Twenty-two new variations ranging—as the title promises—from hard sf to the supernatural, and sometimes successfully blending them. Outstanding examples of the latter include Karen Joy Fowler's long story about voodoo and drugs, Michael Bishop's extended parable exploring apartheid and physics, and Ursula K. LeGuin's tale of space habitat refugees who hallucinate the ruined Earth they've fled. The finest entry of all is Marcos Donnelly's ``Tracking the Random Variable''—a sparkling, witty study of statistics, obsession, and infidelity. Also, interestingly, two translations appear, one from French (descent into madness) and one from German (resurrection). While more variable in quality, the remainder should provide sufficient scope—ecological parables, ghosts, sculpture, helpful aliens, psychic powers, witches, mathematical puzzles, werebeasts, and more—to tempt even readers turned off by the bland, dull, writers'-workshop uniformity so characteristic of short stories in recent years.
Pub Date: June 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-385-41801-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The impossibility of pigeon-holding Ray Bradbury as a science fiction writer is once again emphasized in this charming philosophical study of adolescence. Douglas Spaulding at twelve is suddenly excitingly aware of the world around him, of the magic and wonder and understanding that had passed him by. His neighbors take on new dimensions. Death and old age as universal factors of living shock him to the depths. A country summer becomes something that must be seized and recorded with every passing hour. A friend who has been all-compassing moves from town; it is almost more than he can bear — and he turns to his small brother with unexpected attachment. The dandelion wine becomes a symbol of successive events, week by week. This is not a novel. Rather is it a blend of nostalgic recall — very definitely an adult remembering, interpreting, philosophizing over the brief period of awakening that belongs to adolescence, and episodes about incidents, often horrors, related to other people in the town. There's a succession of murders of young women; there's a newcomer, an old lady, who learns through the children not to cling to her past; there's a strange love affair between an elderly spinster and a young newspaper man; there's an ancient whose vivid reliving of his past brings history to life for the boy listeners. Douglas is now a central figure, now a participant, and frequently merely a passer-by in the lives of his elders. This demands rather special handling and understanding. The poignant quality of Bradbury's writing, the evocative elements that will capture others than his usual audience, combine to make this an unusual reading experience.
Pub Date: March 26, 1975
ISBN: 0380977265
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1975
A confident beginning with the promise of future installments that can’t come quickly enough.
A scholar of Byzantine history brings all her knowledge of intricate political maneuvering to bear in her debut space opera.
The fiercely independent space station of Lsel conserves the knowledge of its small population by recording the memory and personality of every valuable citizen in an imago machine and implanting it in a psychologically compatible person, melding the two personas into one. When the powerful empire of Teixcalaan demands a new ambassador, Lsel sends Mahit Dzmare, hastily integrated with an imago the current ambassador, Yskandr Aghavn, left behind on his last visit home, 15 years ago. Once arrived at the Empire’s capital city-planet, the Jewel of the World, Mahit faces the double loss of Yskandr: Sabotage by her own people destroys the younger Yskandr copy within her, and she learns that the older original was murdered a few months ago. Bereft of the experienced knowledge of her predecessor, she will have to rely on all she knows of the sophisticated and complex Teixcalaanli society as she struggles to trace the actions that led Yskandr to his tragic end and to ensure Lsel’s safety during a fierce and multistranded battle for the imperial succession. Martine offers a fascinating depiction of a civilization that uses poetry and literary allusion as propaganda and whose citizens bear lovely and sometimes-humorous names like Three Seagrass, Five Portico, and Six Helicopter but that can kill with a flower and possesses the military power to impose its delicately and dangerously mannered society across the galaxy. Love and sex are an integral aspect of and a thing apart from the nuanced and dangerous politicking. This is both an epic and a human story, successful in the mode of Ann Leckie and Yoon Ha Lee.
A confident beginning with the promise of future installments that can’t come quickly enough.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-18643-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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