a women with a peculiar hobby. She picks up men who want to fuck her, takes them home, drugs them, straps them on a bed, and slowly tortures them to death for a nebulous movie project. But her last subject turns out to be as nasty as she is. After he has freed himself he begins to kill the inmates of the house, one after another.
Kept is a classical hunt-the-hunter action piece, a relentless story that always keeps the reader on the edge about what happens next, brimming with tension until its gory resolution.
Rating: 5/5
Overclocked (2007)
(Great)
written by Cory Doctorow
can be read online
Overclocked is a collection that achieves something rare. While completely steeped into old SF, mining the nostalgia and concepts of classics, it also successful at placing itself at the cutting edge of SF. These are new riffs on old themes, like the mix of the post-apocalyptic with the myth that the internet would survive a nuclear war. The picture of spam endlessly replicating after most humans have died is both funny as hell, as it is scary in some ways. And yet, like Postman by Brin, it’s a post-apocalyptic story that is about remaking civilization, about hope for a better future. It goes into the face of every survivalist fiction that revels at the end of the world, by making you believe that it won’t take thousands of years for humanity to come back.
One big theme, noticeable in I, Robot and more openly in Printcrime and After the Siege is about how we deal with copyright. But if we go even more meta, the whole book is a statement about that. Most of the stories in Overclocked couldn’t have been written if those who want to enforce an ever more restrictive copyright aren’t stopped. Overclocked shows us what a rich field SF is by sharing and reusing the ideas of others, but going into a dialog with writers who are already dead, by building on those who came before us and by allowing those who will follow us do the same with our contributions. This collection shows us what sharing can give us, but also that it’s something we have to fight for (maybe not as hard as in After the Siege, hopefully this future can be avoided).
Printcrime
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth
Anda’s Game
I, Robot
I, Row-Boat
After the Siege
Bears Discover Fire (1993)
(Weak)
written by Terry Bisson
When Bisson is funny, he can be quite biting and poignant, when he is serious his fiction often seems to go on until it runs out of steam, without so much reaching a satisfying conclusion. The funny pieces are also most of the time short, while the more serious stuff is longer. For example Bears Discover Fire, got both the Nebula and the Hugo. I’ve seen the same concept by other writers, and most of the time done much better (for example Evolution Never Sleeps by Elisabeth Malartre). This collection was a frustrating reading experience, because some of the more serious stories had a good start, built momentum and then went nowhere. One exception is Necronauts, which just proves that Bisson can write serious stuff very well. Sadly, most of the other stories aren’t as good.
Bears Discover Fire
The Two Janets
They’re Made Out of Meat
Over Flat Mountain
Press Ann
The Coon Suit
George
Next
Necronauts
Are There Any Questions?
Two Guys from the Future
The Toxic Donut
Canción Autentica de Old Earth
Partial People
Carl’s Lawn and Garden
The Message
England Underway
By Permit Only
The Shadow Knows
What You Make It (1999)
(Okay)
written by Michael Marshall Smith
I came to this collection expecting strange and mindbending stuff, something similar to what Smith did in his first three novels. There’s only one story that was like that, “Hell Hath Enlarged Herself”, a brilliant story that mixes nanotech and ghosts. The rest of the stories have much fewer fantasy elements. Many of them could be classified as horror, but less in a supernatural way than in a psychological. It’s not that they are complete without it, but the supernatural things are very downplayed. Smith seems more interested to get into the head of his characters, probing questions of reality, showing characters who are slowly losing it. Whether this is because of something that’s just in their head or external isn’t really important. The writing is accessible and absorbing throughout the whole collection, despite that most of the stories are rather uncomfortable, none of them are happy reading material. My overall problem with the collection is that I prefer fiction that has more weirdness at the surface and packs more oomph.
More Tomorrow
Everybody Goes
Hell Hath Enlarged Herself
A Place to Stay
Later
The Man Who Drew Cats
The Fracture
Save As…
More Bitter Than Death
Diet Hell
The Owner
Foreign Bodies
Sorted
The Dark Land
When God Lived in Kentish Town
Always
What You Make It
The Phrrks (1988)
(Weak)
written by Gert Prokop
no english translation / original title “Die Phrrks” (GDR)
The saying goes, you can’t go back. Among my earliest reading experiences is SF from the GDR, but once I discovered a different flavor of SF I went away. And now going back proved problematic. Odd is probably the best word to describe some of the stories in this collection: an old women stops an invasion of aliens who occupy her radio, the fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves turns out to be fabricated by one of the dwarves, who is an alien, a man got a gift from aliens who like to play jokes on people, when he turns invisible he’s completely blind and others. These stories often rely on twist endings, but the twists don’t feel very clever or mind bending, only a bit wacky. The other kind of stories (the not odd ones) in this collection are mostly about gloomy futures or about bad things happening to ordinary people: global warming destroying humanity, secret experiments on humans and the likes. The problem here is that the writing lacks subtility, these stories have always a message, and they hit you over the head with it. Worse, Prokop has the habit to stop the stories before a real conclusion is reached. Ambiguity is like a spice, too much and everything tastes the same (unfinished and incomplete applies in this case), which was a frustrating experience.
