In a few weeks, Big Mouth Press (aka Small Beer Press) releases Holly Black’s collection of short stories, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories. It’s a mix of fantasy and horror, most featuring adolescent or college age characters. These well-written stories aren’t light, happy reading. But then, you should expect dark and complex with a title like The Poison Eaters.

Most of the stories feature characters who are somewhat outcast. They fight themselves more than they do anyone or anything else. Sometimes that sort of inner conflict bores me to yawns, but each of these characters have personality that makes them interesting.

One side note, just to get my opinion out there. Nominally targeted at the young adult market, this collection contains dark stories that include sex (not graphic) and that glorify drinking and partying. These stories don’t teach lessons about how it’s better to behave like an adult. These things are by no means foreign to young adult stories, so my opinion isn’t unusual. My opinion: kids can handle anything and everything thrown at them in a book. I’ve never once met a teen that needed to be protected from anything in any book I’ve ever read. Stuff like this book is the antidote that adults get to counteract the bullshit sheltering they received when they were younger. Worries about what kids can handle are really worries about what the adults can handle.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

This story made a couple of Year’s Best anthologies for good reason. Vampires have the coolness factor that they do in Twilight, eternal life (undeath) and eternal parties, though they are quarantined off in Coldtowns in most cities because of how infectious they are. Matilda has been bitten, but is trying to sweat out the incubation period rather than give in to the blood lust that would turn her. She doesn’t want to be a vampire. Her ex-boyfriend who she’s still in love with and his new girl want to become vampires though. One of the few vampire tales I’ve read in a while that really engaged me.

A Reversal of Fortune

A teen signs a pact with the devil to save her dog. If she beats the devil in a contest, the dog is saved. If she loses, she loses her soul. The contest she chooses is an eating competition, and she gets her overweight brother to train her. I think what makes the story is the set-up where Nikki meets the devil on the bus and then spend the day working at the mall, which isn’t the fun time she imagined when she took the job.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

This story was left out of the review copy I received.

The Night Market

A second deal with the devil kind of story. Set in the Philippines, Tomasa’s sister Eva has been snared by an enkanto, a faery of some sort, and lies wasting at home. Tomasa tries to get the enkanto to make her better, and when it refuses ventures into the faery night market looking for someone who can. A little more confusing than the previous story though.

The Dog King

Intelligent wolves terrorize the countryside, but the residents of the stone-walled city are safe inside until people mysteriously start dying. The king promises his throne to the knight who can kill the wolf causing all the havoc. Of course, it can’t be the king’s tamed wolf, can it? This one had me rooting for the wolf.

Virgin

Jen has a thing for Zachary, a homeless teenage junkie. He’s got the looks that girls draw obsessively in the corners of their notebooks. But Zachary tells a wild tale about watching his mom die in the woods after which a unicorn befriends him. Messed up kids have messed up lives, and this ends up messed up for everyone.

In Vodka Veritas

The lightest story in the collection. The king of the prep school nerds gets stood up by his fellow outcast best buddy Danny on prom night. The friend actually got asked to prom. Our hero’s plan is to get dressed in a tux, break into the old abandoned home of the school on the edge of campus with a bottle of vodka, and get drunk. I’ve had similar plans before when I was young and lonely. His plan is foiled by the Latin club. No one expects the Latin club.

The Coat of Stars

Semi-closeted gay costume designer makes costumes for faeries to try and bring back is youthful crush. Good story, but a little too much clothes-whoring for me to get into it. I dress up as a means to an end, not an end to itself. So I don’t get costume-lust like other people do.

Paper Cuts Scissors

Really liked this one! Justin’s girlfriend Linda knows how to put things in stories. As in, the book in your hand is now changed to include the things Linda wants in it, and those things are no longer in the real world. It doesn’t change the book for other people who have it; just that copy. After an argument between the two, Linda puts herself into a classic Russian novel. Justin, heartbroken, goes to library school to get her out of the story. I mostly don’t like stories written for other writers, but I go ga-ga over stories like this that are written for readers. Perfect.

Going Ironside

A loopy story of faeries attempting to get people to impregnate them. Not my thing.

Untitled (A Modern Faerie Tale Story)

The second story not included in this review copy.

The Poison Eaters

Inventive story of three sisters. They are poison. Touch them and die. It’s hard to explain this story without getting into spoiler territory. Well worth the read.

Four of the stories are must-read: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, A Reversal of Fortune, Paper Cuts Scissors, and The Poison Eaters. All the rest were well-written too. Can’t go wrong buying this one.

One other blogged review:

• Book Nerds

Title: The Poison Eaters and Other Stories
Author: Holly Black
Imprint / publisher: Big Mouth House / Small Beer Press
Format: Advanced reading copy
Length: 156 p. (published version will have 256 p.)
Publication date: Feb 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-931520-63-8

Small Beer Press provided me with an advance review copy of this book. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I’ve donated $12.14 (the price of the book on Amazon.com) to the A.L.S.A.

Reading Cosmos Latinos started off as an attempt by me to expand my reading repertoire and hopefully get exposed to interesting science fiction that I’d never read. By the end though, the reading experience became like eating my vegetables. Clean your plate and they are good for you. For the most part the stories selected for this anthology were ones I did not like much. A few were good. Overall the mood set by the selections was quite depressing. The best of the stories ended on hopeful notes. None except the Utopian screed that opened the volume were out and out positive experiences. One or two were ironically positive types though.

Perhaps it suffered because an academic press published the book and it’s geared toward those who want to study Spanish language literature rather than regular readers. Everything was so serious. And depressingly political. I’m not against politics in my books unless I disagree with the politics, but a lot of the stories here just bashed you over the head with the politics to the exclusion of the story. Or it may have been the literary aspect that put me off. I don’t know for sure.

A lot of the effect was to me cumulative. Nothing wrong with these elements in one story. But repeat them over and over and the reading becomes a slog.

The Distant Future (1862) by Juan Nepomuceno Adorno

This isn’t really a story. It’s a description of a utopia in the future. What’s interesting isn’t so much what he sees as predictions, but instead what he sees as a reflection of his own values. In utopia, women are the weaker sex and are timid. An undefined morality rules the day. Written in 1850, it reflects that time more than it does anything else. What are the things that people then saw as evil?

On the Planet Mars (1890) by Nilo María Fabra

A bit in a similar vein, though with an actual story. A utopian Mars discovers life on Earth and begins communicating with it.

Mechanopolis (1913) by Miguel de Unamuno

Traveler accidentally ends up in a city of robotic souls, and doesn’t exactly like what he finds. Is technology so soul-sucking?

The Death Star (1929) by Ernesto Silva Román

A mysterious star appears in the sky, travels to earth at the rate of one light year per second, and issues a deadly radiation as it gets closer! What will humanity do to survive??!

Baby H.P. (1952) by Juan José Arreola

Convert your children’s vitality into a source of power. That sentence from the first paragraph about says it all.

The Cosmonaut (1964) by Ángel Arango

A first contact story, Cuban style. In some ways it’s the same sort of hilarious miscommunication way that is a staple of first contact stories. But it does have pretty weird aliens that really do stuff not quite like I’ve read before.

The Crystal Goblet (1964) by Jerônimo Monteiro

Scry into the future using a blue glowing crystal goblet and you may not like what humanity does with itself. Drink Coca-Cola!

A Cord Made of Nylon and Gold (1965) by Álvaro Menén Desleal

Distraught by personal problems, an astronaut on a spacewalk cuts his tether (the cord made of nylon and gold). Then it gets weird. This one underwhelmed me.

Acronia (1966) by Pablo Capanna

I really couldn’t follow this story. I think machines are running the world, but people think they are. Or something like that. Maybe this could be called slipstream, just because what the hell is going on is so ambiguous. Or not. I don’t know.

The Last Refuge (1967) by Eduardo Goligorsky

A country has isolated itself from the rest of the world, kind of like North Korea. It’s to keep the country safe from materialism. Interspersed with a narrative about a citizen keeping forbidden photos of what the country was like ages ago, handed down in the family for years, is text from a scene where the man stands next to a spaceship, seeking escape. This is a really good story.

Post-Boomboom (1967) by Alberto Vanasco

Another story I really liked. It’s a post-apocalyptic story. I’m a sucker for those kinds of stories. This one is a little different. Instead of savage people fighting each other Mad Max style, these folks try to help each other. Only… well I’m not going to say. I think they match up well with real-life humanity. If you’ve ever worked retail before, you’ll recognize these characters.

Gu Ta Gutarrak (We and Our Own) (1968) by Magdalena Araceli Mouján Otaño

Basques invent a time machine in order to learn the origin of the Basque people. You can probably guess where this one is going.

Future (1970) by Luis Britto García

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Hated that crap in school. Don’t think much of it in a story-like thing either.

When Pilate Said No (1971) by Hugo Correa

Humans visit aliens, who have their own Christ that predicted the arrival of humans. I kind of liked this story, though the character are all ham-handed.

The Falsifier (1972) by José B. Adolph

A take off on a historical tale of a Christ-like figure of the Andes. This kind of story works so much better if the reader has a connection to the original tale that an author uses as the basis for updating. If I wrote a story updating an apocryphal legend about Ballard, I and people from Ballard would have quite a bit better chance of connecting with the story. Those of you living in Charleston, West Virginia, your eyes would glaze over.

The Violet’s Embryos (1973) by Angélica Gorodischer

My not finishing the story does not bode well for my upcoming (someday) reading of Kalpa Imperial. I read only eight pages and had to force myself to get that far. Its literary style consists of lots and lots of disconnected sentences that do not lead from one to the other. I had no idea what was going on at all. I put literary in quotes because I’m a firm believer that literature can be both good and not obscure. If it takes a class to understand the basic text, it’s not for me.

The Brain Transplant (1978) by André Carneiro

Another writer who eschews the science fiction label and wants to be called literary. You can have it! Gah. The Brain Transplant was a little more comprehensible than Gorodischer’s story, but not by much. Brain transplants make it so you get all the sensation from someone else, which apparently unglues reality. The only thing you can trust are your own senses, according to the editor’s introduction. I suppose that’s as good an interpretation as any, because in the made up world where you feel other’s senses of this story, the writing doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.

From above, an enormous head came down over the table. The professor picked up a scalpel, and with great skill and speed made an incision in the hair and opened up the bone with a small hammer to get at the brain. He inserted something down in there and pushed a pedal. The scene filled with people. There was a new baby doing number two, a nude man in the lotus position, two girls cutting each other’s public hair, and a monk, a cross painted on his chest, with an old paperback book in his hands.The professor kicked the baby, which rolled aside crying.

I’m not saying this doesn’t make sense with some explanations. Bell and Yolanda-Gavilán selected it because it has meaning to them. But I don’t have a degree in literature, so this sort of thing requires some background I don’t have.

