From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:48:42 2004 Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 22:21:50 -0600 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton, sff.discuss.short-fiction Subject: Re: Summary: Anthologies, 2003 One more late-arriving anthology: Strange Pleasures 2, edited by John Grant and Dave Hutchinson 12 stories, 1 novella, 4 novelettes, 7 short stories (one a short-short), for a total of about 93,000 words. A pretty good anthology. The best story was a novelette, Vera Nazarian's "The Young Woman in a House of Old", about an orphan girl growing up among an odd vague mix of cousins, uncles, "second-uncles", aunts, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. etc., people who seem to live only for her. I was reminded just a bit of John Crowley's _Little, Big_. A sweet, or perhaps bittersweet, story. The novella is "The Stars Move Still" by John Brunner. It's obviously a "trunk" story in a sense because Brunner has been dead over 8 years now, but I wonder how long it sat in Brunner's own trunk. It truly reads like it could have been written in the 50s, perhaps for an Ace Double or for an issue of Space Stories. In the dying days of a Galactic Empire a woman is sent from the capitol planet to the rimward worlds, and she sets in motion some shady actions which end up getting suspected "mutants" sold into slavery. One such mutant lucks into a kindly owner and grows up looking for revenge, but finds out that revenge isn't all it's supposed to be -- and that he may have a higher calling. It's not a terrible story, but ... well, it's simply odd to encounter it in 2004. Lou Anders's "Crowd Control" is a rather nice "Galaxy-type" story, about a future in which immortality has led to a grossly overpopulated Earth, so that people share apartments with others, spending 5 hours a day in "real" and the rest of the time in virtual environments. I also liked "The Impossibility of Travelling in Time", by Paul Kincaid, a pure example of using an SFnal device (literally, in this case) in a very "mainstream" fashion -- a man sorting through his late father's belongings encounters a time machine his parents bought for him when he was a teen, and this leads to sad reminiscing about his parents' rocky marriage, and the ways his own marriage may be on the same path. I also liked N. Lee Wood's novelette "Balzac", about a very lucky man who wants to be a genius, and Nick Mamatas' "Joey Ramone Saves the World", about several different time tracks influenced by Joey Ramone in different ways. (My favorite radio station happened to play "Blitzkrieg Bop", one of the greatest Ramones songs, and one of the few songs which really truly is improved by loudness.) I will say that a few of the stories in the anthology simply puzzled me -- and I'm damned if I see why editors keep buying stories in which the secret revelation at the end is that all the characters are actually pet cats! But despite some inconsistency, the best stories in this book make it a pretty worthwhile collection.