Not So Much, Said the Cat

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This is a first-rate, entertaining collection.

I have grown so tired of reading “Best of” collections where the stories go nowhere and seem to be undisciplined in their ability to tell a story. The stories in this collection do what they are supposed to do: tell an entertaining story with a beginning, middle and end and some sense of closure.

The stories are:

The Man in Grey - All the world's a stage, and some of us are talent and the rest are just props.

The Dala Horse - Norse Legends and advanced computing.

The Scarecrow's Boy - Loyalty, as Sony intended.

Passage of Earth - This one involves a really different way of communicating and thinking.

3 A.M. in the Mesozoic Bar - Human life on Earth faces extermination in the age of the Dinosaurs

Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown - Su-Yin goes to Hell out of Love and must preserve her virtue in a place without virtue. This one is particularly witty.

The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree - Love among the Big Bang set.

Goblin Lake - Set during the Thirty Years War and asking the question about what is fiction and what is reality?

From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled . . . This is one is stunningly inventive. A human on a Hellish planet who comes from a culture where information is money and wealth must make his way to safety with an alien millipede for whom trust is money and wealth. Worldbuilding and culture building in the space of a short story.

For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again - Whether it is human or alien oppressors, the Irish will be fighting their hopeless fight for independence with dynamite or the equivalent. (This one again, is a story that made me want to know the backstory.)

Libertarian Russia - Libertarianism is great in theory, but maybe not so much in practice. (Again, this is a story where there is a scant reference to “the Depopulation” that made me want to know more, but we don't get to learn more. The phrase explains the world, and that is all we get.)

Tawny Petticoats - Surplus and Dagger come to New Orleans after the collapse of Civilization 2.0 and the town will never be the same again. Humorously entertaining.

Steadfast Castle - Love, computers and architecture.

Pushkin the American - A great story set in a slightly different version of Russia.

An Empty House with Many Doors - This one put me in mind of Larry Niven's “All the Myriad Ways.”

The She-Wolf's Hidden Grin - Another story where the backstory is brilliantly hinted at. Humanity has colonized St. Anne's....or has it?

The House of Dreams - This one is hard to classify. Is it fantasy or alt.hist? A man making his way through a war-torn Germany is captured and interrogated by Mongolian wizards and rescued by his partner, who is a werewolf. Great story.

The writing of all these stories was amusing and introspective and clean and efficient. I enjoyed all the stories; perhaps “From Babel's Fallen Glory” was my favorite because it seemed a worthy successor - perhaps better as literature - to Hal Clement. Also it was nice to get a taste of Swanwick's Surplus and Dagger anti-heroes, who put me in mind of Vance's Cugel the Clever.

2.5 stars - Metaphorosis Reviews

A collection of speculative fiction by Michael Swanwick.

My database tells me I've read a Michael Swanwick novel, Griffin's Egg. I don't recall it in the slightest, but yes, there it is, on my shelf - a very slim book I now remember owning, but not reading. As far as my memory goes, the only Swanwick I've read is a couple of technically adept but not enthralling relatively recent stories. I keep hearing his name, so I picked this book up to remedy my ignorance. I read it in tandem with a Piers Anthony book figuring they would balance each other out. They did - neither of them was good.

I'm somewhat at a loss to understand why Swanwick has been nominated for and won so many awards. The book doesn't have an auspicious start. Swanwick's introduction gradually dips from description into light braggadocio before resurfacing. The stories here are competent, but often thin. Nothing about them stands out - not the style, not the concepts, not the characters. Some of the prose is clumsy. Several of them make only a thin stab at emotional depth.

All that said, the best stories were:

• 3 A.M. in the Mesozoic Bar - the dinosaurs weren't the only ones to go. Simple, but well done.


• The Woman Who Shook the World Tree - an unusual love story. One of the few stories that surprised me.


• Pushkin the American - arguing exactly that. One of the few in which Swanwick doesn't go for the easy ending.


• An Empty House - love across dimensions. It starts poorly, but ends well.