rivkat | Thanks and reviews, short story edition (Reply)

boniblithe! You sweetie!

She sent me Dodie Smith (author of The Hundred and One Dalmations, a book I loved to pieces, literally!), Patricia Briggs, and The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property -- isn't that amazing?

Kristine Kathryn Rusch, The Retrieval Artist and Other Stories: This collection of short and midlength sf stories features several universes Rusch later revisited in novel form. They were fine, though having read novels in the same universes, I felt the stories seemed undeveloped by comparison. I liked the standalone stories best: "Results," about living in a world in which a man and woman with enough money can find out what the children they'd have together would be like, was short enough to have some real bite, while "Reflections of Life and Death" was an all-too-plausible scenario for an America whose aging population begins to overwhelm the resources of the young. "Flowers and the Last Hurrah" had a great premise – cloning is easy (though illegal); the clones don't last long, and tabloids use clones to get fake "celebrity" photos and video – that made up for the fairly hackneyed unfolding of events.

From the Borderlands: Stories of Terror and Madness, eds. Elizabeth E. & Thomas F. Monteleone: A pretty good collection. Gary A. Braunbeck's story about a guy who has the kind of face that just gets people to open up to him – and why that might be, and what happens when his face changes – starts the volume well. John R. Platt's short-short about the variety of hands in the world is also nice. Adam Corbin Fusco's stylized "N0072-JK1," which purports to be a research report, quickly gets so disturbing that glancing at it again for review purposes made me queasy. Also notable: Whitt Pond's story of small-town bigotry disguised as faith, Michael Canfield's short and bizarre myth about a food processor, John Farris's serial killer story, and David J. Schow's story about The Thing Too Hideous to Describe, the last of which provides some needed (albeit bloody) levity. Stephen King's "Stationary Bike" is a whimsical version of the standard King short story: the protagonist gets a bike, and things go from strange to stranger. Whitley Streiber, Bentley Little, and some others are also represented.

Lawrence Block, Enough Rope: As it turns out, this collection is The Collected Mystery Stories, which I already owned and which was itself composed in large part from shorter collections like Some Days You Get the Bear, plus a few more stories that weren't in the Collected volume. The stories go from the Fifties to the Nineties, covering a lot of cultural ground. Block had a much easier time coming up with motives for murder when the high-society New Yorkers he liked to write about couldn't get divorces and still expect to be respectable; many of the stories are about a world as far removed from ours as Edith Wharton's New York. Still, he's generally an engaging writer. The stories that really suffer from being collected are the Martin Ehrengraf stories, about a lawyer whose clients are always innocent – because Ehrengraf does whatever is necessary to make them so. Once you've read one Ehrengraf story, you know the schtick and don't need to read another. The newer stories, at the end of the volume, nevertheless reveal that Block still has a feel for shady characters.

Murder by Magic: Twenty Tales of Crime and the Supernatural, ed. Rosemary Edghill: A fairly pedestrian collection. Josepha Sherman's story of a magic-seller's death at the hands of a nightmare has a poignant ending; Debra Doyle's pseudo-historical story has the inevitability of myth; Diane Duane offers a tale of a police investigator who talks to ghosts to solve murders – the ending wasn't a surprise, but it's better than some of the stuff of hers I've read. Susan R. Matthews – the reason I bought the book – uses an uncharacteristic setting, involving feuding snake priestesses, with her usual sharp eye for personal conflict in extreme circumstances. Mercedes Lackey's contribution was unreadable – but you won't be surprised to hear that a child with Special Powers was involved. Other authors include: Jennifer Roberson, Carole Nelson Douglas, Laura Resnick, Laura Anne Gilman, Sharon Lee & Steve Miller, Lawrence Watt-Evans, and Esther Friesner.

Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, ed. Al Sarrantonio. Overall, a decent collection. Ursula K. Le Guin's short "The Building" is representative of her work about alien cultures and the meanings that we may or may not be able to divine from what we observe of them. Laura Whitton's "Froggies" is also about alien cultures, but this time the humans get to be more deeply involved – and it's hard to tell whether that's good or bad. Joyce Carol Oates's "Commencement" is also representative – a story about a university and its bloody traditions, which are accepted uncritically by almost all participants – but I don't like Oates as much as I like Le Guin. P.D. Cacek's "Belief," a story about a soldier fighting a war after death, reminded me of Haldeman – who also shows up here, with an abbreviated serial killer story with a cinematic twist. Paul di Fillipo's "Weeping Walls," an if-this-goes-on story about the commercialization of mourning, was competent if predictable. Michael Marshall Smith's story about a creepy guy who likes to covertly tape the girls he fucks was a little disappointing, despite the twist at the end. Other authors include Dan Simmons, Kathe Koja & Barry N. Malzberg, Michael Moorcock, Thomas M. Disch, Harry Turtledove (a kind of cool dragon story set in Afghanistan), Stephen Baxter, Gregory Benford, Kit Reed, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Elizabeth Hand, Catherine Asaro, Jack Dann, Larry Niven (short), Gene Wolfe, and Neal Barrett, Jr. (horrid story).

Kim Stanley Robinson, Remaking History: This short-story collection made me a fan of KSR, whose clear and witty writing I have so far enjoyed a lot. Some of the stories are sf, such as one about a human translator for two alien groups whose job is a little bit harder than he thought it would be; others could be in The New Yorker without much comment; the style is sf, with its thought experiments and juxtapositions between people who have no reason to meet in reality, but the topics can be just men on mountains and on trains. My favorite story was "A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations," which was about a man trying to write said history, and about what history is and what it should mean to us. In fact, a lot of the stories were about that, in the end, though they got there different ways – "A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions," for example, posits a number of alternate histories forking off from August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay took flight. How far forward are you willing to look to decide whether it was right to drop the bomb that day? What if that decision saved millions, then killed billions? What if it's the other way around?

Men Seeking Women: Love and Sex On-Line: A Short-Story Anthology for the Digital Age, ed. Jonathan Karp: I picked this up because I’ve enjoyed some but not all of Richard Dooling’s stories, and Bruce Sterling was also represented. Published in 2001, the collection is obviously not about the digital age; it is about the first fifteen digital minutes. Eric Garcia, of Matchstick Men and Anonymous Rex, starts off with a hackneyed, stereotyped story about lonely women seeking romance with male prisoners, and might have pulled off the twist at the end if not for the sheer batheticness of the writing. Dooling’s story, “Dante Visits Inferno Media’s Online Technical-Support Forum,” was as irritating as the title suggests. Po Bronson’s “Endpoint” had an interesting premise, about a researcher whose project is about improving the quality of life of terminal patients, but I’m not sure it went anywhere. Sterling’s “Code” was, unsurprisingly, the best of the bunch. It was a slightly unsettling take on the war of the sexes, summed up in how the male protagonist, a computer programmer, saw The Rules, that creepy advice book for women: “The Rules ... was a work of deadly seriousness.... [It] was bitter, life-and-death, stripped of all sentimentality. It was about surviving, and protecting children, among a race of large, brutal, half-blind creatures who would exploit you without conscience and could easily beat you to a pulp.... The thing was more than a self-help book: basically, it was an operating system.” And he knows how to work with operating systems.