The SF Site: Featured Reviews Archive

The reviews are sorted alphabetically by authors' last name -- one or more pages for each letter (plus one for Mc). All but some recent reviews are listed here. Links to those reviews appear on the Recent Feature Review Page.

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Kafkaesque edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly
reviewed by Seamus Sweeney
"Kafkaesque" is a word used very often to describe bureaucratic snafus and paradoxes. Even people who have never read a word of Kafka use it to describe their encounter with the Department of Motor Vehicles, or airport security. So pervasive has "Kafkaesque" become that it has nearly lost its link with the works of Franz Kafka. When it comes to trying to summarise this wonderful anthology, there is something of a dilemma. It can be recommended unhesitatingly to anyone who has ever read any Kafka, but what about those for whom Kafkaesque is a noun they use but Kafka is not someone they've read?

The Secret History of Science Fiction edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
reviewed by Martin Lewis
This anthology uses Jonathan Lethem's infamous 1998 Village Voice article, "The Squandered Promise Of Science Fiction," as a starting point to discuss literary science fiction. In brief, it posits that 1973 was a potential turning point for science fiction and that if Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon had been awarded the Nebula that year, science fiction could subsequently have been "gently and lovingly dismantled, and the writers dispersed." Obviously, this didn't happen. The editors therefore take it as their mission to prove that the promise of science fiction was not, in fact, squandered.

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology edited by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
We have been in a "post-cyberpunk" period for longer than cyberpunk lasted. At least, we have if you take a strictly chronological understanding of the term. But "post-cyberpunk" has only really been bandied about for the last year or so, and the closest we have to a definition of the term is this particular anthology. Looking at this, one might say that "post-cyberpunk" bears pretty much the same relationship to "cyberpunk" that "postmodernism" bears to "modernism."

Feeling Very Strange edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
This may be the most self-conscious anthology to come along since Mirrorshades, the definitive cyberpunk anthology. And despite Annie Savoy's self-awareness observation in Bull Durham, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Creative expression requires some degree of self-consciousness, an artist needs at the least an internal idea from which to work. What sets it apart is the proclamatory nature of its self-awareness, the editors and writers contained within are consciously searching to create something new, something that doesn't fit within the usual publishing conventions.

Feeling Very Strange edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
reviewed by David Soyka
This is the second "please don't call us science fiction or fantasy" anthology of the summer. Unlike the "new wave fabulists" in Paraspheres, this collection is more firmly rooted in the genre; the editors are well-recognized SF&F authors in their own right, as are most of the anthologized writers. Moreover, the subtitle employs a term originated by Bruce Sterling back in 1989. This is "The Slipstream Anthology," though the stylistic variations among the selections don't help to clarify exactly what slipstream is. The editors themselves note that they weren't sure "there was such a thing as slipstream."

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