Past Future Present 2011, edited by Helen Davis.

[rachelmanija]

Sponsored by Sartorias, for the same cause as my Read-a-Thon For Mindfulness, only as a sponsored review at any time rather than as part of the read-a-thon. (If you missed the read-a-thon the first time, it's not too late to sponsor me to do something like this, for the same cause

Comments

[tool_of_satan]

Editing nitpicks: you have missing words in "The best stories also made [use of] very old plots and tropes," and something is wonky in the italicized portion of the penultimate paragraph on LJ. Or at least sometimes on LJ - it looks OK now but not on my friends page, so it might just be my settings.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks!

The italics look right to me - one sentence quoted.

[tool_of_satan]

Something is wrong with the quotes and hyphen when I look at it, but it's probably just one of my settings.

[tool_of_satan]

I've heard some good things about Nazarian's work but haven't read any yet, I think.

[rachelmanija]

That was the first thing I read of hers, and it did make me want to read more.

[isabelknight]

Nazarian also wrote an excellent retelling of Beauty and the Beast where the Beast is the powerful and beneficent (but irredeemably and inhumanly ugly) empress of some utopian space empire, and Beauty is a shallow and fairly young/immature adult male courtier. It's one of my favorite executions of the retold fairy tale theme in short fiction.

If I recall correctly, it appeared in one of MZB's Sword and Sorceress anthologies - I want to say 7 or 8, but I got a lot of them when a friend moved in college, read them all twice, and then got rid of them myself, since the good story to aggravating or forgettable junk ratio got pretty far out of whack in a hurry.

[tool_of_satan]

If that's "Beauty and His Beast," it was indeed in #8, but it's also in Nazarian's collection Salt of the Air.

[sartorias]

Thanks! I see that you enjoyed the stories I liked most (Alfred Byrd's, Vera Nazarian's, and Elisabeth Waters')

[rachelmanija]

Yes, I think those were the strongest ones. I was surprised that none of those stories had been previously published.

[swan_tower]

I have to say, it's funny how often my reaction to a short story is split between "this should have been shorter" and "this should have been longer." Sometimes the problem can be fixed either way.

[rachelmanija]

Me too. Either write something longer, with all the necessary detail and emotion, or else write something short, snappy, and without a word wasted. In between, and stories feel simultaneously rushed and padded.

Sometimes the problem is focusing on the wrong thing. If the alternate-reality story had cut all but the absolutely most necessary descriptions of the process of reality-traveling, it would have had room to bring up the heroine's backstory and motivations, thus making the story less boring and more intense and plausible.

[sartorias]

One correction--William Barton

[rachelmanija]

Thanks!