Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology [Hardcover]

John Kessel (Editor), Mark L. Van Name (Editor), Richard Butner (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1995

A collection of superb science fiction stories offers works by the writers who were invited in 1994 to attend the prestigious Sycamore Hills Writers' Conference, including Robert Frazier, Carol Emshwiller, Gregory Frost, and Bruce Sterling, among others.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Each year, the invitation-only Sycamore Hill Writers' Conference brings together some of science fiction's greatest authors in a workshop focused on short SF/fantasy. In 1994, all stories submitted to the workshop were collected for Intersections. These 13 stories and one novel chapter, some rewritten by the authors to incorporate workshop critiques, are accompanied by authors' afterwords and by comments that were made about each story.

Unsurprisingly, Intersections is a superior anthology and an excellent resource for new and intermediate SF/F writers. The fiction is so strong that anyone uninterested in the art of crafting prose may skip the commentary without being shortchanged. (Just don't skip Appendix I, the incisive and hilarious "Turkey City Lexicon: A Primer for SF Workshops.")

The 1994 participants were Richard Butner, Carol Emshwiller, Karen Joy Fowler, Robert Frazier, Gregory Frost, Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Nancy Kress, Jonathan Lethem, Maureen F. McHugh, Michaela Roessner, Bruce Sterling, and Mark L. Van Name. With a lineup that strong, choosing the best stories has more to do with reader taste than writer ability; the works described here were selected to suggest the anthology's range and diversity. Bruce Sterling's Hugo Award-winning "Bicycle Repairman" displays his trademark brilliant high-tech extrapolation in the clash between an obsessed treadhead and a federal agent. "The Marianas Islands" is prose goddess Karen Joy Fowler's subtle, stunning portrait of a WWII widow and '60s activist grandmother whose father-in-law may have invented the submarine. Alexander Jablokov's "The Fury at Colonus" rewrites Greek myth as a modern, hard-boiled, satirical, and very strange sort of police procedural. In "The Miracle of Ivar Avenue," John Kessel pays tribute to a classic Hollywood director in a painfully sharp time-travel tale. In short, this is one of the best original literary-SF/F anthologies of the '90s. --Cynthia Ward --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Emulating the Milford groups established by Damon Knight in the 1950s, the Sycamore Hill writers conferences provide an invaluable platform for mutual criticism among established sf writers. This extraordinary collection presents the stories that came out of the 1994 conference, whose participants represent sf's cutting edge, from cyberpunk specialists Bruce Sterling and James Patrick Kelly to the leading ladies of literary sf, Nancy Kress and Karen Joy Fowler. Each story is followed by criticisms from other conference participants and creative insights from the author. The collection opener, Sterling's "Bicycle Repairman," recounts the fate of a twenty-first-century bike jock when he dabbles with spy-grade technology. Robert Frazier contributes a meditation on the dangers of nanotechnology that features a serial killer who uses tailored nanobugs to "cure" unwary victims. The stories range widely in theme and in manner, from detective fiction to allegory, yet all the authors show a common dedication to honing their craft. Carl Hays

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (December 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312860900
• ISBN-13: 978-0312860905
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,183,175 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A raw workshop and its tasty results., April 26, 2004

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology (Paperback)

One of the best anthologies of fiction I know, for it comes with a program and it shows how it all came together. The "Sycamore Hill" workshop sounds like a more or less annual affair, in which the brightest new lights of science fiction are summoned to a central location (a la The Fellowship of the Ring) and each writes a story for the amusement of the others. Everyone grades everyone else's tale and then the re-writes begin. Here is a healthy sampler of some of the more interesting stories written in 1994, among them are tales by authors who have since grown big enough to hold their own conferences all by themselves if they thought to--Karen Joy Fowler, Jonathan Lethem, et cetera.

The comments by the other participants are included, so it's an anthology which comes closer to the "raw" side of the menu than the "cooked." Ouch! Some of these "comments" must have stung, but everyone bears with it gracefully.

The funniest part is an appendix, "The Turkey Hill Lexicon," a must for leaders of writing workshops in which these practiced writers give witty names to common writing solecisms. I'll never forget "As you know, Bob," which you hear on every soap opera, shorthand for exposition put into dialogue form among characters who already know the information for the supposed benefit of the reader. Way to go, Sycamore Hill.