Willful Creatures, Aimee Bender

Title:		Willful Creatures
Author:		Aimee Bender
Rating:

Willful Creatures is a collection of short stories by Aimee Bender. These came highly recommended and I was looking forward to reading this volume. Sadly, though, they didn't stick with me.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy reading them. I did, in a way, but life has been busy and now, just a few weeks later, I cannot remember any of them without flipping the book open to renew my memory.

What I do recall from reading the book is that the behavior and motivations of the characters seemed rather arbitrary. I know these are short stories so I don't expect the kind of character development I'd get in a novel, but then again I do expect to see something, some explanation for what they do or why they do it. That was lacking.

The situations were interesting - they must have been or I would have abandoned the book - but there was something lacking in the motivations that kept me from being sucked in as deeply as I might have otherwise.

I suspect that Bender has a consistent style. If you've read other works by her and liked them it is likely you will like this. Alternately if you didn't like her other works, then you probably won't appreciate this one much. If you're not sure, reading it won't cost you much time - it is a quick read, and most stories are very short - and you can make up your own mind. For me, I think I am done with Bender's short fiction. It's not bad, but there is lot that I would rather read.

A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction, Vol 2, Anthony Boucher

Title:		A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction, Vol 2
Editor:		Anthony Boucher
Rating:

Well, I didn't actually expect to get to this right away, but they way things fell out, it happened. As with volume one, this is a collection of SF from the 1940s and 1950s. It was only slightly better than the first volume, sadly. Read on for the details about the specific contents:

• Brain Wave by Poul Anderson. A short novel about an odd change in the way people think - actually in the physics of the world causing people to think more clearly and rapidly. I found this rather painful reading. Predictable as well.
  
  
• Bullard Reflects by Malcom Jameson. A short story that left me entirely cold. I suspect it was supposed to be humorous but it was just pathetic.
  
  
• The Lost Years by Oscar Lewis. This isn't SF, it's alternate history, though I suspect that category didn't exist when this collection was assembled. It's a short story describing what might have happened had Abraham Lincoln survived the assassination. I found it interesting reading.
  
  
• Dead Center by Judith Merril. A hard SF short story about early rocket flight and moon exploration. Sadly it just doesn't hold up to reality in hindsight.
  
  
• Lost Art by George O. Smith. A hard SF story full of improbable jargon about human engineers attempting to understand and reverse-engineer a Martian electrical device. Implausible in the extreme, sadly.
  
  
• The Other Side Of The Sky by Arthur C. Clark. A short story presenting the memories and tales of someone working on an early space station. Clark writes hard SF here, and much of what he writes is close enough to reality to give it a pass even now, but he can't tell a story about people well at all. A shame, really.
  
  
• The Man Who Sold The Moon by Robert A. Heinlein. A bad novella by a supposed master - one I can rarely read. This one describes early moon exploration assuming that it was driven by companies rather than governments. Among the vast number of irritating things about this story was the implicit claim that one person could design an entire moon transport vehicle. I don't know why I finished this one... I certainly kept hoping it would end.
  
  
• Magic City by Nelson S. Bond. A post apocalyptic tale in which the survivors start down the path to regaining some of the lost knowledge of their forbears. Predictable and pedantic.
  
  
• The Morning Of The Day They Did It by E. B. White. An end-of-civilization short story of no merit at all. It was supposed to be hard SF at the time, but in reality it got things so wrong - even then - that I can't imagine why it was reprinted here.
  
  
• Piggy Bank by Henry Kuttner. Another short story that would have been better left un-reprinted. This one documents the downfall of a wealthy man as a result of his own greed. The entire thing can only be described as silly.
  
  
• Letters From Laura by Mildred Clingerman. A bad short story about time travel. Pointless.
  
  
• The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. A novel, bridging the SF/fantasy gap in my mind. I'm of mixed opinions about this one. Early on I hated it, and hoped it would end, but it grew on me for some reason. It's frankly not believable, and the main character goes through too much change to be realistic, but somehow the story kept it together. I haven't read anything else by Bester, so I don't know what else he's written, but this one at least wound up interesting in the end.

As with the first volume, many of the giants of SF are represented here, and nearly all fail to produce what I would call good work.

I have no other comments except this: in both of these volumes I kept running into characters who smoke. The action of smoking appears in probably 80% of the items included in both volumes. Why? I know smoking was cool in the 50's, but was it really that entwined with our culture? I shudder to think about it.

