Customer Reviews

Shuteye for the Timebroker: Stories

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Paul di Filippo has some unique and offbeat ideas, but most of the short stories in this collection fail to take hold with the reader. In most of these tales, witty dialogue and surreal plot twists merely become momentarily impressive writing shenanigans, leading to vague and obtuse resolutions that will probably leave the reader unsatisfied. Granted, there are a few strong stories in the collection, with a touch of weird romantic whimsy in "Billy Budd," postmodern celebreality in "The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet," and an especially effective look at the morals of the war on terror in "Shadowboxer." But these are among the few stories in this collection with themes robust enough to truly connect with the reader.

Other tales are built on disappointingly thin premises, like a cheesy rockstars-with-superpowers conceit in "Slowhand and Little Sister," and inconclusive tributes to Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, several of the stories here are vanity exercises for unknown themed anthologies and tributes, and without similarly-themed stories by others, they suffer in isolation here. The ultimate vanity project in this collection is "The Farthest Schorr," a collection of 32 disconnected mini-tales of about one page each, inspired by the paintings of fantasy artist Todd Schorr. This exercise wouldn't have worked much better if you could actually see the paintings in this book, which you can't. di Filippo admits that many of the stories here are inspired by the works of his predecessors, and that's a fine way to find interesting story ideas, but his level of inspiration is only partially passed on to the reader. [~doomsdayer520~]

Paul Di Filippo is certainly a talented fantasy and SF writer. His short stories in "Shuteye for the Timebroker" are gems of the trade and remind me of the days a friend used to send me copies of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction." In fact one of the stories was published in this old standard.

From the lusty "Captain Jill" to the surrealistic "The Farthest Schorr" (the latter commemorated by the painting on the cover) Di Filippo has fashioned a brilliant collection of hard core SF-fantasy that is difficult to put down, If you have ever thought about the possibility of being awake 24 hours a day, or what would have happened if Jules Verne's Captain Nemo were real and his inventions had been applied to solving the world's problems in Iowa, or what it might be like to really go aboriginal, this is your book.

Good reading on a trip, each story will reward the reader with odd and unexpected twists. If you like stories like those presented by Rod Serling on the Twilight Zone, you will love this collection!