RogerBW's Blog

Cultural Artifacts, MaryAnn Johanson 10 April 2021

2021 SF, fantasy and horror anthology, 30 very short stories.

A disclaimer first: MaryAnn is a friend whose film review site I've been reading with enthusiasm for over twenty years. I didn't pay directly for this book, but got it as a benefit of being a supporter of her work in general. She knows I'm going to give an honest review and, thank goodness, I really enjoyed this collection.

These stories are described as "flash fiction", not a form I know well, and they average a bit over a thousand words each; often that means there's no real room for plot. Sometimes what we get is scene-setting that suggests what the "real" story to follow might be; sometimes it's a slice of life; sometimes it's a story that deliberately never quite starts, with a feeling that if only things had aligned a tiny bit differently it could all have been so much better. And sometimes it is a miniature piece of conventional fiction with beginning and middle and end.

I'm reminded of Yuriy Shakov's Russian Tarot of St Petersburg, for which all the images were painted not on the usual canvas for photoreduction but at their actual intended size. Conventional tools of characterisation and plotting leave too wide a trail to be useful here; one has to hint and make reference and suggest, using just a word or two here or there in place of a paragraph of description. Sometimes it fails and only the broad strokes come through, and we veer too close to cliché; more often it works, and by the end one knows who someone is as a person.

There's also not as much room as one might like to develop a distinctive voice, but even the downbeat stories have a basic optimism to them that I find welcome: yeah, maybe one day this thing will be so much part of ancient history that it's not even understood any more. Maybe we won't learn as much from that as we should, but still we'll be around and learning. There's always a sense that there's more out there than we can see though this tiny hole into the world, and leaving the reader wanting more is certainly better than leaving them wishing you'd had a more aggressive editor.

[Buy this at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.

Search
Archive
Tags 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 3d printing action advent of code aeronautics aikakirja anecdote animation anime army astronomy audio audio tech aviation base commerce battletech beer boardgaming book of the week bookmonth chain of command children chris chronicle church of no redeeming virtues cold war comedy computing contemporary cornish smuggler cosmic encounter coup covid-19 crime cthulhu eternal cycling dead of winter doctor who documentary drama driving drone ecchi economics en garde espionage essen 2015 essen 2016 essen 2017 essen 2018 essen 2019 essen 2022 essen 2023 existential risk falklands war fandom fanfic fantasy feminism film firefly first world war flash point flight simulation food garmin drive gazebo genesys geocaching geodata gin gkp gurps gurps 101 gus harpoon historical history horror hugo 2014 hugo 2015 hugo 2016 hugo 2017 hugo 2018 hugo 2019 hugo 2020 hugo 2022 hugo-nebula reread in brief avoid instrumented life javascript julian simpson julie enfield kickstarter kotlin learn to play leaving earth linux liquor lovecraftiana lua mecha men with beards mpd museum music mystery naval noir non-fiction one for the brow opera parody paul temple perl perl weekly challenge photography podcast politics postscript powers prediction privacy project woolsack pyracantha python quantum rail raku ranting raspberry pi reading reading boardgames social real life restaurant reviews romance rpg a day rpgs ruby rust scala science fiction scythe second world war security shipwreck simutrans smartphone south atlantic war squaddies stationery steampunk stuarts suburbia superheroes suspense television the resistance the weekly challenge thirsty meeples thriller tin soldier torg toys trailers travel type 26 type 31 type 45 vietnam war war wargaming weather wives and sweethearts writing about writing x-wing young adult
Special All book reviews, All film reviews
Produced by aikakirja v0.1