Introduction

 

As I write these words, 2005 is drawing to a close, and I’m contemplating an enormous pile of wonderful small-press books, so far left unreviewed. But as you read these words, 2006 is well underway. Yet are these offerings, up to a year old, irrelevant and out-of-date? Hardly! They’re all still available, and worthy of your consideration, as they begin what will hopefully be long satisfying shelf lives for their writers and readers alike.

Longtime, observant readers of this column will note that starting with this installment, I’ve abandoned printing the snailmail addresses of the publishers. Nearly every one has an online presence, making your job and mine much easier.

 

 

Faces Behind the Books

 

Before moving into the actual reviews, I’d like to talk a minute about the editors at the small presses who produce your favorite reading material. It looks like the Hugo Awards have chosen to split out magazine editors and book editors into two separate award categories. And while Big Names like David Hartwell at Tor or Lou Anders at Pyr come readily to mind as candidates for the new prize, those who labor at smaller scales should not be neglected for their fine work.

I’d mention, just off the top of my head:

Sean Wallace, Juha Lindroos, and John Betancourt at Wildside/Prime/ Cosmos.

Gary Turner and Marty Halpern at Golden Gryphon.

Patrick and Honna Swenson at Fairwood Press.

Deborah Layne, Jay Lake, and Forrest Aguirre at Wheatland.

Pete Crowther and Nick Gevers at PS Publishing.

Jacob Weisman at Tachyon.

Chris Roberson at Monkey Brains.

Gavin Grant and Kelly Link at Small Beer.

Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier at Black Coat.

And, last but certainly not least, Jason Williams at Night Shade.

The next time you enjoy a small press title, take a moment to annotate the editor’s name, and then think about them when the Hugo preliminary ballots roll around!

 

 

Sequential Art

 

In science, a failed experiment indicates a lousy thesis. But in the arts, crashing and burning might also be a sign of being ahead of the times. Such was the case with Barry Windsor-Smith and his anthology series called Storyteller. This oversized, deluxe “comic” ran for nine issues in the late 1990s, and consisted of an episode each of three ongoing series in every issue. The storytelling was impeccable, the presentation marvelous. But lack of publicity, a slightly higher price-point, and inertia and timidity among comics-readers doomed the book to extinction.

However, thanks to Fantagraphics, we will now see the entire contents of Storyteller reassembled and reprinted in a format befitting their magnificence. The first volume, 2003’s Young Gods & Friends (hardcover, $29.95, unpaginated, ISBN 1-56097-491-5), collected all the strips concerning a group of wayward deities whose most charming and scary member was the bumptious Princess Adastra. The second volume, The Freebooters (hardcover, $29.95, unpaginated, ISBN 1-56097-662-4), is sword-and sorcery centering around a gone-to-seed barbarian named Axus. The third volume, The Paradoxman, is SF, and due out this year.

Windsor-Smith is artist and scripter here, and he excels at both tasks. His art displays a unique, masterful style that nonetheless echoes both fine-art influences such as Art Nouveau and the pre-Raphaelites, and fellow comics geniuses such as Winsor McKay and Walt Simonson. (Young Gods is dedicated to Jack Kirby, for instance, probably as a nod to Kirby’s “Fourth World” creations.) Having devised three separate troupes of vivid characters (who cross over into each other’s universe at certain points), Windsor-Smith turns them loose and follows them in dreamy, meandering, but always intriguing fashion (much the way that Bradbury once dictated that plot should consist of “following a character’s footprints in the snow”). The dialogue is charming and insouciant, the imagery is gorgeous, and the combination is like inhabiting a dreamscape blending E.R. Eddison, Robert E. Howard, and Thorne Smith.

These volumes are also filled with generous ancillary material, including never-before-seen strips and insights into Windsor-Smith’s creative process. So while we can lament that Windsor-Smith never got to complete these three sagas as envisioned, we can glory anew in what he did achieve.

