octavia_cade's reviews
2466 reviews

Very average little story about a young Beverly Howard (one day Crusher) at Starfleet Medical. She was always fairly thinly characterised in canon, but honestly: the protagonist here could have been anyone. Blandly pleasant, and that's about it. The story, as is so often the case in these Academy tie-in novels, is basically about ineffectual adults and the teens who solve problems for them. Which is presumably the brief, given that the series is aimed at kids, but still. It's hard to take the teachers here seriously. 

There's nothing else especially wrong with it, bar the fact that it's mildly boring. 

I know that I read this book as a kid, because there's a chapter in here that I remember more than any of Durrell's other stories. I don't remember much else about this book, enjoyable as it is, but the chapter where Gerry - promised an injured barn owl - goes for lunch with Countess Mavrodaki engraved itself upon my childhood memory. Partly because of the meal itself, which was this litany of deliciousness that very likely opened my eyes to the pleasure that could be derived from food writing, but partly because it was just so ridiculously funny.

"Owls and Aristocracy" it's called. The Countess and her butler are an elderly couple who live to good-naturedly squabble with each other, and the image of them stuffing and carping while Gerry sits there, dreaming of his owl and half stupefied with food and wine, covered in mud from falling off his donkey, and surreptitiously undoing the buttons on his shorts so as not to appear rude by gorging insufficiently, is an absolute delight. I was so glad to come across it again! 

I have to admit that I've read very little Philip K. Dick before - only Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - and while I was vaguely aware that he wrote short stories I don't remember ever reading one. Now I want to read them all. They're very, very good. In a way he reminds me a little of John Wyndham in that many of his stories fall back onto ordinary people and domestic life, as well as a sort of general sense of the humane. (Otherwise, they're quite different writers.)

It's that domestic element that most appeals to me, and the two stories that got the biggest reaction from me - "Foster, You're Dead" and "The Days of Perky Pat" - represent this in spades. The former is one of the most horrifying stories I've read in ages, as a little boy is terrified by the fact that his dad can't keep up with the Jones' when it comes to safety measures at home in case of war. It's clear that the father is right, in that it's all just a big con to sell more useless crap, but the manufactured threat of war is enough to drive that poor child out of his mind with fear. What a fantastic, awful story that was; I'll be thinking about it for a long time. You can keep your "Minority Reports" and "Adjustments Teams", compelling as they are. "Foster" is the pick of this bunch. 

A lot of these stories, to my mind, aren't really science fiction, for all they are fictions about science. I'm not entirely sure it matters, because they are fantastic stories. There's a very strong reflective effect here, both within and between narratives, and that mirrored technique is excellent. It's one I often use myself, because underlining science with human life makes it more approachable. It also makes the presentation of that science flexible, which is how you can get excellent stories about Antarctica and amorous mice and x-rays.

Anyway, I've just written a 2300 word review of this for Strange Horizons, which will - once the review has wended its way through the editing process - better illustrate just how much I like this collection and why. Subsequently I'm quite bloated with reviewing today... hence the shortness of this one. Suffice to say: You should read it, and if you have a friend named Elise/Lise/Lisa or a similar variant thereof, this might be a suitable Christmas present for them. It's just very well done. 

This is a short, gentle collection of stories featuring characters from other books in the Mangoverse. I've only read one of the novels of that series, and that was a slight disadvantage, I think - although each story had a note saying which book the characters had come from, I was clearly missing background context. That wasn't a big deal for most of the stories, but "Every Us" in particular made me feel as if I needed more information to really appreciate it.

That being said, what I most like about this collection is how kind it is. The stories tend to be stuffed full with goodhearted people doing their best to think of others and treat them well, which results in this really optimistic, friendly tone. That doesn't mean a lack of conflict - and my favourite story of the bunch, "No Whining", illustrates this when a restaurant owner is torn between finding a more reliable wine seller when doing so means letting go of a helpful young delivery driver - but it does mean that resolutions to such conflict tend more towards the conversational. 

Sometimes you can read a work and you can appreciate it for the language and the innovation and the originality, and still not enjoy it.

