From Publishers Weekly
Irvine does a good job of describing intricate, odd settings, but he's less adept at actual storytelling, as shown in the 13 tales ranging from surrealist fantasy to hard SF that constitute his first collection. One of the best, "Gus Dreams of Biting the Mailman," is a charming riff on the old idea of characters aware they're in fiction, like a Philip K. Dick story but without the tension generated by Dick's paranoia. "The Golems of Detroit" has an intriguing alternate-historical setting, a mass-production factory for rabbinically magicked clay soldiers during WWII, but there's little plot or character development. Technical descriptions of mining diamonds on Neptune delay the action in "Shepherded by Galatea." "The Lorelei," on the other hand, offers memorable characters and evokes the kind of real emotion to be found in such Irvine novels as
A Scattering of Jades and
The Narrows.
(Dec.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Irving's stories cover a lot of ground. The title story concerns the terrible human consequences of the media circus surrounding the first manned Mars mission. "And Now It's Eight O'Clock" injects a threatening fairy-tale creature into a familiar suburban lifestyle. "Gus Dreams of Biting the Mailman" considers some unsettling questions about the natures of fiction and reality. From "Golems of Detroit," in which an assembly line produces golems for World War II, to the terrifying totalitarian future of "Peter Skilling" (a man of our time is resurrected into a nation in which Green Party membership makes him a terrorist), Irvine creates microcosms well worth exploring.
Regina SchroederCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
