Coney Island Wonder Stories [Paperback]

Robert J. Howe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 7, 2005

Take a trip to Coney Island, dark and delightful. Eleven writers, including Kij Johnson, Paul Levinson, Maureen F. McHugh, Mike Resnick, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Lawrence Watt-Evans, imagine the fabled playland's past, present and future. Travel with them to dreamland's gateway on the ragged edge of North America, where Merlin haunts the deserted amusement rides, memory is more real than desire, and the dark Atlantic surges behind a bathroom mirror. Edited by Robert J. Howe and John Ordover

Product Details

• Paperback: 116 pages
• Publisher: Wildside Press (September 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557423490
• ISBN-13: 978-1557423498
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,752,847 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

My novel The Silk Code won the 2000 Locus Award for Best First Novel. I've since published Borrowed Tides (2001),The Consciousness Plague (2002), and The Pixel Eye (2003). The Plot To Save Socrates published in 2006 - Entertainment Weekly called it "challenging fun". My science fiction and mystery short stories have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Edgar, and Sturgeon Awards. Nine nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge (1997), Digital McLuhan (1999), Realspace (2003), Cellphone (2004), and New New Media (2009) have been the subject of major articles in the New York Times, Wired, the Christian Science Monitor, and have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and eight other languages. I appear from time to time on "The O'Reilly Factor," "The CBS Evening News," "Nightline," "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," and other TV and radio programs - I like talking just as much as writing. I'm also a songwriter, and have been in several bands over the years - one had two records out on Atlantic Records in 1960s. My 1972 album Twice Upon a Rhyme (on HappySad Records) was re-issued on CD by Beatball/Big Pink Records in 2009, and on re-pressed vinyl by Whiplash/Sound of Salvation Records in 2010. I was listed in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Top 10 Academic Twitterers" in 2009. And last but not least: I'm Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Urban Wonderland, October 20, 2005

By 

Richard Bowes (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Coney Island Wonder Stories (Paperback)

For CONEY ISLAND WONDER STORIES editors Robert J. Howe and John Ordover have assembled an impressive line up of writers. In addition Howe contributes a nostalgic introduction that captures a bit of the childhood excitement and tawdry allure evoked by the name Coney Island.

Various difficulties kept this little anthology from seeing print for almost twelve years - nothing like the record shattering decades' long delay of Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions Three, but enough of a time gap to produce a wonder effect of its own. 1993 names like Rusch, Resnick, Watts-Evans remain sizable draws still. Others like Kij Johnson came into their own over the intervening years. Some of the stories have found other publication since 1993 but the effect of opening the book and reading them now is a little like that of opening a time capsule

For me the stories with the most impact were, "Just Don't Block The View, "a tale of early `90's New York violence by hard-boiled crime writer Michael Jahn here sporting a speculative fiction edge and Maureen McHugh's story of gender games in a Virtual Reality gallery, "A Coney Island Of The Mind." Virtual Reality seems now to be a concept more firmly rooted in the late 20th century than in any potential future we have seen unfold. Likewise J.R. Dunn's "The Custodian," set deep in the 21st century, posits a deserted Brooklyn devastated in vicious 1990's urban rage and a Coney Island preserved by the stubbornness of a single old woman. In fact it's gentrification that will finally obliterate that wonderland on a sand bar.