Review by New York Times Review
More than any other genres, I think, science fiction and fantasy are in constant conversation with their past, present and future. Entering those worlds as a child meant growing into an awareness of how deeply they depend on a kind of exchange between readers and writers - almost inevitably, new works of science fiction and fantasy inherit a sense of engagement, whether it shows up as homage, critique or collaboration. Three recent books of short fiction, each of them fantastically hybrid, join the conversation and demonstrate just how overt its dynamics can be. Del and Sofia Samatar are siblings, and monster portraits (Rose Metal, paper, $14.95) is a dialogue between Del's art and Sofia's words that is equal parts exploration, investigation and meditation about monsters and monstrosity. From the title 1 expected something like a bestiary, where the text would build fictions out of the art to pen (as it were) the creatures into a mythology - but this book is nothing so simple or straightforward; it is, if anything, an anti-bestiary, organized around the systems that produce bestiaries. Most of the portraits describe an author's encounters with the creatures depicted, encounters that spark real-world musings on race and diaspora, framing the often contradictory ways in which we represent, consume or reject monstrosity, ft's a book of discomfort, of itching beneath the skin - which dovetails beautifully with the fact that Del Samatar works as a tattoo artist, and that many of the images in this book are easily imagined inked onto bodies. His art is gorgeous, whether thick and dense ("The Knight of the Beak"), spare and clear ("The Perfect Traveler"), or pale and unfinished (the "Notebook" entries). Some reward long gazes, while others seem to reflect questions back at the viewer, questions only partially answered by the text. Sofia Samatar's writing has dazzled me for years, and it does so in this book as well, dancing a difficult line between her novels ("A Stranger in Olondria," "The Winged Histories") and her nonfiction ("Skin Feeling," "Writing Queerly: Three Snapshots"). In her novels, she builds tremendously detailed fantasy worlds; in her nonfiction, she curates a magpie's nest of fragments - critical theory, song lyrics, personal anecdotes - into insightful ensembles. "Monster Portraits" resists review and anticipates and complicates any attempt at an adjective. 1 reached for "mesmerizing," and found that the publisher's ad copy contained it. 1 tried "magnificent," and imagined the text raising a cool eyebrow at unseemly hyperbole. Finally 1 turned to other languages: In French one says of a moving work that it puts la vague a l'âme, a wave on the soul, and if a wave sank sharp salt teeth into one's heart this phrase might be accurate here. Every sentence that doesn't cut is a handle wielding the blade of the rest. Reading this was like wandering out of a dream and into an awareness of something with claws sitting on my chest. Offering a more traditional, but no less impressive, relationship between art and prose, THE WEIGHT OF WORDS (Subterranean, $40) is a stunningly produced anthology of original fiction inspired by the work of Dave McKean, a British artist perhaps best known for his album covers (Counting Crows' "This Desert Life") and frequent collaborations with Neil Gaiman ("The Sandman," "Coraline," "The Wolves in the Walls" and "The Day 1 Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish," to name a few). Edited by McKean and William Schafer, the stories - by Gaiman, Alastair Reynolds, Maria Dahvana Headley, Catherynne M. Valente, Caitlin R. Kieman, M. John Harrison, Joe R. Lansdale, Joe Hill and fain Sinclair - are each bookended by McKean's instantly recognizable mixed-media surrealism. The anthology also includes a short comic and piece of prose fiction by McKean. Many anthologies are organized around a stated theme, but few are organized around a mood; what most impressed me about "The Weight of Words" was its sustained core of loneliness, memory and loss across extraordinarily different styles of storytelling, from the sinuous far-future elegance of Reynolds's "Belladonna Nights" to the sharp, fragmented opacity of Sinclair's "Broken Face." Every piece felt steeped in the sepia tones of McKean's unsettling art even if it seemed to make only the most glancing contact with the image's contents: Valente's "No One Dies in Nowhere," for instance, opens next to a pencil-sketched image of a bird-headed person in a long thick scarf and coat, but spins from it an affecting story of afterlives that's C. S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce" dressed in hard-boiled noir by way of "The Pilgrim's Progress." Other stories are more visibly interpretations of and responses to the art. A violin cradling a naked woman beneath a tree growing out of its curves leads to Headley's "The Orange Tree," a story about an 11th-century female golem with a stringed instrument in her belly who resists her creator's abusive programming; Kiernan's "Objects in the Mirror" - a story of doubleness and doppelgängers partially written as a screenplay set in a therapist's office - is preceded by an image of a stylized head containing a person cringing from the eyepiece of a telescope, as if afraid to be seen. The caliber of fiction here is genuinely remarkable. 1 fully expected the stories by Valente and Headley, whose writing I've long loved, would be among my favorites, and they were, but Hill's "All 1 Care About Is You" and McKean's "The Language of Birds" - the first fiction I've read by either - shocked and moved me in equal measure. In Hill's gut-punchingly perfect story, a girl struggling to adjust to her family's reversal of fortune finds a robotic friend who will be her devotee for a single paid hour, while McKean's experimentally displayed story - the sepia from his images bleeding into, over and through the text in places - speaks to the anguish of losing the "sweet wine golden flow" of childhood perception, potential and possibility. The anthology is more than worth it for these four stories alone. Jo Walton's STARLINGS (Tachyon, paper, $15.95) - her first collection of short fiction, rounded out by poetry and a play - represents a different kind of conversation piece, one that shows an author in conversation with her work. Most of its contents are reprints, having appeared in magazines, anthologies or on Walton's website; others have been available only behind the author's walled Patreon garden. "Starlings" collects a range of works written between 2000 and 2017, prefaced with an introduction that lays out Walton's relationship to short fiction. "For the longest time," she says, "1 didn't know how to write short stories... 