Perhaps you recall me raving about Lewis Trondheim’s Astronauts of the Future (2004). Now comes more from the French artist-writer, this time in collaboration with Joann Sfar; both books are from publisher NBM. Dungeon Volume 1: Duck Heart (trade paper, $14.95, unpaginated, ISBN 1-56163-401-8) and Dungeon Volume 2: The Barbarian Princess (trade paper, $14.95, unpaginated, ISBN 1-56163-421-2) both tell the story of the eponymous Keep, a place run by a money-grubbing, selfish avian businessman and designed solely to fleece adventurers of all their worldly goods, while killing them in the process. The place is inhabited by an assorted cast of wizards and monsters and functionaries, but most importantly by our two heroes: Herbert, a duck-turned-warrior, and Marvin, a bipedal, vegetarian dragon.

From this précis, I think you can see that the setup is comedic in nature, and Trondheim and Sfar score innumerable laughs. Their dialogue is laden with Marx Brothers non-sequiturs (“Wait for what? For you to be less stupid?”), their simple yet clever and detailed artwork perfectly captures sight gags and emotions alike, and their plotting is manic. The whole series reminds me of Sergio Aragones’s classic Groo, and deserves a place on the shelf of any lover of sword-and-sorcery or parody or both.

The rudely but accurately titled F*ck Off and Die (Savoy Books, hardcover, £30.00, 160 pages, ISBN 0-86130-113-7) is the latest bilious, cathartic blast from writer David Britton and artist Kris Guido. Stuffed to overflowing with B&W and color strips, this volume (with a blazing introduction by Alan Moore) features Britton’s infamous troupe of characters: Meng and Ecker, Lord Horror, and La Squab. The latter is the true star of this volume. A foul-mouthed, violent, pre-pubescent girl, she mirrors, inspires, and parodies the current crop of media tartlets. Britton uses his cast to comment on politics, sex, and art, as well as the general sad state of humanity. His vituperation is scabrous but funny. What more can you say of someone whose idea of a book review of, say, Martin Amis, is to simply explode Amis’s head? As for Guido’s art, it reminds me more and more of that of S. Clay Wilson, with pages and scenes that alternate between meth-freak enjambed intensity and clean-lined iconography.

 

 

Miscellaneous Titles

 

Suzette Haden Elgin’s The Science Fiction Poetry Handbook (Sam’s Dot Publishing, trade paper, $11.95, 125 pages, ISBN 1-930847-81-5) fills a unique niche in the field, and does so admirably. While there are plenty of books for the aspiring writer of SF/F/H prose, there are few I’ve seen for poets who wish to deal in the fantastic. Elgin’s book is a fine introduction to the rigors—and joys—of poetry creation and marketing, with a pronounced slant toward what makes SF verses special. The chapters progress clearly and logically, giving plenty of specific examples (from Elgin’s own poems). Just when you’re sated with theory, practicality takes over, and vice versa. The tone is warm and encouraging, not lofty and dismissive of beginner’s efforts. The les-sons taught here would be valuable for any dealer in words, not just those who rank their output in stanzas.

Along similar lines comes Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller (Small Beer Press, trade paper, $16.00, 192 pages, ISBN 193152016X). But Wilhelm’s distillation of nearly thirty years’ worth of teaching experience is salted with a running memoir. Anecdotes mostly revolve around the Clarion Writing Workshops where Wilhelm presided with her husband, Damon Knight. But she also generously shares moments from her private life and professional career, making this a volume that’s doubly attractive. You get valuable insights into becoming a writer, practical exercises for honing your skills, as well as a mini-autobiography told in a charming and humble manner. I heard Wilhelm speak as GOH at Readercon 2005, and can testify that this volume is as engaging as the live person behind it.

The name of artist Matt Howarth should be familiar to any reader of the small presses, for his fine comic-strip work in many venues. Now Howarth has hooked up with a musical group called Radio Massacre International (Steve Dinsdale, Duncan Goddard, and Gary Houghton) to concoct a mixed-media happening in the form of a two-CD release titled Emissaries (Cuneiform Records, $18.98, CD1: 60:00; CD2: 76:36, ASIN B0009GUT3S). This trio of musicians works in the genre known as “space rock,” whose lineage includes such bands as Tangerine Dream and Hawkwind. RMI is fully the equal of these progenitors, creating moody, shimmering soundscapes with moog, theremin, and more conventional instruments. At times vast and cosmic, at others intimate and organic, these compositions—with resonant titles such as “seeds crossing the interstellar void” and “a piano wanders the incandescent vapours”—chart a galactic odyssey across many alien terrains. It’s a journey you’ll want to take again and again.

