Customer Reviews

Kaleidoscope

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Since I had been looking for this book in used book stores for some time, then finally got it by placing an out-of-print order with amazon.com, it seemed only fair that I review it here. Like most short-story collections, this is a bit uneven, but most of the stories are above average. Some, like "The Boring Beast" are very funny. Others, like "The Last Article" and "The Road Not Taken," are very original and thought-provoking. Several of the stories have appeared in other collections or anthologies. This book is not easy to find, but if you can get your hands on it, it is well worth your time.

Harry Turtledove usually hits the best seller lists these days with huge multi-volume works. But in this collection of short stories he's doing something right at the other end of the spectrum - and having to get an idea over in a short space of words brings out some of his best writing.

This book is now out of print, but well worth buying if you get the opportunity.

Needless to say, a few of the thirteen stories in this collection are alternate history, but most are other genres - in fact I cannot recall finding a book by this author with so many stories in it which are not alternate history. The preface to "The girl who took lessons", the last story in the book, described it as the only mainstream fiction piece which the author has ever sold.

These stories range from mainstream to fantasy, from whimsy to horror. Some are absolute gems, but not all would suit every taste. The author says that his wife, a novelist in her own right, will not even look at the story "Cry-baby" and he doesn't blame her. Neither do I, and in fact I wrote a note in my copy shortly after our children were born warning my own wife never to read it either.

However, one or two of the stories in this volume are amongst the most original things Turtledove has ever written, and that is saying a lot. For example, "The road not taken" is probably the most unusual - and funniest - tale of an alien invasion of earth ever written, and it's possibly also a better candidate to use as a base for a multi-volume series than many short stories which have actually had that treatment.

"Bluff", superficially an account of a trading voyage to another planet, was inspired by a paper on how consciousness might have evolved as a species becomes intelligent and presents a picture of a completely different civilisation to ours - and what effect a few words from humans might have on them.

"The Last Article" is a chilling account of what might have happened if Mahatma Ghandi had ever met the Nazis. And at the start of the preface to that story, Turtledove sums up in a few words the real theme of many of the books he has written:

"Alternate history stories are not really about the alternate worlds in which their authors set them. They're about our own world, as seen through the funhouse mirror of a changed past."

There are some authors whose comparatively least successful work is still far above the average -- authors like Cherryh and Le Guin and Powers. But most writers go from superior to execrable, with the average being pretty, er, average. Turtledove, unfortunately, is one of those. This collection of thirteen of his short stories shows it isn't just a matter of being better at longer or shorter length, either. A couple of the stories are among his best, like "And So to Bed," a Pepys pastiche about the survival in the New World of australopithecines, and what their existence alongside homo sapiens might say to an intelligent man about natural selection. And there's "The Road Not Taken," in which most alien species discovered antigravity and hyperdrive early on, so that the invaders arrive in spaceships with cutlasses and flintlocks in hand. And the much-anthologized "The Last Article," an alternate history story in which the victorious Nazis who conquered British India have their own way of dealing with Gandhi's passive resistance. And there's "Crybaby," a well-written little piece of horror (which the author's wife refuses to read, and no wonder). But most of the remaining stories are thoroughly mediocre, especially the two Dunsany-like fantasies. Even the "The Girl Who Took Lessons," which isn't SF at all, reads like a REDBOOK reject.