Ringingly brilliant, far better than its title.
Twenty-six big laughs at the way the world turns, half originals, half reprints, mostly SF and fantasy but also crime fiction, horror, and realism.
Lalumière, a Montreal writer, is a former magazine editor and owner of a bookshop devoted to “the fantastic, the imaginative, and the weird.” Co-editor Halpern also edits SF’s Golden Gryphon Press and was a 2001 World Fantasy Award finalist. In creating an anthology of strongly sardonic fiction, containing not just classics but flavored with contemporary tales by unknowns, they hit upon the facetious rubric “witpunk,” which would not be filled with “rote reiterations of tired old tropes [that] bore you to death.” Of the 24 writers, some slap you upside the head, others turn to dark irony. Among the standouts are the celebrated Robert Silverberg’s wonderful “Amanda and the Alien” (filmed in 1995), in which an adolescent girl spots an alien masquerading as another adolescent girl and takes her home for the weekend to help the alien shape up her act. Two-time Hugo-winner Allen M. Steele’s “The Teb Hunter” tells of hunting season opening on hungry little tebs. Tebs, it turns out, are bioengineered teddy bears that have developed vocal abilities and say things like “Come out and play. . . come out and play” and “I wuv you so much!” Loaded for bear, the hunters set traps with a tiny table, four wooden chairs, and kindergarten lawn furniture from Toys “R” Us. (“. . . [If] God had meant animals to talk he would’a . . . I dunno. Given ’em a dictionary or sum’pin.”) Jeffrey Ford’s brief prose poem, “Spicy Detective,” is “a shiv in the kidneys, a brass-knuckle sandwich for grandma,” while Cory Doctorow and Michael Skeet’s “I Love Paree” reports in mock Parisian lingo (“normalment”) on the night the lights went out in Club Dialtone on Boul’ Disney.
Ringingly brilliant, far better than its title.Pub Date: April 21, 2003
ISBN: 1-56858-256-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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