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The development machine is still down, although it is hoped that the
new motherboard will come in today. People continue to wander around
aimlessly. You'd think that with the development machine down I'd be
able to get more done in terms of my webpages & such, but the
opposite seems to be true. Unfortunate, because I've thought of a few
things I'd like to do. I've been reading a lot of short stories
lately, and it'd be nice to finally get a review page up and do real
reviews of them -- I've never managed a structured book review before
in my life, but I suspect I could if I really put my mind to it. I'm
also rereading Watchmen, and am contemplating putting the archived
net.comics posts up in a pretty HTML format. Eventually, I hope. For
the moment you'll just have to put up with me doing rambling critiques
of things here.
So, short stories. I read Starlight II, which is a
collection of new sf stories edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who is a
pretty fascinating guy. My reaction to the stories was mixed; there
were two that I found extremely good ("Mrs. Mabb" by Susanna Clarke and
"Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang), many that were enjoyable, and one
("Divided By Infinity" by Robert Charles Wilson) which felt so much
like a pale imitation of Greg Egan that I was forced to rant at Jim. I
should also note the Ellen Kushner story "The Death of the Duke", which
is set in the same world as her novel Swordspoint and made
me very happy. I'm not sure how well it'd work for people who aren't
familiar with the novel, though.
After that I read a collection of Hugo-winning short fiction from
1983-1985, edited by Isaac Asimov. This included "Fire Watch" by
Connie Willis, which was breathtakingly good to my annoyance.
Annoyance, because it's set in the same world as Doomsday
Book, which is a book I feel is strongly over-hyped. Sure, it
was a good read, and sure, it made me cry -- but books in which the
Black Death is a major plot factor are inevitably going to be
tear-jerkers, because lots of people died of it. It was a nifty
historical novel, but not the most amazing sf book of the decade; I
like almost everything else she's written much, much more.
Lincoln's Dreams was a beautiful haunting book, for
example, but hardly anyone seems to have read it. Grr.
But anyway, I liked "Fire Watch". It did everything Doomsday
Book did (except for the hundreds of painstakingly detailed
pages describing the Middle Ages), and did it in a compact and
surprising fashion. I had tears in my eyes at the end of it from the
sheer beauty.
Of the other stories in the volume, the only one that really did it for
me was "Press Enter" by John Varley. The ending was unsatisfying, but
I enjoyed the mystery of it, and was amused that someone from Caltech
was a main character. "Cascade Point" (Timothy Zahn) and "The Crystal
Spheres" (David Brin) were both fun, but neither had involving enough
characters for me to be thrilled. The rest of the stories didn't work
for me due to various reasons -- usually because I didn't find the
ideas in them exciting enough to make up for boring characters. One
was just badly, badly written (the Spider Robinson one) and one
("Souls" by Joanna Russ) had an ending so intensely annoying to me that
it ruined what was otherwise a pretty enjoyable story.
Hmn. I certainly have enough strong opinions about what I read to
write reviews. It's definitely structure I need to learn.
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