A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction, Vol 1, Anthony Boucher

Title:		A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction, Vol 1
Editor:		Anthony Boucher
Rating:

This was a waste of time. I kept reading only out of the hope that the next item in this anthology would be better. They really weren't. And there is a second volume to this tome and I am not at all sure I am going to bother trying to sled through it the way I did this one.

This anthology was compiled in the 1959 and mostly appears to contain material published in the early 1950s. These pieces are almost all very, very dated. Most are just plain poor in my opinion. They include:

• Re-Birth by John Wyndham. A short novel about a post atomic apocalypse society. 125 pages of trudging predictability.
  
  
• The Shape Of Things That Came by Richard Deming. A short story that might have been fascinating in 1950 but is horribly out of place in 2007.
  
  
• Pillar Of Fire by Ray Bradbury. I know he's supposed to be this god-like author, but this wasn't a winner for me. And in fact, viewed with our sensibilities in 2007, he'd probably be locked up for writing this now, particularly if he wrote it as a kid or in college. It's basically a horror story, though, set somewhere in the future, with a couple mentions of rockets that probably caused people to think of it as SF. Not in my definition, but...
  
  
• Waldo by Robert Heinlein. Now I know why mechanical devices that manipulate items in place of people's hands are called "waldoes", but beyond that there isn't anything to recommend this novella. I've always had trouble with Heinlein, but this is problematic in an entirely different way from his later works. Waldo is boring. His later works are patently offensive.
  
  
• The Father Thing by Philip K. Dick. Another horror story; definitely not SF. I am starting to think that much early SF was actually horror in disguise, and that renders it much less interesting to me.
  
  
• The Children's Hour by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. This one borders on fantasy, rather than SF, and it's a pretty dull tale of a relationship doomed to failure.
  
  
• Gomez by C. M. Kornbluth. A childish tale - though perhaps not from the POV of 1953 or so - about someone working out important atomic secrets on his own. Other than enhancing my impression of the paranoia of the 1950s about our atomic secrets, there's nothing of interest here.
  
  
• The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff by Theodore Sturgeon. This novella is probably the strongest entry in the book. Again it bordered more on fantasy than SF, but it was actually centered on a whole series of complex relationships, and kept me interested as a result. Not enough to re-read it, but it was OK.
  
  
• Sandra by George P. Elliott. I have no idea why this was included in a volume of SF. I'd call it an alternate history piece, I guess. The central idea is that slavery still exists (the time of the story is not specified, nor is it easy to determine from context) and the main character presents in writing the development of the relationship with his female slave. I found the entire thing pointless and offensive.
  
  
• Beyond Space And Time by Joel Townsley Rogers. A travesty of a hard SF story. I'd never heard of Joel Townsley Rogers before reading this, and I hope I never hear of him again. A quick google search tells me that he was prolific. I'll continue to avoid him, and if you're ever offered the chance to read this short story, don't bother. It's the worst of the lot in this book.
  
  
• The Martian Crown Jewels by Poul Anderson. A rather predictable pseudo-locked room mystery set in the future and involving space travel. Yawn.
  
  
• The Weapon Shops Of Isher by A. E. van Vogt. An oddball novella with some appeal, but I found it slow going for reasons I am not entirely sure I understand. There are a few interrelated plot lines and a reasonably well fleshed out universe, but something seemed lacking.

And there you have it. Many of the giants of SF have pieces in this collection, and my impression is mostly not good. To be honest, the editor states that he was trying to "get together a great deal of good reading in modern (1938-1950) s.f. which had been overlooked by earlier anthologists". I suggest there is a reason these works were overlooked.

As a sociological study, however, there is a tiny bit of interest here. Female characters are scarce and female leads are even less common, everyone smokes, and the predictions for the future are mostly lame. None of those is a good reason to read this volume - or these works in other locations - but if you were making a study of just how far wrong SF can go, this might be an interesting place to start.

The Best From Fantasy And Science Fiction, Nineteenth Series, Edward L. Ferman

Title:		The Best From Fantasy And Science Fiction, Nineteenth Series
Editor:		Edward L. Ferman
Rating:

This is going to be a short review.

I know I read this book. In fact, I just finished it. But I can remember just about nothing from it. Fourteen short stories, all published in Fantasy And Science Fiction magazine in about 1969 or 1970, but nothing stuck with me in any detail.

