Reading roundup: short story edition
I've been reading short stories. Lots of short stories. Fifty, to be exact, across three (really quite good) fantasy/sci-fi collections. I'm not sure how to do this, really, but I wanted to have a couple of sentenes or a paragraph on each story, otherwise I just don't remember them, and it bugs me afterwards. So, that's down below, and I've tried to keep these spoiler-free as much as possible. It got quite long.
28. Starlight 2, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden:
- "Divided by Infinity", Robert Charles Wilson -- it took me awhile to get into this one, even though once it got going I did actually like the premise. The execution was OK, not all that impressive. Eh, I don't know, I feel like something different could've been done with the idea to use it better.
- "Mrs Mabb", Susanna Clarke -- I know I've read this one before, but I can't remember where! This is driving me nuts... I do actually think Clarke's "quaint" style, which is, indeed, a rather good imitation of Jane Austen, is better suited for a short story than a monstrosity of a novel, so it was a actually a pleasure and not a chore to read. So, I enjoyed this story a whole lot.
- "Lock Down", M.Shayne Bell -- Reading Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog last summer reminded me how much I love time-travel stories, especially "need to keep the time stream from going astray" kind of stories, and I enjoyed that aspect of this story, although it never was very clear to me how or why time became fractured. The second-person POV seemed totally gratuitous (I think it's generally pretensious, anyway), and the fairly heavy-handed moral... *sigh* Yes, racism and segregation are bad. I don't think you need to build a short story around that message. I did like the divergent versions of events, the way the story was put together, and it was an enjoyable read, butin an annoying, emotionally manipulative sort of way. Too easy.
- "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation", Raphael Carter -- OK, this is officially the oddest format sci-fi story I've ever read. It's presented as a neurolinguistics/sociology/something paper, written by two authors who don't really agree on what their results mean. The pholosophical stage-setting introduction was actually the least interesting part for me, but I enjoyed everything that came after -- authentic-sounding descriptions of the way the research was conducted (with amusing but still plausible asides), the jumble of (presumably real and definitely bogus, because they cite future dates) references to other scientific papers, the dueling theories and incomplete conclusions. I am a person who reads real psych/sociology papers for fun, as long as they're not too full of jargon or bullshit, so this was right up my alley, and very amusing.
- "House of Expectations", Martha Soukup -- I rather liked the story until the "twist" ending, but don't feel that it's anything like a work of sci-fi genius. Not a whole lot of sci-fi in it, period, the speculative fiction angle is rather slight, and, eh, I kind of wonder about its inclusion in this collection. It's one of those things where I feel that either the premise could've been done much differently (and made for a better story) or a different premise would've worked better in the existing story.
- "Game of Consequences", David Langford -- I think it takes some doing to make me dislike a protagonist in a 10-page short story, but this story accomplished it. I kind of hate Ceri, who, in 10 pages where she is not even the main source of action for half of them, she comes across as annoyingly smug and condescending and self-righteous and self-congratulating, and have I mentioned I kind of hate her? I also found the science kind of laughable. I mean, yes, we accept that the beating of a butterfly's wings in Brazil creates a typhoon somewhere else, or that squashing a prehistoric bug leads to an unrecognizable future, so why shouldn't these same things apply to manipulating quantum mechanics via a computer program? I don't know, but I just couldn't suspend disbelief for that. I did like the interwoven vignettes from Ceri's past, the monotonically decreasing number of people with her, which takes on an eerie aspect as the story unfold, and Sammy's "I didn't know it would do that" antics. But the message of the story seems paranoid and anti-scientific to me. Well, *obviously* there are physical forces one should approach *very* carefully and there are reckless people who should be kept away from them, but the generalization seems to be that "there are things man is not meant to know" -- or play with -- and, nope, I don't believe that, and I don't think it's a feasible approach anyway. I guess I just don't really buy her reaction to the experiment as the reaction of an actualy *scientist*. I could see someone in her position being simultaneously elated and horrified, staggered by the enormity of the discovery, bowled over by the implications -- instead, she is mostly just smug and self-righteous and self-congratulatng again. It's a pity, 'cos I feel like this could've been a much better story with a less annoying protagonist at its center. Eh.
- "The Amount to Carry", Carter Scholz -- what an odd story! It's too artsy to be my cup of tea, but I keep comparing it (favorably) to "Lock Down" (above) and "Five Ways Jane Auster Never Died" (below), because, like the former, it looks at an earlier time, including a blot on human history, and like the latter it centers around an author (in this case Kafka; and also Wallace Stevens (who is never fully named) and Charles Ives, whose name meant nothing to me until I looked him up, because I'm a modern music heathen.) The thing that makes me like this story better than those other two is that it's considerably more subtle, less of a message piece than "Lock Down," less of a one-trick pony than the Jane Austen one. There are parts of it I really enjoyed -- for instance the miscommunication and mispronunciations that keep occurring when the three men are talking to each other -- and parts that didn't really work for me (like the whole rhapsody about the hotel), but it was a very *interesting* story, one I'm glad I've come across.
- "Death of the Duke", Ellen Kushner -- this is a sort-of sequel to Swordspoint and, chronologically, though not publishing order, to Privilege of the Sword. I actually liked it less than I'd expected to, because Alec is definitely not my favorite character in Swordspoint-verse, and also because I just don't feel like this story adds a whole lot to the canon. This is disappointing.
- "Brown Dust", Esther M. Friesner -- I keep thinking of Friesner as a humorous fantasy writer, because I first came across her via the Majyk by Accident books, and then her short stories keep surprising me by how grim they are. This was grimmer than most. To be honest, I didn't enjoy this one much at all -- not because it's not well written, but because it's too gritty and coarse and just not at all the sort of thing I want to immerse myself in when reading. And there wasn't really a pay-off for me to make up for the grimness, so... Another disappointment.
- "Access Fantasy", Jonathan Lethem -- a neat little dystopia where only the elite have apartments and everybody else lives out of their semi-permanently gridlocked cars, gaining access the the apartment world only by serving as living advertisements. I wanted there to be more of the story, because it ends, not on a cliffhanger, since the outcome is actually pretty clear, but in some place that wasn't just having the rug yanked out from under you, even though the ending is quite fitting. My favorite part was actually a scene towards the end where the protagonist has to "negotiate the three priorities of hunger, Advertising, and his investigation" -- the integration of the Advertising-implanted patter about a brand of beer is very neatly done, and also later on as he gets more agitated. A really neat story, though quite depressing. I've seen this author's name before but haven't read anything by him;now I'm sufficiently intrigued to look him up.
- "The End of a Dynasty", Angelica Gorodischer, translated by Ursula LeGuin -- I didn't expect to like this story as much as I did, but it turned out to be one of my favorites from the collection. It does have a very story-tellery feel, even though the actual story-teller narrator was somewhat annoying, or at least over the top, with the constant abuse of her(?) listeners. But the story itself has got that dreamy yet grounded feel to it that works really well, and the way the plot unfolds is nicely done, interspersed with odd little digressions of ferrets and scarab beetles. The thing I liked best, though, is that it's very much not a happy ending story, even though good triumphs over evil, loosely, and justice is served, sort of. Renka and Loo have to leave rather than live happily ever after, and the prince ends up profoundly mad, in addition to being a good ruler -- which is a pity, but a lot more likely than the kind of childhood he had resulting in a normal person. And the madness is presented not as a tragedy but just as one of those things, an attribute of his: "The Emperor Ferret never lost his anger, though in fact it didn't keep him from being sensible, just, insane, and possibly wise." LeGuin was a perfect translater for this story, I think you can really feel the synergy, her narrative style fits the style of the story very well, and leads to some lovely, haunting sentences.
