Book Review #3: Getting Home (F.M. Busby)
Getting Home
by F.M. Busby
Buzz writes pulp fiction, and he's not the least bit ashamed of it. I think that's why I love his work so much. He messes around with ideas he gets, and creates entire universes around them, and he's not the least bit apologetic that he's writing the male equivalent of chick-lit, with bonus gutsy heroines, to boot. My favourite of his creations remains Rissa Kerguelen, who's smart and sassy and married Bran Tregare and overturned an empire had two fab babies, and founded a dynasty - all before turning twenty-five. Plus, she's a trained assassin. Who could ask for more?
Getting Home is a series of Buzz's short stories, and I confess that I was vaguely hoping that we'd get more of the same. It... wasn't. But that's no bad thing - the stories were smart, and wide-ranging, and messed around with reincarnation and nature of humanity. Sometimes they were plain scary. My favourite remains 'Getting Home', the final story, about a man's consciousness hopping across different bodies, trying to get back to his own body. I also liked 'The Learning of 'Eeshta', which was actually a short snippet from Buzz's Demu trilogy - one of his darker, less gung-ho works. Eeshta is more or less an adolescent, and more or less gendered female (although given that 'she' resembles a crab, that's all debatable). The story is about the humans keeping Eeshta captive, and their attempts to coomunicate with 'her' in a way that Eestha would find meaningful. It's a lot harder than it sounds.
I was also pleased with 'The Puiss of Krrlik', which is about a world so completely alien to our understanding, and humanity's interference - and its results; and 'Three Tinks on the House', which is set on an all-too-plausible future Earth, where roadways are divided according to the level of pollution produced, smog is so thick you can't go outside without a mask, and having more than one child is considered abhorrent. All of these choices come about by necessity, but, underneath it all, man's brutishness remains unchanged.
Overall, I think that this collection of short stories might be a good way to get a taster of Buzz's work. His books are all out of print, and I've been slowly collecting them by scouring on-line second-hand bookshops (I got the first two in my collection entirely by accident, in my local library's surplus book sale about ten years ago), so starting with this wide-ranging offering might be a good thing.
by F.M. Busby
Buzz writes pulp fiction, and he's not the least bit ashamed of it. I think that's why I love his work so much. He messes around with ideas he gets, and creates entire universes around them, and he's not the least bit apologetic that he's writing the male equivalent of chick-lit, with bonus gutsy heroines, to boot. My favourite of his creations remains Rissa Kerguelen, who's smart and sassy and married Bran Tregare and overturned an empire had two fab babies, and founded a dynasty - all before turning twenty-five. Plus, she's a trained assassin. Who could ask for more?
Getting Home is a series of Buzz's short stories, and I confess that I was vaguely hoping that we'd get more of the same. It... wasn't. But that's no bad thing - the stories were smart, and wide-ranging, and messed around with reincarnation and nature of humanity. Sometimes they were plain scary. My favourite remains 'Getting Home', the final story, about a man's consciousness hopping across different bodies, trying to get back to his own body. I also liked 'The Learning of 'Eeshta', which was actually a short snippet from Buzz's Demu trilogy - one of his darker, less gung-ho works. Eeshta is more or less an adolescent, and more or less gendered female (although given that 'she' resembles a crab, that's all debatable). The story is about the humans keeping Eeshta captive, and their attempts to coomunicate with 'her' in a way that Eestha would find meaningful. It's a lot harder than it sounds.
I was also pleased with 'The Puiss of Krrlik', which is about a world so completely alien to our understanding, and humanity's interference - and its results; and 'Three Tinks on the House', which is set on an all-too-plausible future Earth, where roadways are divided according to the level of pollution produced, smog is so thick you can't go outside without a mask, and having more than one child is considered abhorrent. All of these choices come about by necessity, but, underneath it all, man's brutishness remains unchanged.
Overall, I think that this collection of short stories might be a good way to get a taster of Buzz's work. His books are all out of print, and I've been slowly collecting them by scouring on-line second-hand bookshops (I got the first two in my collection entirely by accident, in my local library's surplus book sale about ten years ago), so starting with this wide-ranging offering might be a good thing.