Short Stories Books - Page 5

Burning Chrome

William Gibson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 69 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

worth it for "Hinterlands" alone 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Take this and the collection Mirrorshades (edited by Bruce Sterling and you will have the definitive "cyberpunk" short story collection.

Burning Chrome is a solid representation of Gibson's early work ("the Sprawl period") and while its most often represented with references to Neuromancer, his finest, most poignant prose is in this collection of short stories.

Perhaps most utterly fascinating is the late-stage Cold War mentality that we had ourselves a nuclear armageddon just around the corner but that after we got there, we would discover it just wasn't nearly as bad as we'd hoped. A few feeble bomb exchanges are overshadowed by black ops infiltration both physical and digital. Our wars are over in days rather than years and then we all go back to normal with re-drawn borders that mean anything only to cartographers anyway.

Even in the shorts where a near-term memory of war is noticeably absent (e.g., "The Gernsback Continuum"), the emphasis still seems to lie on epoch-altering events that are so feeble in their moment but so far-reaching in their wake.

All that said: "Hinterlands" is the most gut-wrenchingly emotional story in science fiction; if nothing else, it alone makes this collection a must-have.

Editorial Review:

Best-known for his seminal sf novel Neuromancer, William Gibson is actually best when writing short fiction. Tautly-written and suspenseful, Burning Chrome collects 10 of his best short stories with a preface from Bruce Sterling, now available for the first time in trade paperback. These brilliant, high-resolution stories show Gibson's characters and intensely-realized worlds at his absolute best, from the chip-enhanced couriers of "Johnny Mnemonic" to the street-tech melancholy of "Burning Chrome."

The Philip K. Dick Reader

Philip K. Dick

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Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

His religions, psychoses, divorces, and drug use aside, Philip K. Dick changed the face of American science fiction with his mind-bending writing. There may be readers who have only heard of him as the mind behind Blade Runner (based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). But even casual PKD fans should take a look at these 24 short stories, among them, "Second Variety," from which the movie Screamers was made, and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," basis of the Schwarzenegger film Total Recall. Other standouts include "The Turning Wheel," "The Last of the Masters," "Tony and the Beetles," and "The Minority Report." Readers will recognize PKD's trademark themes: capitalism and the American dream run amok, a disquieting loss of ability to distinguish friends from enemies, and humans versus machines.

Since Philip K. Dick's heyday, and thanks in large part to his influence, the contemporary science fiction short story has evolved into a form more self-reflective and psychologically complex. This is a wonderful development, to be sure. But don't regard the older stories in this collection as dated. Instead, enjoy the peppery punch: PKD's stories provide plenty of plot twists and surprise endings. --Bonnie Bouman

The Heart of Valor (Confederation)

Tanya Huff

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Bad...even for a Valor novel 2 out of 5 stars.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

The Valor books aren't my favorite to begin with, but this one, unlike the first two, was virtually unreadable. Completely predictable (from the moment the doctor says she managed to get her hands on a quantity of organic plasticine only the most dimwitted of readers wouldn't immediately figure out everything). And since that reveal occurred in the first couple of chapters, the rest of the novel fails to entertain. Huff's space opera concept is becoming so convoluted it's boring. Hopefully she'll get this out of her system soon and return to books that are driven by character and real plots instead of a reliance on techno-gadgets and a never ending series of explosions and battles, the vast majority of which I skimmed through entirely (which reduces the book down to about 30 pages), Also, since there is virtually no character building in these books, when the characters do go boom, the readers don't really care. The characters are all red shirts, and therefore, their deaths are meaningless and lack impact, rather like the novel itself.

Editorial Review:

Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr's goal is to keep both her superior officers and her troops alive as they face missions throughout the galaxy. But she's been sidelined with endless briefings and debriefings for a while, so she jumps at the chance to go to Crucible-the Marine Corps training planet-as temporary aide to Major Svensson. The major was reduced to little more than a brain and spinal cord in his last combat, and now he and his doctor are eager to field test his new body.

It's supposed to be an easy assignment-after all, Crucible was set up to simulate battle situations so recruits could be trained safely. But Torin's barely on-planet when someone starts blasting the training scenarios to smithereens...

The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard

J. G. Ballard

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Food for Thought 4 out of 5 stars.
15 of 16 people found this review helpful.

Ballard is one of the great "conceptualizers" of modern literature. The premises of his stories are the most immediately striking thing about them. Sometimes the story doesn't live up to the expectations he creates, but this is probably because he sets the bar so high.