The Annunciation (1983) by Daína Chaviano

This is the story I point to in my commentary on The Falsifier that I didn’t know I was pointing to. It’s a science fictional retelling of the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary where he told her she was to be the mother of God’s child. That’s a story I know! I have a connection to it, and so the retelling is something I grok much better than I did Adolph’s story. It’s pretty fun, by the way. Maybe a little sacrilegious for devout Christians, but I approve.

A Miscalculation (1983) by Federico Schaffler

Young kid dreams of space and looks to the skies. A depressing sensawunder kind of story, if you can really combine both terms.

Stuntmind (1989) by Braulio Tavares

Aliens have technology. We have … contentment? Slower lifestyles? Spare brainspace for sure. It’s a good exchange in this story.

Reaching the Shore (1994) by Guillermo Lavín

A father becomes a guinea pig for his company’s product, but he gets defective implants and no one will help him. But really the story is about his kid’s adoration for dad and the lengths he’ll go to to make his dad okay. Good story.

First Time (1994) by Elia Barceló

Another Lord of the Flies effect. Character study of future kid in a society with no morals. Violent and depressing.

Gray Noise (1996) by Pepe Rojo

This one was pretty inventive. Media companies hire reporters to record first hand the news events of the day, with their eyes. In return for paying for the ocular recording implant operation, the companies get first dibs on six hours of footage every day. Really good.

Glimmerings on Blue Glass (1996) by Mauricio-José Schwarz

Investigators look for people who are only pretending to be dumb in a future anti-union economy, because employers don’t want smart people who will just rabble-rouse and want more. But the investigators have to be smart to do their job.

The Day We Went through the Transition (1998) by Ricard de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero

Time travel special ops team has to go back in time to fix disruptions to history. That whole thing has been done to death. But the love story between two of the operatives is kind of interesting.

Exerion (2000) by Pablo A. Castro

Eternal life through video games.

Like the Roses Had to Die (2001) by Michel Encinosa

Gave up on this one ten pages in. No clue what was going on in this absurdist riff.

Title: Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain
Editors: Andrea L. Bell, Yolanda Molina-Gavilán
Cover creator: Raúl Cruz
Imprint / publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Format: Paperback
Length: 330 p.
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 0-8195-6634-9
Subject: Science fiction, Latin American — Translations into English
Subject: Latin American fiction — 20th century — Translations into English
Subject: Science fiction, Spanish — Translations into English
Subject: Spanish fiction — 20th century — Translations into English
LC classification: PQ7087.E5C67 2003

I picked this book up at the dealers room at Wiscon 33 last weekend. I’m not particularly familiar with slipstream, though I’d read one story that appeared in this anthology. But I had such a nice chat with M. Rickert so I decided I would see what this was all about, since one of her stories appears. Verdict: overall probably not my thing. I really liked some of the stories. Some of the ones that didn’t work for me really didn’t work for me. When a story is trying to mess with me, it better succeed well or I’m just gonna be irritable.

Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel start with an introduction trying to explain slipstream. Not define it, exactly, though. It’s an extended musing on the definition, as as it exists, it’s history, whether it should be defined, and the pitfalls of including particular stories for this undefined thing. Throughout the book they’ve also reprinted a series of comments made on David Moles blog regarding what slipstream’s definition. The end result really isn’t a definition any more than Bruce Sterling’s original essay was. Conclusion: hey, there’s some weird fiction out there that has some common elements that we like.

Al by Carol Emshwiller

The first story in the anthology didn’t work for me at all. According to the introduction, it’s sort of a mashup of Lost Horizon and a satire of the New York City art scene. Al crash lands in a different culture and tries to become part of it. That different culture is, in this case, an artist commune of some sort. Not having any connection to any of the pieces, it seemed strange for strangeness sake to me.

The Little Magic Shop by Bruce Sterling

Very cool little story about a fellow who comes back to a magic shop every decade or two to get a magic elixir that returns him to his youth in exchange for everything he possesses.

The Healer by Aimee Bender

Another really good story. Two school girls, one with a hand of fire, one with a hand of ice. The water from the second girl’s ice can heal. But can it heal the unstable fire girl?

The Specialist’s Hat by Kelly Link

A ghost story. I’ve read this story before, and liked it then. My opinion hasn’t changed on re-reading it. When I went back and read what I wrote way back when though, I said something that I probably should have paid attention to. Overall, I wouldn’t read her again, even though I liked half the stories. Just too much trouble. I just bought Magic for Beginners in the Small Beer Press sale, so I might end up not liking it. For $1 though, you can’t really go wrong.

Light and the Sufferer by Jonathan Lethem

Mysterious aliens follow people who have drug habits. Another great story.

Sea Oak by George Saunders

Another awesome story! Absurdist science fiction fantasy crossover. Aunt Bernie comes back from the dead a little more assertive than she was when she was alive. Great bit is a faux T.V. show called The Worst That Could Happen which takes unlikely but possible tragedies and simulates them. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he’s eaten by wolves. Brilliant!

Exhibit H: Torn Pages Discovered in the Vest Pocket of an Unidentified Tourist by Jeff VanderMeer

This is one of the ones that didn’t work for me at all. Shades of H. G. Wells The Time Machine with stratified garbage workers.

Hell Is the Absence of God by Ted Chiang

I wonder if there’s a Ted Chiang story that I don’t like. This one I loved. It’s simple in structure, but thought-provoking. Two big tenets of Christianity don’t have to be taken on faith in this story: god exists and manifests himself all over the place, and hell is the afterlife whose primary feature is being cut off from god. God and angels still are mysterious. They do things for strange reasons. Angels show up randomly, curing some and afflicting others. Neil Fisk’s wife is killed in one of these appearances and ascends to heaven. Neil wants to love god so he can be with his wife in heaven when he dies, but he also hates god for taking her from him. Quite the dilemma!

Lieserl by Karen Joy Fowler

Einstein’s daughter? I think … ? That absence of sound you hear is the vacuum inside my head.

Bright Morning by Jeffrey Ford

Decent but fairly unmoving story about a writer who searches for a lost Franz Kafka story only to have the writer Jeffrey Ford outbid him for it at auction. It kind of pulls a Memento like trick though, in that the gimmick really felt like a gimmick. Clever for cleverness sake.

Biographical Notes to A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes by Benjamin Rosenbaum by Benjamin Rosenbaum

This story tries to pull a similar self-referential trick, but to my mind, the story worked better. Not because of the gimmick though. It’s just a bit more fun is all.

The God of Dark Laughter by Michael Chabon

The second story that I’d previously read. Still like it.

The Rose in Twelve Petals by Theodora Goss

Kind of a re-telling/take-off of Sleeping Beauty with a bit of alternative history. I like it, and I may like it more on a re-reading. It has that kind of feel to it.

The Lions Are Asleep This Night by Howard Waldrop

An alternative history story where a kid in Africa saves his lunch money to buy cheap books and wants to write his own. Alternative history because Europe and America aren’t dominant (and might not ever have been). I liked it, but that’s the book geek in me identifying with the book geek in the kid.

You Have Never Been Here by M. Rickert

This is the reason why I bought the anthology. As the introduction to the book states, it’s very haunting. It’s second person, in a hospital. The doctors are doing something, perhaps conducting an experiment, but perhaps doing something else. They want you to love. It’s confusing. But in spite of the fact that I don’t know what the hell is going on, I liked the story. It works like I wish poetry did for me, mostly by setting a mood and instilling feeling.

Other blogged reviews:

• Everything Is Nice

Title: Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology
Editors: James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel
Cover creator: Isabelle Rosenbaum (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Tachyon
Format: Paperback
Length: 288 p.
Publication date: 2006
ISBN-10: 1-892391-35-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-892391-35-3

The middle of this anthology wasn’t particularly strong, but you can’t go wrong with something that includes Beggars in Spain. Gene Wars, Eyewall, and Desert Rain round out the top stories in the collection, at least according to me. As I’ve noted before, Dozois’ seeming obsession with naming authors as Big Names and Ones to Watch irritates me. While I think who writes a story is important, Dozois spends more ink in his intros on an author’s pedigree than on the story.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

I think this is the first time I’ve read a short story after reading the novel version. Kress set the standard for the trope I call human evolution: what happens when the next version of humans come along. The idea: genetic engineering allows us to create people who don’t need to sleep. The extra time and some beneficial side effects mean they are smarter and more balanced than normal humans. Who promptly start treating them like crap. Re-reading this is tough precisely because I’ve read so many stories that mimic Kress’.

Living Will by Alexander Jablokov

You are going senile. You know it. You want to off yourself before you get too far gone to be a burden. However, you don’t want to do it while you have some semblance of brain left. The dilemma is that once that semblance has left you, you are no longer capable of making the decision. Could you turn that decision over to someone else? Someone you trusted utterly? Good story.

A Just and Lasting Peace by Lois Tilton

Alternate history in which Reconstruction goes on a lot longer, and southern resistance goes on a lot longer. Rather than the north winning and eventually losing, they never really win. Not bad, but it didn’t impress me either.

Skinner’s Room by William Gibson

I don’t really understand why Dozois’ introduction says this story is about housing the homeless. In a future where cities are falling apart, the poor take over the Golden Gate bridge and build structures for themselves to live in. Nothing earth shattering. Pretty good style though, which sets a mood really well.

Prayers on the Wind by Walter Jon Williams

Sometimes it seems like people disaffected by monotheistic Christianity flock toward Eastern religions or philosophies. Although I don’t share Christopher Hitchens vehement language toward those religions, I do tend to agree on principle. If you can’t find evidence for it, it’s not true. Buddhism is one of those religions that falls into that category for me. If you want to believe it on faith, be my guest, but I need evidence. Reincarnation? Asceticism? Bah! Intentionally or unintentionally, this story fits in very much with my view. A future Buddhist-themed galactic empire runs into conflict with an alien race. But right when things come to a head, the empire’s version of the Dalai Lama dies and the new incarnation of Buddha changes things up a bit. To me, highlights how little sense soul reincarnation makes, as well as how despotic religion can be.

Blood Sisters by Greg Egan

When you do a double-blind test of a new drug, isn’t it kind of unfair (if the drug works) that the control group won’t be cured?

The Dark by Karen Joy Fowler

A dark fantasy/horror tale about a boy raised by wolves who ends up as a C.I.A. experiment. It didn’t do a whole lot for me.

Marnie by Ian R. Macleod

If you could go back to high school/college and do it all over again, would you? Here’s how that might happen.

A Tip on a Turtle by Robert Silverberg

What would it be like to actually have premonition? For the guy in this story who predicts who can win turtle races at a resort, it kinda sucks. Well-written, but I’ve seen this done better elsewhere.