Readers of this magazine will need no introduction to the splendid poetry of Bruce Boston. But accustomed as we are to his richly hued stanzas rife with complex sentiments and ideas, we might not be ready for the simple, even silly verses of Etiquette With Your Robot Wife and Thirty More SF/F/H Lists (Talisman, chapbook, $4.95, ISBN unavailable). However, once you adjust your expectations along David Letterman lines (if Letterman and his writers were good poets, that is), then you’ll be receptive to Boston’s Sheckleyan humor. You’ll learn about “Things Not to Say After a Nuclear Holocaust” and “Why I Chose a Robot Body and Never Regretted It.” And the illustrations by Marge Simon are perfect accompaniment to these inspired verbal pratfalls.

Can any one person possibly command an encyclopedic knowledge of the science fiction field today, given how sprawling the territory has become? I’d have to say yes, just on the basis of one man and his most recent book. Don D’Ammassa, longtime reviewer and critic for [SF] Chronicle and other publications, author of fiction and fannish works alike, has just released his Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Facts on File, hardcover, $65.00, 538 pages, ISBN 0-8160-5924-1), a book single-handedly compiled by the author, which manages to encompass the whole range of printed SF (as well as some cinematic works). True, there’s not an entry for every single person who ever penned SF, nor are such peripheral areas as SF cartoons or comics or music covered, as in the Clutepedia, but the representative entries that are included are so clear and comprehensive that the reader will come away with a fine sense of the field’s history and current state.

D’Ammassa devotes entries to authors, novels, multi-book series, movies, and, best of all, individual short stories (many of which are not the obviously famous choices). He offers career summaries, plot synopses, and carefully weighed opinions. I’m fond of his observations on the genre, such as “Science fiction has traditionally been a literature of heroes. . . .” (in the entry for “Carcinoma Angels”), or “One of the perils of extrapolating near-future trends in fiction is that there is a high probability that the trends depicted in the story will be outdistanced by events very quickly” (in the entry for Code Three). With a wealth of such pronouncements, earned through decades of reading and thinking about the genre he loves, this book offers many hours of sheer browsing pleasure.

Another reference work of longer pedigree has just been reissued, in its fifth edition. Neil Barron’s Anatomy of Wonder (Libraries Unlimited, hardcover, $80.00, 995 pages, ISBN 1-59158-171-0) is an acknowledged milestone in the field of reference works about SF. And this new incarnation wears its laurels proudly. The book was assembled under Barron’s supervision with the help of nearly two dozen experts, including such reliable names as Brian Stableford, William Contento, and Gary Wolfe. Divided in three, the book exhibits a beautiful and clever schema. The first part consists of five essays that chart the development of SF from 1516 to 2004. The second part offers 1400 critical entries on the core books of the field. And finally, we close out with “The Secondary Literature—Annotated Bibliography,” constituting almost half of the thousand pages.

The opening essays brilliantly sum up the canon; the crisp, evocative paragraphs on individual titles pique readerly interest; and the massive guide to further critical reading is a map for future study. What better vade mecum could you want?

Alan Moore as a young SF fan? You can learn all about his roots, plus so much other fascinating material, in Alan Moore Spells It Out (Airwave Publishing, trade paper, $9.95, 74 pages, ISBN 0-9724805-7-9), a book-length interview that is the result of five hours of conversation with publisher Bill Baker. Baker asks intelligent, probing questions and Moore responds openly and at length. Some of the material is a little dated by recent events—the career decisions Moore forecast in 2002 have already come to pass—but the vast bulk of the work maintains its timeless interest.