- "Snow", Geoffrey A. Landis -- it's a fine little story, but I really don't see why it's science fiction. Yes, the juxtaposition of a crazy homeless woman and the "other world" is surprising, but I'm still not seeing the speculative fiction, really.
- "The Story of Your Life", Ted Chiang -- this story completely surprised me, and in a good way. It's the longest in the collection, and the only Ted Chiang story I had read previously (in a Locus collection, I think) I had hated -- it was all heavy-handed philosophy and theological sleight of hand and stuff. So, I was dreading this story, and then I read the first line and noticed it was another one of those second-person POV stories, and started dreading it even more -- but it ended up being my favorite in the collection, actually.
I don't know if it's actually a really good story or just one that's uniquely suited to my taste and interests. There's xenolingistics! -- which is something I haven't encountered before, as a story's focus, and it's tied into the alien morphology and psychology and science, and it's really neat, and xenolinguistics! Xenolinguistics, people! Not that all of the science/psychology/everything made perfect sense to me -- there were some areas where I was going, "hmmm, I wouldn't've thought it would work this way" -- but it wasn't "that's stupid," the way it was with "Game of Consequences" up above. And interspersed with the First Contact and the science and xenolinguistics are parenting vignettes.
The First Contact story is told in first-person POV, past tense. The parenting vignettes are told in first person *to* second person in future tense, featuring phrases such as "I remember when you'll be three" -- which sounds like a pretensious mess, but it *works* -- in this case, it's actually justified, not just being artsy-fartsy, "look at me! I'm playing with Time!" (like in "Lock Down"). The vignettes are perfect, and humorous, and elided and understated. The jump around in the timeline, the "ending" is given away by p.5 of the story, and the actual end of the story circles back to it in a seriously powerful way. The vignettes at first don't seem to have much to do with the linear story that's progressing between them, but they all come together, thematic links with individual vignettes and the broader overrching theme. It's not exactly subtle, but the point is never belabored, it just sits there once it has unfolded, and it's powerful enough not to need embellishment. I really like the way it's put together -- I want to poke around in it and see how it works, an urge I pretty much never get with speculative fiction, which I prefer simply to experience.
My main qualm/quibble with this story came from the fact that, out of 9 linguistic/physicist teams working together in the US, all of the breakthroughs either came from the protagonist or were realized in parallel by everyone. Nobody else among her coleauges got any "Aha!" moments, which seemed hardly fair and kind of Sueish. But that's nowhere near the central premise of the story, so it was a minor distraction for me, not a big deal.
I didn't think any story in this collection could out-geek the pseudo-scientific-paper one, but this one's got graphs! And physics I'd actually forgotten. And acknowledged gradations of dorkiness. (It also won the Nebula in 1988 and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 1999. I was pretty sure it had won something, because honestly it's one of the most powerful and also one of the most unusual sci-fi/fantasy stories I've read.)
And the other thing about this story is that I feel it retroactively justifies the inclusion of "Snow" in this collection -- there's just this really neat vector in going from one to the other, with "Snow" serving as the appetizer, I guess. Really neat!
So, let's see: "Story of Your Life" is the hands-down favorite, and possibly even joins the ranks of favorite short stories overall -- not sure yet, need more distance. "Mrs Mabb" was delightful and "The End of a Dynasty" made me want to read the book it came from, and I really enjoyed the "Gender Ideation" short story, but part of its charm is definitely a gimmick, and I also enjoyed "The Amount to Carry", but not in any visceral way -- it's more that I'm intrigued by the idea and like the execution. Didn't hate any of the stories, either, or feel they were significantly below par, just... nothing special or not my cup of tea.
29. Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2006 edition, edited by Rich Horton:
- "Pip and the Fairies", Theodora Goss -- there is some magic in this, I guess, but I almost wish that there weren't. Not because it wasn't well done -- the story is well written, but because the non-magical, human, mundane side of the story -- 'Pip's relationship with her mother, mentions of father and husband, other people -- were actually more compelling, and it felt like the fairy side trivialized those. Unless the moral is that the fairyland actually appeared because Pip's mother wrote about it. The possibility is mentioned but I don't think it's ever resolved, and, I don't know. Mostly this story left me feeling sad.
- "Comber", Gene Wolfe -- there is no actual fantasy/magic in this story, I'd classify it as sci-fi just without the background explanation for how (modern) humans are now living in islands on the crests of enormous waves. It's a short little story, but I think it's a really neat sort of premise on which to base a movie like Armageddon or Deep Impact, with the crucial difference that the theme is not "man against Nature" (which bores me, because there is no conflict, really, just outcome) but "some people against human nature", or different facets of human nature warring against each other, which is considerably more interesting. I really liked this story. And, I guess I didn't realize that Gene Wolfe was an engineer before he was a writer, but you can totally sense it in even a couple of pages of this.
- "Three Urban Folk Tales", Eric Schaller -- pretty much what it says, three connected ficlets set in the city, one about a postman, one a love story (with loss and resolution), and one a love story with rats as characters. How could I not like it? I was particularly amused that the human love story closes with the words "if the two are not divorced, then they are married still," while the rat love story ends "If rats can marry, then they are married still."
- "Wax", Elizabeth Bear (matociquala) -- this is actually the first bit of fiction by Bear that I've read, and it's kind of weird coming to an author that way, from reading her LJ. Also because of that, I knew something about these characters (Abby Irene and Sebastien), so I wasn't starting from scratch. I liked Sebastien, and Abby Irene was somewhat different from what I had expected (I kind of didn't expect the relationship between them to occur quite so quickly...). The plot seemed a bit top heavy to me -- like, I would've liked to see the resolution trail on a bit from where it left off. But, of course, this is only the first story in the New Amsterdam collection, which I now do want to read.
- "The Emperor of Gondwanaland", Paul Di Filippo -- this one's really funny. The descriptions of cubicle life and workplace politics that kick it off are very amusing. And the description of online community and discussion -- though brief -- is also right on. And the ending is very cute, right down to Mutt's business plans. It was a fun, lovely story.
- "CommComm", George Saunders -- I really liked this one, too, right up until the end. As with "Gondwanaland", the description of everyday work life (in this case, on a military base) was really very funny. And the fantasy element, presented in a magical realism sort of way in this ghost story, really worked well too, poignant and pathetic and creepy. I liked the narrator, I liked Rimney (up through the end, actually), but I didn't like the resolution -- probably just my atheist ways. The style in which the story is written is odd, and worked for me only partially -- the capitalized routines (Moral Value Analysis and so forth) worked for me, the things like "pride/shame" and "say/think" trying to show two words smooshed into one didn't. Liked it on the whole, but would've liked it even more with a different ending.
- "Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died", Samantha Henderson -- I'm not a huge fan of this type of story, and I don't think I know enough of the inticacies of Austen's biography to fully appreciate it (it felt like I was missing some inside joke). But the "five ways" are nicely different from each other, which is of course critical with this sort of structure, yet there are some threads that tie them together, which was also nice. And each individual vignette is well done.
