Catherine Asaro, ed.
Completed 8/4/2014, Reviewed 8/11/2014
4 stars
I’m not usually a short story fan, and I always have an
initial negative reaction to books selected by the SF book club I attend. So of course I was predisposed to disliking
this collection of Nebula winning and nominated stories from 2012 for the
August selection. But this book was a
revelation. The stories included here
are full of literary genre-bending speculative fiction that I have barely
sampled in limiting myself to the novel format.
What I thought would be two weeks of teeth-gnashing drudgery became a
four day marathon of wonder.
The standout story was “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken
Liu. It was the first story of any
length to win the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. It’s about a Chinese-American boy whose
mother makes magical origami animals that come to life to be his friends. It’s also about love, identity, and
self-acceptance. This is one of those
gems that makes you understand the power literature can have on society and
understanding. When you get this book,
go right to this story and read it first.
Some other favorites include Connie Willis’ “Ado”, about political
correctness and censorship taken to the extreme; “The Axiom of Choice” by David
W Goldman, told like an interactive story about a musician down on his luck;
“The Sea King’s Second Bride”, a poem by CSE Cooney; and “Sauerkraut Station”
by Ferrett Seinmetz, about a young girl growing up on a space station known for
its amazing sauerkraut in the middle of a galactic revolt.
Two stories that I found quite wild were “The Migratory
Pattern of Dancers” by Katherine Sparrow and “The Cartographer Wasps and the
Anarchist Bees” by E Lily Yu. These
stand out as being incredibly inventive.
I wasn’t exactly happy with the ending of “Dancers” but I was still very
impressed by the concept, and really liked the prose.
That sort of sums up how I felt about this book. Even if I didn’t care for a story, I was
still enthralled by some aspect of it, the writing, the concept, a
character. And with stories of these
sizes, from short to novelette to novella, you get an amuse bouche, something
that delights the palette.
I’m not great at reviewing collections of stories that are
not related. So I hope I conveyed that
this is a great collection. Some stories
are profound, some wild, some traditional.
If you read a lot of full length novels, or generally don’t care for
short stories, I recommend testing your palate with this book. 4 stars out of 5.
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