Stable Strategies and Others
I saw a big stack of Eileen Gunn's Stable Strategies and Others on a table in the Dealer's Room at Worldcon one morning, and didn't think much of it. Later that day, it got mentioned as a fabulous small-press success, and when I went back to look at it again, the publisher had sold out. Word of mouth works, I guess...
Anyway, this is a short-story collection including pretty much everything Gunn's ever written, I believe. It also boasts appreciative essays (and one bit of doggerel) by William Gibson, Michael Swanwick, and Howard Waldrop, which pretty much tells you what you're going to get. At least, assuming you've read those three.
The twelve stories in this book are so carefully crafted that it's easy to see why there aren't more of them. They feel as if the deletion of a single adjective would cause the whole thing to dissolve, like a special effect from a Thursday Next book. They're also all very odd, and mostly satirical. In "Stable Strategies for Middle Management," people undergo extensive bioengineering to fit in better with corporate culture, while "Fellow Americans" imagines Richard Nixon as a tremendously popular game-show host, in a world where Barry Goldwater was elected President.
This sounds utterly bizarre, I'm sure, but they mostly work very well. The only exceptions are the two co-authored pieces, "Nirvana High" and "Green Fire." The former runs afoul of my low opinion of Kurt Cobain, while the latter (which puts Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein at the center of the "Philadelphia Experiment") is just too cute to really work.
Ten out of twelve is pretty darn good, though. It's a fine collection, and deserves to be a smashing success for its publisher.
Posted at 8:26 PM | link |