The Locus Awards | ||||||||
edited by Charles N. Brown and Jonathan Strahan | ||||||||
HarperCollins Eos, 514 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Greg L. Johnson
The stories are arranged by decade, starting with the 70s. Many of them, from Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Day Before
the Revolution" to Terry Bisson's "Bears Discover Fire" will be familiar to anyone who regularly reads short SF. There are
always stories you haven't read, though, and the surprise for me was John Crowley's "Gone," a low-key but effective offering
of hope in a crazy world. If there is one name here that is new to other readers it is probably Ted Chiang, whose "Hell is the
Absence of God" fits neatly into the last section of the book, in-between Greg Egan's "Border Guards" and Neil
Gaiman's "October in the Chair." The transition from Egan's hard SF to Chiang's allegory to Gaiman's take on classic
fantasy is no let-down from The Locus Awards opening salvo of Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Harlan Ellison.
For long time readers, whether they wish to purchase The Locus Awards may depend on how many of these stories they
already own. New readers may find this a handy introduction to some of the best stories and writers of the last thirty
year, though not necessarily a complete one. (If your only guide to SF and fantasy of the last thirty years was
the Locus awards, you'd hardly be aware of the movement known as cyberpunk, for example). Either way, there
is no denying the high quality of writing and story-telling on display here. The Locus Awards is testimony to the status
of SF as literature, and to the existence of an audience that appreciates it.
Reviewer Greg L Johnson enjoys being part of a crowd that knows a good SF story when it reads one. His reviews also appear in the The New York Review of Science Fiction. |
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