Immortal: Love Stories With Bite Review

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(More customer reviews)Cynthia Leitich Smith's Haunted Love: This story wasn't exactly bad but it wasn't good either, it was "blah." It was ok for a short story, nothing special though.
Kristen Cast's Amber Smoke: Ugh, where to start? Just like the House of Night series she tries WAY too hard to sound teen friendly, like a cool hip teenager. It is ridiculously over the top, no teen actually talks like that. It is cheesy and irritating, Kristin really needs to tone it down. Being in touch with teens is one thing but sounding like that sad middle-aged mom trying to fit in with her teen daughter's friends is another. As for the story itself, awful. The author took every overdone, cliché story idea and threw it into one story. She also put way too much random info into the story and it got to the point where you were like "wtf?! why did that happen, how did that happen" every few sentences. It was the type of storyline that needed to be a novel so that everything could be explained, instead its a short story that doesn't make sense and doesn't flow smoothly at all. It wasn't much of a short story at all, just random nonsense thrown together with no meaning at all.
Rachel Caine's Dead Man Stalking:
Excellent! I haven't read the Morganville series but now I want to. The author's tone was great, the story was interesting, plus clear and solid and it made sense. It was what a short story should be, a whole story in just a few pages, not too much but not too little either.
Tanith Lee's Table Manners:
Very well written. A new interesting look on vampires. I enjoyed it.
Nancy Holder's Changed:
Another excellent, well written story. Showing a different kind of love and a different kind of vampire world. Instead of the dark brooding romantic vampires, you get the evil apocalyptic ones. A great read.
Richelle Mead's Blue Moon:
I really liked this one. I almost always love vampire stories where the vampires are known to the world.
Claudia Gray's Free:
I loved this one. It was a great story about a strong woman doing what she needs to do to make herself happy. It was also the only story that wasn't set in the present which was a nice change of pace from the other stories.

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Her Smoke Rose Up Forever Review

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(More customer reviews)In 508 pages we get 18 short stories by James Tiptree, Jr. Original publication dates range from 1969 to 1981. Time has overtaken many of the tales in a strange way, that makes one wish Tiptree were still around to appreciate developments. For instance, in "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," the world breathlessly watches the real-time antics of young, beautiful wealthy girls... who are actually brainless synthetic creations animated by what amount to brains in jars in an underground lab. What would Tiptree make of the Parises, Nicoles, Lindsays and Brittanies of our own day, who appear to have no brains located anywhere?
Tiptree really got rolling in 1973, when she published her three best-known stories, "The Girl...," along with "Love is the plan the plan is death," and "The Women Men Don't See." Along with 1976's "Houston, Houston, do you read?" these are the quintessential Tiptree tales. "Love is the plan..." is my favorite science fiction short story, and one of the best short stories of any kind ever written. It has not a single human character, and depicts the unbearably touching efforts of a gigantic, heavily-armored, multi-limbed alien to tackle and solve three deadly problems faced by his species, two internal--- stemming from instinctively programmed behavior--- and one external, a global climate change. That he will fail, and why he will fail, is evident early on from many clues fairly planted within the narrative. But he does his level best, which is indeed far better than you and I could hope to do, and like most Tiptree aliens, he is totally charming and lovable throughout his hopeless task. Our own species is currently failing completely to deal with a global climate change, and we are neither charming nor lovable in our miserably conflicted efforts.
"A Momentary Taste of Being" is another quintessential Tiptree story; an expedition of interstellar exploration inadvertently discovers the true purpose of human existence... a purpose which reveals all human effort, achievement and aspiration to be utterly pointless and futile. "With Delicate Mad Hands" is a key story, from 1981, that catches Tiptree in transition from symbolic War of the Sexes tales to space-operatic adventure. Almost all her stories from 1981 to her death in 1987 were space adventures set in the distant future.
Several tales here were completely new to me, particularly "Slow Music," from 1980, in which a chance (?) encounter of the earth with some alien stream of disembodied consciousness has made suicide so irresistibly attractive that there are only a handful of living humans. This story seems to contain a sly self-portrait of Tiptree herself, as the dying ancient human wreck that the two main characters discover on their way to see "The River," as the stream is called.
There's not a bad or mediocre story in the volume. And, alas, this is probably the only collection of Tiptree fiction currently in print in the US. Get it while it's still available.

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Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions (P.S.) Review

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(More customer reviews)I should point out first that (a) I've been Neil's friend for many years, and therefore not without bias, and (b) some of these stories I've read several times before. However, due to various health problems, I have been spending a lot of time in a series of doctor's waiting rooms for months now, and Smoke and Mirrors has been my book of choice for resisting lure of six month old issues of Field and Stream. I have read it from start to finish, resisting the strong temptation to flip forward to the stories I hadn't read, savoring each offering as I would a course in a lavish meal (and considering I'm on a diabetic's diet that's more savoring than I'm allowed in the traditional sense). It's been an unalloyed pleasure. And yesterday, while waiting for my endcrinologist to check me over, I finished the last story.
I rationed myself on this book, but you don't have to. If you only know Gaiman from Neverwhere or his Sandman comics, this is a chance to see the full range of his writing chops, which are formidable. I defy anyone to find me a better story this side of Nathaniel West about the mythical land of Hollywood than "The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories." I cannot think of a more bizarre marriage than the melding of epic poetry and bikini bimbos that is Baywolf. I heard the ghost of Peter Cook at my ear in "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar." I took inordinate pleasure in reading "Snow, Glass, Apples" aloud to a group of my son's friends, and watching them laugh uneasily.
There is a wealth of fine storytelling here, a veritable trove of style and substance, passion and pastiche, wit and bite and vision and venom. The art of the short story is in excellent hands.

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