One of the greatest things about the genre of the fantastic is the sheer diversity which is offered to us on such a regular basis. Why, there’s almost something for everyone. Not that it’s all good, but it is out there. Whether you’re into straight SF or like your SF laced with horror or your horror laced with fantasy or your fantasy straight and dark or straight and high or mixed with some magic realism or just want a fix of your TV jones, this is the place to be. For example, I present the following collection of mixed genre-type materials.
Serve It Forth: Cooking With Anne McCaffrey, Anne McCaffrey & John Gregory Betancourt, eds., Warner Aspect Trade Paperback, ISBN 0-446-67161-4, $12.99/$16.25 Canada, 208 pgs.
I’m going to break two of my rules with this review; I’m reviewing the book in more than one place and I’m reviewing a book that contains my own work. Now, besides the obvious ego blasting I should also point out that if you want to see my contribution you need to buy the book since it would be obscenely self centered to review my own stuff. The reason I’m rule breaking is two fold as well; this is an unusual book in terms of content and all of the profits are being donated by the authors to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Of America Emergency Medical Fund.
Years ago, back in August of 1973, Ballantine books published an anthology of recipes by Science Fiction authors which was edited by Anne McCaffrey and which was called Cooking, Out Of This World. The book sold very few copies and today it can be found for prices as high as $400. More recently, the idea evolved to redo the concept and once more present the favorite recipes of authors, along with a few lines about the work in progress, to the public.
Inside you will find ideas and wonders by such notables as Larry Niven, David Drake, Ardath Mayhar, Allen Steele, Peter S. Beagle, Lois McMaster Bujold, Poul Anderson, Joan D. Vinge and close to 50 others. I should also point out that this is a serious cookbook in that all of the recipes work and produce edible food. Most of the recipes produce excellent food in fact. There are a couple of tongue in cheek entries but these are easily spotted. The recipes themselves run the range of very short half pagers to long and complicated multi-page events. There are recipes for snacks, for entrees, for deserts, for specialty presentations, for quick fixes and for grand feasts. There’s even a recipe for liquid nitrogen grapefruit sorbet which really works, although where you’d get the liquid nitrogen is always a question.
Besides giving you some insight into what you favorite author cooks, this book provides a widely diverse running commentary by these same authors on either the recipe, how the recipe came to be, or their lives at the time the recipe became important. The whole book is not only something you’ll want on your kitchen shelf, but it’s an extremely interesting collection of short-shorts as well.
Buy three copies of this book. Stash the first one away in case it becomes as collectible as the first one did. Buy the second copy because the proceeds of this book are going to such a good cause. Buy the third book because you’re bound to find a half dozen or more recipes which you’ll want to make over and over; and the next time you make dinner for friends and they ask where you got the recipe for Greek-Style Artichokes you can tell them you got it from Joe Haldeman.
A Man Betrayed, J. V. Jones, Warner paperback, ISBN 0-446-60351-1, $5.99/$6.99 Canada, 598 pgs.
This is the second book in the great fantasy series “A Book of Words.” The third book just came out in trade paperback as well so now would be the time to get this series if your a completist. If you’ve been waiting and wondering, do neither for much longer. You want this book.
J. V. Jones is a wonderful writer and this is a great example of a writer’s first work being just amazingly excellent. This is a tale of high fantasy with extremely complex characters involved in some intricate intrigue while the world spins and interacts around them. These are people who have their own agendas and while they might indeed be fulfilling prophecy they are doing so on their own terms and in their own way and, in fact, it is a prophecy that may not be all that carved in stone to begin with. This is also a book of young people caught up in that adolescent web that is so prevalent in fantasy. It does not work against the book, though, as it does in so many other cases. This is truly a wonderfully created world with characters cut from multifaceted backgrounds. These are people with character who often are working more than one motive and on more than one level who often have something to lose and something to gain. In some instances these characters are more real-life than real life characters.
And the story is even more wonderful, a highly convoluted tale which takes three books to converge to a single point and which spans a continent and different empires and agendas. There is much going on here and many people doing it. This is very interesting stuff. Buy the first book, “The Baker’s Boy,” then buy this one and you’ll then be eager to get the third. The baker’s boy of the first book’s title, by the way, is the main character and when was the last time a hero came from such a background. And never did bread and baking play such an important role in so many cases.
The October Country, Ray Bradbury, Del Rey trade paperback, ISBN 0-345-40785-7, $10/$14 Canada, 306 pgs.
Ray Bradbury has published more than 500 short stories, novels and plays in his lifetime and he’s still going! Arguments arise when you try to discuss which he is better at. His novels like The Martian Chronicles are classics, his short stories have all been made into Twilight Zone, Outer Limits or other anthology TV episodes. Is Bradbury the best fantastical short story writer alive now? Is he perhaps the greatest fantastical novelist still writing? Maybe he’s the most prolific producer of fantastical episodic television. Myself, I vote yes in all three cases.
Regardless of the medium or the length, Bradbury is a writer who evokes images, who has the ability to juxtapose the absurd and the ordinary. He is, in some ways, a better horror writer than most horror writers. This anthology collects 19 classic Bradbury stories, reprinting 15 from his first anthology, Dark Carnival and adding four more. There’s also a new introduction by Bradbury where he tells how he came to produce such work in the first place.
This is vintage Bradbury, the scary settings, the nervous placements, the people you seem to know put in compromising situations, and the devil his payment collecting. Bradbury is purely scary and there is no better time of year to be scared than now. If you’re not a fan you owe it to yourself to give Bradbury a try and find out why he’s considered one of the masters of the field. If your an old friend then maybe it’s time for a revisit. And if you’re somewhere in between, writing this good is never to be passed up.
Del Rey has done a nice job of packaging this anthology and it’s worth taking a look at. Buy a bunch and pass them out for Halloween.
Okay (note that this, like the previous commentary is in third person, thus reflecting your thoughts and not my impressions)the stuff is somewhat interesting in a 'hack' sort of way. Still, I'd just as soon go back to the start.
Wait, I got confused somewhere in here and I'm sure I missed something. Perhaps it's the only thing of value? Let me look at the contents page to be sure.
I found this review column entirely fascinating and would like to go back to the review page so I can read the rest.
I'd like the chance to actually look at the Dubious Matters site where I can read all of your wonderful reviews!
Hey, did you send me mail yet? This could be your last chance!
© 1997svs@webconn.net
Get your own Free Home Page