Good science-fiction is a marriage between ideas and style. Well, this is actually true of all writing, but to count as science-fiction it requires a certain kind of ideas. There is a whole hell of a lot of bad science-fiction out there, and almost all of it can be written up as to an imbalance between the two. I don’t think I have rediscovered hot water by declaring that, but as I have dug deeper into more modern sciencefiction, I am noticing just how much of it is failing at it, and failing badly.
(I want to make it very clear here that I am not one of those goons that goes on about the good old days. Science-fiction back in the day likely had the same Sturgeon’s Law success rate as everything else – the difference being that no one is telling me read the awful stuff from the past. People are however telling me that we are in a golden age of science-fiction. I don’t see it.)
As mentioned in a previous post, I encountered a short story by Alexander Weinstein in a ‘Best of’ collection. His story was by far the best, and unlike practically every story in the collection, it had a lot of staying power. A few days later I was still thinking about it. I was pretty damn motivated to pick up one of his books and see what the hell else he had to offer.
I wasn’t disappointed.
I tend to find short story collections to be hard to describe. Even Delany’s Aye, and Gomorrah…, the only collection I can say I truly loved, only gets described as “Um, a short story collection?” if pressed. With Children of the New World , I actually do have a way of describing it. The stories in this collection stem from a person who (like myself) grew up in the transitional period when the world went from pre to post internet, and watching the technological improvement happen while the world goes worse in many other aspects. Some of Weinstein’s stories have the same flavor as the first two seasons of Black Mirror (the only two seasons of the show that were any good). I don’t mean to say that with any kind of accusation of plagiarism, but just to reinforce that they seem to have the themes, and touch upon the same topics. That’s my benchmark. If you like those, you will likely enjoy this.
I do have to confess that as I got on with the reading of this some of the splendor of this collection did wear off. I suspected that it was because the writing, not that it was bad so much as it was samey throughout. Something about the stories felt the same all the way through. To test this was the case, I reread the story that got me to this collection, Openness, last (normally, I wouldn’t have reread it at all). The story was still captivating in a good way, so maybe it was just that I didn’t love all the stories in this collection, particularly some of the longer ones. But I still suspect that a full collection of Weinstein stories may be too much time passed at a buffet. I will put some time between now and reading Weinstein’s other collection for this reason, and also because my library doens’t seem to have it.
Failures in Polymathy 