Eclipse 4

April 4, 2011
The latest volume in Strahan's unthemed anthology series has almost no weak links. The highlight is Rachel Swirsky's "Fields of Gold," a diabetic ghost's witty and melancholy tale of his life and death. Other standouts are Andy Duncan's folksy, Twainesque "Slow as a Bullet," Kij Johnson's metafictional "Story Kit," and Caítlin R. Kiernan's uncommonly beautiful Lovecraftian "Tidal Forces." Even familiar tropes are handled elegantly by top talents like Michael Swanwick (whose "The Man in Grey" explores the idea that human reality is controlled by others), Jeffrey Ford (playing with doppelgängers in "The Double of My Double Is Not My Double"), and Eileen Gunn (nicely twisting time travel and paradox themes in "Thought Experiment"), as well as relative newcomers like Peter M. Ball (whose "Dying Young" is a surprisingly fresh postapocalyptic western). Less successful contributions from Gwyneth Jones and Emma Bull are still entertaining but outshone by their companions. Strahan continues to raise the bar for original genre anthology series.

May 15, 2011

From Andy Duncan's tale of a man's bet that he can outrun a bullet ("Slow as a Bullet") to Damien Broderick's cosmic story of a woman's encounter with a cat whose ability to speak is the least of its talents ("The Beancounter's Cat"), the 14 original stories in this collection illustrate the strength and vitality of the sf and fantasy short fiction genre. VERDICT Including contributions by James Patrick Kelley, Nalo Hopkinson, and other contemporary authors, this volume should attract fans of those authors as well as readers who enjoy short stories.

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