Tag Archives: short fiction

Elizabeth Bear’s The Chains That You Refuse

I seem to be running across a number of writers for whom the idea of “genre” is as fluid as the idea of a “short story.” Stories are like a painter’s drawings or a composer’s piano studies: they can range … Continue reading

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Jane Yolen’s The Midnight Circus

Jane Yolen’s The Midnight Circus is an appropriately titled collection of her darker stories, featuring sad endings, disturbing implications, and utter beauty. While almost all qualify as dark, more than one deal with the perils of actual historical events, albeit often … Continue reading

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An Armload of Fur and Leaves

In the last year or so, I found a genre that hadn’t previously been on my radar, but which I really enjoy: furry fiction. Kyell Gold had put up his novel Black Angel on the SFWA member forums, where members … Continue reading

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Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, Jeffrey D. Smith, eds., The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1; The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2

In case anyone doesn’t know, the mysteriously reclusive science-fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., whose writing was cited by no less than Robert Silverberg as “ineluctably male,” was in fact Alice Sheldon, who, during the course of her somewhat unconventional life, … Continue reading

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Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, Jeffrey D. Smith, eds., The James Tiptree Award Anthology 3

Anyone experiencing art, particularly with the goal of commenting on it, inevitably faces a quandary: how much of the meaning was the intent of the artist, and how much was supplied by the audience? This observation is particularly relevant to … Continue reading

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Jack Vance’s The Kragen; Thomas M. Disch’s The Voyage of the Proteus: A Eyewitness Account of the End of the World; Cat Rambo and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories

You may recall that we here at GMR are extraordinarily fond of the small presses that publish so many of the things we discuss. We are fond of them because they bring us all-but-forgotten classics, exciting new works from important … Continue reading

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Michael Cadnum’s Can’t Catch Me And Other Twice-Told Tales; Tim Powers’ A Soul in a Bottle

It seems that more and more, the books that cross my desk don’t fit into any sort of traditional category. I have to assume that’s deliberate, since there is a whole generation of young writers who are deliberately blurring the … Continue reading

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Thomas M. Disch’s The Wall of America

Thomas M. Disch was one of the more challenging of the American New Wave science-fiction writers. Where writers such as Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany were pushing the boundaries of the formally acceptable in science fiction (and fantasy, for … Continue reading

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Roger Zelazny’s The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories

Although he published his first story in the early 1950s, Roger Zelazny didn’t really impact the science fiction scene until 1963. That’s when I remember reading “A Rose for Eccelsiastes” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (with their … Continue reading

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Peter S. Beagle’s Return

As you’ve no doubt heard many times here at GMR, there is something unique about the writing of Peter S. Beagle. There’s a “can’t quite put your finger on it” quality that is, perhaps, equal parts simple, uninflected narration, universes … Continue reading

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