- "Fancy Bread", George Feeley -- I had a problem with this one. Feeley can clearly write *really well* -- the first page or so, that describes the ogre eating, is really well done -- the rhythm and consonanse and the overall sound of the words reflect the ponderous grating of his teeth and the heavy jagged overall atmosphere. And the interaction between characters when it occurs, with parenthetical remarks for thoughts, is well done, too. But the overall thrust of the story just bored me -- I appreciate the idea, and it was even sort of well done, but I don't want to read a fairy tale riff about market economy which consists of pages upon pages of description largely uninterrupted by dialogue or action. I just don't. So it felt like a waste of those elements that I did like. And it was the first story in this collection that I had to force myself to finish, which is a pity.
- "Sunbird", Neil Gaiman -- I think Neil could tell any story at all interestingly and charmingly, judging by his blog. So, it's no surprise that I really liked this one. I liked Zebediah T. Crawcrustle (who is never really explained) and Virginia Boote, and, apparently, I just really like the myth on which this story is based, because I keep finding myself liking stories which are based on it.
- "The Secret of Broken Tickers," Joe Murphy -- the setting reminded me a bit of Henry Kuttner's Hogben stories, but I actually didn't terribly like the story. It's neat having the narrator be who she is, and there are some details which are nice (I liked the frogs, and the birthdays being counted off by knowing family secrets) and some not particularly effective (the grandfather always speaking in lies... it was quite disorienting but didn't do much for me otherwise), but mostly what I didn't like about it was that the token normal person was a villain. I thought this was the weakest/least interesting one of the stories so far.
- "On the Blindside", Sonya Taaffe -- it started way too slow for me, and had too much description for my taste, throughout, but some of the words were truly lovely: "mole-mottled", "owl-slow", which made the thickets of verbiage worth it. There are some lovely, glancing sort of descriptions which reminded me of Patricia McKillip's imagery. The idea was OK, and Chion was a fascinating sort of character, half-glimpsed, and even the absent Lucas seemed nice, but I really couldn't care at *all* for or about Samantha the protagonist, which made the story feel ultimately hollow. And this was one case where the insertion of specific details of flavor (e.g. "my Bede class") felt like a bad thing -- trying too hard, fake.
- "Jane", Marc Laidlaw -- really, really creepy. A tad underexplained, for my taste -- I would've liked more background, to understand better the why as well as the who -- but it does the nightmarish thing well, and by nightmarish I mean not goblins chasing you or anything, but terribly things happening, progressing inevitably and making a consistent kind of dream-sense. The practice of hooding that is mentioned extensively (but also not really explained), and especially the way the narrator longs for it, is almost as creepy as the rest of the stuff happening in this story, which is saying something.
- "Life after Rehab", Pat Cadigan -- fun premise narrated in a fun, breezy style. I didn't think it had a plot, really, and I certainly didn't feel like it had an ending -- the presumably clever one didn't work for me -- and I think it's actually pretty weak compared to most of the other stories in this book, but I enjoyed reading it on that shallow level, so no complaints.
- "Two Hearts", Peter S. Beagle -- I haven't even read The Last Unicorn (to which this is a sort-of sequel), and I was misty-eyed through a good portion of this story. There are some fantasists who are, beyond being simply writers, story-tellers and Peter S. Beagle is one of them (LeGuin is another, or can be). And it's pure pleasure to read stories that are told by story-tellers, that don't have fancy showy devices or narrative gimmicks and aren't trying too hard, but just tell the story in a lovely and natural way. As this one does. The first-person narrator is charming and believable as a 9-year-old girl, and all the things she says underline both the narrowness of the world she knows and the breadth of the world beyond, all the little charming touches like comparing the crown on the king's head to the wreath with which the prize ram of the village is crowned. The characters are all nuanced and imperfect and deserving of sympathy, and the aged king is described with both dignity and unflinching honesty, and it's all beautiful and poignant and hopeful and sad and funny. (I found out from the next collection that this story won a Hugo. I can see why.)
- "Super-Villains", Michael Canfield -- light, funny piece about an aging superhero, the frustrated plucky reporter girlfriend jilted by both the superhero and his tycoon alter ego, and a retired super-villain. My favorite thing about it were the names: the action takes place in Excelsior City, run by Mayor Dirtly, the frustrated girlfriend's name is Virginity Flynn (she goes by Ginny), and there's a Belfry Hospital for the Criminally Insane. It's all a lot of fun!
- "Empty Places", Richard Parks -- unless I'm totally missing the point here, I really don't understand why this story was included. (The editor actually notes that there are not a lot of short stories of the high/epic fantasy type in this collection -- that this is the only one -- but while he says that it features "a non-traditional resolution and a quite individual theme," I wouldn't really say that. It's forgettable, utterly forgettable. Not original, not clever, just blah. It features a thief and a wizard who are fairly boring and also don't really do anything. The moral seems to be something you would encounter in a children's cartoon. Boring! And the only piece in this collection in which I couldn't find anything to like.
- "Invisible", Steve Rasnic Tam -- this is the most depressing short story in the book. Possibly, the world. It is nicely done, though I liked it better before the ending sequence kicked in, but, god! so depressing.
- "By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun", Holly Phillips -- the thing I liked about this story was the atmosphere of End Harbor, the place itself, with its world-traveling fogs, the community, the sense of history. There isn't much in the way of characters in this story, and the plot is just OK -- I foresaw several of the twists, except for the last one, which I simply don't believe. But it's nicely written, and the past unfolds in a way that mostly works.
- "The Gist Hunter", Matthew Hughes -- it took me a long time to get into this story, because it features a really annoying narrator, with rather annoying diction. Intentionally annoying, I think, but that doesn't make it a whole lot better. Plot's OK -- it's even got some exciting parts to it -- but what I mostly liked was the setting, and especially the slang word for the equivalent of 'cop' -- "scroot", because they're part of the Bureau of Scruitny.
So, really liked: "Comber", "The Emperor of Gondwanaland", "Sunbird", "Two Hearts". Didn't like: "Fancy Bread", kind of didn't like "The Secret of Broken Tickers". Total waste of space: "Empty Places".
30. Wizards, edited by Jack Danna and Gardner Dozois:
- "The Witch's Gravestone", Neil Gaiman -- lovely story, especially because of the premise -- a boy named Bod (short for Nobody) living in an abandoned cemetery, getting looked after and tutored by the ghosts and the undead (including a vampire named Silas who shows up in, like, half a dozen lines and is already somehow a favorite of mine). The story reminded me, amusingly enough, of Mowgli / The Jungle Book, and also of Good Omens in a couple of bits, and is precisely the kind of charming story with characters I'd like to get to know better that I've come to expect from teh Neil.
- "Holly and Iron", Garth Nix -- why don't I enjoy reading Nix's writing? I've no idea really... The premise of this story was awesome -- the clash of native "Inglish" magic (holly and wood) and the iron magic of William the Conqueror (and so far, that's 2 for 2 stories in this collection that have mentioned old William... odd) -- and there are references to the (presumably Saxon) magic of the Allfather worshippers, and the layering of Roman roads and abbeys of Christ Godsson, and it's precisely the sort of thing I should *love*. And I was impressed with the shape-changing -- the thought behind that. And stuff happens, kind of. So why did it take me so long to get into this story? Maybe it's the characters, because I never did grow to feel anything for any of them (and thought Robin was a naive, whiny brat), and I guess it's also that I just don't feel swept up by his writing. I read it, and got through it, and it was a neat story, even, with lots of neat things in it -- like the allusions to the Robin Hood myth and the sword in the stone -- but I got no organic enjoyment out of it. It just kind of sat there on the page. Why is that?