In any case, whether a Ballard story is a total or only a partial success, it invariably provides plenty of food for thought. Three of them--"The Overloaded Man", "The Drowned Giant", and "The Garden of Time"--rank among my all-time favorites for their perfect fusion of speculative and mythic qualities. The more technology-based stories ("Concentration City", "The Voices of Time") are more interesting for their ideas than their execution.

In the introduction to this volume, Anthony Burgess hits on the central importance of Ballard's work: "Ballard considers that the kind of limitation that most contemporary fiction accepts is immoral... Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination." If you agree, buy this book.

Editorial Review:

First published in 1978, this collection of nineteen of Ballard's best short stories is as timely and informed as ever. His tales of the human psyche and its relationship to nature and technology, as viewed through a strong microscope, were eerily prescient and now provide greater perspective on our computer-dominated culture. Ballard's voice and vision have long served as a font of inspiration for today's cyber-punks, the authors and futurist who brought the information age into the mainstream.

Pushing Ice

Alastair Reynolds

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 57 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Clever Science, Stupid People 2 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Alastair Reynolds is excellent, sometimes brilliant, when it comes to science. Unfortunately he doesn't understand people as well as he understands physics. In his books "Revelation Space" and "Redemption Ark" the characters tend to lack depth and be a little two dimensional, but not so much that it interferes with the story. In "Pushing Ice", however, the characters make it very difficult to enjoy the book. The characters do things which are so incredibly stupid that you almost want them all to die. And it's not as if a character was written with a flaw that causes them to make a poor decision. Mr Reynolds needs to get the plot from point A to point B, and instead of thinking of a really clever way to make the transition, as he has in some of his other books, he makes a character do something completely retarded.
I really enjoy Mr Reynolds' books, and regret giving this one a bad review. But not as much as I regret the huge flaws in "Pushing Ice". Read "Revelation Space" instead, it is an excellent book.

Editorial Review:

2057. Bella Lind and the crew of her nuclear-powered ship, the Rockhopper, push ice. They mine comets. But nothing can prepare them for the surprises in store when Janus, one of Saturn's ice moons, spins out of control.

The October Country

Ray Bradbury, Joe Mugnaini

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Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Welcome to a land Ray Bradbury calls "the Undiscovered Country" of his imagination--that vast territory of ideas, concepts, notions and conceits where the stories you now hold were born. America's premier living author of short fiction, Bradbury has spent many lifetimes in this remarkable place--strolling through empty, shadow-washed fields at midnight; exploring long-forgotten rooms gathering dust behind doors bolted years ago to keep strangers locked out.. and secrets locked in. The nights are longer in this country. The cold hours of darkness move like autumn mists deeper and deeper toward winter. But the moonlight reveals great magic here--and a breathtaking vista.

The October Country is many places: a picturesque Mexican village where death is a tourist attraction; a city beneath the city where drowned lovers are silently reunited; a carnival midway where a tiny man's most cherished fantasy can be fulfilled night after night. The October Country's inhabitants live, dream, work, die--and sometimes live again--discovering, often too late, the high price of citizenship. Here a glass jar can hold memories and nightmares; a woman's newborn child can plot murder; and a man's skeleton can war against him. Here there is no escaping the dark stranger who lives upstairs...or the reaper who wields the world. Each of these stories is a wonder, imagined by an acclaimed tale-teller writing from a place shadows. But there is astonishing beauty in these shadows, born from a prose that enchants and enthralls. Ray Bradbury's The October Country is a land of metaphors that can chill like a long-after-midnight wind...as they lift the reader high above a sleeping Earth on the strange wings of Uncle Einar.

The New Space Opera

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Perhaps just not a sub genre for me 3 out of 5 stars.
10 of 12 people found this review helpful.

"New" space opera. I have to say I that I kind of liked the old space opera. I found these stories to be somewhat depressing and most seemed unresolved by the end of the story. I'm glad I read it however.

I think my biggest complaint is that the ends of the stories weren't generally satisfying to me. I guess the stories must have been sufficiently good in that I was anxious to see how they would turn out. However that is where I found myself disappointed.

I would recommend this collection, but I wouldn't put it at the top of my list.

Editorial Review:

The brightest names in science fiction pen all-new tales of space and wonder:

Kage Baker
Stephen Baxter
Gregory Benford
Tony Daniel
Greg Egan
Peter F. Hamilton
Gwyneth Jones
James Patrick Kelly
Nancy Kress
Ken Macleod
Paul J. McAuley
Ian McDonald
Robert Reed
Alastair Reynolds
Mary Rosenblum
Robert Silverberg
Dan Simmons
Walter Jon Williams

Vampire Hunter D, Vol. 1

Hideyuki Kikuchi, Yoshitaka Amano

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 41 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Very Poorly Written 1 out of 5 stars.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful.

