Customer Reviews

Washed by a Wave of Wind: Science Fiction from the Corridor

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With Washed by a Wave of Wind, M. Shayne Bell has produced a unique and fascinating anthology which will become increasingly significant and more frequently analyzed as years go by. This book is a must have for any serious reader of Western science fiction, LDS science fiction, or regional/ethnic science fiction. It is also full of unusual, well-written fiction that any adventurous reader should enjoy.

M. Shayne Bell has done an amazing job of obtaining top-quality stories from a talented and diverse group of writers. The contributors to this anthology represent a wide range of viewpoints, from very mainstream LDS authors who teach at BYU and have books sold by Deseret Book (Glenn L. Anderson), to people who are LDS but interestingly "unorthodox", to people who have never been LDS but live in the region. The stories run the gamut as well. Some could be published without causing a stir in the New Era. Others are definitely "subversive" (to use the word from the book's back cover blurb). But none of them are simply mean or "anti."

Many stories contain plot points and ideas and speculations about future that many Latter-day Saints would find offensive. But there is nothing that readers widely read in either science fiction or LDS fiction will be driven to apostacy by. The viewpoints are so diverse, there are only two "messages" a person could take away from the anthology as a whole: Utah/LDS writers are an extremely talented, diverse bunch and Utah/LDS culture is unarguably unique. A book of this sort, so bound to place and so culturally marked, never has been and never could be produced by "science fiction writers from Ohio," for example.

Edited by Hugo-nominated author M. Shayne Bell, this anthology is the first work to collect short fiction by all the major (and many of the minor) science fiction writers to have emerged from Utah in the past two decades. Included are reprinted stories by Orson Scott Card, Michaelene Pendleton, and Bell himself; also showcased are strong original works by the likes of Dave Wolverton, Elizabeth H. Boyer, Virginia Baker, Glenn L. Anderson, Pat Bezzant, Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury, Diann Thornley, and D. William Shunn. Uneven, but on the whole quite interesting and worthwhile.