by Margaret Atwood
ISBN: 9780385533973

I’ve been on something of a kick reading about stories/storytelling lately and this book definitely fits the theme. It is ostensibly about certain kinds of stories — science fiction — though is really about imagination, and how these kinds of stories are but one lens to examine ourselves and our world and to explore what makes us tick.

In some ways it’s an odd collection, mixing new essays with older review-type pieces and excerpts from longer, previously published work. Atwood has been a fan and creator from an early age: witness the flying rabbit superhero of her childhood. She’s also been a voracious reader, paying little attention to whether or not something was supposed to be good or bad. It didn’t matter to her if it was serious literature or seriously schlocky, she read it. (Though she does note “it’s always encouraging to be told that it is intellectually acceptable to read the sorts of things that you like reading anyway.”)

She talks about utopias and dystopias, inventing the word ustopia to combine the two, because in her view “each contains a latent version of the the other”. She talks about cartography:

With every map there’s an edge — a border between the known and the unknown. In old medieval and early Renaissance maps, the edges were where the monsters were drawn — the sea serpents and many-headed hydras, which were, as we say, off the map. Monsters live under the bed when you’re little because you can’t see under the bed when you’re actually in the bed.

I loved that bit about it’s because you can’t see under the bed. Of course.

In her piece on Bill McKibben’s Enough, she brings up his point that just because we have a technology doesn’t mean we have to use it, and cites among his examples the Amish (“who examine each new technology and accept it or reject it according to social and spiritual criteria”). We might accept a higher level of technology than the Amish, but as Atwood reminds us, we should still be setting social and spiritual acceptance criteria for what we let into our lives.

The collection does move around, from the aforementioned flying rabbits to adventure stories, to Victorian “scientific romances” to Orwell and Le Guin, to mad scientists and H.G. Wells to pulp cover art. Part of the fun in reading this collection is following Atwood as her mind wanders — not so much off course, as making and remaking connections.

We need her clear voice, and recognition of the need to act with conscience.

…this is the beginning of Newspeak. Fancy verbiage is what confuses Boxer the horse [in Animal Farm] and underpins the chantings of the sheep. To insist on what is, in the face of ideological spin, popular consensus, and official denial: Orwell knew this takes honesty, and a lot of guts. The position of odd man out is always an uneasy one, but the moment we look around and find that there are no longer any odd men among our public voices is the moment of most danger — because that’s when we’ll be in lockstep, ready for the Three Minutes’ Hate.

Yes, you’d expect the author of The Handmaid’s Tale to see this — and continue helping us to see. It’s not that she has particularly high expectations for society, it’s that she has a sense of right and wrong. It’s an author’s place to explore all the ground in the middle, true, but I like to think there’s a greater point than just poking around in the dark. You have to know some monsters must really be there, and stories help us prepare for finding them.

I read Yu’s Third Class Superhero and enjoyed it, and I looked forward to reading his first novel.

Yu has included many clever nods to fanboys and fangirls in this book, including the very idea you can live in a universe that is a narrative structure that people obsess over. It’s a funny, clever, very meta read. It’s a book about time travel that manages not to make time travel sexy, which is more entertaining than it sounds.

What people really want, Yu seems to tell us, despite our resistance to it and running away from it, is a real life. The trick is recognizing the value in the one we’ve got.

This was a weird trippy story, funny and disturbed from the title on down. The narrative loops around on itself (okay, that was a lie; those drugs don’t exist) and questions its own believability. If you are a sucker for an unreliable narrator, you’ll have to read this book, because Jane Charlotte is your girl.

Janes’s story is fascinating. Paranoia? Check. Delusions and self sabotage? Check. Insane (insanely clever?) bureaucracy — with units named things like “The Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons”? Check.

Ruff manages to ask some interesting and serious questions along the way. What’s evil? What about redemption? What should you be doing with your life? His characters make a distinction between fighting crime and fighting evil, and it doesn’t seem like splitting hairs.

If you like near future or alternate reality stories, want off kilter and a fast pace, I highly recommend Bad Monkeys. If you are like me, you’ll find yourself wanting parts of Ruff’s world to be real, then wondering what it says about you that you think that. Also: if mandrills didn’t creep you out before, now they will.

This is apparently the fourth book Ruff has written. I’ll be on the lookout for the previous three, and I eagerly await the next one, which he’s writing now.

This collection of thirteen stories is hard to describe. There are fables (“A Fable Ending in the Sound of a Thousand Parakeets” is stunning), some are science fiction (“The Lady with the Pet Tribble” is probably best example of Brockmeier’s humor), and one is a choose your own adventure format (but is not in the least tacky). The stories aren’t all the same format or genre, aren’t more or less the same length — what they have in common is that they are well written, and they’ll make you think.

I imagine his stories would appeal to fans of short fiction that aren’t necessarily fans of genre fiction, as the stories are more about connections or loss or unintended consequences than they are about space travel or techological wizardry. What they seem to have in common is that they are quiet stories that burrow away in your head.

This is Brockmeier’s fourth book, though the first I’ve read. I’ll be looking for the others based on the strength of this collection. Definitely recommended.

This collection of fifteen short stories surprised me. Individual stories — the ideas in them — stayed with me in ways I didn’t expect. There’s a museum security guard who transports otherwordly spirits, a discussion of hungry ghosts, an alien crash landing in the woods, and a kid who finds an angel in the form of a horse among others, but saying that makes the stories seem louder than they are.

Wolf’s stories aren’t loud, aren’t outlandishly over the top, aren’t hard to believe in the ways the list of characters might make them seem. They also aren’t quite as riveting as the subject matter might suggest (if you are into the supernatural or extraterrestrial). They quietly go about their business, moving from the beginning to the middle to the end, and while not really being all that impressive still managed to have an influence, to get me thinking about communication or the power of wishes or what is really important about consciousness or patience.

At the beginning of each story Wolf tells us a little about the story — the germ of an idea it sprang from, or some question she was turning over. I liked this, and I’ll confess it got me to keep reading when maybe I otherwise would have put the book down. I appreciated the effort of her sharing, and it made me curious to learn how the stories played out.

So it’s a quiet book, good but not stellar, full of unusual stories that are good companions for an afternoon though their ideas are stronger than their language. If this sounds like your kind of thing, probably is.

Note: I received this book through LibraryThing Early Reviewers. That means I didn’t pay for it. Participation in LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer is not dependent on writing a positive review; writing a review is all that is expected.