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Short stories (reread/partial-reread)
May. 22nd, 2012 09:31 amI am getting caught up on my backlog of posts/reading, finally.
Red as Blood (Tanith Lee) - 3 to 5. Reread. The title story is amazing, in my opinion, a tour-de-force of dark lush reimagined-Christian imagery. I'd forgotten exactly how good it was. The other stories range from quite good (I liked the Pied Piper one more than I'd remembered) to a bit silly (I'm sorry, I didn't find "Beauty" entirely convincing).
Going for Infinity: A Literary Journey (Poul Anderson) - 3+ to 4. Some of these stories were rereads. Poul Anderson is totally awesome, really: he's got the hard-science thing going and he also has the Scandinavian-myth thing going as well, and the stories where those things come together are made of awesome. "The Queen of Air and Darkness," complete with an actual ballad and a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, is a fantastic SF story (yeah, with that title and a ballad, were you expecting a fantasy story?), as are "Goat Song" and "Kyrie," all three of which have aged very well (okay, fine, occasionally one would wish for updated gender politics, but otherwise they are all very good). Some of the earlier stories are, well, they don't age nearly as well, but even those have interesting and well-worked-out ideas. The only thing is that his stories almost never viscerally grab me, but it might be impossible to do that with the careful working-out of ideas that is a hallmark of his stories.
Red as Blood (Tanith Lee) - 3 to 5. Reread. The title story is amazing, in my opinion, a tour-de-force of dark lush reimagined-Christian imagery. I'd forgotten exactly how good it was. The other stories range from quite good (I liked the Pied Piper one more than I'd remembered) to a bit silly (I'm sorry, I didn't find "Beauty" entirely convincing).
Going for Infinity: A Literary Journey (Poul Anderson) - 3+ to 4. Some of these stories were rereads. Poul Anderson is totally awesome, really: he's got the hard-science thing going and he also has the Scandinavian-myth thing going as well, and the stories where those things come together are made of awesome. "The Queen of Air and Darkness," complete with an actual ballad and a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, is a fantastic SF story (yeah, with that title and a ballad, were you expecting a fantasy story?), as are "Goat Song" and "Kyrie," all three of which have aged very well (okay, fine, occasionally one would wish for updated gender politics, but otherwise they are all very good). Some of the earlier stories are, well, they don't age nearly as well, but even those have interesting and well-worked-out ideas. The only thing is that his stories almost never viscerally grab me, but it might be impossible to do that with the careful working-out of ideas that is a hallmark of his stories.
