Short Story Sunday 28: “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories” by Gene Wolfe

The ebook version of The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction is on sale for the month of February. A sale price of $2.99 for a book running a length of 224 thousand words and collecting more than 30 short stories, it’s a hard deal to pass up. Despite having read only two books and a handful of his stories, Gene Wolfe looms large in my pantheon of favourite writers. I find his work to be difficult and frustrating (probably the reason I haven’t read many of his works), but his mastery of prose sucks me in every time. It’s alluring and hypnotic in the way good fiction can be, but what makes it great is that the time I spend rereading large passages and sometimes entire chapters or stories is greatly rewarded. It’s challenging, but worthwhile.

As I’ve been doing with other anthologies, I’ll be writing about the stories I read here at SUR. It’ll undoubtedly make my progress through the book laboriously slow. However, I trust it will be a labour of love and like the strongest of loves will require a lot of work and dedication. Pick up your copy and join along. Wolfe writes the kind of fiction that generates discussion and interpretation, so do not be shy about leaving comments.

Short Story Sunday 27: Johanna Sinisalo and H. G. Wells

There was a fair amount of hubbub in 2016 around the release of The Big Book of Science Fiction edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. I knew of their reputation even though wasn’t very familiar with their work. Still, a new collection of science fiction stories by dozens of authors spanning roughly 100 years of publishing history carefully curated by two knowledgeable editors and anthologist in the field does call for some attention. That and its very reasonable price point and easy availability led me to purchase a copy. The goal was to read each story and write about it here on the blog. Five years lately, I’m finally starting.

I’ll be taking a specific approach to these reviews. For starters, the VanderMeers wrote wonderfully detailed introduction to each story. Part biography, part career overview, sometimes structured like a miniature essay about an author’s work, these text pieces are as much a draw of the book as the written contents. They also have a great and lengthy introduction to the whole collection in which they write about the difference phases of science fiction writing in the English language while also making mention of non-English authors and their work. They present their criteria in compiling the collection and it makes for a compelling read as well as an excellent contextualization for the reader to sample all of these stories.