Customer Reviews

Illumined Black and Other Adventures

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"Illumined Black" by Mac Tonnies is a collection of short stories that explore the future from inspired and compellingly skewed perspectives. The stories are strange, stylized and topical, with a prose style that suggests cyberpunk underpinnings as well as "Golden Age" genre tropes. Ultimately, "Illumined Black" is a chilling reflection on inner and outer space. As Bruce Sterling writes on the back cover, "I like it when young guys with attitude tear right into the genre without asking anybody's permission."

Compared to other sci-fi authors, Mac Tonnies ranks with P.K. Dick, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling. He is thought-pivotingly original. If you wallow in science fiction like I do, you'll eat this book up.

In this short 133-page book, Tonnies' ethereal ideas strikingly contribute to the advance of science fiction.

In the introductory story, "Reflections of a Specimen," Tonnies wow-ed me with a new take on clique leaders. He launches into a seeming takeoff on William Gibson's style yet holds his own by injecting his own provoking vision. The other stories in this book are just as juicy. There's no way you can have a favorite because they're all so invitingly well-developed and original. Absolutely fantastic.

This is a book come before its time.