While this could have been an entertaining read, the writing makes this novel impossible to enjoy. This novel is severely lacking in character development...I didn't care at all about any of the characters. The plot is predicatable, and slow paced. Basically, I found this book a chore to read.

Editorial Review:

12,090 A.D. It is a dark time for the world. Humanity is just crawling out from under three hundred years of domination by the race of vampires known as the Nobility. The war against the vampires has taken its toll; cities lie in ruin, the countryside is fragmented into small villages and fiefdoms that still struggle against nightly raids by the fallen vampires - and the remnants of their genetically manufactured demons and werewolves. Every village wants a Hunter - one of the warriors who have pledged their laser guns and their swords to the eradication of the Nobility. But some Hunters are better than others, and some bring their own kind of danger with them. From creator Hideyuki Kikuchi, one of Japan's leading horror authors with illustrations by renowned Japanese artist, Yoshitaka Amano, best known for his illustrations in Neil Gaiman's Sandman: The Dream Hunters and the Final Fantasy games.

Ring of Fire (Assiti Shards)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Brilliant idea 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

A brilliant idea: both this book and the new series of which it is a part. All red-blooded Americans will like these stories, and probably many Germans, too.

This is a better reading book than Flint's "1632" or "1633." Those are the novels that introduced the idea, of a bunch of small-town West Virginians mysteriously transported back to 1632 in south German lands in the middle of the misery of the Thirty Years War, into a series. This volume is the first to consist of a number of short stories and a novela, each one focused on a single topic or set of characters that are much simpler to understand than the novels. The argumentation or plots are short and tight here. Each story is an entire capsule, rather than open-ended threads (as in the novels), within a saga that is gradually spreading to encompass (and rewrite the "history" of) all of Europe, and equally difficult to integrate. The "main line" of novels sprawls a good bit, each juggling numerous parallel threads--like real history-- which will all, hopefully, link up some day. In this collection we get entire stories of how some line of innovation got started after the Americans arrived down-time, such as naval ships, the dye industry, religious rapprochements, telegraphy, infiltration, and the propagation of the American way, seen as the only route to survival. The idea is a bit like Twain's The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but now for an entire town of 3500 facing and adapting to the brutal challenges of a strife-torn Europe.

The brilliant innovation of the series is its structure. Besides the novels, written by the creator Eric Flint and picked collaborators, Ring of Fire begins a line of anthologies that fill out the big picture developed in those huge novels. This anthology is not the usual passel of authors riffing on someone's created world, each in their own inimitable but clashing styles. It includes stories set in the world of "1632" submitted by unknown authors over email, taking advantage of an intense online community that has grown for the further development of this world. They produce a coherent collection of disparate stories, but linked by style and consistent background events, thanks to Flint's strong editorial hand and the cooperation of the writers. Significantly, some stories provide the backstory of major characters seen in the novels, while others show the contributions of minor characters to the fight for survival. Most remarkably, new characters are also introduced who will be allowed to become leading actors in the future main line novels. This series is a truly collaborative enterprise; the many authors of this anthology are not merely guest writers. Their stories spin in to, not spin out from, Flint's world of "1632." This structure is very generous, excitingly productive, and is unique in my reading experience.

While the novels contain major military actions, as one might expect from Flint's other books, this volume concentrates mostly on a great variety of civilian matters vital to the survival and then expansion of the community. The prose is so-so, quite literal, and just drives staight ahead. There also must be lots of pedantic history necessary to make sense of the specific problems and situations addressed here. Although this book should be read after "1632," the stories are not confined to a time line, and so can be read alongside any of the "1634: xx" novels. The Assiti Shards moniker has nothing to do with the series at present, but may eventually explain the mysterious initial time travel element.

Editorial Review:

Praise for 1632 and 1633: "[Eric Flint's 1632 is] a rich complex alternate history with great characters and vivid action. A great read and an excellent book." --David Drake

The Cyberiad

Stanislaw Lem

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 44 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Stories held down held down by fixation on hollow science aesthetic 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Two stars, ouch. Don't get me wrong, The Cyberiad is filled with episodic comedy that I wouldn't crabbily dismiss. The presentation though gets heavily weighed down, or even flattened, by an overwhelming amount of limp techno-posturing. (I'd give some stars to the translator personally, I think-- sometimes I was shocked when I stopped to consider that the endless wordplay was a labored translation from the Polish. It really seemed that the Polish must have had a large amount of English loan words already in it. If that's not the case, somebody needs to buy this translator a cigar.)