- "Color Vision", Mary Rosenblum -- the protagonist is a sixth-grader with synaesthesia who also happens to be half-magical, half-human (which, refreshingly, doesn't seem to be related to her synaesthesia at all). She was OK, and I thought her normal-human friend (who always talks in shades of yellow) was absolutely delightful, with the cheerful screwed-uppedness of a child whose mother is a school counselor. But there are a couple of quibbles I have about this one which mean it doesn't make it on my favorites list. The "oh, you humans are people too" realization in the end is too facile, and the happy ending is... well, a bit of a cop-out, I felt.
- "Ruby Incomparable", Kage Barker -- this was a cute story, but it seemed to be trying to do too many things at once: Good and Evil, kinds of Power, parents and children -- just a whole lot going on, and while it was a fun, humorous read, it didn't actually cohere much for me.
- "A Fowl Tale", Eoin Colfer -- yeah, the Artemis Fowl guy, but the story, despite the title, has nothing to do with Artemis. It's a very short, humorous, odd (and extremely unreliable) narrator kind of story, which was actually better written than the Fowl books, I thought -- less grating style.
- "Slipping Sideways Through Eternity", Jane Yolen -- the first story I was disappointed by. I've read such exquisite short stories by Yolen, but this one just... The narrator is annoying, but it's not even that. The premise is this: modern Jewish teenage girl travels back in time to a concentration camp, where she essentially rescues some people. This does not sound to me like a story that can be written well, by anyone. And it did not belie my expectations. There is a sort of inversion of the "going back in time to kill your own grandfather," and there are all these painfully modern references -- iPod, Captain Jack Sparrow, a Holly Black book, and it's just, the whole thing feels so artificial. And it's got one of my pet peeves -- said modern American teenager talks to the women in the Polish concentration camp with no problems -- apparently in English. Or, if not in English, still effortlessly and in a way she doesn't have to think about. It was just... lame. And I was expecting so much better from Yolen.
- "The Stranger's Hands", Tad Williams -- this is the kind of story that I would like to write, or at least one that speaks to the same places in me where my stories come from. Or maybe even just the story that has in it the kinds of wizards that I think about when I think of wizards. Anyway, it's not the deepest story or the cleverest or anything, but I like it a lot because it feels *right* to me. And also because it has sentences like: "Other than an ill-considered attempt by some local bandits to waylay him [the wizard] just outside the Drunken Princes' Pass, an interaction that increased the frog population of the highlands but did not notably slow Dondolan's progress, it was a swift journey."
- "Naming Day", Patricia A. McKillip -- this story didn't read at all like a McKillip story -- it didn't have that lyrical imagery and slow melancholic pace that I associate with her. Instead it was brisk and funny and hectic and reminded me, more than anything, of Diana Wynne Jones. The protagonist starts out as a Mary-Sue kind of gal -- violet eyes, ivory hair, best student in her class -- but it diverges from the stereotype rather entertainingly from there. Also, the four-year-old demon of a little brother was very realistic. Lovely story, though not at all what I had expected.
- "Winter's Wife", Elizabeth Hand -- the introduction calls it a "chilling tale" and it is kind of freaky, though much less so than I had expected. It's told well, and the eponymous character is in fact presented as both sympathetic and really creepy, as well as plenty mysterious, which works. The other characters, especially the young narrator, are well done too, except for the cardboard villain who, of course, gets his comeuppance.
- "A Diorama of the Infernal Regions, or the Devil's Ninth Question", Andy Duncan -- another fun narrator, and a fun setting -- the story splits its time between a curiosities museum and Winchester's Mystery House (back when it was still occuppied by the widow Winchester). The Devil's son-in-law is adorable, the ghosts are neat, and while the whole central plot didn't bowl me over or anything, it was a rather fun read, and unusual too.
- "Barrens Dancing", Peter S. Beagle -- so, it's a nice enough story, and I want to own a shukri or three now -- they sound like something intermediate between cats, rats, and ferrets -- and the handsome, friendly, blue-eyed wizard who is pretty much the only wizard bad to the bone (yet still is the guilty pride of his barren homeland) was a very neat character, but the story seriously pales compared to "Two Hearts" in the previous collection. It's good, but still a letdown compared to that one.
- "Stone Man", Nancy Kress -- eh. Not a bad story, by any means, but a bit "after-school special" for me, and, just, if you're going to do urban action fantasy about wizards, I'd much rather see a Harry Dresden story in this collection. It took me a long time to warm up to the teenage protagonist, though I eventually did -- once he started consciously using magic, especially the scene where he is trying to get pebbles to show him the way.
- "The Manticore Spell", Jeffrey Ford -- not a very memorable story, really. My favorite part was actually the rathe mad king who shows up in two or three lines only. He seemed more interesting than eiher the old magician or his apprentice the narrator.
- "Zinder", Tanith Lee -- oy. I dislike this story, though I don't think I could tell you why. I find the narration, with its questions posed and answered thing, annoying and kind of, I don't know, condescending, I guess. I find the premise of a handsome and powerful wizard inhabiting the body of a misshapen and retarded outcast, and getting to come out at night to do good things for everyone -- that central premise, offensive or cowardly or both. Or, I don't know, it just bugs me. The idea that doing good for everyone, fixing the world, is a form of ambition, of love of power -- he just chooses it because it's more *creative* than subjugating the world -- is intriguing, but I find it really hard to buy. Maybe because it's buried in the rest of this story, which irritated me.
- "Billy and the Wizard", Terry Bisson -- this story actually reads like it was written by a nine-year-old boy. And yet it's still readable and even sort of neat, even though i don't think I get what you're supposed to get out of it. It was an interesting thing to read, as an experiment sort of thing, but I sure am glad it wasn't longer.
- "The Magikkers", Terry Dowling -- I wasn't impressed so much with the plot or the characters, but the idea that's central to this story was the most unusual one in the lot of them, I think, when it comes to what wizardry is like. See, Magikkers are magicians who have only one act of magic in them, and once it's spent their power is gone forever, and if they wait too long to use it they just lose it, also.
- "The Magic Animal", Gene Wolfe -- like the Beagle story, this is another case where the story is OK but I'd just read a better one by the same answer. This one doesn't seem as cohesive, as economical as "Comber". Also, it seems to cover a lot of the same ground as Wolfe's Knight/Wizard duology, just in a less interesting way. (For one, I prefer the Norse myths to the Arthurian cycle.) I did like Merlin, but I'm not sure how I feel about the ending -- on the one hand, I was expecting it and it would've been sad otherwise. On the other hand -- a little too pat.
- "Stonefather", Orson Scott Card -- it's a good enough story, but the magic in it reminded me a lot of Alvin Maker, and the setting wasn't as interesting. So, OSC is a gifted storyteller and I enjoyed reading it, but it wasn't a standout or anything.
So, liked: Gaiman, Tad Williams, and Patricia McKillip. Disliked: Yolen's "Slipping Sideways through Eternity" (to my great disappointment) and "Zinder", with "The Manticore Spell" as a great big nonentity.
So, overall favorites from the three collections:
- "Mrs Mabb", Susanna Clarke
- "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation", Raphael Carter
- "The Story of Your Life", Ted Chiang***
- "Comber", Gene Wolfe
- "Sunbird", Neil Gaiman
- "Two Hearts", Peter S. Beagle**
- "The Witch's Gravestone", Neil Gaiman
- "The Stranger's Hands", Tad Williams
(You'll note that, relative to the per-book favorites lists, I dropped a couple of stories that I liked but which were less memorable than the others. These are the ones that stayed with me.) Everybody should go read "The Story of Your Life", especially if one is interested in language.
