Customer Reviews

The Ant King: and Other Stories

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
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These are excellent short stories -- fantastic, moving, and vivid. Rosenbaum moves easily between genres, from fable to hard sf to epic post-modern historical fantasy to straight fantasy with astonishing ease and deftness.

Some high points:

"Biographical Notes..." is just tremendous. Simultaneously a zeppelin adventure story, a post-modern literary romp, a deep work of historical fiction, and a treatise on the nature of causality, it is one of the most jaw-droppingly audacious stories I've ever read.

I have never had the experience of laughing and crying simultaneously at a short story until I read 'The Orange'.

"The House Beyond Your Sky" is an original and heartbreaking take on the sub-genre of cosmological fiction that Steven Baxter and Greg Egan have popularized.

Anyone interested in contemporary fiction should read this book. Particularly recommended for fans of Borges, Kelly Link, Howard Waldrop, and Michael Swanwick.

Oh, these stories are delightful! They beg to be read and reread (and I have read them again and again!) Brilliantly inventive, they feel curiously familiar while at the same time showing you things you have never imagined. So many innocent memes of the modern world are roughed up, turned on their heads, tickled a bit, then pushed to their most delightfully absurd, shocking, bizarre-yet-real conclusions.

I've read a lot of requisite major SF, and many characters in those novels and stories are either stiff-and-formulaic or sickly over-humanized...Rosenbaums are not. The most un-human un-familiar situations and characters--a jackal-headed sepulchrist-warrior, a parakeet that "was once the dreaming cloud of plasma in the heliopause of a simulated star", and an apprentice godcarver all of whose memories (as well as those of his forefathers) reside in small fanged symbiotes that crawl around his body--feel both alien and strangely, closely, known.

Even the shortest short stories create rich worlds that are SO different, yet seem so strangely real. He's a master at not telling too much, painting a broad swatch with just the right details. Consider these first lines from two of the shorter pieces: "You're on the 236th-level Kaiserstrasse moving sidewalk when you see her." (from Falling) and "On the plain of Myrkhyr, in the first year of the cycle, a million nomads cross the salt flats." (from Other Cities/Myrkhyr)

In a (probably unimportant-my "editor" hates this paragraph, but I think this stuff is just so cool...) aside, many of these stories refer to other stories, other books, literary tropes, cultural memes, computer games--I think they are great on their own, but it's fun to get the references. If you have ever sat across the table from venture capitalists or were part of the crazy SV dotcom boom, or played very early online games, you MUST read the story "The Ant King", and see yourself as never before. If you have ever held your sleeping infant child just to drink in his or her smell, your heart will alternately pound and scream in "On a Cliff by the River", "A Siege of Cranes" and "The House Beyond Your Sky". If you had the misfortune to spend any amount of time studying literary theory (or better, philosophy) "Bibliographical Notes" and "Sense and Sensibility" are seriously crazy adventures with smart and pointed inner workings. Oh, and did you ever read Babar as a kid? Wait and see :)

I think that every reviewer, professional or otherwise, who is concerned about exactly what genre this book of short stories might fall into (science fiction? fantasy? slipstream? pomo? old-style surrealism? magical realism?) is only trying to find the footing that these stories yank out from underneath you. Which is a bit reverse of the point.

Heartbreaking is the absence of "Droplet", a fantastic far-future almost-novella-length story previously published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, reprinted in Silverberg & Haber's Science Fiction: The Best of 2002, that you should totally seek out at all costs.

Many of these stories are simply sublime. In this, the first collection of his work, Rosenbaum successfully lilts between genres between and even within stories. It's an auspicious start that will leave readers craving whatever is to come.

"Biographical Notes..." is simultaneously a steampunk alternate history, a postmodern romp with comic flourishes, and an action story that pauses occasionally to consider the nature of cause and effect. Joyously, it all works. The story strings together assassins, pirates, Eastern philosophy, and zeppelins while the main character, Benjamin Rosenbaum, creates our own world as a fictional landscape in which to ground his latest plausible fable.

Also impressive are:
"A Siege of Cranes" - a sober, dark fairy tale in which a man seeks vengeance for his family from the mysterious cataclysm that ruined his village. The climax is a bit lacking, but the journey there is fantastic.

"Embracing-the-New" - a science fiction story set on a seemingly pre-industrial alien world. Told through an entirely alien perspective, the story evokes themes of artistic expression, identity, and innocence while involving the reader in the main character's plight.

"Start the Clock" - a science fiction story with cyberpunk overtones set in a future in which aging is optional. The story follows a small cadre of young professionals that are biologically prepubescent. The story succeeds both in its portrayal of aged children and in its overarching theme of tolerance.

The low points of the collection:
"Sense and Sensibility" - It may be my unfamiliarity with the well-known novel, but the humor and absurdity of this postmodern story never hit the mark for me.

"Other Cities" - This sequence of short vignettes that each describe a fictional city occasionally piqued my interest but never reached the standard set by the rest of the collection.

The collection is rounded out by a few other stories and a number of mostly agreeable postmodern interstitials.

Overall, the breadth and quality of the stories is remarkable. The collection is an easy recommendation to any fan of science fiction or postmodern fiction.

I came across this book at my local public library. Once I picked it up, it was very difficult to put down. Rosenbaum is a brilliant writer that defies classification or categorization. The stories he writes are unlike anything I've ever read before and he comes highly recommended.

I've always felt that the short story is the ideal form for speculative fiction, especially of the surrealist or magical-realist type. Rosenbaum's stories support this notion because they allow us brief visits into interesting, often delightful, and ultimately unsustainable realities. *The Ant King* comprises stories that challenge the "willing suspension of disbelief" in ways at once satisfying and unsettling and (often) amusing.

Other reviewers have addressed various individual stories, so I won't do that here; besides, I want to read the collection again before weighing in more specifically (and I'm not a big re-reader). But if you like the John Barth of *Lost in the Funhouse* and the very best of Harlan Ellison (e.g. "'Repent, Harlequin,' Said the Tick Tock Man" and "I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream"), I think you're going to like *The Ant King*.

I pretty much uniformly liked these stories. Many for very different reasons. Numerous stories were delightful examinations of the structure of stories and or writing. The flash pieces were fun to read and though provoking. Everything was given a touch of whimsy, from biblical vampires to parasitic hive mind artist/priests.

You can try out a bunch of the stories online (some in good quality audio format), but the Trade Paperback is put together quite nice and I'd highly recommend a purchase.