Reads like a forgotten Twilight Zone episode - small-scale, interesting, unsettling; just enough eeriness mixed with the familiar to make the whole exReads like a forgotten Twilight Zone episode - small-scale, interesting, unsettling; just enough eeriness mixed with the familiar to make the whole experience deliciously creepy. The ending is a bit of a letdown, unfortunately, but the whole story is quite gripping....more
Very, very short, more of a flash fiction than short story, and probably never written with ambitions for any kind of award - so some of the flak it gVery, very short, more of a flash fiction than short story, and probably never written with ambitions for any kind of award - so some of the flak it gets now might be because of the Nebula nomination. It's mildly fun and very flimsy; more of a set of four vignettes from the protagonist's life, than a story, focused on showing the gender inequality in a non-accusing way....more
The latest (and I mean the latest, its pub date is today!) instalment in the Murderbot series returns to the tried and slightly tired format of a novella. Pity, I say, I preferred the novel length, but it looks like I’m in a minority ...more
Don’t let the publication date fool you: Izumi Suzuki committed suicide in 1986, at the age of 36, and her SF dystopian short stories were all written in the period between mid- 1970s and mid-1980s. Her works were both highly controversial and influential, diametrically different from mainstream, and the publication of Terminal Boredom, a collection of seven of her most famous stories, is a good opportunity for the English-speaking readers to get acquainted with Suzuki’s world.
Suzuki creates a very intriguing world, indeed. Deeply dystopian, populated by unhappy people bound in equal measures by the societal norms, their own fantasies and their fears, it features green-skinned aliens, potent drugs, elaborate medical procedures designed to deal with very mundane relationship and psychological problems, and even a post-apocalyptic matriarchal society where men are held in prison-like structures, kept alive only for procreation purposes, like drones in a beehive. No one is truly happy; some have forgotten what happiness even means. The suffocating mood of ennui seems to arise from a number of moods and feelings: social constraints, regrets, inability to feel empathy, bad life choices haunting the present and the future, and the overwhelming boredom all conspire to create a nauseating lack of will to live. The mood, the feeling of these stories is prescient: four decades on, we deal with the very issues so clearly intuited by Suzuki – from the crippling emotional numbness among individuals to the aggressive, grasping behaviour of societies.
While Suzuki introduced many typical SF tropes into her works, from humanlike aliens and interplanetary travel to nearly miraculous technological advancement, she didn’t pay them much attention: they are there as props in the everyday, banal yet tragic drama of the protagonists. Indeed, the main strength of her stories lies in this intimate focus on the characters: their flaws and vices, their dreams and fears, their unhappy relationships marked by lack of understanding. The main theme of her stories is alienation; and while she didn’t say break any new ground in this area, what she did say is still important, and profound – maybe even more so today. Some of her stories seem indeed prescient: the problems already arising in the 70’s, noticed by the sensitive, non-normative few like Suzuki, in our times became widespread societal maladies.
I must say the stories’ mood affected me a little: the pervasive ennui, unhappiness, despair hidden beneath a very thin surface of the bustle of everyday life are depicted in a thoroughly realistic way. There is a disconnect between Suzuki’s characters and their life; there is a feeling of desolation that contradicts John Donne’s optimism: in Suzuki’s world every man is an island, separate and isolated, and hopelessly alone.
[...]
In the case of Suzuki’s anthology the whole becomes something more than sum of its parts; the collection in its entirety gives off a unique vibe, and it doesn’t hurt that it ends on a strong note: the titular story, Terminal Boredom, was for me the best of them all.
That said, however, I must end my review with two caveats: these stories are old, and their age is noticeable. What was unique and ground-breaking in the 70’s now, four decades on, has turned into something more obvious and at times tropey. Secondly, Suzuki’s stories are focused predominantly on creating a certain mood and exploring mostly psychological ideas of alienation, addiction, exhaustion; there is barely any action, worldbuilding, or even character development. In short, they are vignettes, not full histories – psychological portraits frozen in time. I read them with interest and appreciation, if not exactly enjoyment: they do tend to dampen one’s mood.
I have received a copy of this book from the publisher Verso through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks....more
Sterling's foray into Italian themes turned out for me to be at once an intriguing and slightly disappointing venture. Sterling's alter ego,5/10 stars
Sterling's foray into Italian themes turned out for me to be at once an intriguing and slightly disappointing venture. Sterling's alter ego, Bruno Argento, is clearly, absolutely enamored of Italy, its history, culture, and people. His indulgent but not uncritical love for all things Italian is contagious: more than once I snorted with laughter at his deft play on national stereotypes, prominent in stories such as Kill the Moon or Esoteric City.