 

 

Novels and Novelettes

 

One could not imagine a classier and more honorable bearer of the Baumian banner of Oz than Hungry Tiger Press. Their books of recent years—Paradox in Oz (2000) and The Salt Sorcerer of Oz (2003)—were simultaneously glorious and affordable objects calculated to thrill the hearts of collectors, and also winningly winsome extensions of the Oz mythos. Their latest offering, The Living House of Oz (hardcover, $27.95, 239 pages, ISBN 1-929527-08-X), maintains these high standards. The novel is written by Edward Einhorn (author of Paradox) and copiously illustrated by Eric Shanower (author of Salt Sorcerer and illustrator of both previous works). On both a narrative and visual level it succeeds admirably, telling the story of a young boy named Buddy and his quest for his true parentage and a place of refuge from the abominable beings—Phanfasms—who hunt him and his mother. There are twists and turns aplenty, charmingly surreal yet dream-logical; new characters who consort seamlessly with the classic protagonists (I particularly enjoyed an animated coat-rack named the Earl of Haberdashery); and meaty yet not over-done themes such as personal responsibility and the tyranny of the state. Shanower’s art has never been more luminous nor droll. Double-page spreads, such as Buddy’s arrival at the Phanfasm city or the attack of the Phanfasms in Ozma’s throne-room practically leap off the page. The combination of Einhorn’s wit and Shanower’s affectionate envisionings make this Oz adventure a near-tangible reality.

Lance Olsen is a writer whose technical ingenuity is matched only by his fertility of invention and compassion for his characters. His novel 10:01 (Chiasmus Press, trade paperback, $12.00, 187 pages, ISBN 0-9703212-6-0) illustrates all these qualities beautifully. Here’s the premise and setup. We are in a movie theater at the legendary Mall of America, as the unnamed feature is about to begin. The theater is partially filled with a score or so of moviegoers whom chance has assembled into a temporary unity. We will bounce omnisciently from one POV to another, learning the deepest secrets of these characters in the space of ten minutes of previews, before a certain fate overtakes them all. In this sense, Olsen’s book resembles Geoff Ryman’s famous experiment, 253 (1998)—intentionally, I’m sure, given that both books share numerical titles. But Olsen’s book is more satirical than Ryman’s, as we might infer, given its kitschy venue. Here on display is a panoply of postmodern lifestyles and vacuous egocentric concerns. But Olsen digs into the reasons why his characters are as they are, and the result is empathy and tragicomic insight. I’m also reminded of the work of Robert Coover and William Gaddis along these same lines (especially given Coover’s fascination with the products of Hollywood). There’s a hint of Kafka as well, with plenty of outright supernaturalism (ghosts and other unlikely beings) and surrealism. By page 161, Olsen has established a central dichotomy between two schools of film—and, by extension, schools of literature and even attitudes toward life: mimesis versus fantasy. Do we regard the world as solid, sensible, rational, cut-and dried—or fleeting, uncanny, illogical, and mysterious? A book like this is the winning synthesis between both camps.

Eric Brown has done a clever thing in Approaching Omega (Telos Publishing, trade paperback, $8.95, 117 pages, ISBN 1-903889-98-7. He’s found a scientifically respectable way to combine zombie fiction and space fiction, to the one-shot betterment of both genres. (I would hate to see endless ripoffs and dilutions of his concept, but it’s cool once.) In a way, Brown’s notion is reminiscent of the core conceit of the Alien films, or the Borg from the Star Trek mythos. But Brown makes use of a lot of scary riffs traditionally associated with the classic zombies that might have inspired the others mentioned above.

At the end of the twenty-first century a dying Earth sends off a generation ship carrying five thousand star-colonists as the heirs of mankind. One thousand years into the journey of the Dauntless, a quartet of commanders—Latimer, Li, Renfrew, and Emecheta—are automatically awoken to deal with the results of a collision that has seemingly destroyed the AI that runs everything. They make all possible repairs, setting up lesser, backup computers in charge, then go down once more into hibernation, hopeful that all will be well. They are woken a second time to find that the Central AI is not dead, but mad. The inhuman intelligence has begun plundering the people-freezers to produce a race of brainwashed cyborgs. Now the foursome is alone against a force of violent cyber-zombies, their former friends, who wish to convert the holdouts to Central’s utopia. Can the survivors manage to take the ship back and resume their mission? Perhaps—but only after running firefights in the corridors and bays of the immense ship.

Brown moves his action along zippily, evoking real sympathy for his quartet of unlikely action-heroes. Filled with suspense and horror, this novel offers a fresh twist on an old theme.

