Invaders

Starred review from March 28, 2016
In this very fine reprint anthology, Weisman has brought together 22 SF stories by authors who, although not generally associated with the genre, are clearly fellow travelers (not the ominous invaders suggested by the title). Among the major names are Pulitzer Prize–winner Junot Díaz, George Sanders, Katherine Dunn, Jonathan Lethem, Amiri Baraka, W.P. Kinsella, Steven Millhauser, Robert Olen Butler, and Molly Gloss. Among the best of the consistently strong stories are Díaz’s “Monstro,” the horrifying tale of a disease outbreak in Haiti; Gloss’s near-perfect first-contact story, “Lambing Season”; Kinsella’s totally bizarre “Reports Concerning the Death of the Seattle Albatross Are Somewhat Exaggerated”; Ben Loory’s fable-like “The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun”; and Saunders’s “Escape from Spiderhead,” a deeply sexy tale of wild experimental science. In general, the stories tend toward satire and emphasize fine writing more than hitting genre beats—technology is usually a means to an end rather than the center of the story—but most of them could easily have found homes in SF magazines. This volume is a treasure trove of stories that draw equally from SF and literary fiction, and they are superlative in either context.

May 1, 2016
A collection of 22 short stories featuring several big names of literary fiction experimenting with science-fiction themes and concepts. Introduced by editor Weisman, a veteran of the SF landscape, the anthology presents a broad spectrum of stories, though only a few display conventional integration of the science of science fiction. For every story grounded in scientific developments, there is another that is best described as magic realism. If any one story embodies the overall tone, it may be Chris Tarry's "Topics in Advanced Rocketry," wherein the conceit of a rocket ship serves as mere vehicle for ruminations on family dynamics, the created celebrity, and 21st-century disaffection. (Lampshading the point, the rocket itself has fake dials which our "astronauts" cannot control at all.) Several stories stagger about under the weight of their own interpersonal relationships with hardly a plot to be found (J. Robert Lennon's "Portal," Jonathan Lethem's "Five Fucks," Jami Attenberg's "In the Bushes," Jim Shepard's "Minotaur," Rivka Galchen's "The Region of Unlikeness."..). That said, other stories in the anthology straddle an effective and potent line between the tight plotting of good SF and their own literary sensibilities: Julia Elliott's "LIMBs" is a poignant exploration of technology enabling discovery of one's personal past--and how one must outwit that technology to regain one's agency. Bryan Evenson's "Fugue State" is a dreamlike zombie-plague tale that leaves one unsettled--an understated contrast to Junot Diaz's "Monstro," which handles the same theme but with more pyrotechnics. Deji Bryce Olukotun's "We Are the Olfanauts" creatively condemns our emerging media-and-safety-net global culture, and Eric Puchner's "Beautiful Monsters" is an enjoyably queasy take on eternal youth. By their natures, anthologies are often hit and miss: there are misses aplenty here, but the hits, when they come, are solid and lingering.

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April 15, 2016

This anthology grew out of a question posed by the editor: Are stories really sf if they are written by nongenre writers? If not, what are they? Gathered here is speculative and fantastical short fiction by such acclaimed literary authors as Junot Diaz, Katherine Dunn, George Saunders, and Rifka Galchen. (Note: some of these selections contain graphic content intended for an adult audience.) The themes and settings of these stories vary enormously; one tale is terrifyingly successful at simulating a fugue state. Another depicts a future in which cars are illegal--or in which being a normally aging human is. There is the sad dignity of an alien who crashes on a woman's sheep ranch, the enthusiasm of a bohemian inventor with his clothes ray, an aspiring squid, and two modern dysfunctional families juxtaposed with a space-time portal and a rocket launch. VERDICT This volume will be appreciated by readers who are interested in genre experiments (looking for the boundaries, as it were, of sf). Fans of The Secret History of Science Fiction, edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, will want this title.--Sara Schepis, Wappinger Falls, NY

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