Übermensch! by Kim Newman

A sorta alternative history story. It’s not really alternate to real history. Alternate to the Superman history. Instead of the spaceship from Krypton landing in a Kansas field, and Superman working to save the allies, he grows up in Germany and is a tool of the Nazis. Despite not being particularly fond of alternative history, I did like the story. Maybe because superheros from this kind of perspective are done so rarely (that I run across at least).

Dispatches from the Revolution by Pat Cadigan

Not fond of alternative history unless done really well. This one, not so well. What if… the right wing ascended in 1968?! Yeah, it happened in Germany. Perhaps it could have here. But it didn’t. And I’m not sure we really need another scare piece on what the right wing could do in America. I’m pretty sure we don’t need one at all.

Pipes by Robert Reed

An okay story about environmental restoration. Predicated on cheap food from offshore farms making midwest farming unnecessary.

Matter’s End by Gregory Benford

I did not like this story one little bit. A lot of melodrama about India hating scientists so much any scientist/Westerner will get beaten or killed. Westerner comes to secret Indian physics experiment that is measuring proton decay, which will determine the end of the universe. And then things really go to hell. Everything except the actual experiments felt false to me.

A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations by Kim Stanley Robinson

This seems more like a fictionalized travel essay than science fiction or fantasy. A lot more. Maybe I missed something. As travel writing, it seems pretty decent. I want to travel to the Orkney Islands now. As speculative fiction, it seems lacking.

Gene Wars by Paul J. McAuley

I really liked this story about genetic engineering. Not that it’s necessarily likely to happen. The story follows more along the lines of take something to it’s extreme to good effect.

The Gallery of His Dreams by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Interesting concept. Interesting writing. Interesting point. But for some reason I just didn’t get into the story. Mathew Brady, a photographer who sought to chronicle the horrors of war during the U.S. Civil War, went penniless from his efforts. The story has a time traveler whisking Brady to wars throughout time to use his skills and equipment to chronicle wars of all kinds. In the end, people view his work as art, not history. Good story, but perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood.

A Walk in the Sun by Geoffrey A. Landis

Good mundane-SF (at least by my estimation) story about rescuing a person from the surface of the moon. The walk in the sun refers to the fact that the castaway’s life support in her space suit is solar powered. She can’t let sundown catch up to her or her ability to breathe will shut off for 15 days (you try holding your breath that long!). So she has to walk ahead fast enough to stay in the moon’s daylight for a month (at least) until a rescue rocket can reach her from earth. Kind of like the premise of Stephen King’s The Long Walk; walk or die.

Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria by Ian McDonald

A Jew during and before World War II is visited by an angel? I think. I’m not really sure what her visions represent. Another story that didn’t resonate with me, but again probably more me than the story.

Angels in Love by Kathe Koja

A girl overhears her apartment neighbors having loud sex, and she wants some of it. Enough that she starts spying on the woman hoping to get a glimpse of her boyfriend, to see if she can horn in on the action. Nice to see a story about a hard-up undersexed loser being a woman instead of a pasty white geek boy for once. Anyhow, she never sees the man enter or leave the place, despite increasingly stalkerish behavior. What’s going on over there?

Eyewall by Rick Shelley

I loved this story. I have Shelley’s book Fires of Coventry which I really want to read now. Not technically a mundane SF story, but all the key parts of the story are. Basically, a category 5 hurricane leaves 20,000 dead in Florida and a million homeless. A hurricane study group must bow to political pressure. Instead of pure science research, they are supposed to conduct experiments using explosives (including nuclear) to disrupt the eye of a hurricane to get it to dissipate. They don’t like the applied research, and they don’t like using nuclear weapons, and they don’t like that their scientific existence depends on something they don’t like. The non-mundane part is that the experiments occur on a water covered world that has lots of hurricanes and is mostly untouched by human hands. The awesome part is the simmering conflict between the political guys and the original science people. Awesome tension and buildup.

Pogrom by James Patrick Kelly

Another story I liked. Near future story where the young are in conflict with a richer older generation. What I loved is the hypocrisy of the main character, an older woman, commenting on how the younger generation blames the entire older generation for the sins of a few.

The Moat by Greg Egan

Interesting but not compelling (gah! I just used compelling in a review!) idea about people who create their own alternate D.N.A. and why they might want to do so. Hint: it’s an us vs. them thing.

Voices by Jack Dann

Boy talks to the dead. Friend doesn’t believe him. Not inspiring.

FOAM by Brian W. Aldiss

FOAM stands for Free Of All Memory. Unscrupulous people steal other people’s memories to sell, kind of like drugs. Eh.

Jack by Connie Willis

I don’t usually like stories of this type. A type I won’t reveal here so as not to spoil the story, but also partially because the relevant word is never actually used in the pages. But I liked this one. Thought it was a novel take on the idea, and some of the things left unsaid intrigued me. For instance, how down and out would Jack have to be to resort to the kind of subterfuge he does?

La Macchina by Chris Beckett

Yet another version of robots gain awareness. Nothing about this screams best of the year to me, though I wouldn’t call it bad either.

One Perfect Morning, with Jackals by Mike Resnick

I like this story because of what a bastard Koriba Kimante (the elder) is, so beholden to his convictions that he cannot be a father.

Desert Rain by Mark L. Van Name and Pat Murphy

The miracle of artificial intelligence illustrates this story about one woman’s one person bubblehead validation brigade. A BVB is always a little more empty than you’ll think it will be. I’m not sure if this is my favorite story in the book or not. I guess it depends on how I think people relate to their BVBs. Most days, I don’t think most people get that a BVB is skin-deep. Those days I probably will like this story even more.

I kinda do want to know why this particular year is still in print. I bought this new from Amazon. New. It was published over 15 years ago and every other edition of the series older than a year or two has to be purchased used. So why this one?

Title: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Cover creator: Bob Eggleton (artist)
Series: Year’s Best Science Fiction; 9
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Length: 575 p.
Publication date: 1992
ISBN-10: 0-312-07891-9

Usually when I review a collection of short stories, I’ll include a paragraph for each story. Not this time. This time will only appear a fairly brief review for the entire collection. That’s because I didn’t get it. I’m missing something. I thought Chekhov was supposed to be the epitome of the short story writer, but I’m not sure what I should be noticing about the writing. Mostly idle Russian noblemen fret about their lives. Is there some symbolism I’m supposed to notice? Are these particularly classic views of Russian life? My quick reading of SparkNotes’ Chekhov entry doesn’t really explain why they are masterful in terms I can understand. I guess part of my problem is that I didn’t give a rip about any of the characters. So the possible fact that they were particularly good examples of pathos or something like that went right by me. If he was a trailblazer, I think I am glad his literary descendants read him and used him and not I.

For the record, the stories are:

• The Black Monk (1894)
• The House with the Mezzanine (1896)
• The Peasants (1897)
• Gooseberries (1898)
• The Lady with the Toy Dog (1899)

Title: Five Great Short Stories
Author: Anton Chekhov
Imprint / publisher: Dover
Format: Paperback
Length: 94 p.
Publication date: 1990 (stories originally published in 1890s)
ISBN-10: 0-486-26463-7

Of all the Year’s Best S.F. collection’s by Gardner Dozois, this one might be my favorite so far. There weren’t any stories that just blew me away, but there were only a couple I hated and I quite liked quite a bit. Best stories: Bears Discover Fire, Tower of Babylon, and Learning to Be Me. And now thoughts on the stories…

Mr. Boy, James Patrick Kelly

There’s nothing in this story about genetic manipulation/body modification that I haven’t read before. But it’s still really really good. Mr. Boy is the assumed named of Peter Cage, a 25 year old boy. He’s been genetically modified to stay the age of 13, and acts that age. His mom is a ¾ scale statue of liberty. Being rich, they can do all this. And then he meets Treemonisha Joplin, whose family isn’t rich. She wants in, and Mr. Boy increasingly wants out. It was really easy to get in to the character of Mr. Boy, despite the strangeness.

The Shobies’ Story, Ursula K. Le Guin

Uh. Okay. I think this is about some sort of new instantaneous space travel that ends up requiring those who do the traveling to believe in it. Or something.

The Caress, Greg Egan

Performance art gone bad. Evil genius genetically creates human/animal hybrids to mimic paintings he’s seen. And more. Very twisted. Pretty good. I especially liked the ending, where the victim doesn’t feel anger.

A Braver Thing, Charles Sheffield

Good story about a physicist who wins the Nobel Prize. This is his first-person account of how he made the discovery. Only tangentially science fiction. The meat of the story could take place at any time.

We See Things Differently, Bruce Sterling

Since this story first saw publication, not a whole lot has changed. In fact the story seems even more relevant, even if the time line in the story places the plot nearly a decade ago. U.S. and Russia in decline. The Arab world ascendant. It’s been unified into a caliphate, and although it’s clearly won the cultural battle there’s still resentment against the U.S. An Arab journalist travels to the U.S. to cover a patriotic rock singer who is galvanizing the populace. I saw the ending coming a mile away, so it is kind of predictable. Well written though.

And The Angels Sing, Kate Wilhelm

Kind of a first contact story. Small town newspaperman comes on a being stumbling around town. At first he takes it for one of the local girls, but when he gets her inside he realizes she isn’t a she. The story could be his ticket out. Very well written. I liked it.

Past Magic, Ian R. MacLeod

This story didn’t resonate with me. In a somewhat dystopian future, a rich person tries to hold on to her memories by re-creating her daughter. Told from the viewpoint of the ex-husband father. Not bad, but seemed old hat and I couldn’t get into the characters.

Bears Discover Fire, Terry Bisson

Just an awesome story. One day, bears do what man did tens of thousands of years ago. The bears discover fire. I love the mixture of the practical and absurd. This is begging to be made into a short film.

The All-Consuming, Lucius Shepard and Robert Frazier

Lucius Shepard seems to write stories that I either love or that just bore me. This is one of the boring ones. I can see where some folks will like this one, but the style just doesn’t suit my tastes. In this fantasy story, a rich person decides to grok the world by eating it. Our protagonist is a jungle guide type person who provides the rich guy with meals from a magical jungle, and they all begin to notice a change.

Personal Silence, Molly Gloss

This is one type of science fiction I really like, where the science fiction is integral to the story, but it’s presence is not overwhelming. A protester walks around the world engaging in a personal silence (i.e., not talking) to try to end an endless world war of some type. On the Olympic peninsula he runs into a young pre-teen who dreams a little precognitively. Really liked this one.

Invaders, John Kessel

So if you’ve read this blog for the last few months or some of my comments on other folks blogs, you’ve read me saying that I think the meaning of a story isn’t really up to the author. By that I meant that once released, the author gives up exclusive control over the interpretation. If he/she later says something about that book, I feel that readers may at that point decide for themselves whether to accept the additional input or not. Sometimes authors have changes of heart. Sometimes they were just chicken-shit when they wrote their book and didn’t want to say something. After a story has been released, the owner is the reader. The author only owns it until it’s released. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. One way though for an author to have a lasting say is to do what John Kessel did in this story, and that I’ve never seen done elsewhere. He inserted little mini-essay like pieces on his literary intentions about Invaders into the text of the story itself. He broke the 4th wall, so to speak. Anyway, I kind of like it. And I really like that the aliens are just here for our cocaine.

