Obsolete Your Idols

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

I came back from Wiscon 32 yesterday and on the flight I read a book.

The Next Fix by Matt Wallace.

I have the book at all because I saw Deb Taber as I often do at these places and she made a compelling case for me to buy it along the lines of “gimme your munny!” so then when I got on a plane with nearly no attention span and a powerful thirst for water (yes, I suffered from and continue to suffer from this year’s WisCholera) I figured a collection of short stories would be good flight fodder.  It was.

The foreword identifies the lack of unifying theme for the collection other than them being exploratory works by a developing writer.  Given that, there’s the unevenness to the stories you might anticipate.  Some were created as podcasts and I liked that aspect.  There’s an awful lot of pop culture mashed up in these and while I range from finding it amusing to irritating, I suspect it may soon date many of these stories as time accelerates onward.

Here’s my story by story breakdown reactions.  As many of these are available as podcasts and in other forms, you don’t need to buy this collection to experience them, but at $15 or so, it’s pretty much a steal.

1. Absolution, Insured – good zippy opening but I wanted more from the ending
2. Delve – a remarkable story about the End of Everything (At Least As We Know It), one of my favorite tale settings; I’d pick this as one of the top three in the collection
3. The Losting Corridor – did not like, it felt like an awkward exercise in 4th wall busting if you consider tropes to be a 4th wall.  I find more fun in the tvtropes site.
4. No World For Warriors – I like stories about immortals and immortal perspective.  This one comes with a rumination on the distinction between warriors and soldiers.  It’s pretty good.  You’ll like it if you like that kind of a story
5. Another Man’s Run – another one of my top three pick from this collection, it’s a sort of Damnation Alley / Escape From New York / PKD flavored pony express in space story.  Despite it featuring a Post Office, I don’t think Vy would dig it like I did
6. The Last Frequency – I feel bad about not liking this story.  I just couldn’t get past how irritating I find radio DJs and how this story didn’t feel like it broke any new ground.
7. Mercury’s Magnitude – extremely short sequel to The Last Frequency: liked it even less
8. A Place of Snow Angels – thematically this felt quite a bit like Delve to me but with more imagery; if you find snow more romantic than irritating (eg, you’ve never had to shovel the stuff in order to get out of your home) you’ll probably like it
9. Akropolis – ehn.  It’s a sinister Perry Rhodan story
10. My Caroline – ehn.  It’s a dude who’s monster-whipped with a revenge twist
11. Killing Jars – it’s a horror story.  It reminds me of all those King horror stories people tried to tell me I would enjoy and which I didn’t.
12. Old Tricks – what if Satan didn’t exist but Loki did?  another story I wanted to like more than I did
13. The End of Flesh – the longest and I’d say strongest story of the piece.  This is the third of my top three in this collection.  It’s got noir, for which I am a notorious sucker.  It’s got cannibalism and other taboos.  It’s got a future, one bleak and hungry.  When people tell me about MEAT, the NecroPhasiac event is pretty much what I picture.  Satisfyingly creepy ending.