At the same time, however, his fixation can come over as very superficial and heavy-handed, when he focuses on contemporary figures such as Berlusconi (one of the main characters in Elephant on Table), or Sarcozy's wife, Turin-born Carla Bruni (Black Swan). Furthermore, this affectation seems detrimental to the storytelling - both of the stories mentioned above are, in my opinion, among the weakest in the collection.
Sterling's style in the stories collected here reminds me quite a lot of dramatic plays: very heavy on conversation, with plenty of exposition delivered through the dialogues; while in some stories it works pretty well, such as Robot in Roses which is in fact a very interesting, humorous (and quite significantly indebted to classics) discussion on the meaning of humanity, art, and science, in other stories, such as Pilgrims of the Round World it gets increasingly tiresome and meaningless. This story almost made me DNF the whole thing - but I'm happy I persevered, because the best stories were hiding at the very end of the anthology.
My two favorite stories were Esoteric City, a twisted fantastical tale of FIAT's devilish connections, full of impressive Hellish imagery and well-pointed satire; and above-mentioned Robot in Roses. The latter's foundation in the outdated dichotomy of the relationship between male/female and culture/nature is the only serious criticism I have for this story, which otherwise is funny, full of cool quotes and fantastic images, and a wonderful, tongue-in-cheek tribute to Rome, the eternal city.
Scores for each of the story: Kill the Moon7/10 Black Swan4/10 Elephant on Table1/10 Pilgrims of the Round World1/10 The Parthenopean Scalpel3/10 Esoteric City7.5/10 Robot in Roses8.5/10
I have received a copy of this novel from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks....more
Salman Rushdie's collected short stories focused on the meaning of home.
Some real pearls in this one: At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers, 8/10 stars
Salman Rushdie's collected short stories focused on the meaning of home.
Some real pearls in this one: At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers, angry and prescient, and laughing madly through tears, Chekhov and Zulu, a heartwarming and heartbreaking tale of friendship and displacement masterfully clad in the Star Trek language and concepts, and The Courter, a beautiful love story stretched between East and West.
There was one complete dud, too, alas -Yorick was just absolutely not to my liking, even with the knowledge that it's meant as a typical cock-and-bull story I felt that the joke was stretched too thin. ...more
Exceedingly crass but thankfully short, funny in places, and utterly unnecessary. I didn't suffer while reading, but this is a far cry from 3/10 stars
Exceedingly crass but thankfully short, funny in places, and utterly unnecessary. I didn't suffer while reading, but this is a far cry from either Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen novels or even previous Bauchelain and Korbal Broach short stories/novellas.
There was a curious dearth of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, who appear only for a few moments amidst masturbating demons, farting barbarians, unbelievably dumb thugs, egotistic failed artists and mean, cowardly critics. Oh, I almost forgot to mention a very late-hour-way-too-much-beer attempt at a satirical portrayal of a D&D campaign that, while initially funny, soon became tiresome and overstayed its welcome.
There were a few cool moments of the usual Erikson's snark and irony, particularly in the dungeons, where all artists and critics from a recent festival have been imprisoned and sentenced to torture and death by Bauchelain the tyrant king - just in case, because as every self-respecting tyrant king knows, artists and critics are the most dangerous of all. But that was a tiny ray of light in otherwise boring murky bog of unfunny physiological jokes and a general feeling of superfluity.
All in all, this novella seems like a perfect example of an exercise in futility. Hopefully, Erikson will find his writing legs again and delight us with something worthwhile.
I have received a copy of this novel from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks....more
After a couple of disappointing books by Tchaikovsky I approached this novella with certain trepidation. After all, one can become too thinly spread, “sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread,” even without One Ring (unless you want to confess, Mr Tchaikovsky?) I needn’t have worried, tough – this novella is short and sharp and scathing, with long pointed teeth and unrelenting snarkiness that brings to mind the best that stand-up comedy has to offer.
And this novella is indeed written very much in the style of stand-up comedy, with the protagonist wound up to the extreme, never shutting up, venting his anger and misanthropy in an unceasing torrent of words. It’s funny, it’s rabid, it’s sarcastic – but most of all, it’s to the point. You see, in Causality Wars the unnamed protagonist is the veteran of the humanity – and history – ceased to exist. With the onset of time travel rewriting the past became the favorite pastime of governments and agencies, and all the innumerable, contradictory changes to the history carried out by time soldiers resulted in shattering the past and erasing the present. It was still salvageable, more or less – until Causality bombs destroyed the substance of time. And so now, at the end of times, in the one stable point of a glorious indeterminate amount of time, our protagonist treasure hunts the sharp shards of the past, gathering farming equipment, growing veggies and killing random time travellers who inexorably land in his garden, in the farthest possible future. Until travellers from the actual, future, future turn up on his porch and call him Gramps. The gall! Gramps is not happy; he’s a nasty mean old geezer and wants to stay this way forever, so obviously the only thoughts he spared for his bride-to-be are how to most efficiently kill her before they can produce any of that horrible offspring.