The Cairene Purse, Michael Moorcock

Long and slow story about an engineer who travels to Egypt looking for his sister, who he has reason to believe has run into some trouble. It’s a degraded earth by the time of the story. And locals think the sister is into witchcraft or in league with aliens. I just didn’t care about the character. And the drawn out storytelling really put me off.

The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk, Dafydd ab Hugh

Sometimes I think speculative fiction appears on a grand scale too much. Nation against nation, species against species, fighting for the survival of all that is known to man or alien. Dafydd ab Hugh’s story is small scale. After a genetic accident elevates animals, three of them set off on a quest to bring Progrets and Democrazy to one of man’s redoubts. Kind of hard to get in to the story, but it had a spark that I don’t often see in S.F.

Tower of Babylon, Ted Chiang

Another small scale fantasy story. Ted Chiang imagines the tower of Babel fable from the perspective of a miner digging through the vault of heaven after the tower’s been built to reach that high. I believe this won the Nebula, and for good reason.

The Death Artist, Alexander Jablokov

I only read seven or eight pages of this and moved on. One of those stories that jumps around and changes settings and doesn’t really tell you what’s going on. I don’t like being in a maze of mirrors.

The First Since Ancient Persia, John Brunner

Scientists conduct experiments on unsuspecting local population. New person stumbles on it all. Trouble follows. Not original. Not awful, but I felt like I could have missed this one and not really missed anything.

Inertia, Nancy Kress

Previous story was about biological manipulation. So’s this one, with a much more interesting idea behind it. Some sort of disease strikes humanity, disfiguring the infected with rope-like blemishes. It’s communicable, though it doesn’t seem to have any other apparent effects. Nevertheless, no one wants to catch it so those who have it are banished to internment camps, which become permanent. There’s a little of the Inside/Outside type of theme common to internment camp stories, but there’s also a lot more levels to this than there is in many short stories.

Learning to Be Me, Greg Egan

Damn fine story. The only story I’ve ever seen that tackles head on one of the implications of uploading oneself into a computer. What happens to the old copy? There’s a bit of David Marusek’s Wedding Album in this, as well as one I can’t remember the title of, where transporting one’s self across the universe instantaneously resulted in a very bad side effect of two copies of one’s self. The story fuses it all together in a fairly horrifying way. It’s also pretty clever too.

Cibola, Connie Willis

Didn’t like this one. A descendant of El Turco, a Native American guide for Coronado who led the Spanish explorer on a wild goose chase for Cibola, leads a Denver newspaper reporter on a wild goose chase for Cibola. Connie Willis led me on a wild goose chase for Cibola.

Walking the Moons, Jonathan Lethem

Virtual reality is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Rainmaker Cometh, Ian McDonald

I didn’t get this and I didn’t finish it.

Hot Sky, Robert Silverberg

Really liked this story about a future after global warming. Small scale story of a boat capturing an iceberg in the Pacific to tow it to San Francisco which like all cities in the story needs fresh water. The plot is fairly conventional. Another boat is in distress, forcing the captain to choose between helping the other boat and bringing fresh water to a city. I liked it because Silverberg put a lot of effort into the details of the story, which all fit together well.

White City, Lewis Shiner

I usually like Shiner stories (the couple that I’ve read). But this one was pretty emotionless. Although the story is supposedly about an emotionless man, I just don’t think that worked.

Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates, Pat Murphy

In a nominally post-apocalypse story, one of the last (dying) people alive is a robotics person. She creates a couple of robots to live on after her, with pseudo-sexual organs. It’s less prurient than the description makes it seem. Kind of on the weird side really. I didn’t get in to it, but I thought it was an interesting story nonetheless.

The Hemingway Hoax, Joe Haldeman

Huh. I must be missing something big here. I really liked this story up until the ending, and then I just got lost. Someday perhaps I’ll re-read it and I’ll get the ending and like it. The story has that sort of feel to it. Like pasta. Better after re-heating.

Title: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Cover creator: Michael Whelan (artist)
Series: The Year’s Best Science Fiction; 8
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Length: xxxii, 624 p.
Publication date: 1991
ISBN-10: 0-312-06009-2

What a slog! Ten days to read this immense anthology. Too long. Too many works. I’ve now finished both Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies I bought a while ago. I don’t think I’ll be picking up any more. There were three really outstanding stories, but overall I just don’t think I like enough of the stories to bear with more of the Datlow/Windling Best Ofs. The three I like most were Onion, Struwwelpeter, and Gestella. His Own Back Yard follows closely after those. While I didn’t get most of the poetry, I don’t mind it so much because it’s usually short, and those who do like poetry get something they enjoy.

On to the stories.

The Hunter’s Wife, Anthony Doerr (from The Shell Collector)

A stalkerish hunter sees a magician’s assistant performing through a window. He follows her from town to town, and pesters her every year she returns until she marries him. She has the ability to see the dreams of others, as well as visions of the after-life for the recently dead. He dreams of wolves. He lives for the wilderness. But he is frightened of his wife’s ability, and she leaves. Twenty years later, he goes to a séance she conducts, still married but neither have seen the other in the intervening decades. It seemed well written, but I never connected with the character or story.

The Cowardly Coffin, Marin Sorescu (from Sept/Oct 2001 American Poetry Review, subscribe)

A whimsical (and pretty good) poem about a coffin that refuses to be buried, shooting up as if on top of a geyser when it’s dropped in the hole. Sorescu had cancer when he wrote this, which killed him shortly afterward. Considering I generally don’t like poetry, I’m kind of impressed.

In These Final Days of Sales, Steve Rasnic Tem (from In These Final Days of Sales)

I’m really not sure what to make of this story about a very bad salesman. I think there’s a lot of subtext that’s gone over my head. I didn’t connect with it at all.

To Dream of White Horses, June Considine (from Thicker Than Water)

Father and son each have a hard time coming to grips with mom’s suicide. Dad by ignoring it. Son by obsessing over it. At least from the son’s perspective. Until son meets a homeless girl who sees his dreams. I didn’t think this was all that profound.

Skin, Charlee Jacob (from Perihelion Broadside Series, Volume 3)

Narrative poem that I didn’t understand.

Prussian Snowdrops, Marion Arnott (from Crimewave 4: Mood Indigo) (2001 The Macallan Short Story Dagger)

Set in what apears to be pre-World War 2 Nazi Germany, a journalist is stationed in the countryside to let things cool off after he has offended the authorities. He stumbles on a scandal where the doctor in charge of the local insane asylum committed suicide in a spectacular fashion in Berlin, yet no one seems to know anything about it. And the denizens of the asylum have disappeared. Here’s the thing: Nazi Germany made no secret to it’s citizens that certain races and kinds of people were undesirable and treated them very badly. Among those persecuted were Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and the mentally ill. So why would any mistreatment of the insane be considered a scandal? It would be as if the Klu Klux Klan’s lynching of a black person in the 1920s were a scandal. Wrong, yes. But the U.S. tolerated this kind of atrocity. Nazi Germany tolerated it as well. So I don’t understand the premise of the story. Why would a journalist think the German public would make a stink?

The Honeyed Knot, Jeffrey Ford (from the May 2001 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, subscribe)

Another story I didn’t connect with. The college teacher Jeffrey Ford runs into some sort of fantasy stag after one of his students kills someone. Or something like that. I totally don’t get any of the symbolism.

Timmy Gobel’s Bug Jar, Michael Libling (from December 2001 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction)

I liked this one! Did you ever trap bugs and put them in a canning jar with holes punched in the lid for air? Even with air the bugs never lived long. So a kid finds a bug jar from the previous summer, but it has more than bugs in it. There’s a miniature headless skeleton also in there. That can’t be anything good, can it?

The God of Dark Laughter, Michael Chabon (from April 9, 2001 The New Yorker, subscribe)

A small-town prosecutor investigates the death of a clown, the body being found shortly after a circus leaves town. Descriptions of this story call it Lovecraftian, but I wouldn’t know as I’ve never read Lovecraft. It does have lost tribes and obscure religions like you’d find in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, so if that’s what makes it Lovecraftian I won’t argue. I liked the story.

The Adolescence of Orpheus, Kurt Leland (from the Spring 2001 The Beloit Poetry Journal, subscribe)

So I know reviewers theoretically aren’t supposed to employ ad hominem criticism. In other words, criticize the text, not the author. Who decided that anyway? Perhaps I should write up an opinion piece on that, because I’m not so sure I agree in the case of literature. Anyway, I didn’t like the poem. Just couldn’t get in to it. Side ad hominem (and why is latin italicized? time to Google® that question too) note: Windling’s introduction notes that Leland has written two books on speculative metaphysics. That’s a nice way to say Leland is loony. Either that or Windling gives some credence to the speculative metaphysics and didn’t want to cop to it. Cause when I go to Leland’s web site, it’s all about astral fucking projection! Yup, it has nothing to do with whether or not the poem is any good. I still want to know when I’m reading the works of the insane.

Trading Hearts at the Half Kaffe Café, Charles de Lint (from Single White Vampire Seeks Same)

I kinda liked this story. It’s a little on the unoriginal side, but it’s sweet nonetheless. Basically, arty bohemian girl answers a personal ad for a guy who happens to be a werewolf (well, technically a skinwalker, but I wouldn’t know what that was unless a story told me). Only she doesn’t know he’s a skinwalker. Things get hairy when some other werewolves show up. I liked how de Lint alternates perspectives. Again, not original, but it worked well.

Louise’s Ghost, Kelly Link (from Stranger Things Happen, download) (2001 Nebula Award, Novelette)

Louise and Louise meet weekly and gab. Louise #1 has a ghost. She tries to figure out many ways to get rid of the ghost haunting her house. On a superficial level, the story gets a little confusing at the end. I mostly like it, but it’s weird enough that I’m missing something.

Fairy Tale Pantoum, Ellen Wernecke (from The Louisville Review Issue 49, subscribe)

More poetry. Whoosh! That’s the sound of this going right over my head.

The Puppet and the Train, Scott Thomas (from Cobwebs and Whispers)

I didn’t find much about Scott Thomas on the web, mostly because the name is pretty common and I didn’t want to disambiguate. I liked this story quite a bit. Remember in Men in Black when one of the aliens turned out to actually be a robot run by another alien? That’s this story. A small town veterinarian in 1909 is called when a train hits an elephant. It’s a talking elephant even, owned by a circus. As the vet is poking and prodding, a man jumps out of the carcass and runs away. That’s the start of the story…

Crocodile Lady, Christopher Fowler (from Crimewave: Dark Before Dawn)

Pretty good horror/suspense tale about a teacher’s first day back at school after taking a decade plus off because her husband didn’t want her to work. Conflict with other teachers. Classifying kids. Figuring out she doesn’t have too much rust to be there. And then on an outing to the zoo one child disappears on the London Tube.