1 went on to write, and sell, a couple ... that is, specifically, two. You'll find them toward the end of this book. 1 continue to think of myself as a novelist and a poet and not really a short fiction writer at all." An odd start - but what emerges from the collection is not Jo Walton, writer, but Jo Walton, conversationalist. The whole volume is an entertaining discussion with its author that equals, if not exceeds, the fiction and poetry and drama in the book. Walton follows each story with a brief afterword elaborating on some combination of its origins and publication history, often debating whether the work is, in fact, a story. I often disagreed with Walton's assessment of her own work: I wanted to argue with her that "Three Twilight Tales" is, in fact, good short fiction and not a poem, or that some of what she calls opening chapters to unwritten novels are very accomplished short stories as well. Eventually I found myself reading the stories less to see what happened and more to see what she had to say about them. "Starlings" is valuable, too, as a potted history of genre communities on the internet. Walton often refers to Livejournal - many of the poems in the book first appeared there - and small online magazines like Eric Marin's Lone Star Stories, which was deeply beloved during its five years of operation from 2004 to 2009, citing them as catalysts and curators of her work and conversations. Of the poems, the standouts for me were "Starlings" and "Sleepless in New Orleans"; of the stories, "Three Twilight Tales," "Turnover" and "A Burden Shared." The play, "Three Shouts on a Hill," is emblematic of the entire collection: The narrative dissolves into a conversation about narrative, with a sort of grumpy impatience that manages the surprising trick of also being generous and kind. AMAL EL-MOHTAR, our new Otherworldly columnist, won the Nebula, Locus and Hugo awards for her short story "Seasons of Glass and Iron." She is the author of "The Honey Month," a collection of poetry and very short fiction; her novella "This Is How You Lose the Time War," written with Max Gladstone, will be published in 2019.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 11, 2018]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This collection of fiction and poetry from Hugo- and Nebula-winner Walton (The Just City) showcases her trademark focus on genre and philosophical questions. Most of the fiction is very brief, and fans of the form will have plenty to appreciate. The strongest story is the relatively long "The Panda Coin," which follows the path of a gold coin as it passes through the economy of a space station. Cleverest is "Sleeper," the story of a future biographer interviewing a simulation of her 20th-century subject. The inclusion of "Tradition," however, is unfortunate, as it's an undisguised, nearly point-for-point rehashing of a very common joke, and the play "Three Shouts on a Hill" fails to rise above the tropes and clichés it attempts to interrogate. Of the poetry included at the end, "Machiavelli and Prospero" stands out as a rewarding and clever piece of character insight, and "Sleepless in New Orleans" is particularly striking for its voice. The collection will appeal most strongly to Walton's dedicated fans and those with academic interest in her work. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In the introduction to Walton's first story collection, the author claims to have spent most of her career not knowing how to write a short story. One of the few pieces she acknowledges as a "proper" story is the marvelous and sad "A Burden Shared," set in a future where an app allows users to share their pain with others. But there are also first chapters of books never penned, extended jokes, and writing exercises that allowed Walton to play with a theme or point of view that intrigued her. All are enjoyable, no matter how brief. One of the entertaining experiments is "The Panda Coin," which follows a single coin as it is passed from person to person on a space station. There is also a hilarious play, "Three Shouts on a Hill," which pokes fun at the heroic quest. The volume concludes with a lovely sampling of Walton's poetry. VERDICT This collection of 20 stories, 15 poems, and a single one-act play demonstrates Walton's versatility as an author whose novels have also bounced among genres with kinetic abandon, including the Nebula- and Hugo Award-winning Among Others.-KC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Award-winning sci-fi novelist and essayist Walton shares her poetry, a play, and assorted short fiction, accompanied by lengthy insights about writing each work and complaints about not getting paid.Walton has some interesting and frank insights about her writing process and what she felt she needed to learn in order to compose a short story that works. She argues that it's vital to match a story length with the appropriate ending "weight." This is true, up to a point; and the selections in the book illustrate Walton's skill at crafting appropriate endings to her intriguing beginnings. However, she might want to devote more attention to developing story middles, many of which come across as either incompletely established or rushed. It's also true that short stories, particularly in speculative fiction, are wonderful opportunities for experimentation, to say "What if?" and carry the idea forward for a bit and stop. Several of the included works are mainly overt experiments of this kind, almost one-joke sketches, such as a brief correspondence between Jane Austen and Cassandra of Troy. But Walton, as she's demonstrated in her novels (Necessity, 2016, etc.), is an expert experimenter, and even her weaker efforts are worth a reader's time. Selections of particular note include "Three Twilight Tales," three brief and gorgeously enigmatic scenes at an inn; "Sleeper," about employing Cold War-type subversion in a near-future era of repressive capitalism and constant surveillance; "A Burden Shared," in which an app allows you to take on a loved one's pain (Walton is correct about these two; they're both successful, fully formed short stories); and "Three Shouts on a Hill," a delightfully metafictional and anachronistic play that retells an Irish legend, which Walton accurately claims as the collection's best work. The book also includes several poems, whose shorter length is well-suited to Walton's idea-tinkering.An intriguing peek inside a fertile mind. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