I did not enjoy this. I can tell it's quality work, but it's just not to my taste. I had to pace myself and read one story from this collection a day because I wasn't interested enough to read two at a time and I wanted to get through it. So why have I given it three stars, which correlates to a general liking? Well, there were two stories in here that I did like, and I don't think it's a coincidence that those two had a co-writer: "Red Star, Winter Orbit" written with Bruce Sterling, and "Dogfight" with Michael Swanwick. These two dragged the collection up from two stars - admittedly two stars is ill-deserved from a quality perspective, but again: I didn't much enjoy reading this.

For all Gibson's stories are linguistically and visually interesting, I get no emotional effect from him whatsoever. I can only assume that Sterling and Swanwick were the difference in those two stories, because I actually felt something when I read them, and it was not an objectively impressed indifference. 

This novel is clearly heavily inspired by Moby Dick which, fair warning, I have not read. It's on my list of things to read, but admittedly it's not very high up that list. I just can't make myself get excited at the thought of tackling it, classic though it may be. I did enjoy this YA scifi version of it, though.

Seventeen year old Ishmael leaves Earth, which has become a crapsack world, to work on a not-whaling ship on the idyllic planet of Cretacea. I mean, it's a whaling ship in every meaningful sense, but what Captain Ahab's after isn't the great white whale, it's the great white stingray. Oh, the stingray's called a terrafin, but it's essentially a stingray, and it's not happy about being hunted. Why would it be? In these stories, I'm always on the side of the grumpy homicidal beast, so it didn't matter how boringly virtuous Ishmael was, I was still hoping he'd get chomped.

He didn't, but there's a decent twist at the end which I found entertaining. I do think that the book's a bit repetitive, and it probably could have lost at least a third of its bulk with no ill-effect, but whenever I look at a copy of Moby Dick on a library shelf I think the same thing there too, without benefit of reading, so take my preference for concision with a pinch of salt. 

I'm always interested to read authors who write both short and long fiction, because I tend to think that most writers have a natural length, as it were, which it can be hard to move beyond. I've had around 70 short stories published in various places; they're my natural length, and while I've managed to produce the odd novel, it's like pulling hen's teeth. Enormously difficult, and I'm not talking about how much time it takes. The skills for a short story are different to those for a novel, and I'm curious where other authors sit on the spectrum.

Recently, for instance, I read a short story collection by Ben Aaronovitch, who writes the Rivers of London series. For me, his novels were significantly better than his shorts. I enjoyed the latter, but the difference in quality was marked. For Riggs, it's the other way around. I've read all the Peculiar novels, but as they went on they felt more and more laboured. The short stories, though... they're polished and delightful and I'd infinitely rather read them again than Desolations, for instance. I hope Riggs writes more short stories in the future, because I love the form and it's clear to me that he's excellent at it. 

I've read this several times and never regret it. I thought it was hilarious when I was a kid and I still do. The Durrells move to Corfu, and the youngest son, Gerry (who adores animals beyond all reason) starts to fill up their various houses with all the wild and domestic pets that he can. There are field trips in the surrounding countryside, often with the local naturalist, but as appealing as the nature writing is, the real draw here is the family itself, all of whom are slightly mad in one way or another.

I always wonder, when I read this, what they were actually like. I'm sure there's some truth in their almost-caricatures, but I can't help but picture Larry or Margo or one of the rest, reading this memoir some decades later - reading it for the first time - and their immediate responses. 

I'd pay good money to see that. 

This little mini-collection of two short stories - or, as I suspect, a short story and a novelette - is a quick, easy read. I'm not too inspired by "Aviva and the Aliens" to be honest, in which a palace cook is briefly abducted in order to prepare a meal for some rather off-putting aliens. I did enjoy "Rivka in Port Saltspray" though, mostly for the emphasis on communication. Rivka rescues a woman in distress, and they share stories but not a language, so the two of them trying to understand each other with limited vocabulary was really cleverly done. It reminded me of that Star Trek: TNG episode... oh, what was it. "Darmok," that's it - Shaka when the walls fell. (I remembered the phrase before the title!)