Stability and Fragility
I’ve been reading a lot of airport language books lately, because my employer is undergoing some changes. New people, new focus, new strategy, and I wanted to keep up with the thinking and jargon going into this transformation. But when I haven’t been reading those, I’ve been reading short stuff to cleanse my palate. Here’s something I read worth talking about, the collection by Eileen Gunn named Stable Strategies and Others.
I think this is it, all the collected Gunn, and I say that with keen disappointment because these stories range from the great to the mindblowingly awesome.
I’m not going to go line by line on these but I do want to especially call out “Fellow Americans” which is an alternate history where Nixon hosts a gameshow, “Nirvana High” which is set in and around Kurt Cobain High School and “Green Fire”, a round-robin story about Heinlein and Asimov and Hopper. These stories were the highlights for me but here’s the thing: if you read this collection I doubt you’d agree with me on which stories are the best but I bet you will really love some of the stories in it.
Who might like this collection
- people with short attention spans, who generally like weird fiction
- people who’ve lived in Seattle
- people who remember the politics of the 60s and 70s
Who might not like this collection
- people who don’t like the sf/f genres
- people who don’t like in-jokes in their fiction
