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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great collection of short stories!, August 28, 2009
Let me start by saying that the titular novella that begins this book has to be the best SF/crime fiction story I've read since Asimov's "Billiard Ball" and the Caves of Steel (The Isaac Asimov Collection Edition) and is well worth the price of admission. Nor does the rest of the book disappoint. I especially enjoyed "Come Al Ye Faithful" about the 1st Catholic priest on Mars and "Mikeys" which lovingly revisits and revives the reputation of astronaut Mike Collins - the Apolo 8 astronaut who was left in orbit and didn't get to walk on the moon. There are other gems as well - "The Uploaded" which looks at the perils of humanity choosing between two paths, a new look at the Morlocks of HG Well's The Time Machine (Penguin Classics), and "Flashes" which considers the demoralizing effect of contact with a truly advanced civilization. The only disappointments I had were the stories "Shed Skin" and "Immortality". The former is an earlier version of Sawyer's book Mindscan and the author did a much better exploration of the philosophical and moral issues of creating a copy of one's consciousness when he used the longer form. The latter, an homage to the music of Janis Ian (which I like - ie: Between the Lines) seemed a bit forced in integrating references to her music. (She's also a hardcore SF fan and apparently she loved it, so maybe you'll disagree with me.) Another criticism IMHO is that I find Sawyer's openings somewhat weak and rely all to much on characters talking or thinking, but he quickly picks up the pace with a strong description, plot lines and characterization. IMV good hard SF is about "what if" and following through on the implications of ideas and in that respect Sawyer is one of most reliably good writers around today. I highly recommend Identity Theft: And Other Stories for a good dockside or snuggle up next a fireplace read as well as his other short story collection Iterations: And Other Stories
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Collection of Futuristic Tales Focusing on New Social Problems!, February 26, 2010
This is a collection of short fiction by Sawyer with each the author giving a brief background behind the writing of each. The longest story and the best on is the title story, Identity Theft. This story as well of a couple of the others uses the basis for Sawyer's Mindscan novel, that is people decide to have their mind scanned into an automation. In some cases, the human is euthonized after the scan. In the Shed Skin tale, the human is sent to an isolated paradise to live out their remaining days (the Shed Skin tale is actually a scaled back version of Mindscan). In Identity Theft, a man disappears (his robotic form) after he has uploads his mind. It turns out that he never entered the intended robot body but assumed the robot body that was meant for another (thus the title). This story has some tense moments making it the best of a collection of very good stories. Some of the other stories would make excellent Twilight Zone tales such as Ineluctable, where man tries to be too "smart" communicating with the first aliens to make contact and thus ultimately sends the "wrong" message to the aliens. In The Eagle Has Landed a bunch of astronauts travel back to Earth after more than a hundred years have passed since they left and find that the now governmentless world may not be a place where they can ever live. The final tale Biding Time is a lot like a Twilight Zone episode that involved a male astronaut. This tale involves a woman that goes into space for over 30 years where she will only age seven years during the process and will leave her husband behind during that time. Sawyer has an amazing gift for anticipating many of the social problems humans will face as we move into space and each one of his tales focuses on a different one of these problems. It makes this a very intriguing collection of tales from a science fiction master.
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0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Canadian liberalism masked as sci-fi, April 18, 2011
After reading Rollback and not caring for it all that much (see my review at [...]), I decided to give Mr. Sawyer one more chance by reading this collection of short stories. Unfortunately, these short stories reinforced my original view of his works as liberalism masked as sci-fi. (Much like Glenn Beck's The Overton Window is conservatism masked as a thriller.) There are some good stories in here: "Mikeys" was quite well-done; "Kata Bindu" was an interesting take on the typical moon colony story; and "Flashes" was a very good thought experiment about the Earth suddenly receiving "pages" of the "Encyclopedia Galactica". However, too many of his stories take a post-religious view of the future, either outright denying the existence of the soul in favor of some nebulous definition of humanity ("Shed Skin") or mocking (and even villainizing) those who hold religious beliefs ("O Come All Ye Faithful"). There's also the ridiculous notion (as I mentioned in my previous review) of current fads and dubious theories being presented as real and enduring ("Emails from the Future"). There's even a "post-government utopia" story ("The Right's Tough") that is such utter nonsense that it is laughable that someone would conceive of the Earth functioning that way for more than a week. Another problem I have with his stories are the hit-or-miss quality of them. There are some, as I said before, that are good, but others are like lesser-quality "Twilight Zone" episodes ("Ineluctable", "Driving a Bargain", ) or the insipidly bad "The Good Doctor" (yes, I get what he was doing there - it just failed horribly!). Even the first and last stories ("Identity Theft" and "Biding Time"), which are detective stories that take place in the Martian colony of New Klondike, are intriguing, but leave something to be desired. While I was surprised by the perpetrator (and their motive) in one story, the other one I saw coming a long way before the big reveal. I know I shouldn't expect every short story in any anthology to be a great story. However, I would hope that more than half of the stories would be less blatantly "trans-human and post-religion is the future" frustrating and would be more entertaining. This is the last time that I take a book off the library shelf just because I think I recognize the author's name.
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