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3.67 AVERAGE
3.67 AVERAGE
a really satisfying short story collection of polemical speculative fiction. these easily could be made into twilight zone episodes.
Subtract the dull I, Rowboat and perhaps Printcrime (or don't, it's short enough that it doesn't matter, but like every other story here hits the same themes deeper and better) and this is a thoroughly enjoyable collection
Mixed fare.
Some of the stories ( Anda's Game, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, After the Siege) are fantastic and deserving of 5 stars. Others were a bit 'meh'
Some of the stories ( Anda's Game, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, After the Siege) are fantastic and deserving of 5 stars. Others were a bit 'meh'
I'm not a fan of short stories but I enjoyed this collection. Great writer with good imaginative stories. If you like short stories you'll love these. If you like great science fiction you'll enjoy them.
Neat to see into the world of science fiction. But the stories were ultimately a weak on the storytelling side.
adventurous
dark
informative
medium-paced
3.5 bumped up—fair warning that this has some pretty violently triggering fatphobia in it
I finished two stories, failed to finish the third, and gave up a few pages into the fourth. Comments on what I did read:
- Printcrime - the stifling future of IP crime. Clunky writing, good world building, characters are wooden. 3.5 / 5
- When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth - all the apocalypses come at once, told from the view of a group in a data centre. Overly cliched, and spent a lot of time attempting consciously clever and just being annoying. 2.5 / 5
- Anda's Game - the title hit me as 'too clever, too cute', particularly after the previous story. Tedious. DNF. I vaguely get what the author was going for (although possibly only because I read the intro) but I found the viewpoint character impossible to resonate with, particularly because all the dialogue --including the internal narrative--seemed forced and wooden. My reading notes say "my general perception is a writer wanting you to grin back at their cleverness and humour".
- I, Robot - Yet again, the character voice is clunky. Added to that, we have 'cop behaving badly' laced with some completely dehumanising commentary on others. The worst was the commentary on robots, but the comments on his own kid were vile.
Probably closer to 3.5 stars than 4, but we'll round up. Doctorow's stories are often entertaining, and he gets the technology details down extremely well, but he's not entirely a natural storyteller. "Sysadmins" is enough of an inside job to work well, and both "I, Robot" and "I, Rowboat" hit a bunch of neat points on self, consciousness, and robotics, kind of like Stanislaw Lem-lite without his full array of narrative gifts. The Siege is a bit more story than Doctorow can really manage, and Anda's Game is either too prescient or too mundane for its own good -- it reads more like general fiction than sci-fi, too possible for its own good.Basically, the kind of story collection you are glad to have read, though maybe a bit underwhelming from a blogger who wears a red cape and writes from a hot-air balloon...