The Barbarian and the Queen: Thirteen Views, Jane Yolen (from Starlight 3)

Thirteen queens and thirteen barbarians. Thirteen little snippets of stories. All with tea. Interesting, and I’m still deciding if I like it or not.

Becoming Bird, Bob Hicok (from Quarterly West Issue 51)

A poem I got! And even think was kinda nice. Kind of an illustrated man sort of vibe from it.

Sop Doll, Milbre Burch (from April 2001 Realms of Fantasy, subscribe)

A Jack story, a class of stories I’ve never heard of. Jack rolls in to town looking for work and is hired by the mill owner to run the mill while the owner keeps the men away from his wife. The previous two men hired to run the mill ended up with their throats slit.

Plenty, Christopher Barzak (from May 28, 2001 Strange Horizons)

A nice story about going home again and remembering the people who were once important. In this case, it’s a nice old lady across the street who feeds our narrator and his roommate during the lean college years. He’s heading home for her funeral.

Bones of the Earth, Ursula K. Le Guin (from Tales from Earthsea)

This tale from Le Guin’s Earthsea world left me unimpressed. Not bad. Not great either. A Gontish wizard senses trouble, and enlists the aid of a former apprentice. The plot isn’t so much. Any enjoyment of the story really comes from the characters and their relationship. They’re decent, but not overwhelming to me.

What the Story Weaves, the Spinner Tells, Terry Blackhawk (from Calyx, Volume 20, Number 2)

More poetry.

Onion, Caitlín Kiernan (from Wrong Things) (2001 International Horror Guild Award, Best Short Story)

The first story in the collection that I really got completely in to. This was awesome! Gives a great sense of dread to the common trope of parallel worlds, without ever having any truly bad happen right in front of you. Everything is done through intimation.

Where the Woodbine Twineth, Norman Partridge (from The Man With The Barbed-Wire Fists)

Horror tale set just after the Civil War featuring a Confederate soldier that can’t quite forget the war. Again, not particularly inspiring to me.

Struwwelpeter, Glen Hirshberg (from SciFi.com)

I really liked this story, and it really irritated me as well. It’s set in Ballard, which is a plus, though it’s not quite the Ballard I know. Hirshberg has taken liberties with the location. That’s totally fine. It works well in the story. What I didn’t like about it was a couple of things about suspension of disbelief. Like a lot of horror stories, Struwwelpeter asks the reader to believe something that it just plain weird. No, not the supernatural. I mean the idea that a haunted house on the hill will be completely ignored by kids for ages and ages until the kids in our story come along. Aside from that though, this is an awesome story. Kind of a classic ghost story feel to it, even though it’s not an old classic. The kids in the story explore the yard of a haunted house type of place, and are scared away by the owner telling them they’ll wake the dead. Two years later they return to the scene, one of them determined to reclaim his superiority over the one place that affected him. Of course, it’s Halloween, and it’s dark, and they have a couple of girls with them.

Outfangthief, Gala Blau (Conrad Williams) (from The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women)

Well now, turns out that one of the stories in the so-called Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women is actually by a man. Gala Blau is Conrad Williams. So is it bad to use an ad hominem criticism here? I kinda wondered how a supposedly previously unpublished author was included in a prominent anthology. Not that new writers can’t appear in anthologies, but anthologies usually have people that have been published once or twice. I wonder if the editors knew. Anyway, this is actually a pretty decent, if pedestrian, vampire story. Sarah and her daughter Laura are running from loan sharks who own a rather large amount of debt owned by Sarah. In her flight, Sarah crashes a car. But something saves Laura in the night. The saviors, Manser (the criminal element), Sarah, and Laura all converge on a lonely house in the countryside at night.

Rites: Cleaning the Last Bones, Gavin J. Grant (from Dark Planet)

Poetry about animals picking the bones of something dead. Very eh.

Watch Me When I Sleep, Jean-Claude Dunyach (from Interzone, subscribe)

A re-working of the fairy trope. In this version, fairies are parasites that pupate in a person’s stomach, stealing the person’s intellect when they emerge. Seems like a fair number of fantasy short stories (especially vampire short stories) fall into the category of re-working a fantasy trope. My internal reaction is usually along the lines of Well, aren’t you clever? You have to imagine that with dripping sarcasm. That’s probably not fair to the stories, but it seems to be automatic in my case.

The Tattoo Artist, Patrick Roscoe (from Fall 2001 Descant)

A unique tattoo by a legendary artist becomes a burden over time instead of a boon.

Cleopatra Brimstone, Elizabeth Hand (from Redshift) (2001 International Horror Guild Award, Long Fiction)

An award winner it may be, this seemed to be a pretty run-of-the-mill revenge fantasy with a bit of a supernatural twist. I think I didn’t like it because so little was revealed of what went on in our protagonists head. If you are going to make the bad guy the protagonist, just simply iterating through his actions makes it uninteresting.

Grass, Lawrence Miles (from September 2001 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction)

A short alternative history story about mammoths in the Louisiana Territory and Thomas Jefferson sending Lewis and Clark to find them.

If Death, a Preprimer, Sandra J. Lindow (from The Magazine of Speculative Poetry)

Poetry goths would like.

The Bird Catcher, S. P. Somtow (Somtow Sucharitkul) (from The Museum of Horrors)

How one child met a serial killer and blames himself. Not for what you might think tough. Not great, but pretty good.

Black Dust, Graham Joyce (from Black Dust)

Ghost story. By the numbers. Man talks to boy, turns out he died minutes before.

Annabelle’s Alphabet, Tim Pratt (from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 9)

Cute little story about a little girl, Annabelle, who dreams of flying.

Tom Brightwind, or, How the Fairy Bridge Was Built at Thoresby, Susanna Clarke (from Starlight 3)

A decent story, but one that seems to be overwhelmed by how little goes on. Clarke’s novel showed how lots of text can describe very little when the author is aping a Jane Austen feel for her writing. This is the same. Seriously, it’s a one-trick pony and shouldn’t be trotted out story after story (just like Gregory Maguire).

Gestella, Susan Palwick (from Starlight 3)

So far this is vying with Struwwelpeter and Onion for my favorite story of the collection. It’s a werewolf tale, with somewhat of a twist. It doesn’t really re-work the rules of werewolves, thank god. Just takes the trope and extrapolates some of its implications, then puts a human face on it and combines it with some human foibles. Vague enough? Okay, here’s the gist: werewolves age at a wolf rate rather than a human rate. A man and a werewolf woman hook up and fall in love. But she (Gestella) ages at a much faster rate than he does. Now run with that. It’s one fucked up, awesome story.

The Legend, Ray Gonzalez (from The Ghost of John Wayne)

I think this story concerns when a ghost haunts the person who killed her. I think. It could be the ghost is helping him instead. I can’t tell.

Oh, Glorious Sight, Tanya Huff (from Oceans of Magic)

John Cabot sails to America with a little bit of help from a magical flute and a ragamuffin he saves on the dock before sailing. Of course, being religious he thinks the magical flute is witchcraft. Good story!

Home Cooking, Daniel Ulanovsky Sack (from With Signs and Wonders)

After the death of their mother, a family discovers that Eustaquia has learned how to cook mom’s specialty dishes. Maybe I’m just a foodie at heart, but I liked this story even though I never quite figured out all the relationships in the story. I can totally understand bonding over food and associating certain meals with particular people, so that part totally sucked me in.

Queen, Gene Wolfe (from December 2001 Realms of Fantasy)

Two men show up in town to take an old woman to the coronation. The town’s wealthiest man helps them find her, and then serves them food before they all leave. Not a particularly exciting story.

The Project, Carol Emshwiller (from August 2001 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction)

An interesting story, one without much in the way of overt fantastic elements. Harrier is a mountain man, though he suspects he may be a bastard son of the bigger lowlands people. Because of his size, he’s the foreman of the tribe’s Project, which involves moving large rocks for reasons I never quite figured out. But it’s really important to him. A mountain lion eats his child while he works on the Project. His wife is livid at his devotion, and sets off to stalk the mountain lion herself. Harrior discreetly follows and kills the mountain lion (as his wife wouldn’t be able to do it herself). But it seems Mrs. Wife has plans to head off the mountain, and Harrier can’t understand why. Despite not quite getting everything, I still found myself really getting into Harrier’s mind. It’s done so well I can understand his devotion to the Project even though I never figured out what the hell it was.

The Man in the Comic Strip, Liz Lochhead (from Winter 2001 Poetry Review, subscribe)

Again, I’m not so much on the poetry, but I do like hearing this reading of a version of the poem by the author, Liz Lochhead.

Strange Things About Birds, Scott Thomas (from Cobwebs and Whispers)

Short story where an older woman tells disturbing stories that involved birds that happened to her in her youth.

What We Did That Summer, Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg (from Redshift)

Pretty creepy story, but I totally didn’t get the ending.

Aesculapius in the Underworld, Ryan G. Van Cleave (from May 2001 Poem)

Didn’t get it.

Scarecrow, Gregory Maguire (from Half-Human)

A mostly decent story about assuming things from the perspective of a newly conscious scarecrow who is told stories by crows and foxes about how he came to be and what happened to the farmer who owned the field. And then he’s the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz and I got irritated.

The Bockles, Melissa Hardy (from The Uncharted Heart)

Always keep your word with magical creatures. This was so by the numbers I could count to ten using it.

His Own Back Yard, James P. Blaylock (from SciFi.com)

Heading down nostalgia lane, Alan stops at his old house while his wife and son are out of town. The house is boarded up. He digs up a coffee can time capsule he buried as a kid, which transports him magically into the past. In this case, he can go home again. Pretty good story.

Title: The year’s best fantasy and horror: fifteenth annual collection
Editors: Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling
Cover creator: Thomas Canty (artist)
Series: Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror; 15
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin / Holtzbrinck
Format: Paperback
Length: cxviii, 542 p. (includes supplemental material)
Publication date: August 2002
ISBN-10: 0-312-29069-1
LC classification: PN6120.95.F25 Y4

I’ve heard John Kessel’s name a few times, and read a few of his stories that have appeared in anthologies, but I’ve never made an effort to read his work before. Small Beer Press released this collection of some of his short stories last month, and licensed them under a Creative Commons license. Smart move, methinks. It got me to download the PDF of the book and read it. Color me impressed with the work.

The theme of the stories in the book is that most of them are responses or homage to other works of fiction, most of which I am not familiar with. The opening story takes on Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, while some in the middle are responses to science fiction works, to the last story which combines Pride and Prejudice with Frankenstein. I liked almost everything in the collection, with the exceptions being several of the more experimental stories toward the end.