Yes, don’t expect this novella to be scientifically plausible. It’s not. It’s a totally absurd, tongue-in-cheek mishmash of the most popular time travel tropes, juggled with admirable deftness and self-awareness by the angry old man in the center of the story. Time travel serves here only as a literary vehicle for funny and sharp critique of our human foibles and vices and prejudices. And if we can get an adorable, feathered, man-eating dinosaur as a bonus, all the better.
[...]
I only have one criticism to offer, though it is twofold: the ending feels truncated and rushed; while it still delivers the payoff, it feels much more suitable to a short story than what in good (or bad, depending on your point of view) old days would’ve been a full-length novel. As for the novella itself, it never feels boring or redundant (ah, well, maybe a little, in places ...more
Liu’s short story collection comes in the wake of his breakthrough success with the award-winning The Three-Body Problem. Translated by several translators (none of which was Ken Liu, who translated The Three-Body Problem, and I can’t help but wonder if politics wasn’t the reason for that) To Hold Up the Sky offers 11 diverse stories spanning near and far future of our own reality; their main common point seems to be their prominent focus on China and a strong undercurrent of Chinese nationalism. As usual with short stories collections, I’ll review each story separately and give an overall, composite score at the end.
The Village Teacher 0/10
I’d give it 0/10 if I could. Oh, wait, you know what? I can.
Over a quarter century after the collapse of the USSR I never expected to read such a prime example of soc-realist fiction fresh off the publishing press. The primitivity of this story is simply staggering on every level: from the utterly two-dimensional character of the martyr to knowledge – the selfless village teacher bravely giving his life in the heroic quest to teach little kids the Newton’s laws of motion on his death bed in the mountain shed serving as a classroom – to the cosmic conflict between the good carbon-based life-forms who live peacefully in a Federation and the bad silicone-based life-forms who formed a bloodthirsty Empire… Having read both the Polish positivist literature (Orzeszkowa’s ABC vividly comes to mind, and that’s a horrific memory of sickly good intentions married to a total inability to write) and the USSR bestseller and soc-realist opus magnum Story of the Real Man by the Hero of Socialist Labor Boris Polevoy I’ve been scarred for life already. But this… This was even worse. Much, much worse. Polevoy’s book was actually interesting, if you stripped it of the Soviet propaganda – maybe because it was based on a true story. Here? Nothing makes sense.
The Time Migration 1/10
A sickly sweet, unbelievable happy ending belatedly tacked on a nihilistic philosophical story about how humanity is bad and how its progress will eventually lead to its self-inflicted demise. While the main arc at least tried to introduce some ideas about the relationship between humanity and its environment, the conclusion was at once predictable and nonsensical, serving only some vague aim of ending on a positive note. Extremely heavy-handed, populated with cardboard representations of roles (not people, just positions), it reads like a juvenile piece dug out from a drawer after several decades. It should have been left in that drawer.
2018-04-01 5/10
Immortality is costly, and inducive to crime. Love is a mirage of convenience; the only love one can find in life is self-love, and if you’re criminally-minded enough, you can have an eternity of it. The characters are still paper-thin, but at least the story breaks the mold a little and in its depressing depiction of egoism feels more honest than Time Migration.
[...]
The Thinker 9/10
Star-crossed lovers from different walks of life bonding over the discovery that stars in the universe communicate like neurons in a brain. A lovely, melancholy story that touchingly underscores the tragic shortness of human life span and the wonderful miracle of consciousness. If you need proof that Liu can actually write something that is not a primitive propaganda piece, you need not look any further. I were to read one Liu’s story, that would be it.
That was one rough ride. The only undeniable positive coming from this mostly harrowing experience is that because I was able to consider it as an anthropological case study I became more interested in Chinese culture and socio-political situation. But judging Liu’s collection on purely literary merits, as a whole it can get only one score from me (unweighted mean is a bit higher, 3/10, but my overall experience was definitely worse than that): 2/10.