**
Oh, and, meant to link to
If ASOiAF were a fandom, which was very funny and spot on.
28. Starlight 2, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden:
- "Divided by Infinity", Robert Charles Wilson -- it took me awhile to get into this one, even though once it got going I did actually like the premise. The execution was OK, not all that impressive. Eh, I don't know, I feel like something different could've been done with the idea to use it better.
- "Mrs Mabb", Susanna Clarke -- I know I've read this one before, but I can't remember where! This is driving me nuts... I do actually think Clarke's "quaint" style, which is, indeed, a rather good imitation of Jane Austen, is better suited for a short story than a monstrosity of a novel, so it was a actually a pleasure and not a chore to read. So, I enjoyed this story a whole lot.
- "Lock Down", M.Shayne Bell -- Reading Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog last summer reminded me how much I love time-travel stories, especially "need to keep the time stream from going astray" kind of stories, and I enjoyed that aspect of this story, although it never was very clear to me how or why time became fractured. The second-person POV seemed totally gratuitous (I think it's generally pretensious, anyway), and the fairly heavy-handed moral... *sigh* Yes, racism and segregation are bad. I don't think you need to build a short story around that message. I did like the divergent versions of events, the way the story was put together, and it was an enjoyable read, butin an annoying, emotionally manipulative sort of way. Too easy.
- "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation", Raphael Carter -- OK, this is officially the oddest format sci-fi story I've ever read. It's presented as a neurolinguistics/sociology/something paper, written by two authors who don't really agree on what their results mean. The pholosophical stage-setting introduction was actually the least interesting part for me, but I enjoyed everything that came after -- authentic-sounding descriptions of the way the research was conducted (with amusing but still plausible asides), the jumble of (presumably real and definitely bogus, because they cite future dates) references to other scientific papers, the dueling theories and incomplete conclusions. I am a person who reads real psych/sociology papers for fun, as long as they're not too full of jargon or bullshit, so this was right up my alley, and very amusing.
- "House of Expectations", Martha Soukup -- I rather liked the story until the "twist" ending, but don't feel that it's anything like a work of sci-fi genius. Not a whole lot of sci-fi in it, period, the speculative fiction angle is rather slight, and, eh, I kind of wonder about its inclusion in this collection. It's one of those things where I feel that either the premise could've been done much differently (and made for a better story) or a different premise would've worked better in the existing story.
- "Game of Consequences", David Langford -- I think it takes some doing to make me dislike a protagonist in a 10-page short story, but this story accomplished it. I kind of hate Ceri, who, in 10 pages where she is not even the main source of action for half of them, she comes across as annoyingly smug and condescending and self-righteous and self-congratulating, and have I mentioned I kind of hate her? I also found the science kind of laughable. I mean, yes, we accept that the beating of a butterfly's wings in Brazil creates a typhoon somewhere else, or that squashing a prehistoric bug leads to an unrecognizable future, so why shouldn't these same things apply to manipulating quantum mechanics via a computer program? I don't know, but I just couldn't suspend disbelief for that. I did like the interwoven vignettes from Ceri's past, the monotonically decreasing number of people with her, which takes on an eerie aspect as the story unfold, and Sammy's "I didn't know it would do that" antics. But the message of the story seems paranoid and anti-scientific to me. Well, *obviously* there are physical forces one should approach *very* carefully and there are reckless people who should be kept away from them, but the generalization seems to be that "there are things man is not meant to know" -- or play with -- and, nope, I don't believe that, and I don't think it's a feasible approach anyway. I guess I just don't really buy her reaction to the experiment as the reaction of an actualy *scientist*. I could see someone in her position being simultaneously elated and horrified, staggered by the enormity of the discovery, bowled over by the implications -- instead, she is mostly just smug and self-righteous and self-congratulatng again. It's a pity, 'cos I feel like this could've been a much better story with a less annoying protagonist at its center. Eh.
- "The Amount to Carry", Carter Scholz -- what an odd story! It's too artsy to be my cup of tea, but I keep comparing it (favorably) to "Lock Down" (above) and "Five Ways Jane Auster Never Died" (below), because, like the former, it looks at an earlier time, including a blot on human history, and like the latter it centers around an author (in this case Kafka; and also Wallace Stevens (who is never fully named) and Charles Ives, whose name meant nothing to me until I looked him up, because I'm a modern music heathen.) The thing that makes me like this story better than those other two is that it's considerably more subtle, less of a message piece than "Lock Down," less of a one-trick pony than the Jane Austen one. There are parts of it I really enjoyed -- for instance the miscommunication and mispronunciations that keep occurring when the three men are talking to each other -- and parts that didn't really work for me (like the whole rhapsody about the hotel), but it was a very *interesting* story, one I'm glad I've come across.
- "Death of the Duke", Ellen Kushner -- this is a sort-of sequel to Swordspoint and, chronologically, though not publishing order, to Privilege of the Sword. I actually liked it less than I'd expected to, because Alec is definitely not my favorite character in Swordspoint-verse, and also because I just don't feel like this story adds a whole lot to the canon. This is disappointing.
- "Brown Dust", Esther M. Friesner -- I keep thinking of Friesner as a humorous fantasy writer, because I first came across her via the Majyk by Accident books, and then her short stories keep surprising me by how grim they are. This was grimmer than most. To be honest, I didn't enjoy this one much at all -- not because it's not well written, but because it's too gritty and coarse and just not at all the sort of thing I want to immerse myself in when reading. And there wasn't really a pay-off for me to make up for the grimness, so... Another disappointment.
- "Access Fantasy", Jonathan Lethem -- a neat little dystopia where only the elite have apartments and everybody else lives out of their semi-permanently gridlocked cars, gaining access the the apartment world only by serving as living advertisements. I wanted there to be more of the story, because it ends, not on a cliffhanger, since the outcome is actually pretty clear, but in some place that wasn't just having the rug yanked out from under you, even though the ending is quite fitting. My favorite part was actually a scene towards the end where the protagonist has to "negotiate the three priorities of hunger, Advertising, and his investigation" -- the integration of the Advertising-implanted patter about a brand of beer is very neatly done, and also later on as he gets more agitated. A really neat story, though quite depressing. I've seen this author's name before but haven't read anything by him;now I'm sufficiently intrigued to look him up.
- "The End of a Dynasty", Angelica Gorodischer, translated by Ursula LeGuin -- I didn't expect to like this story as much as I did, but it turned out to be one of my favorites from the collection. It does have a very story-tellery feel, even though the actual story-teller narrator was somewhat annoying, or at least over the top, with the constant abuse of her(?) listeners. But the story itself has got that dreamy yet grounded feel to it that works really well, and the way the plot unfolds is nicely done, interspersed with odd little digressions of ferrets and scarab beetles. The thing I liked best, though, is that it's very much not a happy ending story, even though good triumphs over evil, loosely, and justice is served, sort of. Renka and Loo have to leave rather than live happily ever after, and the prince ends up profoundly mad, in addition to being a good ruler -- which is a pity, but a lot more likely than the kind of childhood he had resulting in a normal person. And the madness is presented not as a tragedy but just as one of those things, an attribute of his: "The Emperor Ferret never lost his anger, though in fact it didn't keep him from being sensible, just, insane, and possibly wise." LeGuin was a perfect translater for this story, I think you can really feel the synergy, her narrative style fits the style of the story very well, and leads to some lovely, haunting sentences.
