Customer Reviews

Aristotle and the Gun and Other Stories (Five Star Speculative Fiction Series)

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A short collection of decades-old tales that deserve renewed life amongst a new generation of science fiction readers. To expose them to the talent that was L Sprague de Camp, who died just recently. He had been writing continuously since before World War 2. Mostly short stories, like those in this collection.

Harry Turtledove weaves a nice editorial thread that gives some background on de Camp and his stories. Shows that Turtledove is as skilled an editor as he is an author.

The author of these stories seemed fond of guns. They're in five out of the seven stories in the collection. He seemed to like ancient history and time travel as well.

"A Gun for Dinosaur" is by far the best story in the book. Two other 'time traveling to hunt prehistoric animals' stories follow up after this one, bringing back the same characters to further enjoy. Unfortunately the two latter stories don't pack the same punch the first one does.

The author does a pretty good job of coming up with theories to make his science fiction plausible, especially since these stories were written so long ago. I think there were only one or two times I felt the material was technologically dated (although I did imagine the dinosaur-hunting guns shooting lasers instead of bullets). His background education in engineering served him well.

I kind of like the Aristotle story too, echoing the all-too-familiar theme of screwing up the past when you try to alter it.

I'll close by saying I got a good laugh out of the book's last story, when the knight got busted for killing a dragon without a hunting license.

A good light read that introduces hopefully the author to a new generation of SF readers. If you like this one then go read "Lest the Darkness Fall" by the same author.