In The Cosmology of the Wider World (PS Publishing, trade paperback, $18.00, 173 pages, ISBN 1-904619-82-7), Jeffrey Ford succeeds in blending the sundry charms of fables, fairy tales, beast tales, and magical-realist parables into a unique whole that only he could have concocted. Reminiscent a bit in tone and feel of his magnificent story, “The Annals of Eelin-Ok” in the Datlow-Windling anthology The Faery Reel (2004), this narrative is the life story of Belius, a minotaur born to human parents in a world not too far removed from ours. A unique freak among his human community, Belius grows up, naturally enough, somewhat bent in spirit and outlook. A final insult to his young-adult sensibilities sends him fleeing over the mystical border into the legendary Wider World, a land where all animals are sentient. There he will become a scholar and philosopher, living in a coral tower constructed with his own hooves like some Joycean exile. But even here, a vague malaise overtakes him, and only the efforts of his good friends—a turtle, an owl, an ape, and others—can possibly restore him to his prime.

Ford’s writing has never been more beautiful: full of pleasing and arresting figures of speech (“His stomach hung out in front of him like a destination the rest of his body was traveling to”), yet uncontorted and direct. His inhabiting of Belius’s psyche is intimate and detailed, yet the narrative invites us to stand off at a small distance and regard the minotaur’s tragicomic life with some wise dispassion. (I am reminded of a lost classic with a similar protagonist and slant: Christopher Morley’s Where the Blue Begins [1922].) Events proliferate in rich and surprising ways, and the dialogue among the animals is worthy of a Kipling. Like the work of Gene Wolfe, this book reinvigorates the whole fantasy genre.

Antediluvian author A. Hyatt Verrill does not even rate an entry in either the SF or Fantasy volume of the all-encompassing Clutepedia. But at one time he helped fill the pages of the pulps in a satisfying manner. Consider his major offering for 1929 in Amazing Stories Quarterly, now reissued in book form: The Bridge of Light (Capricorn Publishing, trade paperback, $16.00, 220 pages, ISBN 0-9753970-7-9). This tale blends A. Merritt, Mark Twain, and H. Rider Haggard into a charming lost-world romp. Coming into possession of a mysterious Mayan codex, our hero plunges into the wilds of Guatemala and discovers, after arduous trials, the hidden land of Mictolan on the far side of the titular radioactive luminous span, where he falls in love with the beauteous Itzá, introduces rudimentary engineering principles to the benighted natives, foils the evil dwarfish priest Kinchi-Haman, and earns the name Itzimin-Chac, herald of Kukulcan. Verrill’s prose is sturdy and streamlined, his sense of suspense adequate, and his plotting economical. Anyone in the market for some proto-Indiana Jones thrills will get their money’s worth here.

 

 

Anthologies

 

Deborah Layne and Jay Lake have assembled in Polyphony 5 (Wheatland Press, trade paperback, $18.95, 419 pages, ISBN 0-9755903-5-9) one of the meatiest, most enticing volumes of original stories to hit the market since—well, since Polyphony 4. These tales highlight so many varied voices, themes, styles, and genres that the lucky reader will put the book down upon completion and marvel that our field is so rich. As usual with this series, there’s a splendid mix of newer writers and classic names, all of high quality. Among the former, choosing almost willy-nilly, I enjoyed Nick Mamatas’s “To-do List,” which is formalistically congruent with its title, yet manages to construct a shimmering narrative; “Dwelling,” by John Aegard, which charts the fate of survivors in the ruins of Seattle; and Brian Richard Wade’s “The Woman Who Spoke in Parables,” a compressed birth-to-death account of a woman who is either very wise or very foolish. The more widely known contributors include Jeff VanderMeer with “The Farmer’s Cat” (how one ingenious farmer battled an infestation of trolls); Ray Vukcevich’s “Tongues” (the particularly nasty fates of a New Age couple); and Leslie What’s “Nature Mort” (a painter and his female servant dance around the nature of death). The genres range across the literary map, from pure SF to fable to fantasy to slipstream, providing a change of pace with every entry. The writers you encounter here will define the future of fantastical fiction.