Perhaps the problem is that these stories are really a product of their time: two mention (or feature) recreational drug use; two discuss Bigfoot. How 1960's.

Most are by authors I've never heard of, but for the record, here's the list from the back cover:

• Gone Fishin' by Robing Scott Wilson
• Selectra Six-Ten by Avram Davidson
• Longtooth by Edgar Pangborn
• Sundance by Robert Silverberg
• The Brief, Swinging Career Of Dan And Judy Smythe by Carter Wilson
• Dream Patrol by Charles Runyon
• Calliope And Gherkin And The Yankee Doodle Thing by Evelyn E. Smith
• Notes Just Prior To The Fall by Barry N. Malzberg
• Confessions by Ron Goulart
• Get A Horse! by Larry Niven
• The Man Who Learned Loving by Theodore Sturgeon
• Litterbug by Tony Morphett
• An Adventure In The Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness by Vance Aandahl
• Starting From Scratch by Robert Sheckley
• Benji's Pencil by Bruce McAllister
• And six cartoons by Gahan Wilson

This volume just didn't hold up. It wasn't bad. It wasn't good. It just wasn't. Oh well.

The Best From Fantasy And Science Fiction, Fourteenth Series, Avram Davidson

Title:		The Best From Fantasy And Science Fiction, Fourteenth Series
Editor:		Avram Davidson
Rating:

I bought an old, used copy of The Best From Fantasy And Science Fiction, Fourteenth Series to get one specific short story - Automatic Tiger by Kit Reed - on Doug's recommendation.

Alas I once again get to disagree - at least somewhat - with Doug. I didn't find Automatic Tiger the stand out story here. For me that honor fell on A Rose For Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny. Automatic Tiger was OK, but not all that special in my mind.

For more on the topic of my favorite short story, you can look here, and you might contribute your own favorites here.

But about this book...

It's a collection of (mostly) fantasy short stories, originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine in 1963, 1964, or 1965. (The copyright data in my copy is very limited, and not even the editor's introduction says what - if any - specific year these stories were published in.

As I read over the back cover, reviewing each of the stories I read just a few days ago, it's sad to note that I remember so few of the details. Some are already mostly forgotten and a few I actually don't recall at all. Perhaps my tastes really are changing in some way, but clearly most of these stories didn't stick with me. For the record, in this volume are:

• Sacheverell by Avram Davidson
• Trade In by Jack Sharkey
• The Illuminated Man by J. G. Ballard
• A Bulletin From the Trustees of the Institute of Advanced Research by Wilma Shore
• Automatic Tiger by Kit Reed
• The Court of Tartary by T. P. Caravan
• Touchstone by Terry Carr
• Thaw and Serve by Allen Kim Lang
• Nada by Thomas M. Disch
• Into The Shop by Ron Goulart
• A Rose For Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny
• Olsen and the Gull by Eric St. Clair
• Dark Conception by Louis J. A. Adams
• The Compleat Consumators by Alan E. Nourse
• The House by the Crab Apple Tree by S. S. Johnson
• The Girl With the Hundred Proof Eyes by Ron Webb
• Fred One by James Ransom

So how many of those stories and authors have you heard of, now that we're 40+ years past the initial publication of these works?

As stated above, the highlight of this collection - for me - was Zelazny's A Rose For Ecclesiastes. I'd probably read it before, somewhere, but if so it was a long, long time ago. In that story, I finally found what I believe to be the origin of this line: "Tone of Voice: An Insufficient Vehicle for Irony", which I have heard many times in my life. It comes from this slightly larger quote:

Someday I am going to write an article for the Journal of Semantics, called "Tone of Voice: An Insufficient Vehicle for Irony."

As with nearly everything Zelazny wrote, he really can turn a phrase, and he keeps my attention. This is an early work, and the first he published in Fantasy And Science Fiction. He was 25, and (among other things) a former epee instructor. I knew I liked him for a reason. If only he was still among the living.

The rest of the book is what it is: uneven, with a couple of average or slightly better pieces, with the rest being basically forgettable, at least for me. But read A Rose For Ecclesiastes from some source, even if it isn't this one. That's a great story.

Year's Best SF 9, David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer editors

Title:		Year's Best SF 9
Editors:		David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
Rating:

There have been a lot of distractions lately, and they have kept me from reading as much as I usually do. As a result I picked up a collection of short science fiction stories to fill the few gaps I've had in my schedule. I wish it had been worth it.

