Reviews: Short stories
A Wolf at the Door, and Other Retold Fairy Tales, eds. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling: Big fantasy names tackle fairy tales for young readers, straying from tradition in various ways - Delia Sherman sets her story in modern New York City while keeping the moral (be nice to strangers) the same, while Michael Cadnum retells Jack & the Beanstalk from the perspective of the giant’s wife (not the same as it was in Into the Woods, either). Younger readers may enjoy it, but it really is for the 7-11 set. Other authors include: Jane Yolen, Neil Gaiman (poem about fairy tale rules), Tanith Lee, Kelly Link (still don’t get her), Kathe Koja, Gregory Maguire (moving poem about the Seven Dwarves), and Patricia A. McKillip (oddly flat retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses - almost very creepy, but not that different from the standard story).
Robert J. Sawyer, Iterations: Short stories aren’t Sawyer’s best medium. They rarely give him a chance to explore the clever premises and big ideas that are his strength, leaving the reader with a setup and a conclusion that follow one another too quickly. I was almost always surprised at how few pages each story took up, and not in a good way. Still, if you are a completist and want to see sf-intensive Sawyer take on prehistoric vampires and satanic space explorers along with his more usual dinosaurs and computer simulations of the entire population of Earth, the book isn’t bad.
ReVisions, ed. Julie E. Czerneda & Isaac Szpindel: A short-story collection on the theme of discovery AUs: what if X was discovered earlier in time, or later? Some of the stories stick to particular inventions, such as printing; others range more widely, as with Doranna Durgin’s story in which humans failed to domesticate dogs. Some stick to known science and others don’t. I enjoyed many of the stories, which often showcased the authors’ typical strengths and weaknesses. Kage Baker, for example, decided to have Leonardo Da Vinci’s talents shifted to warmaking, with heavy-handed allegorical consequences. Also notable: Robin Wayne Bailey’s “The Terminal Solution,” in which a mysterious epidemic plagues Europe, confounding doctors such as Lister, Pasteur, and Arthur Conan Doyle; John G. McDaid’s aforementioned printing story set in Sumeria, a Flintstones-like take on the past; and “A Word for Heathens,” by Peter Watts, with his characteristic interest in neurological phenomena, here married with religious revelation. Most annoying story: the one by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, which is really just an excuse to decry government regulation of technology - I’m basically on their side, but I wanted characters and story, not hand puppets and morality play.
The Queen in Winter, stories by Claire Delacroix, Lynn Kurland, Sharon Shinn, & Sarah Monette: I ordered this because of Sarah Monette (of whom more soon), but it wasn’t really my thing. Four short (~80 pages) romance novellas set in various fantasy worlds - it wasn’t my thing because, given the length, I had to take on faith that the main characters were really, really in love based on short exposure. Kurland’s story featured an elf princess rescued from an evil wizard by a human prince and seemed oddly free of internal conflict, even though the external barriers between the prince and princess supposedly created painful dilemmas, at least for the princess. Shinn had an unusual setup - the heroine was the sister of a woman who’d given birth to a sorcerous child, who was going to be persecuted, and she went on the run with them - but a too-neat resolution (again, arguably a necessary function of length + genre). Delacroix’s story of a chaste sorceress forced to bargain for a more powerful magician’s help with her sexuality was too painful for me to finish it, but I think it might have been edgy in that there were two guys she wanted to have sex with. Monette’s was the best of the lot, set in her Mélusine fantasy universe but featuring characters unknown to me - a hardened bodyguard taking her war-traumatized charge to be treated by experienced wizards. The bodyguard just happens to be the man’s former lover and also just happens to get caught up in a murder mystery. The fact that the characters had been lovers before made them more appealing to me, because I didn’t need to buy a sudden overwhelming connection, but it’s still not exactly a meaty story.
Robert J. Sawyer, Iterations: Short stories aren’t Sawyer’s best medium. They rarely give him a chance to explore the clever premises and big ideas that are his strength, leaving the reader with a setup and a conclusion that follow one another too quickly. I was almost always surprised at how few pages each story took up, and not in a good way. Still, if you are a completist and want to see sf-intensive Sawyer take on prehistoric vampires and satanic space explorers along with his more usual dinosaurs and computer simulations of the entire population of Earth, the book isn’t bad.
ReVisions, ed. Julie E. Czerneda & Isaac Szpindel: A short-story collection on the theme of discovery AUs: what if X was discovered earlier in time, or later? Some of the stories stick to particular inventions, such as printing; others range more widely, as with Doranna Durgin’s story in which humans failed to domesticate dogs. Some stick to known science and others don’t. I enjoyed many of the stories, which often showcased the authors’ typical strengths and weaknesses. Kage Baker, for example, decided to have Leonardo Da Vinci’s talents shifted to warmaking, with heavy-handed allegorical consequences. Also notable: Robin Wayne Bailey’s “The Terminal Solution,” in which a mysterious epidemic plagues Europe, confounding doctors such as Lister, Pasteur, and Arthur Conan Doyle; John G. McDaid’s aforementioned printing story set in Sumeria, a Flintstones-like take on the past; and “A Word for Heathens,” by Peter Watts, with his characteristic interest in neurological phenomena, here married with religious revelation. Most annoying story: the one by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, which is really just an excuse to decry government regulation of technology - I’m basically on their side, but I wanted characters and story, not hand puppets and morality play.
The Queen in Winter, stories by Claire Delacroix, Lynn Kurland, Sharon Shinn, & Sarah Monette: I ordered this because of Sarah Monette (of whom more soon), but it wasn’t really my thing. Four short (~80 pages) romance novellas set in various fantasy worlds - it wasn’t my thing because, given the length, I had to take on faith that the main characters were really, really in love based on short exposure. Kurland’s story featured an elf princess rescued from an evil wizard by a human prince and seemed oddly free of internal conflict, even though the external barriers between the prince and princess supposedly created painful dilemmas, at least for the princess. Shinn had an unusual setup - the heroine was the sister of a woman who’d given birth to a sorcerous child, who was going to be persecuted, and she went on the run with them - but a too-neat resolution (again, arguably a necessary function of length + genre). Delacroix’s story of a chaste sorceress forced to bargain for a more powerful magician’s help with her sexuality was too painful for me to finish it, but I think it might have been edgy in that there were two guys she wanted to have sex with. Monette’s was the best of the lot, set in her Mélusine fantasy universe but featuring characters unknown to me - a hardened bodyguard taking her war-traumatized charge to be treated by experienced wizards. The bodyguard just happens to be the man’s former lover and also just happens to get caught up in a murder mystery. The fact that the characters had been lovers before made them more appealing to me, because I didn’t need to buy a sudden overwhelming connection, but it’s still not exactly a meaty story.