- "Snow", Geoffrey A. Landis -- it's a fine little story, but I really don't see why it's science fiction. Yes, the juxtaposition of a crazy homeless woman and the "other world" is surprising, but I'm still not seeing the speculative fiction, really.
- "The Story of Your Life", Ted Chiang -- this story completely surprised me, and in a good way. It's the longest in the collection, and the only Ted Chiang story I had read previously (in a Locus collection, I think) I had hated -- it was all heavy-handed philosophy and theological sleight of hand and stuff. So, I was dreading this story, and then I read the first line and noticed it was another one of those second-person POV stories, and started dreading it even more -- but it ended up being my favorite in the collection, actually.
I don't know if it's actually a really good story or just one that's uniquely suited to my taste and interests. There's xenolingistics! -- which is something I haven't encountered before, as a story's focus, and it's tied into the alien morphology and psychology and science, and it's really neat, and xenolinguistics! Xenolinguistics, people! Not that all of the science/psychology/everything made perfect sense to me -- there were some areas where I was going, "hmmm, I wouldn't've thought it would work this way" -- but it wasn't "that's stupid," the way it was with "Game of Consequences" up above. And interspersed with the First Contact and the science and xenolinguistics are parenting vignettes.
The First Contact story is told in first-person POV, past tense. The parenting vignettes are told in first person *to* second person in future tense, featuring phrases such as "I remember when you'll be three" -- which sounds like a pretensious mess, but it *works* -- in this case, it's actually justified, not just being artsy-fartsy, "look at me! I'm playing with Time!" (like in "Lock Down"). The vignettes are perfect, and humorous, and elided and understated. The jump around in the timeline, the "ending" is given away by p.5 of the story, and the actual end of the story circles back to it in a seriously powerful way. The vignettes at first don't seem to have much to do with the linear story that's progressing between them, but they all come together, thematic links with individual vignettes and the broader overrching theme. It's not exactly subtle, but the point is never belabored, it just sits there once it has unfolded, and it's powerful enough not to need embellishment. I really like the way it's put together -- I want to poke around in it and see how it works, an urge I pretty much never get with speculative fiction, which I prefer simply to experience.
My main qualm/quibble with this story came from the fact that, out of 9 linguistic/physicist teams working together in the US, all of the breakthroughs either came from the protagonist or were realized in parallel by everyone. Nobody else among her coleauges got any "Aha!" moments, which seemed hardly fair and kind of Sueish. But that's nowhere near the central premise of the story, so it was a minor distraction for me, not a big deal.
I didn't think any story in this collection could out-geek the pseudo-scientific-paper one, but this one's got graphs! And physics I'd actually forgotten. And acknowledged gradations of dorkiness. (It also won the Nebula in 1988 and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 1999. I was pretty sure it had won something, because honestly it's one of the most powerful and also one of the most unusual sci-fi/fantasy stories I've read.)
And the other thing about this story is that I feel it retroactively justifies the inclusion of "Snow" in this collection -- there's just this really neat vector in going from one to the other, with "Snow" serving as the appetizer, I guess. Really neat!
So, let's see: "Story of Your Life" is the hands-down favorite, and possibly even joins the ranks of favorite short stories overall -- not sure yet, need more distance. "Mrs Mabb" was delightful and "The End of a Dynasty" made me want to read the book it came from, and I really enjoyed the "Gender Ideation" short story, but part of its charm is definitely a gimmick, and I also enjoyed "The Amount to Carry", but not in any visceral way -- it's more that I'm intrigued by the idea and like the execution. Didn't hate any of the stories, either, or feel they were significantly below par, just... nothing special or not my cup of tea.
29. Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2006 edition, edited by Rich Horton:
- "Pip and the Fairies", Theodora Goss -- there is some magic in this, I guess, but I almost wish that there weren't. Not because it wasn't well done -- the story is well written, but because the non-magical, human, mundane side of the story -- 'Pip's relationship with her mother, mentions of father and husband, other people -- were actually more compelling, and it felt like the fairy side trivialized those. Unless the moral is that the fairyland actually appeared because Pip's mother wrote about it. The possibility is mentioned but I don't think it's ever resolved, and, I don't know. Mostly this story left me feeling sad.
- "Comber", Gene Wolfe -- there is no actual fantasy/magic in this story, I'd classify it as sci-fi just without the background explanation for how (modern) humans are now living in islands on the crests of enormous waves. It's a short little story, but I think it's a really neat sort of premise on which to base a movie like Armageddon or Deep Impact, with the crucial difference that the theme is not "man against Nature" (which bores me, because there is no conflict, really, just outcome) but "some people against human nature", or different facets of human nature warring against each other, which is considerably more interesting. I really liked this story. And, I guess I didn't realize that Gene Wolfe was an engineer before he was a writer, but you can totally sense it in even a couple of pages of this.
- "Three Urban Folk Tales", Eric Schaller -- pretty much what it says, three connected ficlets set in the city, one about a postman, one a love story (with loss and resolution), and one a love story with rats as characters. How could I not like it? I was particularly amused that the human love story closes with the words "if the two are not divorced, then they are married still," while the rat love story ends "If rats can marry, then they are married still."
- "Wax", Elizabeth Bear (matociquala) -- this is actually the first bit of fiction by Bear that I've read, and it's kind of weird coming to an author that way, from reading her LJ. Also because of that, I knew something about these characters (Abby Irene and Sebastien), so I wasn't starting from scratch. I liked Sebastien, and Abby Irene was somewhat different from what I had expected (I kind of didn't expect the relationship between them to occur quite so quickly...). The plot seemed a bit top heavy to me -- like, I would've liked to see the resolution trail on a bit from where it left off. But, of course, this is only the first story in the New Amsterdam collection, which I now do want to read.
- "The Emperor of Gondwanaland", Paul Di Filippo -- this one's really funny. The descriptions of cubicle life and workplace politics that kick it off are very amusing. And the description of online community and discussion -- though brief -- is also right on. And the ending is very cute, right down to Mutt's business plans. It was a fun, lovely story.
- "CommComm", George Saunders -- I really liked this one, too, right up until the end. As with "Gondwanaland", the description of everyday work life (in this case, on a military base) was really very funny. And the fantasy element, presented in a magical realism sort of way in this ghost story, really worked well too, poignant and pathetic and creepy. I liked the narrator, I liked Rimney (up through the end, actually), but I didn't like the resolution -- probably just my atheist ways. The style in which the story is written is odd, and worked for me only partially -- the capitalized routines (Moral Value Analysis and so forth) worked for me, the things like "pride/shame" and "say/think" trying to show two words smooshed into one didn't. Liked it on the whole, but would've liked it even more with a different ending.
- "Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died", Samantha Henderson -- I'm not a huge fan of this type of story, and I don't think I know enough of the inticacies of Austen's biography to fully appreciate it (it felt like I was missing some inside joke). But the "five ways" are nicely different from each other, which is of course critical with this sort of structure, yet there are some threads that tie them together, which was also nice. And each individual vignette is well done.
- "Fancy Bread", George Feeley -- I had a problem with this one. Feeley can clearly write *really well* -- the first page or so, that describes the ogre eating, is really well done -- the rhythm and consonanse and the overall sound of the words reflect the ponderous grating of his teeth and the heavy jagged overall atmosphere. And the interaction between characters when it occurs, with parenthetical remarks for thoughts, is well done, too. But the overall thrust of the story just bored me -- I appreciate the idea, and it was even sort of well done, but I don't want to read a fairy tale riff about market economy which consists of pages upon pages of description largely uninterrupted by dialogue or action. I just don't. So it felt like a waste of those elements that I did like. And it was the first story in this collection that I had to force myself to finish, which is a pity.