I have received a copy of this novel from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks....more
The Seventh Perfection is a fantasy mystery. Set in a city still remembering the throes of popular revolution which dramatically altered its physical, ideological and spiritual landscape two decades prior, the novella follows Manet – a young woman gifted with an eidetic memory and rigorously trained to become God-King’s Amanuensis. Amanuensis is a sort of a glorified portable memory/bodyguard/entertainment center slave, and the titular seven perfections refer to seven disciplines of mind and body that an adept must master before they are deemed worthy of entering the presence of the God-King. Manet has finished her training, attaining all seven perfections; but before she assumes the position of Amanuensis, she needs to solve a mystery surrounding her past. That obsession drives her through the city like a honed knife, and The Seventh Perfection is the recording of her quest: we travel with Manet from one person to another, listening to their answers, searching for clues, teasing apart the conspiracy of silence surrounding the events of the revolution. Polansky lets the readers become Manet, in a manner peculiarly reminiscent of video games: the text of The Seventh Perfection consists only of responses of the people Manet meets along the way; and her unrecorded, unwritten questions become ours as we must ask them ourselves while slowly learning about the city’s history, Manet’s quest and its real stakes.
There are so many aspects of this novella that I loved, and ironically enough the fantasy elements are at the end of the list. Both the exalted God-King living in his magic tower, and the Amanuenses and their seven perfections are necessary here, but as a prop: without them, particularly without the eidetic memory of our protagonist, this novella wouldn’t make much sense. But these elements are absolutely secondary in the development of the story and its protagonist; the more important aspects are hidden deep within the pages, patiently waiting to be found.
On the surface, The Seventh Perfection is a mystery set in a fantastical world. But when you dig deeper, it turns into a fascinating reflection on power, truth, and sacrifice. It’s a very political novella and more than once while reading I had flashes of historic events in mind: various popular revolutions, from Europe and South America. The Seventh Perfection asks many incredibly pertinent questions regarding not only our political and ideological systems, but also regarding the way societies shape their identities and institutions. Polansky slyly analyses the very real chasm between the worldviews of people representing the old world and the new; the shaping of history by the victors and the slow dissolution and diminishing of those ground beneath the inexorable wheel of events; and the role of individual heroes within popular social movements – are they catalysts, instigators, or simply convenient symbols? He even manages to cram in these 170-odd pages a short impression of the curious way in which for many people even the bloodiest, most radical political change in fact changes nothing.
Polansky’s writing is impeccable here; there are no empty runs, no red herrings. Each character has their unique voice and agency, and we meet an astounding variety of them, from the lowest to the highest echelons of the city. The action runs smoothly and linearly, out of necessity streamlined into a form of an interrogation, of a series of meetings, more or less accidental, that shape not only one life, but, in the end, the lives of all. Could it have been a bit less simple, a bit less like an artistic, highly ambitious video game? I’m pretty sure the answer’s yes; but I’m not at all certain it would make The Seventh Perfection any better. Polansky’s novella is a very quick, slick and immersive read; an open invitation for a truly wild ride. But beware: it puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of its readers, going off the deep end and not caring if they can swim – it offers no explanations and no shortcuts to easy answers, and yet in return for a bit of goodwill it delivers a very satisfying, highly rewarding reading experience.
Enough of the gushing. I’ll finish this review by saying that The Seventh Perfection is for me one the best reads of 2020. Short, slick, brutal, challenging, mind-bending and thought-provoking – what else would you need? ...more
Ken Liu's works won multiple awards, Nebula, Hugo, Locus and World Fantasy Award among them, and I must say that, at least with regards to the collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, he deserves quite a lot of the praise ...more
Conventional, funny, very well-written. Nothing controversial, and with cats as main characters (portrayed as wittily as stereotypically) an7/10 stars
Conventional, funny, very well-written. Nothing controversial, and with cats as main characters (portrayed as wittily as stereotypically) an instant crowd-pleaser. It's a great lift-me-up, with some craftily woven Faustian motifs and atmosphere slightly reminiscent of Bulhakov's Master and Margarita. Worth reading!...more
Fortunately, Pratchett knew himself well enough to realize short stories weren't his forte. In his own words,
"short stories always seem to
5/10 stars
Fortunately, Pratchett knew himself well enough to realize short stories weren't his forte. In his own words,
"short stories always seem to cost me blood, and I envy people who can do them for fun"
This collection showcases Sir Terry's curiosity and imagination, but also lays bare the failings in execution. I guess reading these stories for the second time doesn't help, as the novelty of ideas is gone and what's left is exactly the execution ;). Most of these are rather embryonic ideas for novels than fully developed short stories, and believe me, there's a difference between the two.
For those with an analytical streak this collection offers an insight into Pratchett's creative process of writing. For all the others, I'd recommend just reading the Discworld novels instead....more
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