![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroExactly what it says on the tin: A collection of time-travel short stories. Like any anthology, it’s a mixed bag, though there are some solid pieces in here.
I think my biggest complaint with a bunch of the stories was that they didn’t properly end—they had a beginning and a middle, but then trailed off without properly resolving. Don’t get me wrong, there’s something to be said about a story that leaves you wondering, but many of these felt like the author was building up to a twist, and then decided not to write that part. “With Fate Conspire,” “Twember,” “The Mists of Time,” and “Number 73 Glad Avenue” all had this problem to varying degrees. As opposed to “The King of Where-I-Go,” which apparently forgot to make sense of its resolution, as there is never any cause given for the ending that takes place.
I was particularly fond of “Thought Experiment” for managing to avoid that problem and actually make it to the twist. It also had a really clever take on time travel and the ramifications thereof; one which I don’t think I’ve seen the likes of before.
“The Ghosts of Christmas” tries, but I think it could have used another round or two of editing to make it clear how much of history was being changed and how much was just stable time loops (which it seems to imply are the norm), and to front-load a bit more character-building so the impact of visiting the past and future makes more sense as you see it.
“The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park,” and Genevieve Valentine’s “Bespoke,” both avoid the problem of thinking too much about the time travel by making it a peripheral part of the story rather than the main thrust, and giving you a tale where the people and their small piece of the altered world are what matters. “The Ile of Dogges,” is fairly decent (if straightforward) along these lines as well. Also strong was “Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous,” which is a piece about a marriage falling apart that just happens to involve time travel and dinosaurs, and works pretty well.
A bunch of the stories are also very much “I found out about this cool historical event and wanted to go on at length about it.” This includes “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” with Japan's 'Unit 731' in Pingfang; “Two Shots from Fly’s Photo Gallery,” and the gunfight at the OK Corral; “First Flight” and the first flight of the Wright Brothers; and “September at Wall and Broad,” with the Wall Street bombing of 1920.
The weakest story, though, was Michael Moorcock’s "The Lost Canal,” which was over-written to the extreme. Every other sentence is throwaway exposition, to the point where you wonder if it’s going to turn out that the protagonist is just making all this shit up. (He’s not.) He definitely was trying to write it as a pulp action story, and the feel is there, but it just drowns in too much worldbuilding/backstory for a story of this length.
Overall: A decent collection; worth it if you like sci-fi short stories, basically.
I think my biggest complaint with a bunch of the stories was that they didn’t properly end—they had a beginning and a middle, but then trailed off without properly resolving. Don’t get me wrong, there’s something to be said about a story that leaves you wondering, but many of these felt like the author was building up to a twist, and then decided not to write that part. “With Fate Conspire,” “Twember,” “The Mists of Time,” and “Number 73 Glad Avenue” all had this problem to varying degrees. As opposed to “The King of Where-I-Go,” which apparently forgot to make sense of its resolution, as there is never any cause given for the ending that takes place.
I was particularly fond of “Thought Experiment” for managing to avoid that problem and actually make it to the twist. It also had a really clever take on time travel and the ramifications thereof; one which I don’t think I’ve seen the likes of before.
“The Ghosts of Christmas” tries, but I think it could have used another round or two of editing to make it clear how much of history was being changed and how much was just stable time loops (which it seems to imply are the norm), and to front-load a bit more character-building so the impact of visiting the past and future makes more sense as you see it.
“The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park,” and Genevieve Valentine’s “Bespoke,” both avoid the problem of thinking too much about the time travel by making it a peripheral part of the story rather than the main thrust, and giving you a tale where the people and their small piece of the altered world are what matters. “The Ile of Dogges,” is fairly decent (if straightforward) along these lines as well. Also strong was “Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous,” which is a piece about a marriage falling apart that just happens to involve time travel and dinosaurs, and works pretty well.
A bunch of the stories are also very much “I found out about this cool historical event and wanted to go on at length about it.” This includes “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” with Japan's 'Unit 731' in Pingfang; “Two Shots from Fly’s Photo Gallery,” and the gunfight at the OK Corral; “First Flight” and the first flight of the Wright Brothers; and “September at Wall and Broad,” with the Wall Street bombing of 1920.
The weakest story, though, was Michael Moorcock’s "The Lost Canal,” which was over-written to the extreme. Every other sentence is throwaway exposition, to the point where you wonder if it’s going to turn out that the protagonist is just making all this shit up. (He’s not.) He definitely was trying to write it as a pulp action story, and the feel is there, but it just drowns in too much worldbuilding/backstory for a story of this length.
Overall: A decent collection; worth it if you like sci-fi short stories, basically.