- "Sunbird", Neil Gaiman -- I think Neil could tell any story at all interestingly and charmingly, judging by his blog. So, it's no surprise that I really liked this one. I liked Zebediah T. Crawcrustle (who is never really explained) and Virginia Boote, and, apparently, I just really like the myth on which this story is based, because I keep finding myself liking stories which are based on it.
- "The Secret of Broken Tickers," Joe Murphy -- the setting reminded me a bit of Henry Kuttner's Hogben stories, but I actually didn't terribly like the story. It's neat having the narrator be who she is, and there are some details which are nice (I liked the frogs, and the birthdays being counted off by knowing family secrets) and some not particularly effective (the grandfather always speaking in lies... it was quite disorienting but didn't do much for me otherwise), but mostly what I didn't like about it was that the token normal person was a villain. I thought this was the weakest/least interesting one of the stories so far.
- "On the Blindside", Sonya Taaffe -- it started way too slow for me, and had too much description for my taste, throughout, but some of the words were truly lovely: "mole-mottled", "owl-slow", which made the thickets of verbiage worth it. There are some lovely, glancing sort of descriptions which reminded me of Patricia McKillip's imagery. The idea was OK, and Chion was a fascinating sort of character, half-glimpsed, and even the absent Lucas seemed nice, but I really couldn't care at *all* for or about Samantha the protagonist, which made the story feel ultimately hollow. And this was one case where the insertion of specific details of flavor (e.g. "my Bede class") felt like a bad thing -- trying too hard, fake.
- "Jane", Marc Laidlaw -- really, really creepy. A tad underexplained, for my taste -- I would've liked more background, to understand better the why as well as the who -- but it does the nightmarish thing well, and by nightmarish I mean not goblins chasing you or anything, but terribly things happening, progressing inevitably and making a consistent kind of dream-sense. The practice of hooding that is mentioned extensively (but also not really explained), and especially the way the narrator longs for it, is almost as creepy as the rest of the stuff happening in this story, which is saying something.
- "Life after Rehab", Pat Cadigan -- fun premise narrated in a fun, breezy style. I didn't think it had a plot, really, and I certainly didn't feel like it had an ending -- the presumably clever one didn't work for me -- and I think it's actually pretty weak compared to most of the other stories in this book, but I enjoyed reading it on that shallow level, so no complaints.
- "Two Hearts", Peter S. Beagle -- I haven't even read The Last Unicorn (to which this is a sort-of sequel), and I was misty-eyed through a good portion of this story. There are some fantasists who are, beyond being simply writers, story-tellers and Peter S. Beagle is one of them (LeGuin is another, or can be). And it's pure pleasure to read stories that are told by story-tellers, that don't have fancy showy devices or narrative gimmicks and aren't trying too hard, but just tell the story in a lovely and natural way. As this one does. The first-person narrator is charming and believable as a 9-year-old girl, and all the things she says underline both the narrowness of the world she knows and the breadth of the world beyond, all the little charming touches like comparing the crown on the king's head to the wreath with which the prize ram of the village is crowned. The characters are all nuanced and imperfect and deserving of sympathy, and the aged king is described with both dignity and unflinching honesty, and it's all beautiful and poignant and hopeful and sad and funny. (I found out from the next collection that this story won a Hugo. I can see why.)
- "Super-Villains", Michael Canfield -- light, funny piece about an aging superhero, the frustrated plucky reporter girlfriend jilted by both the superhero and his tycoon alter ego, and a retired super-villain. My favorite thing about it were the names: the action takes place in Excelsior City, run by Mayor Dirtly, the frustrated girlfriend's name is Virginity Flynn (she goes by Ginny), and there's a Belfry Hospital for the Criminally Insane. It's all a lot of fun!
- "Empty Places", Richard Parks -- unless I'm totally missing the point here, I really don't understand why this story was included. (The editor actually notes that there are not a lot of short stories of the high/epic fantasy type in this collection -- that this is the only one -- but while he says that it features "a non-traditional resolution and a quite individual theme," I wouldn't really say that. It's forgettable, utterly forgettable. Not original, not clever, just blah. It features a thief and a wizard who are fairly boring and also don't really do anything. The moral seems to be something you would encounter in a children's cartoon. Boring! And the only piece in this collection in which I couldn't find anything to like.
- "Invisible", Steve Rasnic Tam -- this is the most depressing short story in the book. Possibly, the world. It is nicely done, though I liked it better before the ending sequence kicked in, but, god! so depressing.
- "By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun", Holly Phillips -- the thing I liked about this story was the atmosphere of End Harbor, the place itself, with its world-traveling fogs, the community, the sense of history. There isn't much in the way of characters in this story, and the plot is just OK -- I foresaw several of the twists, except for the last one, which I simply don't believe. But it's nicely written, and the past unfolds in a way that mostly works.
- "The Gist Hunter", Matthew Hughes -- it took me a long time to get into this story, because it features a really annoying narrator, with rather annoying diction. Intentionally annoying, I think, but that doesn't make it a whole lot better. Plot's OK -- it's even got some exciting parts to it -- but what I mostly liked was the setting, and especially the slang word for the equivalent of 'cop' -- "scroot", because they're part of the Bureau of Scruitny.
So, really liked: "Comber", "The Emperor of Gondwanaland", "Sunbird", "Two Hearts". Didn't like: "Fancy Bread", kind of didn't like "The Secret of Broken Tickers". Total waste of space: "Empty Places".
30. Wizards, edited by Jack Danna and Gardner Dozois:
- "The Witch's Gravestone", Neil Gaiman -- lovely story, especially because of the premise -- a boy named Bod (short for Nobody) living in an abandoned cemetery, getting looked after and tutored by the ghosts and the undead (including a vampire named Silas who shows up in, like, half a dozen lines and is already somehow a favorite of mine). The story reminded me, amusingly enough, of Mowgli / The Jungle Book, and also of Good Omens in a couple of bits, and is precisely the kind of charming story with characters I'd like to get to know better that I've come to expect from teh Neil.
- "Holly and Iron", Garth Nix -- why don't I enjoy reading Nix's writing? I've no idea really... The premise of this story was awesome -- the clash of native "Inglish" magic (holly and wood) and the iron magic of William the Conqueror (and so far, that's 2 for 2 stories in this collection that have mentioned old William... odd) -- and there are references to the (presumably Saxon) magic of the Allfather worshippers, and the layering of Roman roads and abbeys of Christ Godsson, and it's precisely the sort of thing I should *love*. And I was impressed with the shape-changing -- the thought behind that. And stuff happens, kind of. So why did it take me so long to get into this story? Maybe it's the characters, because I never did grow to feel anything for any of them (and thought Robin was a naive, whiny brat), and I guess it's also that I just don't feel swept up by his writing. I read it, and got through it, and it was a neat story, even, with lots of neat things in it -- like the allusions to the Robin Hood myth and the sword in the stone -- but I got no organic enjoyment out of it. It just kind of sat there on the page. Why is that?