I first read a single story from this book when I was younger ("Gargantua"), and only read the rest of the collection years later. At the time I loved that story-- it stayed on my mind for a long time and that's why I sought out this book-- but my opinion has taken a reverse course.

First, Lem ruins his world by overdoing it with ham-fisted puns. He populates his robotic universe with cyber-creatures. Throughout the narrative, instead of referring to earth dogs, Lem will refer to "St. Cybernards and Cyberman pinschers"-- with an exclamation point. (He means St. Bernards and Doberman pinschers.) Lem ham-fistedly puts "cyber-" in front of many many other words in the book. Why would a completely robotic and cybernetic world use the prefix "cyber-" for anything? It would be redundant, since that aspect would be taken for granted. (We could likewise prefix the names of all creatures on our planet earth with "bio-" and have the same effect.)

For that and similar reasons most of the punning comes off as only so many groaners to me. If you like Richard Lederer's work and puns in general, you'll like this book. No harm done. (A successful one is an inexplicable dragon, or "draganomoly" which even now I laugh at, but it's funny because of the scene, not the pun itself.)

Secondly, even though Lem superficially creates a unique robo-world from his imagination, he strangely resorts to tropes and cliches for much of the book. All the characters and locales have a feudal, ancient aesthetic-- that's fine and good, even great. But he re-imagines it all with an overblown cybernetic veneer. If Lem wanted to write fairy tales about the middle ages, which is what many of these are, he could have ditched the cybernetic veneer and been less distracting. The cliches (a character's "wire-hair stood on end") were tiring but went on endlessly.

Thirdly, the rest of the text is made up of strings of misused terminology from calculus and physics. In all seriousness they seem to have been pulled out of a glossary with no purpose or rationale. Some readers may enjoy that, since there is a newly emerged "math aesthetic" within some segments of popular culture that has no connection to the actual study or understanding of math or science (Real-world example: putting up on the wall a framed painting of a physics formula-- a painting of the formula itself in black and white, looking just like it would look when typed in a textbook).

A critic's blurb on the back cover says "Lem plays in earnest with every concept [...] from free will to probability theory", but asinine rhymes containing the word "stochastic" is the extent of the so-called "probability theory" you'll experience in this book. That is a prime example of the shallow science aesthetic: "probability theory" is referred to explicitly only because that term is oh-la-la techno-babble, not because it has any role in the narrative. The word lazily carries vague connotations of the higher-functions of human thought, that's all.

In summary, too much of the book is based on thematic overbearing wordplay that loses its freshness almost right away. The has a higher concentration of groaners than any book ever written, I'm pretty sure. (Example: Lem describes things as "informational and transformational", which in context has no justification other than that the two words form a (forced) rhyme, and that they have a loose floppy air of "technology" about them.)

Lem's Solaris was better than this, even in an English translation that came through French from the original Polish. In Solaris too there's some shallow scientific/techno posturing, but it was negligible since it made up a thinner layer of the book's content. Plainly put, the scientific bent of Solaris was a straw man, but the psychological core of the story was excellent and stayed with me. Or I'd suggest skipping The Cyberiad and getting Lem's THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS. Lem's indulgent there too, but with enjoyable results. You also might want to check out Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, which is distantly similar to The Cyberiad in its spacey themes but which I liked a lot more. Other than that I strongly recommend Kurt Vonnegut if you're looking for imaginative faux-sci-fi amazements. Vonnegut had and has no rival to the deftness he brings to fictional and non-fictional scientific concepts. (And for the record, the blurb by Vonnegut on this edition of The Cyberiad is a blatant misquote. Any discerning reader would do a double-take.)

If the puns and hollow misused jargon were stripped out, the residue could be commendable. The book isn't terrible. Afterall, I got through it. Meanwhile there are thousands of books out there that have no right to bring anyone past the first page. If I looked way past the drawbacks I have harped on, I could say Lem finds a creative and likeable thread.

Editorial Review:

Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try to out-invent each other. They travel to the far corners of the cosmos to take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequences for their employers. “The most completely successful of his books... here Lem comes closest to inventing a real universe” (Boston Globe). Illustrations by Daniel Mr—z. Translated by Michael Kandel.