Posts tagged with "Anthology" :: Page 4

Short stories. Seems I’ve been getting through my fair share of them lately, between the NEBULA AWARDS SHOWCASE (EBR Review), the Hugo nominees (EBR Review), the most recent Writers of the Future anthology, and more. The hard part with anthologies of short stories is that it’s usually such a mixed bag. There will be some that’ll knock your socks off and others that make you feel like someone’s licking the butter between your toes. It isn’t often we get an anthology that stands really high overall, though sometimes you can find em. Most end up just left or right of middle.
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Good short stories in my opinion are those that get in, get memorable, and then get out. They’re quick, they’re sharp, they’re efficient. Sometimes you can’t help but come out a little dirty. Others catch you with your back turned and give you the once-over of your previously boring life. And then there are the stinkers. Ugh. Let’s not talk about those though.
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Here we are with the Hugo novellas. In case you are wondering, a novella ranges from around 17,500 words and measures up to 40,000 words in length. There’s some beautiful stuff in this set of nominated works—in fact, it was a little hard to choose which was the best. In the end, this category will vary a lot from reader to reader. Anyway, let’s jump in.
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It’s been a while since I read these novelettes, but I wanted to sit on them for a bit to see which ones stuck with me, which ones disappeared from memory and just see when I came back to it, which ones were the best compared to the others. The question I hear a lot is, “What the heck is a novelette?” Simply put, it’s a work of fiction ranging from 7500 words to around 18,000 words in length. It is that piece of fiction that takes up the space between the short story and the novella.

There were some pretty good pieces of of fiction in this year’s Hugo nominated batch of novelettes. So here we go:
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We know Lou Anders, and we know his style and what he is capable of. So when we picked up MASKED (Amazon), a superhero story anthology, we already knew we were going to have to reevaluate our appreciation for the genre. Superheroes, to us, have only ever been as interesting as their villains. Villains, in actuality, are the driving force behind the superhero tale. The reasons for this can be boiled down to the fact that the Heroes are almost always reactionary, waiting around for something bad to happen, and the Villains are the ones who have the grand plan or scheme.

It’s because of this that neither of us are big comic book gurus, or even fans. Did the two of us, a couple of hard-sells in the genre, enjoy the anthology? You bet your Bat-Mobile!
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WARRIORS (Amazon) is an extremely cool idea for an anthology. It is a collection of multiple stories, from various genres, written by some of the biggest names in speculative fiction. Martin, in his preface talks about how he wanted the book to have no specific genre attached to it (though the cover makes it seem as if it is an epic fantasy anthology), and in this sense the anthology succeeds magnificently. There are short stories from genres spanning fantasy, historic fiction, SF, WWII, and even western. Each of them tells a tale of a “warrior” in that particular setting. Martin’s thought here is that books should broaden our reading perspective, and WARRIORS specifically should show us something new. In this anthology, there truly is something for everyone, and any reader would be hard-pressed not to enjoy it.
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THE NEW DEAD (Amazon) is a zombie anthology (surprised?) edited by Christopher Golden, and it goes by the title ZOMBIE in the UK. Included in this collection are stories by Tad Williams (the guy’s is everywhere lately), Jonathan Maberry, Max Brooks, Mike Carey, John Connolly, Joe Hill, Kelly Armstrong, and a bajillion others. This was one of the few short-fiction collections that really had us excited, and we were lucky enough to get a copy sent to us by Jonathan Maberry’s publicist for review purposes.

The short version? This was an excellent collection. Long version? OK fine, we’ll give you that too.
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How about something new and different for our review here at EBR? We read and review novels pretty much constantly, but we have yet to discuss any short fiction. The thing to be wary of when reading short fiction, in our opinions, is that you can’t treat it like a novel. Where novels have several fully developed ideas that all contribute to the plot, setting, and characters, short stories and novellas typically only have one or two fully developed (sometimes) ideas. If you go into a collection of short fiction with the right mind-set, you will find that it can be a refreshing change from the novels that you have been reading.
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