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keyboardandcouch 's review for:
Welcome to Bordertown: New Stories and Poems of the Borderlands
by Cassandra Campbell, Holly Black, MacLeod Andrews, Ellen Kushner, Neil Gaiman
Uck, what a relief to be finished. More than anything else I found this boring. I originally bought it with the intention of reading it and then giving it to my little sister but now I think I'll save her the bother and just sell it to the used bookshop.
On the one hand based on the surface fact Bordertown seems like such a crapsack world that it's not clear exactly why anyone would want to run away there, or at least why they'd stay. On the other, the grittier aspects of Bordertown life never come to life in any real way. So what we end up with is a sort of rank wish fulfillment fantasy that fails, because the wishes are never fulfilled in such a way that a sane reader would want to trade places with the protagonists, but doesn't function as a subversion either because Bordertown is just so flat and empty.
Not all the stories were terrible* but with the exception of Doctorow's 'Shannon's Law', none of the stories that I enjoyed have stuck with me.
*all the poems were terrible though, yes even Gaiman's.
On the one hand based on the surface fact Bordertown seems like such a crapsack world that it's not clear exactly why anyone would want to run away there, or at least why they'd stay. On the other, the grittier aspects of Bordertown life never come to life in any real way. So what we end up with is a sort of rank wish fulfillment fantasy that fails, because the wishes are never fulfilled in such a way that a sane reader would want to trade places with the protagonists, but doesn't function as a subversion either because Bordertown is just so flat and empty.
Not all the stories were terrible* but with the exception of Doctorow's 'Shannon's Law', none of the stories that I enjoyed have stuck with me.
*all the poems were terrible though, yes even Gaiman's.