Worth purchasing I think, and definitely worth downloading.

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence

Well, this collection is off to a great start! Dot (a.k.a. Dorothy) worked for a rich family which owns a summer cottage in the woods. She and Sid plan to break into this summer cottage where Dot believes the family has left $10,000. They get to the house all right, but can’t find the safe. What they do find is a secret door and stairwell down to a subway station. I’m probably missing a lot of the layers of this story. But I just love the suspicious bewilderment Sid adopts, as well as the nonchalant attitude from the people they meet.

Every Angel Is Terrifying

That’s one helluva cat! This one follows an escaped criminal and his cat. I can’t write how good this story without giving any of it away. Read this!

The Red Phone

Not deep, but pretty cute. A quick riff on the idea of executives who have their help make their phone calls for them. In this case, they are doing this with phone sex. And the best part is the help embellishes the calls and makes them so much better.

I double your investment, going short on Euros in the international currency markets while shaving your balls with a priceless ancient bronze Phonecian razor of cunning design.

The Invisible Empire

A story of a night of one of the female vigilance societies in the 1800s. Alternative history. Also a very inventive story like the previous three. Four for four so far!

The Juniper Tree

Here’s the setup: Jack, estranged from his ex-wife Helen, steals his daughter Roz away (she wants to go) to a new colony on the moon. The colony of Cousins is matriarchal, as well as sexually open. The idea of the social experiment is similar to that of female-only education; without men in charge, the dependency girls feel will be broken and can achieve their full destiny. However, the story isn’t really about the social experiment so much as the personal relationship between Jack and the two women in his life, Roz and Eva. Jack has a really hard time adjusting to the different mores of the colony. I’m having a hard time putting into words just how messed up he is. Suffice to say I think he would need medication even if he in a place he found normal. Actually, his history indicates he did have problems there too. He can’t let go of Roz as she grows up, and he can’t even have a conversation about her without losing his cool. Good story.

Stories for Men

There’s a lot going on in this story set in the same Cousins lunar colony as the previous story. It’s mostly the story of Erno and a provocateur who goes by Tyler Durden. Obviously there is a connection between Fight Club and this story. Erno is a young male who has a lot of anger and grievances against the colony which oppresses his sex. Tyler impresses on young Erno the male ethos as coming from the 20th century. Tyler Durden without the anti-corporate message, but continuing the non-conformity. Tyler would bring down the Cousins. Several views of sex roles came to my mind when I read the story. One is that there is little difference between men and women; our roles are primarily cultural. Put women in charge and you could easily just have a reversal of roles. The women in this story certainly do not behave ideally when in charge. This could also be viewed as a story turning the tables on men from the current situation in the U.S., and how would we feel. Show men being objectified in a non-positive way and see if male readers might have an emotional reaction. I certainly did. And a third look is that men are denying their basic nature when they subsume the macho. If we don’t indulge ourselves, we lose something essential (but also destructive too). If nothing else, the story will make you think.

Under the Lunchbox Tree

The two previous stories looked at the Cousins society from the perspective of men. This one looks at it from the perspective of a girl, Mira. She’s sent off to a summer camp, becomes homesick and doesn’t like the other girls (boys don’t get to go to camp). She escapes by social engineering one of the older male servants at the camp. In other words, she gives him a sob story that’s a complete lie and he agrees to take her home. Of course, it doesn’t take long for Mira to be missed and her escape is thwarted, putting her pawn in jeopardy. There’s a little but of exposure of female to female relationships. Mira also has a small epiphany about how her brother is treated differently.

Sunlight or Rock

Now Kessel returns to the story of Erno in exile (his punishment for his transgressions in Stories for Men) in a non-Cousins lunar colony. Surprisingly, it doesn’t deal too much with Erno’s adjustment to a non-female run culture. A little bit, but not much. Destitute, Erno attempts a big gambling score by hawking everything of value at a pawnshop.

The Snake Girl

This is a non-genre story. Ben is an awkward lad in college, starting his experimentation with drugs and other forms of slackery. Linda takes a liking to Ben, and initiates a relationship. But to her, it’s just a college fling. Ben makes a fairly common mistake though and thinks his first love is forever, but is devastated when it isn’t. Also, Linda owns a snake. The story didn’t seem particularly original, but I still really liked it. Sometimes it’s just nice to put yourself in someone else’s shoes for a bit, and it’s easy to do that with Ben.

It’s All True

I’ve read other stories where people from the future travel to their past (i.e., around now) and snatch people to use their genius in the future. I’m pretty sure I’ve even read one about abducting Hollywood people to make movies. But I can’t recall any of them that make the characters as interesting as Kessel does. I’m in the home stretch of this collection, and I’ve liked every single story (though some more than others). This one is about a blackballed talent scout who gets another chance to land Orson Welles for the future, something that no one else has been able to do.

The Last American

This story is a review of a biography of the future last president of the United States, Andrew Steele. I guess I shouldn’t have written so soon, as I thought this story was pretty blah. Though Kessel probably meant it to be more than speculation on how the United States and it’s culture would end, that’s all that came across to me. And that’s not a topic I usually find all that interesting.

Downtown

I didn’t get this one at all. I have no clue what to write about it. It’s short. Definitely short.

Powerless

I didn’t completely dislike this story. Parts I liked. Parts I didn’t. Part a story of a guy trying to invent a Foucault engine, powered by the rotation of he earth. Part ruminations on the Foucault’s (the other Foucault) philosophy of power. A couple other parts thrown in. Some essay style. Some third person. Some second person. Just wasn’t my style.

Pride and Prometheus

I’ve always assumed I wouldn’t really like Pride and Prejudice and so I’ve never read it. Although it is good social commentary from what I’ve read, I’ve thought it would be too subtle for me to appreciate and I would get bored with the language and lack of action. I could be completely misinformed on the contents of the book though. Here, Kessel combines Jane Austen’s work with Frankenstein, with Dr. Frankenstein traveling the English countryside. It’s kind of slow at the beginning, and I had a hard time keeping my interest up. But toward the end when the action picks up and the two novels are pushed together to expose a common theme, then things got interesting. I liked it.

Title: The Baum plan for financial independence and other stories
Author: John Kessel
Cover creator: Nathan Huang (artist)
Imprint / publisher: Small Beer Press
Format: E-book
Length: 316 p.
Publication date: April 2008
ISBN-13: 978-1-931520-50-8
LC classification: PS3561.E6675B38 2008

I’ve been working on this collection for a week and a half. I never seem to get through Dozois’ Year’s Best S.F. editions quickly. They are big. But I think the short story format means I keep getting jarred out of a reading rhythm as well. Just as I get going on one set of assumptions, or one mode, or whatever, the story ends, and I start out at zero with the next story.

Anyway, for today’s Sunday Salon, I finished up with the last couple of hundred pages worth of stories. Forgive me any etiquette faux pas by including my previous reading in today’s review.

On a personal note, I started wearing spectacles earlier this week. Thirty-seven years old and I apparently haven’t been able to read with my right eye for a couple of decades. Not that I really realized this as my left eye has nearly perfect vision and dominates. With glasses, the pages became so much clearer though. But oh is it a change! I am not liking the adjustment. I don’t know how you glasses-wearers do it!

On to the stories…

Tiny Tango, Judith Moffett

Imagining a future in which AIDS and HIV cause carriers to be reviled by the general population. Kind of like in 1989, when the story was published. The story follows a woman who is infected but keeps it secret, as she attempts to live a completely stress-free, ambition-free life in the hopes that it will extend her life. Of course, stress-free is difficult after a nuclear accident makes her home city of Philadelphia uninhabitable and an alien race (the Hefn) appear in the sky. Decent story.

Out of Copyright, Charles Sheffield

A fairly mundane story about multi-national corporations vying for a contract to crash asteroids onto Io. In order to do it better, they all clone famous scientists to run the projects. But clones don’t have memories of who they were. And sometimes they don’t even have the skills that the originals did. Nature vs. nurture and all. The hook for the title is that a scientist has a copyright on himself for 75 years after his death, and so he can’t be cloned until that expires.

For I Have Touched the Sky, Mike Resnick

A story set on Kirinyaga, where ethnic Kikuyu are attempting to create a society based on the old ways of the Kikuyu. One of those ways is that girls are not to learn how to read. And yet Kamari is smart enough to learn to read behind the mundumugu’s (the shamanistic leader) back. He tells her she cannot learn further despite having a taste of it. If she wishes to read she must accept exile from Kirinyaga. She does not like her choices.

Alphas, Gregory Benford

Bleah. Boring story. If you were stranded in space, falling toward a planet cored out by a superstring rotating very rapidly, falling straight down the middle of the axis of rotation, falling with no thrusting power in your space suit, how would you escape? If you can’t do it, you’ll just fall back in when you reach the other side, eventually setting down in the middle of the planet where the hear incinerates you. Oh yeah, the Alphas are the alien race that is coring out the planet.

At the Rialto, Connie Willis

A story about quantum physics. I gave up reading around five pages in. Just not my bag.

Skin Deep, Kathe Koja

A man becomes obsessed with a thing that has sex with him. A lump of flesh kind of thing. Oookay then!

The Egg, Steven Popkes

I really enjoyed this story! In a future Boston beset by flooding and gangs and whatnot, a young orphan Ira and his alien caregiver Gray come across an egg. Ira fixates on the egg as his relationship with his aunt and cousin degrades, but Gray thinks it might be dangerous. Nothing amazing (nor bad either) science fiction wise in the story, but Popkes does a good job putting you in Ira’s head and making it feel right.

Tales From The Venia Woods, Robert Silverberg

This is an alternate history story from Silverberg’s Roma Eterna universe. The key difference from our history being that the Roman empire did not fall, at least not like it did for us. This story is from a present day Roman republic, somewhere near Venia (Vienna?). Two school children come upon a haunted house in the woods, one that used to be a hunting lodge used by the Roman emperor, and they come across a very aged caretaker who remembers times before the republic supplanted the empire. I kinda liked it, even though it was pretty simple.

Visiting the Dead, William King

While on Earth for a funeral from the space-based overtowns, a visitor is caught in the center of war fever. Not too bad, though not groundbreaking either.

Dori Bangs, Bruce Sterling

Lester Bangs and Dori Seda, two real-life people I’ve never heard of died in the 1980s. Both were involved in counter-culture type stuff. Lester Bangs as a rock journalist. Dori Seda as an alterna-comic book artist and writer. Sterling writes the story of the two of them not dying and instead meeting, dropping out of the counter-culture, and getting married.

