In a previous post, I reviewed two other collections. These two were meant to be bundled with that, but then I got a bit lazy and finished neither of these collections in that time frame. I am kind of glad I didn’t, as these two weirdly complimented each other. More on that below.
The Best of Tor.com 2021
I am on Tor.com’s mailing list. They just give away free books on their mailing list (or at least, they used to), which is something I should say as a nice little PSA. And who doesn’t like that? In fact, this book was one of the free ones that they did give away. A lot of their free books end up on my TBR pile and never make their way to my Kobo, but as I was on a shorty story kick, I decided to put this one on.
Before anything else is said about this, I have one personal thing to address. The indexing of this thing on my Kobo was awful. I am not sure who was responsible for it, but having it index the title page, author’s biography, copyright, and chapters for each individual story made navigating this collection really annoying. It made a difference to me because I prefer to read stories in order from shortest to longest. To figure that out with this one, for many of the stories I had to open each chapter, jot down the page count, and then do that for each successive chapter. It’s why I put this off till 2023 to begin with. Some of the nice little extras they added to this collection (cover page illustrations for each story) regretfully ended up getting ignored. I don’t always have all that much time to mess about. Reading time is sometimes at a premium. I kinda felt bad for the hard work someone put into all that.
I am afraid to say that it was a bit of a slog. Don’t get me wrong, Tor is a big name in SF, and they attract a lot of talent. But I don’t think this had the hit rate of a publisher like Tor should have, as I found some of the stories included actually dull. More puzzling yet, there were more than a few stories that I could not understand why they were considered sci-fi at all – where the description of the setting was so thin that it could have been anywhere. I know that sci-fi is more than a setting, but a proper sci-fi setting does much for me, and I more than once wondered what a certain story was doing in the collection. Still, there were some great pieces in here.
Strange Economics
I’ve been obsessed with the idea of economics in Fiction for probably well over a decade now. I have shared this anecdote before, but years ago I was reading one of the Harry Potter books, and something about a worldbuiding detail was so wonky it made me sit upright in bed and ask myself “but how the fuck does this economy work anyway?”. It was for me, a powerful lesson about what considerations should go into worldbuilding, and to what extent not doing it can take someone out of the narrative.
Or maybe I am just weird.
Economics is extremely important to the modern world, as I am sure everyone reading this knows. My thought was that it was also good fodder for science-fiction. This is all to say that I was pretty enthusiastic about these stories.
And I was a bit disappointed.
This collection made me realize to what extent Tor really does put out top talent. These stories weren’t bad, or at least some of them were not, but at times something about the quality felt a little lacking. A lot of them were just kind of meh, in terms of both writing and worldbuilding. Some of the stories felt a little cliche, as well. One of the stories here was unfortunately a very trite “humans are a war like species” morality tale written for little more than that exact punchline. Why was it included in a collection supposedly about Economics? Because it was written from the point of view of a person selling the services of the war-like “hoo-mans”, and after several pages of hard selling, that was the punchline. It felt thinly justified. The story told from the point of view of Karl Marx did give me a chuckle, however.
Meh. Maybe I am being to hard here. I should confess that I find all short story collections to be slog to read. The past so many posts about them has been a challenge that slowed down my reading. I can’t say I really loved any of it. This does feel like the weakest of the lot, but that might also be my expectations of it.
I don’t think I have much else to say about this. This publisher has a couple other similar titles – “Strange Religion” and “Strange Wars”, and on top of that he has a couple other free books on his website. I don’t think I will be tracking them down.
Failures in Polymathy 