Editor and publisher Mike Allen has taken his periodical anthology of new fantastical poetry, Mythic Delirium, out of Warren Lapine’s DNA stable of magazines and re-embarked on a solo course. Issue 13 (chapbook, $5.00, 28 pages, ISSN unavailable) is strong indication that nothing has been lost by this move. Almost twenty poems by a diversity of talents exhibit a full spectrum of themes and a heartening mastery of the form. We have the deceptively simple diction and rhythms of Carma Lynn Park’s “Crow Eats Carrion” alongside the dense and recomplicated imagery of Sonya Taafe’s “Ibis, Scribe.” Poems with full narrative engines—Darrell Schweitzer’s “Helen Returns to Troy”; Catherynne M. Valente’s “The Queen of Hearts”; and Aurelio Rico Lopez’s “Arise”—consort easily with more imagistic ones, such as “Motion” by Abraham Linik and “Inuit Sky” by Gary Every. In short, there’s a taste here for every lover of verse.

After publishing their monumental encyclopedia, Shadowmen (2003) and Shadowmen 2 (2004), subtitled respectively “Heroes and Villains of French Pulp Fiction” and “Heroes and Villains of French Comics,” Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier took the next logical creative leap and commissioned an original anthology featuring many of the classic characters whose biographies had been given. The result, Tales of the Shadowmen: The Modern Babylon (Black Coat press, trade paper, $22.95, 253 pages, ISBN 1-932983-36-8), is a feast of retro-style thrills. A varied troupe of authors, including such familiar names as Robert Sheckley (in what must surely be one of his last appearances), Brian Stableford, Chris Roberson, and Terrance Dicks, bring all their affection for the famous creations of other authors into a postmodern mélange of adventure. As you read these pieces, you can play the game of identifying the more familiar figures—Maigret, Lupin, Dupin, Robur, Holmes—before turning to the handy key at the rear of the book that tallies the various appearances of lesser-known personages. The stories range from low-key homages to gonzo outings. It takes Roberson, for instance, some convolutions to get Batman’s parents on the French scene, but he does so expertly. A second volume of this series is already scheduled for 2006. With a third installment of Alan Moore’s allied League of Extraordinary Gentleman coming up soon as well, we’ll have a banner year for interbook, trans-author commingling.

Editor Ernest Lilley has assembled a stellar lineup of writers in his theme anthology Future Washington (WSFA Press, trade paperback, $16.95, 290 pages, ISBN 0-9621725-4-5), and their contributions are all well up to snuff. Spinning off in myriad ways from the simple premise—depict the life of the USA’s capital at some point in the future—these creators come up with wildly contrasting scenarios. Alien invasion arrives in Steven Sawicki’s “Mr. Zmith Goes to Washington.” Repression and revolt crop up in such tales as Edward M. Lerner’s “The Day of the RFIDs” and Joe Haldeman’s “Civil Disobedience.” And of course the possible passing of the torch to new polities can’t be ignored, as L. Neil Smith shows us in “The Lone and Level Sands.” Perhaps the standout entry is Cory Doctorow’s “Human Readable,” which examines recurring everyday apocalypses through the viewpoints of a young couple.

This is definitely a keeper to shelve next to David Alexander Smith’s Future Boston (1994).

Monsters are hot. King Kong stamped across the cinema in 2005. Marvel Comics is resurrecting great old Jack Kirby monsters. And Dark Horse Press is doing a line of novels based on the monstrous buddies from Universal films: the Wolfman, Frankenstein, and their kin.

In line with this trend arrives a volume titled Daikaiju! Giant Monster Tales (Agog! Press, trade paperback, AUS$32.95, 352 pages, ISBN 0-9580567-4-9). Edited by Robert Hood and Robin Pen, with a wonderful cover by Bob Eggleton, this volume is as gigantically good as its role models. Over two dozen well-done stories, as well as some poems and a fine essay on the history of daikaiju (“giant monsters” in Japanese) bulk this volume out to Godzilla proportions.

Many of the authors naturally enough put a humorous spin on these campy creations, either subverting pre-existing monsters or inventing parodic examples of their own. The title alone of Adam Ford’s witty “Seven Dates That Were Ruined by Giant Monsters” is indicative of a certain slant. But there are plenty of stories that treat the themes seriously, such as George Thomas’s “Requiem for a Wild God.”

If you’ve ever had a hankering to see Chicago destroyed (Stephen Mark Rainey’s “The Transformer of Worlds”) or learn what a North Korean Commie monster might look like (Cody Goodfellow’s “Kongmin Horangi: The People’s Tiger”), then you’ve come to the right place!