Maybe my tastes are changing. Maybe I'm just getting older now, and I see things that I didn't previously see. Regardless, if this collection is the best short SF that 2003 produced, I really wonder about the state of that genre.

Most of the so called "hard" SF in here still had elements of the mystical in my opinion, and character development was nonexistent. The plots were uniformly uninteresting as well. In fact, having finished a 500 page paperback, I can only really remember bits from the first and last stories. The first because there was a unique concept presented, though not that well executed. The last because it was an novella - much longer than anything else here - and because it was the one I finished today.

In all, this was a disappointment, but perhaps that is my fault rather than the work itself. Maybe I am expecting too much from short fiction. Or maybe I have changed. Several years ago we let our subscriptions to both Asimov's and F&SF lapse because they just weren't all that interesting anymore. It seems nothing has changed in the years since, at least based on the contents of this volume.

Reave the Just and Other Tales, Stephen R. Donaldson

Title:		Reave the Just and Other Tales
Author:		Stephen R. Donaldson
Rating:

Donaldson can write. Really.

Reave the Just and Other Tales is a collection of short stories and novellas. Each stands entirely on it's own, and is related to nothing else Donaldson has written as far as I can tell.

My overall impression of the collection is very good. I know everyone reading this thinks I have a "thing" for Donaldson's work, and perhaps I do, but I can still tell good from bad. For me, there is one story here that is fantastic - worth the price of the whole volume. A few others are very good, and one doesn't live up to the standards of the rest. To be more specific, the stories are:

• Reave the Just
  An excellent tale, set in a classic European style fantasy setting. The main character gets himself into a lot of trouble and only gets out with the aid of Reave the Just, or... well... you have to read it.
  
  
• The Djinn Who Watches over the Accursed
  A pompous youth is the main character here. He falls afoul of powers he doesn't comprehend, and suffers for it, and turns. This story is told in a Middle Eastern setting, and from the first person perspective of a very interesting character. A very good story, but not quite as much character development as I've come to expect from Donaldson. Still, definitely worth reading.
  
  
• The Killing Stroke
  A far Eastern tale of several different martial arts styles, the struggle between good and evil, and magic. This one pins the main characters - and reader - down on the question of "What is good without evil?" Donaldson has a way of exploring these sorts of big questions in depth that I find fascinating. A very good story, well written.
  
  
• The Kings of Tarshish Shall Bring Gifts
  Another Middle Eastern tale of magic. This one follows the son of a ruler as he takes power, but doesn't live up to the expectations of those around him. This was a good story, but one that didn't stick with me as well as the others here.
  
  
• Penance
  This is the best story in the book. A classic European setting is the backdrop for a vampire story the likes of which I have never even imagined. In this one, Donaldson considers the basis of loyalty, power, and authority. I cried when this story ended, and my eyes are going blurry now as I write this. This story is amazingly well written, and it will stick with me forever. I'll reread it from time to time as well, simply because it's that good. Read it if you can, please.
  
  
• The Woman Who Loved Pigs
  Another European fantasy setting for a tale of a simple minded woman coming into the presence of a power that she doesn't understand at all, and which eventually must be faced down. A good story, well written. If there is a flaw here it is only that the passage of time in the story doesn't leave enough time (in my mind) for the main character to go through all the changes she experiences. Still, a worthy read.
  
  
• What Makes Us Human
  This was the only real disappointment in the book. It's a science fiction tale of human descendants who encounter something alien, and have to save themselves. The story and setting are fine, but one of the two main characters isn't handled properly, and I found some of the things he says and does out of place. In addition, the enemy here isn't explained in a satisfactory way. Where it comes from is not known, and that left me wanting.
  
  
• By Any Other Name
  A Middle Eastern fantasy in which a wealthy merchant has to confront a necromancer so far beyond him in power that it appears suicidal. Well written and fascinating, but a tad rough in a couple of the particulars. If I gave you the details, I'd be writing a spoiler review, though, and I don't want to do that.

As I said above, Penance is worth the cost of the entire book, without a doubt, and most of the other stories are good or very good. Donaldson is always examining the big issues - particularly questions around people's internal struggles over what they are capable of doing. That kind of inner battle is his forte.

I should also mention that Donaldson's writing is fantastic. Even where I can fault the story, the writing - the construction of the sentences and his use of words - is always flawless. If you want to write, I think studying how he writes would be a good first step.

I recommend this volume, particularly for Penance.