Customer Reviews

Tales from the Crypto-System

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These stories comprise some of the most cleverly contrived, vividly detailed and devastatingly accurate speculative fiction shorts I have ever come across.

Thank Geoff Maloney for the snacks. Keep needling him until he provides a main meal (a novel).

This book is a tease, an exercise in cruelty. The introduction says "you will hunt out and read everything of Geoff's that you can." Lots of introductions say things like this. Sometimes they're true and sometimes they aren't. Rarely will the urge to read the rest of someone's work be as intense as it proves to be after reading Tales from the Crypto-System.

Well, I've tried, and there isn't much out there that's available in year 2005 and, perhaps, outside of Australia. I loved every creative, sensitive, moral, and understanding story in this book so much that I'm driven, really driven, to read more. "More" isn't easy to find.

Buy this now and read it - but be forwarned: It won't be enough.

This is one of the finest collection of short stories I have ever read. 21 stories which span not only the past but also the future. Maloney's stories or intriguing, romantic, and have excellent plot development. This is must read book. Looking forward to the next anthology.

In this collection of stories Maloney ranges from British-ruled India to the strange new worlds of outer space and possible futures, and into stylised, dreamlike environments in which the familiar is made - or shown to be - strange. This is a superb collection from a subtle storyteller. Maloney has the gift of drawing complex, engaging characters with an economy of strokes. His people are most often the small players, men and women with limited control over their circumstances, who, like most of us, are forced make compromises - though their dreams may be noble and their passions strong. Some of the settings have the sense of being psychological states as much as physical places, while others - like the wonderfully depicted India - feel so real that this reader was completely drawn into them and wished for more when the story was over. I want to particularly mention "The World According to Kipling," one of the longer stories in the book, whose protagonist Youngburton, a British agent in India, has led a life of adventure that would make a smashing novel - and I hope Maloney will one day write it.
Maloney is not a writer who feels compelled to tell all. He delights in raising questions and creating mysteries for the reader to ponder. But he also knows how to work a plot, and there is a well-judged balance between the strange and the straightforward, the contemplative and the exciting, in the stories chosen. This is a collection that will amply reward the reader in search of subtle, intelligent speculative fiction. Geoffrey Maloney is a writer who certainly deserves more limelight on the world stage.