 

 

Single-author Collections

 

Much like Italo Calvino with his Italian Folktales (1956), Robert Coover turns—or returns—to a primal wellspring of story-telling in his latest collection, A Child Again (McSweeney’s, hardcover, $22.00, 276 pages, ISBN 1-932416-22-6). Here, you’ll discover masterful metafictional recastings of such Ur-fiction as “Little Red Riding Hood” (Coover’s “Grandmother’s Nose”); “The Pied Piper” (“The Return of the Dark Children”); and “Casey at the Bat” (“McDuff on the Mound”). The effect of these modernizations is at once ultra-contemporary and ancient. The reader feels that he or she is connecting with old, old myths, yet filtered through Coover’s taut prose, keen postmodern wit and narrative hijinx.

Coover’s genius is on display right from the first story, “Sir John Paper Returns to Honah-Lee,” which takes the sixties bit of musical fluff known as “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and distills a touching story about age and loss of innocence and rejuvenation from the pop treacle. Coover’s opening sentences are all hook and heart and mystery. Consider this one from “Playing House”: “Once there was a house, whispers someone in the dark (we are learning about another house, our own house, the one in which we live), and it had windows everywhere and walls as thin as skin and it was full of light.” Who wouldn’t want to continue reading after that? In story after glorious story, he recaptures a childhood innocence not untinged with rueful adult wisdom. And of course, we hear echoes of Coover’s past themes here, from baseball (The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. [1968]) to suburbia (John’s Wife [1996]) to politics (The Public Burning [1976]).

As artifact, this book is exemplary. A chunky hand-filler with marvelous endpapers, the book also features an exterior pocket containing fifteen oversized playing cards with text that can be reshuffled to make a never-ending story titled “Heart Suit,” about the fabled King of Hearts and his missing tarts (in all senses of the word). McSweeney’s proves that its program to reinvigorate literature for the twenty-first century extends to presentation as well as content.

Karl Schroeder has established a fine reputation on the basis of three recent novels: Ventus (2000), Permanence (2002), and Lady of Mazes (2005). But he’s been having fine short stories published since the early 1990s, and now many of them are on display in The Engine of Recall (Robert J. Sawyer Books, hardcover, $19.95, 228 pages, ISBN 0-88995-323-6). Stephen Baxter’s introduction to this volume makes a good case for Schroeder’s unclassifiability strictly as a “hard SF” guy. A story like “Hopscotch,” for example, exhibits a contemporary setting and a characterological examination of what drives people to seek out the paranormal. Two stories involving the freelance trouble-shooter Gennady Malianov—“The Dragon of Pripyat” and “Alexander’s Road” (the latter original to this volume)—reflect a Warren-Ellis-style, day-after-tomorrow edginess. But of course, Schroeder can certainly handle space opera tropes magnificently, as witnessed by such pieces as “Halo” (life around a brown dwarf star) and “Solitaire” (a woman partners with an enigmatic alien). In short, Schroeder has any number of impressive, black-hole-tipped arrows in his copious quiver.

By the way: Rob Sawyer has lent his name to this imprint from Red Deer Press for the purpose of highlighting both Canadian authors and hard SF. A commendable mission, involving, no doubt, lots of unpaid work on his part. Please offer him your support.

Paul McAuley’s Little Machines (PS Publishing, hardcover, $50.00, 328 pages, ISBN 1-902880-94-3) reflects the mid-period work of a master. McAuley has now honed his skills and imagination to the point where he can turn his hand to any type of story and instantly stamp it as his own. The seventeen stories in this limited-edition collectible volume range the gamut from alternate history (“The Two Dicks” and “Cross Roads Blues,” starring Philip K. Dick and musician Robert Johnson respectively); to character studies such as “I Spy”; to hard SF such as “How We Lost the Moon, a True Story by Frank W. Allen.” McAuley examines a world made over by the arrival of “Alien TV” (and its sequel, “Before the Flood”). He indulges in Pynchonian conspiracies in “The Proxy.” And he gets inside the head of a deluded righteous murderer in “The Secret of My Success.” But no matter what the topic, treatment or themes, he exhibits a broad intelligence, superb narrative gifts, and a wry sense of how the world works.