Customer Reviews

The Engine of Recall

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I am not sure why I originally ordered this book from Amazon. I had never read Karl Schroeder before and I normally steer clear of short story collections. I have always preferred novels to story collections, probably because a good short story often leaves you wanting more. Despite my mystification on why I got this book let me emphatically say that I am glad I did so!!!

Wow, there are ten perfect stories here. Each one is a wonderful read, and while a few did leave me wanting more (espcially the two featuring Gennady, an Ukrainian arms inspector) each story was like a perfect jewel, a perfect encapsulation of a story and just the right length. I started reading this last night because I am expecting an overnight delivery of the next Jack Reacher novel today and I didn't want to be stuck in another novel when it arrives shortly. I thought some short stories were the perfect solution to while away an hour before falling asleep. It didn't quite work out that way....I wound up reading this collection, start to finish in one go last night. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes science fiction or likes near-term speculative fiction. The stories span a time scale from the near-term future to the far future and are rife with striking ideas that leave you thinking. It is simply an excellent book and I am going to start ordering the novels this author has written based upon the strength of his short stories.

Canada has been the source of a great deal of intriguing SF over the past decade or so, much of it at least moderately "hard SF." One of the most rigorously "hard SF" writers to come out of this "Canadian Renaissance" is Karl Schroeder, author of the impressive novels Ventus, Permanence, and Lady of Mazes. Now Schroeder has published his first story collection, The Engine of Recall.

The first thing that struck me about the Table of Contents was the relative unfamiliarity of most of the stories. This was a source of mild embarrassment to me, as I consider myself generally very up to date on short SF. It turns out that one engine of the "Canadian Renaissance" I mentioned above has been some Canadian outlets for SF, most notably the magazine On Spec and the anthology series Tesseracts, that to some extent slip under the radar of often US- and/or UK-centric SF readers. So Schroeder managed to publish a passel of first-rate stories without generating quite the buzz he deserved -- though one story here, "The Dragon of Pripyat", was reprinted in Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Edition, and another, "Halo", was chosen for David Hartwell's anthology The Hard SF Renaissance.

Well, that's one reason for story collections -- to bring to light stuff that might have been missed on first publication. And the stories here are well worthy of this exposure. Take "The Dragon of Pripyat." Gennady Malianov is a morose Russian (or Ukrainian) man hired to investigate a threat to release radioactive material from the remains of Chernobyl. Malianov heads directly to the ghost town of Pripyat. There he meets a curious squatter, and also encounters the mysterious "dragon." He and a remote friend figure out the somewhat mundane (though interesting) nature of the dragon -- the heart of the story, though is the paradoxical landscape of Pripyat. Malianov turns up again in the collection's only original, "Alexander's Road." This time the threat is some missing nuclear warheads in Azerbaijan. Malianov's investigation, however, turns up a couple of further, even scarier, nuclear threats.

One of my favorite stories here is "Halo", set in the same future as Schroeder's novel Permanence. Elise Cantrell is a resident of Dew, a planet of Crucible, a brown dwarf star. Dew has just managed to install an artificial "sun," but this hopeful step is endangered when Elise discovers a message from a hijacked ship, taken over by fanatics who plan to destroy the fragile colony on Dew. She forges a tenuous relationship with one of the original crew of the hijacked ship, but they both know the only ultimate hope for Dew is to destroy the attacking ship, complete with innocent crew members as well as hijackers. This is an excellent example of a moving human story essentially set in an exotic, purely SFnal, environment. Another such story, not quite as successful but still enjoyable, is "The Pools of Air," in which a crew filming in Jupiter's atmosphere are placed in peril by a freak accident to their ship. "The Cold Convergence" is also set in the outer Solar System, this time on Saturn's moon Titan. A psychologist is hired to try to treat a man who has just wandered alone into the Titanian wilderness. The interesting story of the man is undermined a bit by an implausible resolution involving unconvincing real estate laws.

"Making Ghosts" is an interesting story about pioneers in transferring human consciousness to computers, while "The Engine of Recall" involves using such "ghosts" to pilot spaceships in such dangerous environments as the neighborhood of a neutron star.

"Allegiances" tells of a woman in war-torn former Yugoslavia who is cursed by the ability rob other people of the facial recognition sense. An intriguing idea that I don't think the story quite used well. "Hopscotch" is a rather Fortean story, in which the narrator is in love with a woman obsessed with statistical analysis of unusual events such as UFO sightings and raining fish. "Solitaire" tells of a young human criminal who manages to be "adopted" as sort of an interpreter by a solitary, uncommunicative, alien. The ending nicely violates traditional SFnal expectations.

It is clear to readers of Karl Schroeder's novels that he is a fascinating writer of Hard SF. The short stories in The Engine of Recall showcase that imagination effectively -- strong stories that aren't afraid to be adventure stories while also portraying cool ideas.

Overwhelming circumstances - they're usually left to superheroes and the supernatural. "The Engine of Recall" is a compilation of stories about people who don't usually face these odds - the every day average Joe and Joanna. Pitting these normal humans against insurmountable odds, Schroeder's stories come off as human even in the strange foreign alien worlds that they must trudge through to get through their lives and survive. "The Engine of Recall" is a top pick for science fiction fans and community library collections catering to them.