The Ends of the Earth, Lucius Shepard

I usually have liked Lucius Shepard stories that have appeared in The Year’s Best S.F. but not this one. An author struggling with a past relationship heads to the Yucatan to exorcise his demons in a relaxing tropical beach setting. There he plays an ancient Mayan game for which he doesn’t know the rules, and is transported into an alternate world. Like Jumanji, but without Robin Williams. Maybe it’s because I’ve already been ruined by the concept of Jumanji that I didn’t like this, even though I never saw the movie.

The Price of Oranges, Nancy Kress

I loved this little time travel story. Harry, a modern day retiree, has a portal to the 1930s in his closet. So he keeps going back then to buy things at cheaper prices and thus making his Social Security check go farther. But he also thinks the 1930s were less cynical, and he wants his grand-daughter to meet someone from that time period so she’ll be less depressed. He hatches a plan…

Lottery Night, S. P. Somtow (Somtow Sucharitkul)

A fantasy story where Samraan goes to the cemetery to spend the night. His great-great-great-aunt’s ghost will hopefully come to him and reveal the winning lottery numbers so his family can reverse their decline. Hopefully. Of course, Samraan could meet demons as well. Dozois calls this story gonzo in the introduction. I agree. It’s different than most fantasy stories that I’ve read.

A Deeper Sea, Alexander Jablokov

This could’ve been a really good story, but in the end I was really disappointed. The premise isn’t too unusual: humans can communicate with dolphins and whales. This is the story of Colonel Ilya Stasov. He tries to use aural pictures to communicate with dolphins. He’s successful, but mostly because in doing so he fakes sonar of the sea bottom to the dolphins, which drives them mad. Kind of like if we established communications with aborigines by feeding them hallucinogenics. Turns out the dolphins could talk the whole time; they’d collectively decided to boycott human interaction in the time of the Greeks. But the hallucinations basically made them cry out I want to die!. The rest of the story is Stasov trying to atone for dragging out speech from them as well as involuntarily enlisting them in the Soviet military.

The problem is that the story doesn’t reveal what was so horrible that Stasov did until late in the plot. And then when it does I don’t think Jablonkov really put enough effort into what pain he imagined the dolphins went through. Stasov’s atonement is to help the dolphins achieve their Messiah story culmination. But the authors explanations of that were so choppy I couldn’t figure out what it was he was actually doing.

The Edge of the World, Michael Swanwick, The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award

This isn’t really science fiction. It’s fantasy, set in a world very much like our own. All the countries of Earth exist, and there is conflict of some sort between the U.S. and some Arabic countries. Here’s the difference: the world is flat. Swanwick doesn’t bother to explain how it would all work. There’s no directions in the story about where all the countries of a spherical world would fit on a flat one. It doesn’t matter. Three kids, Russ, Piggy, and Donna live somewhere near the edge. One day they decide to descend a set of stairs built into the side of the world. They aren’t the first at all. There’s lots of graffiti and vandalism, as well as trash thrown over the edge and caught up on the landings from air flows. But even this isn’t a huge part of the story. Really, it’s just additional flavor for a story of three kids and how they relate. Pretty damn good.

Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man, Megan Lindholm (Margaret Ogden)

This is an eager story about a failed writer working as a sales clerk at a department store. A nondescript balding fortyish man comes in asking for silk. She only notices him because work is slow that evening. He comes in again another day, and that leads to magical adventures.

The Third Sex, Alan Brennert

Brennert tries to get inside the head of a new third sex, androgynes, people without a sex. How do you find love? Do you care? That sort of thing. I thought it not all that insightful.

Winter on the Belle Fourche, Neal Barrett, Jr.

Barrett’s story isn’t a deep exploration of anything. It’s a nice alternate history western what-if. What if Emily Dickinson traveled the west and got herself stranded in the winter in a cabin with a western woodsman/trapper/hunter? What if he was also a poet? I really liked it, because Barrett made some pretty good, if somewhat stock, characters.

Enter a Soldier. Later, Enter Another, Robert Silverberg

In U.S. elections lately there has been a focus on personality. George Bush is your next door neighbor. Hillary Clinton is too emotional, and simultaneously too cold. As if we really know how to judge what or who a person really is. All we have is their public persona. There is a large volume of information about politicians these days. Is it enough to really know?

Silverberg’s story explores what a person might be like if we recreated them based on the public record. A fantastic computer program creates artificial intelligence based on what we know about a historical figure. The idea is common (Hyperion had one), but in this short form it’s done fairly well. Francisco Pizarro meets Socrates in a computer simulation. It definitely reminds me that I hate the Socratic method. Resnick uses it in dialog in a particularly annoying fashion. Here it isn’t overdone and it fits, because it is Socrates.

Relationships, Robert Sampson

Short short story about a guy who starts seeing women he’s been involved with appear out of thin air. Mad? They tell him he is not, and also that he can’t continue to live in the past.

Just Another Perfect Day, John Varley

This is 50 First Dates. I don’t suppose they made the movie from the story, but the parallels are there. After an accident, a man wakes up every morning with no recollection of what he did the previous day. He last remembers a day in the summer of 1986. He continually wakes up the day after, at least to his recollection. It’s all written as a letter to himself from his previous day’s self. Also, there’s some business with aliens.

The Loch Moose Monster, Janet Kagan

At first I didn’t like this story of life on a colony planet, but as I read further it grew on me. What annoyed me at first was not understanding what was going on, but in the end I think Kagan introduced things at just the right point to keep the story moving along. Loch Moose is a lake jokingly named after Loch Ness with a twist. Jokingly at least until a real monster shows up and the colony’s genetic policewoman (so to speak, she has more duties than that) Mama Jason heads there to find out what’s going on.

The Magic Bullet, Brian Stableford

A murder mystery of genetic engineering. Rather pedestrian except for the ending. Meaning I can’t really say much about the premise of the story without ruining it.

The Odd Old Bird, Avram Davidson

This is a Dr. Eszterhazy story. It’s a recurring character in some sort of European empire/country. In this case, he and his genteel fellow scientists are discussing Archeopteryx, the transitional species between reptiles and birds. Except on of the folks in the discussion dismisses the topic with Seen it. This story just bored me. I think I skipped the Ezterhazy story the one other time I saw one. They just don’t grab me.

Great Work of Time, John Crowley

A work of time travel fiction, concerning a secret society started by Cecil Rhodes to preserve the British Empire. I think I am tired of time travel stories, what with all the jumping around to avoid paradoxes and whatnot. Occasionally there’s something interesting about them, but it’s rare. The more interesting part of this story is the whole preserve the British Empire aspect of the story. What would British hegemony look like? Is British civilization a good thing? This review looks at the secret society as an allegory for the British Empire itself. As it tries ever more complicated means to attempting to keep control, the more it inevitably will lose it. In the order the story is told, I agree. In the order of time, when time travel is involved, things become much more muddled. Which happens a lot with time travel stories. Of course, I did like another time travel story in this collection, so don’t mind me.

Well, my general impression is that I wasn’t as fond of this anthology as I have been of some other volumes in Gardner Dozois’ series. I’m not about to go check statistics, or even really compile them. I quite enjoyed five of the stories. A lot of others were decent, but didn’t really move me. Dozois seems to like to end these with a longish novella. I think he’d do better to start and end with punchy, really good stories. Draw the reader in quickly and send them off with a bang. That didn’t happen this time, at least not for me.

Title: The year’s best science fiction: seventh annual collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Cover artist: Thomas Gold (or Cold, I can’t read his signature real well and neither can I find any info on the web)
Series: Year’s best science fiction; 7
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Length: xxvi, 598 p.
Publication date: 1990
ISBN-10: 0-312-04452-6
LC classification: PS648.S3 Y43

I’ve decided to start blogging a Sunday Salon entry, at least periodically. My current reading routine is to sit at The Black Drop starting in the late morning and read for a few hours prior to heading to my mother’s. However, The Black Drop is closed Sundays. So I need a new routine. We’ll see if this one works for me.

Though I’m not sure exactly how this routine will work. Ms. Hamel’s Sunday Salon page describes a large room where lots of people read. I tend to think of The Black Drop when I read that. Nearly every time I’m there about half the clientèle can be found reading a book, though usually it’s a textbook in front of a W.W.U. student. Here, I’m sitting at home. It just doesn’t feel very salon-like to read in bed. Perhaps I’ll head downstairs to my sofa and read there. It’s winter though, and this townhouse seems to have a problem keeping the first floor well heated. Like at The Black Drop though, I will have a cup of something hot to keep the insides toasty, despite the dearth of heat in my living room. I picked up a Bodum De Chine teapot with infuser from Remedy Teas in Seattle. I’m not drinking one of their teas today though. Today I am drinking a Market Spice tea. My mom gave me all her loose-leaf tea last week, since she no longer can drink it and my step-father is a Folgers coffee person.

For today’s reading I’ve grabbed a collection of Philip K. Dick’s short stories from my ever-growing stack of books to read. He’s the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which became Blade Runner in the cinematic world. A number of his short stories were also turned into movies as well. Four of them are included in the tome I just started.

Fair Game

Extra-dimensional aliens watch a nuclear physicist, who realizes what’s going on. He becomes obsessed and determines they are watching him because he is the pre-eminent nuclear physicist in the world.

The Hanging Stranger

A man emerges from a day of work in his basement. On his way to the store he owns, he sees a body hanging from a post. Strangely though, everyone else doesn’t seem to pay it much thought. Including even the police officers who arrive to take his statement when he calls the authorities. He figures something is wrong and begins to run.

The Eyes Have It

This isn’t so much a story as Dick using a character to ruminate on some figures of speech.

• his eyes slowly roved about the room
• his eyes moved from person to person
• his eyes fastened on Julia
• he put his arm around Julia
• she asked him if he would remove his arm
• we split up
• Bibney lost his head again

Look at those lines again. Taken literally, we’d have some pretty amazing bodies that could do those things. Wouldn’t we be aliens if we could do those things?

The Golden Man

Mutants! Every time I read a mutant story, I really want to know whether it predated or postdated the X-Men. The X-Men was a comic that was used to examine prejudice in a non-threatening fashion. It wasn’t completely analogous to race or other stigmatized traits. Black people, by the color of their skin, are not a threat to anyone. Mutants, on the other hand, can do things like start flamethrowing from their hands! The comic used the fear of such actions as a proxy. And an appropriate question to follow is, why would you be afraid of someone because of what they can do rather than what they have done or what they’ve threatened to do?

Dick’s story is about a Golden Man. A mutant. The government is quite afraid of mutants. Not individually, however. The agents who find and track the Golden Man are pretty sure they can subdue any individual mutant. The fear is that mutants will breed and that will out-compete regular humans. The Golden Man is fast, lightning quick. And he can see the future. So, for instance, he knows where a gun will be fired, and its aim. He can move quickly enough to get out of the way.

