Three Stories | ||||||||
Gregory Benford | ||||||||
Philistine Press, 4009 words | ||||||||
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A review by Trent Walters
John is searching for his father, a father who is not as honorable as John might desire. He drives his skiff ashore to
avoid a mercury-colored beast, only to bump into a man with a duckbill blunderbuss who has other plans for John. John evades
those plans and encounters Stan, to whom he spreads tall tales of jewels and hydrogen hats uptime on the river. Stan takes John
to Zoms, dead people converted into cheap, three-month labor. There John meets a Zom who may or may not be his father.
A river pilot corners John, tests him, and wants him as his boat's navigator. After all, John has come quite a ways alone
down the timestream. As they sail, town to town, John seeks his father among the Zoms but learns his father may have been Zom
trader, not a Zom. Amusingly, things thought to be lies, turn out to be true, and John does run into a man who might or might
not be his father.
This one is a must for any Benford fan. Observing Amazon reviews, one notes good stories disappoint readers, but this
should satisfy most speculative readers, a solid four-stars.
Tor.com also published two of Gregory Benford's works: "Grace Immaculate" and "The Final Now." The first "Grace Immaculate,"
is a free ebook (also online), which is a price difficult to beat. It begins with a distanced narrator describing alien
signals from hydra-like creatures who seemed to have no religion, but humans "poison" the alien minds. They think they've
heard the last of the aliens.... The story unfortunately was all too short. Just when it gets interesting, it ends, feeling
like the opening to a novelette or the prologue to a novel.
The "The Final Now" (available in his latest collection, Anomalies) details a far future where beings have different
concepts of names, memory, and time. A human being brought from the past to this future "now," to stand among the Creators who
stand outside time, struggles to understand and be understood. As the universe collapses, they come to an understanding of
the universe's laws. The idea predominates this work and provides a nice contrast with Down the River Road in terms
of their differing views of time.
Perhaps Benford ought to gather his time stories into one collection. That said, any story collection from Gregory Benford
would be prized. As mentioned earlier, one does exist, Anomalies.
Trent Walters teaches science; lives in Honduras; edited poetry at Abyss & Apex; blogs science, SF, education, and literature, etc. at APB; co-instigated Mundane SF (with Geoff Ryman and Julian Todd) culminating in an issue for Interzone; studied SF writing with dozens of major writers and and editors in the field; and has published works in Daily Cabal, Electric Velocipede, Fantasy, Hadley Rille anthologies, LCRW, among others. |
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