- "Color Vision", Mary Rosenblum -- the protagonist is a sixth-grader with synaesthesia who also happens to be half-magical, half-human (which, refreshingly, doesn't seem to be related to her synaesthesia at all). She was OK, and I thought her normal-human friend (who always talks in shades of yellow) was absolutely delightful, with the cheerful screwed-uppedness of a child whose mother is a school counselor. But there are a couple of quibbles I have about this one which mean it doesn't make it on my favorites list. The "oh, you humans are people too" realization in the end is too facile, and the happy ending is... well, a bit of a cop-out, I felt.
- "Ruby Incomparable", Kage Barker -- this was a cute story, but it seemed to be trying to do too many things at once: Good and Evil, kinds of Power, parents and children -- just a whole lot going on, and while it was a fun, humorous read, it didn't actually cohere much for me.
- "A Fowl Tale", Eoin Colfer -- yeah, the Artemis Fowl guy, but the story, despite the title, has nothing to do with Artemis. It's a very short, humorous, odd (and extremely unreliable) narrator kind of story, which was actually better written than the Fowl books, I thought -- less grating style.
- "Slipping Sideways Through Eternity", Jane Yolen -- the first story I was disappointed by. I've read such exquisite short stories by Yolen, but this one just... The narrator is annoying, but it's not even that. The premise is this: modern Jewish teenage girl travels back in time to a concentration camp, where she essentially rescues some people. This does not sound to me like a story that can be written well, by anyone. And it did not belie my expectations. There is a sort of inversion of the "going back in time to kill your own grandfather," and there are all these painfully modern references -- iPod, Captain Jack Sparrow, a Holly Black book, and it's just, the whole thing feels so artificial. And it's got one of my pet peeves -- said modern American teenager talks to the women in the Polish concentration camp with no problems -- apparently in English. Or, if not in English, still effortlessly and in a way she doesn't have to think about. It was just... lame. And I was expecting so much better from Yolen.
- "The Stranger's Hands", Tad Williams -- this is the kind of story that I would like to write, or at least one that speaks to the same places in me where my stories come from. Or maybe even just the story that has in it the kinds of wizards that I think about when I think of wizards. Anyway, it's not the deepest story or the cleverest or anything, but I like it a lot because it feels *right* to me. And also because it has sentences like: "Other than an ill-considered attempt by some local bandits to waylay him [the wizard] just outside the Drunken Princes' Pass, an interaction that increased the frog population of the highlands but did not notably slow Dondolan's progress, it was a swift journey."
- "Naming Day", Patricia A. McKillip -- this story didn't read at all like a McKillip story -- it didn't have that lyrical imagery and slow melancholic pace that I associate with her. Instead it was brisk and funny and hectic and reminded me, more than anything, of Diana Wynne Jones. The protagonist starts out as a Mary-Sue kind of gal -- violet eyes, ivory hair, best student in her class -- but it diverges from the stereotype rather entertainingly from there. Also, the four-year-old demon of a little brother was very realistic. Lovely story, though not at all what I had expected.
- "Winter's Wife", Elizabeth Hand -- the introduction calls it a "chilling tale" and it is kind of freaky, though much less so than I had expected. It's told well, and the eponymous character is in fact presented as both sympathetic and really creepy, as well as plenty mysterious, which works. The other characters, especially the young narrator, are well done too, except for the cardboard villain who, of course, gets his comeuppance.
- "A Diorama of the Infernal Regions, or the Devil's Ninth Question", Andy Duncan -- another fun narrator, and a fun setting -- the story splits its time between a curiosities museum and Winchester's Mystery House (back when it was still occuppied by the widow Winchester). The Devil's son-in-law is adorable, the ghosts are neat, and while the whole central plot didn't bowl me over or anything, it was a rather fun read, and unusual too.
- "Barrens Dancing", Peter S. Beagle -- so, it's a nice enough story, and I want to own a shukri or three now -- they sound like something intermediate between cats, rats, and ferrets -- and the handsome, friendly, blue-eyed wizard who is pretty much the only wizard bad to the bone (yet still is the guilty pride of his barren homeland) was a very neat character, but the story seriously pales compared to "Two Hearts" in the previous collection. It's good, but still a letdown compared to that one.
- "Stone Man", Nancy Kress -- eh. Not a bad story, by any means, but a bit "after-school special" for me, and, just, if you're going to do urban action fantasy about wizards, I'd much rather see a Harry Dresden story in this collection. It took me a long time to warm up to the teenage protagonist, though I eventually did -- once he started consciously using magic, especially the scene where he is trying to get pebbles to show him the way.
- "The Manticore Spell", Jeffrey Ford -- not a very memorable story, really. My favorite part was actually the rathe mad king who shows up in two or three lines only. He seemed more interesting than eiher the old magician or his apprentice the narrator.
- "Zinder", Tanith Lee -- oy. I dislike this story, though I don't think I could tell you why. I find the narration, with its questions posed and answered thing, annoying and kind of, I don't know, condescending, I guess. I find the premise of a handsome and powerful wizard inhabiting the body of a misshapen and retarded outcast, and getting to come out at night to do good things for everyone -- that central premise, offensive or cowardly or both. Or, I don't know, it just bugs me. The idea that doing good for everyone, fixing the world, is a form of ambition, of love of power -- he just chooses it because it's more *creative* than subjugating the world -- is intriguing, but I find it really hard to buy. Maybe because it's buried in the rest of this story, which irritated me.
- "Billy and the Wizard", Terry Bisson -- this story actually reads like it was written by a nine-year-old boy. And yet it's still readable and even sort of neat, even though i don't think I get what you're supposed to get out of it. It was an interesting thing to read, as an experiment sort of thing, but I sure am glad it wasn't longer.
- "The Magikkers", Terry Dowling -- I wasn't impressed so much with the plot or the characters, but the idea that's central to this story was the most unusual one in the lot of them, I think, when it comes to what wizardry is like. See, Magikkers are magicians who have only one act of magic in them, and once it's spent their power is gone forever, and if they wait too long to use it they just lose it, also.
- "The Magic Animal", Gene Wolfe -- like the Beagle story, this is another case where the story is OK but I'd just read a better one by the same answer. This one doesn't seem as cohesive, as economical as "Comber". Also, it seems to cover a lot of the same ground as Wolfe's Knight/Wizard duology, just in a less interesting way. (For one, I prefer the Norse myths to the Arthurian cycle.) I did like Merlin, but I'm not sure how I feel about the ending -- on the one hand, I was expecting it and it would've been sad otherwise. On the other hand -- a little too pat.
- "Stonefather", Orson Scott Card -- it's a good enough story, but the magic in it reminded me a lot of Alvin Maker, and the setting wasn't as interesting. So, OSC is a gifted storyteller and I enjoyed reading it, but it wasn't a standout or anything.
So, liked: Gaiman, Tad Williams, and Patricia McKillip. Disliked: Yolen's "Slipping Sideways through Eternity" (to my great disappointment) and "Zinder", with "The Manticore Spell" as a great big nonentity.
So, overall favorites from the three collections:
- "Mrs Mabb", Susanna Clarke
- "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation", Raphael Carter
- "The Story of Your Life", Ted Chiang***
- "Comber", Gene Wolfe
- "Sunbird", Neil Gaiman
- "Two Hearts", Peter S. Beagle**
- "The Witch's Gravestone", Neil Gaiman
- "The Stranger's Hands", Tad Williams
(You'll note that, relative to the per-book favorites lists, I dropped a couple of stories that I liked but which were less memorable than the others. These are the ones that stayed with me.) Everybody should go read "The Story of Your Life", especially if one is interested in language.
**
Oh, and, meant to link to
If ASOiAF were a fandom, which was very funny and spot on.