What always gets me about these stories is similar to the same reaction I have to the argument against allowing homosexuals to marry. The other doesn’t threaten you. Mutants aren’t threatening normal humans in the story. Not individually. And not as a group. Not one normal human is harmed in the writing of this story. The fear is that, as a group, they will be replaced. The fear is that in the future, there won’t be people like themselves anymore. That’s it. If white people were to decline in percentage of the population because they were not having as much sex, would I feel threatened because 100 years from now there won’t be any pudgy sunburned bald white guys? Not hardly.

The Turning Wheel

Dick must have seen some sort of connection between Scientology and Buddhism, because this story imagines a future where the two are welded. Combine the Buddhist idea of reincarnation into higher or lower forms of life with the idea that karma is Scientology’s state of clear and you get this. It’s somewhat of a straw man though, as few people espouse the idea that the world is exactly as it should be and should not be changed. That’s the cosmic plan ascribed to the religion in the story. Good job knocking this one down Philip!

The Last Of The Masters

In the future, people tire of government and overthrow it. Except in one isolated area, where a small town-like place continues to exist. The rest of the world is ungoverned, and has no technology really either. Members of the Anarchist League patrol the countryside, looking for renegade governments. If they find any, they issue a call to arms to overthrow it.

The Father-Thing

Charles realizes one day that his father is no longer his father. Something has taken over his dad.

Strange Eden

After landing on a distant planet as part of some sort of expeditionary force, Brent finds the planet is inhabited. A strange but beautiful girl entices him. In the process Brent nearly becomes a rapist. This was a strange aspect to the story. Of course, things are not as they seem. It’s a Philip K. Dick story. Every single one of them so far has a fair amount of the paranoid schizophrenic component to the story: something has taken over someone’s body, aliens secretly have taken over the government, that sort of thing. I knew Philip K. Dick wrote dystopias, but I didn’t realize everything was a short story version of They Live. It’s good for a story. Perhaps even a decent movie. But story after story? I may have to recommend against reading this book even though I’m generally liking each individual story. We’ll see after I read the rest.

Tony and the Beetles

Tony is a kid on an alien planet. The aliens are the beetles, though that’s just the derogatory term most humans use for them. Tony is beyond that though. He and his Pas-udeti playmates. That’s the alien children. Anyhow, there’s a war going on between them, but the planet is human run and occupied. The aliens live by the sufferance of the humans. But the tide is turning halfway across the galaxy, and attitudes on the planet may be changing too.

Null-O

Lemuel is child devoid of normal human emotion. He sees things only logically. He sees the ideal as a universe of perfect uniformity. As in, everything reduced to Null-O, pure energy. Cue Information Society song please.

To Serve The Master

In the future, only Companies exist anymore, no governments. The Companies are governments, after a vast war, the result of which was that all fancy robots have been destroyed because they were on the losing side. Applequist is a letter carrier, and he stumbles upon a robot while out serving his route. He doesn’t reveal he found the derelict robot, but he starts asking questions. Of course, the company hierarchy in its not-so-infinite wisdom has decided that no one should really know anything. People should eat, do their jobs, and little else. Asking questions is verboten. So he sneaks parts to the robot, which repairs itself and in return answers Applequist’s questions about life before the war, and the history of the war. But again, all is not as it seems.

The Crawlers

Due to some sort of radiation accident, children in Ernest Gretry’s locale have been born without arms, legs, or pretty much anything that looks human, except for faces. Big amoeba-like worms they are. Most want to play in the dirt, and build underground tunnels. The populace looks at them with disgust, and the government finds them and puts them on a deserted island to play in the dirt to their own heart’s content. Yes, there’s a twist at the end. Yes it’s got indications of paranoia.

Sales Pitch

Now this is a truly brilliant story! Ed Morris is some sort of office worker on Ganymede. His home is on Earth. He travels in a Jetson-like personal space ship. Here’s the key though: there’s advertising everywhere. It’s transmitted straight to your ears and eyes as you drive by. It’s overwhelming. And once Ed gets home, a robot intrudes upon his domicile to give him yet another sales pitch, for a fasrad, short for Fully Automated Self-Regulating Android (Domestic). In other words, it’s selling itself. And it won’t take no for an answer.

Shell Game

Hey wow! Enough of stories with paranoid tendencies! How about a story about paranoid schizophrenics??! As in a ship full of them on their way to a hospital crash-lands, leaving them stranded. They construct not-so-rational delusions about themselves and how unknown outsiders are attacking them. Until one of them chances upon some tapes that reveal them to be paranoid schizophrenics. But even that could be a trick…

Upon The Dull Earth

This one is almost a fantasy story. But still, depressing. Silvia has a sixth sense for ghosts or angels or something from the beyond. She talks to them. She makes plans to join them early. But of course, her plans go awry and they take her too early in fact. Her fiancé Rick is understandably upset. He calls the beings from the beyond himself and implores them to return his beloved Silvia. They agree but warn that they are inexpert in returning people, and that the price could be fairly heavy. Rick says, not so shockingly, any price is worth it! And like all parables of this sort, we then get to see exactly how high a price Rick pays. It’s fairly inventive! Something that actually got me to think to myself Wow! That would be horrifying! But I’ll leave the spoiler off the review.

Foster, You’re Dead

Mike Foster is the son of John Sloane! No, that’s not an obscure literary reference. Let me explain. Mike Foster is a character in this story. The government has whipped up a frenzy of Soviet-fear. For years! And businesses sell new models of personal defense systems, bomb shelters, etc. every year. They make much money at this. They have new models to fight the latest movie-plot threat (Bruce Schneier should use this story). Mike Foster’s dad thinks it’s all a bunch of malarkey designed to sell these gadgets and refuses to pay for them. He’s a blowhard skinflint, like my friend Jason Sloane’s father. Mike Foster is the butt of jokes in school and the reject kid because he’s different, because of his family’s refusal to buy all these personal defense gadgets.

I personally love the nice little digs at the libertarian anti-government crowd that Philip K. Dick works into the story. One of the reasons why all the hype is blown up and geared toward products that individuals should purchase, is that the government won’t pay for the common defense. Because then it’s part of the commons and you run into the free rider problem. And people don’t value what they don’t directly pay for. No marginal cost, then people treat it like it has infinite marginal utility.

Pay For The Printer

This story fell flat for me. Post-apocalypse, an alien race discovers humans on Earth. Benevolent aliens that they are, they set up shop here and help humanity recover. The aliens have an ability to copy (print) any object they can get their hands on. Need a car? An alien can make a copy out of spit and ash, so long as he has an original to examine. Or a previously made copy. But now the aliens are dying, and people aren’t so happy.

War Veteran

A homeless veteran is found in a park. He’s not very healthy. But at the hospital the staff discovers that this veteran has an I.D. number from the future. And his war memories are of a war that hasn’t occurred yet. About to occur though. The hospital owner is one of the prime war proponents, because he thinks he can profit from it. But the vet’s memories of the war are that humans (as opposed to mutant human residents of Mars and Venus) lose. Decisively. And so the hospital owner begins to reconsider his support for the war. At first this story appears pretty complicated, but it’s a lot simpler than I thought.

The Chromium Fence

Don Walsh lives in a future where Purists and Naturalists are the political parties. The Purists want to force people by law to have no body odor, no unsightly hair, no halitosis. The Naturalists want everyone to be natural. Don Walsh thinks people are just find however they want to be, and doesn’t want to pick a side. In his view, it’s silly to kill people over body odor issues. The rest of society, however, disagrees.

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (inspiration for Total Recall)

Now, when filmmakers get hold of a book, they often butcher it. This is not exception. Total Recall is not this story. But after reading the story, it’s pretty apparent that this wouldn’t have worked as written as a film. Nevertheless, the story is way better, just not suited for film treatment as written. Doug Quail has had a lifelong dream to go to Mars. But he can’t afford it on his government clerk salary. So he goes to Rekal, Inc. to have them implant a memory of a trip to Mars in his head. It will be just like he went there; he won’t even know it’s an implanted memory. But something goes wrong. In the film, Arnold Schwarzenegger as Doug Quail ends up going to Mars to figure out what’s going on, and finds out he’s a secret agent. The climactic scene is when a nervously sweaty man gives himself away as a real man when he’s trying to pass himself off as an implanted memory. The film version is more like Shell Game than this story, with people trying to determine if their memories are real replacing schizophrenics trying to determine whether delusions are real. But in We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, Doug Quail doesn’t have quite as much problem determining what is real. Read the story.

The Minority Report (inspiration for The Minority Report)

And now we have a story about precognition. Kind of standard knowledge of the future kind of story. If you know what the future is, can you change it? In this case, the government runs Precrime instead of the police. Precrime uses precognition to determine who is going to commit a major crime, then arrests the suspect before he can commit the crime. We begin when the precognitive savants/computers pick out the head of Precrime as the next murderer. It makes for a better movie than it does a short story actually, cause I’ve read this story before, just by other writers. And one irritating thing is how the former head of Precrime makes a speech about how immoral it is to incarcerate people based on crimes they won’t commit. Uh… I know Philip K. Dick had to have seen how obvious that was, and how out of character it would be for him to make the speech. Sure it’s classic irony, but it just doesn’t fit.

Paycheck (inspiration for Paycheck)

Here’s a question. What would your price be to lose some of your memory? Let’s say two years of your life. Not even your past memories. The proposition is: come work for Rethrick Industries for a couple of years and we’ll pay you an ungodly sum of money. The catch is, Rethrick will remove your memory of the incident. Now that’s an intriguing proposition to me. But that’s not even the real subject of the story. As in the movie, when Jennings comes to after having his memory erased, it turns out he’s decided against taking the money. Not that he can remember making the choice, that part has been erased along with the rest of the two years. Instead of untold riches, he gets seven little trinkets, and has to figure out what use they are. They must be worth more than the money, or he wouldn’t have picked them. I didn’t think this plot was anywhere near as interesting as the willingness to have one’s memory erased.

Second Variety (inspiration for Screamers)

The movie version is set on another planet, where two sides are at war. One side has created little robots, screamers, which kill soldiers (and other life) indiscriminately like roaming minefields or cluster bombs. Dick’s original was written well before the cold war was over, and it is all about the Americans versus the Soviets. Same scenario though, just played out somewhere in an apocalyptic France, halfway between the former countries. Only the robots are intelligent, and they start manufacturing new varieties of themselves. The new varieties look like people, and they can trick soldiers into letting the robots into protected bunkers. So which of the soldier-survivors left is robot, and which is human. More paranoia writing. For a better exploration of this in film than Screamers, check out Battlestar Galactica. At least the robots there are hot women, not ugly men with three day stubble.

Title: The Philip K. Dick reader
Author: Philip K. Dick
Cover artist: Zina Saunders
Imprint / publisher: Citadel Twilight / Carol Publishing
Format: Paperback
Length: 422 p.
Publication date:
ISBN-10: 0-8065-1856-1
Subject: Science fiction, American
LC classification: PS3554.I3 A6 1997