Shuteye for the Timebroker: Stories (Paperback)

~ Paul Di Filippo (Author) "Someone was singing in the cellar..." (more)
Key Phrases: secret sutras, mind putty, Captain Jill, Blackwood Beach, Lincoln Island (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The 15 stories in Di Filippo's latest collection (after 2005's The Emperor of Gondwanaland) show his command of a colorful palette of ideas and approaches. The title tale is an amusing satire of a sleepless 24/7 near-future in which time is traded like a commodity by professional (if sometimes incompetent) brokers. In the screwball fantasy "The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet," a male writer hires an actress to play the pseudonymous female "author" of his bestselling chick lit novel—then finds himself getting absorbed like one of his feckless male characters into her far too authentic performance. The book also features respectful homages to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany and Jules Verne. Most of the stories percolate with the author's trademark gushes of wit and humor, but several of the best are deadly earnest, including "Underground," a spooker set in the New York City subway system, and "Shadowboxer," a tale of a psychic assassin fighting "the war on terror" that brilliantly captures the moral ambiguity of attitudes in post-9/11 America. (May)
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From The Washington Post

No matter what the genre, the momentum of a good story is inescapable. In its thrall, a reader can overlook any number of errors in the telling. Sadly, in Paul Di Filippo's latest collection, Shuteye for the Timebroker, the reader has too much time to ponder his prose and its shortcomings.

Di Filippo, twice a Nebula Award finalist and a long-running columnist for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, doesn't lack for rich ideas. The 15 short stories collected here all have nuggets of wild-eyed originality buried within them -- from "The Mysterious Iowans," a tale that swims around Jules Verne's oeuvre, to "Going Abo," which imagines a hot new trend in vacations, and "The Days of Other Light," which ponders the source of inspiration. Di Filippo's glee in the act of writing bounds across the page even when the subject matter is grim, as in "Shadowboxer," a rage-fueled tale about assassination. While the ideas behind the stories are generally interesting, Di Filippo infrequently moves beyond them to create something more than just a nifty thought.

When he does push a story beyond a one-note idea -- as he does in "We're All in This Alone" (co-written with Michael Bishop) and the sprightly "The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet" -- Di Filippo proves that he knows what he's doing. But this collection has jammed those two masterly stories together with 13 others that range from dull ("Distances") to irritating (the title story, whose central premise -- that a technological advance freeing humans from sleep leads to the rise of folks who barter time on commission -- makes almost no sense). "The Farthest Schorr," a collection of vignettes inspired by the surrealist paintings of Todd Schorr, would work if published with photographs of his trippy art, but the story lacks the necessary referent without them.

Di Filippo tries to hide the weakness of some stories with the writerly equivalent of shiny trinkets to distract us from the lack of momentum. "Captain Jill" is a tour of Roget's thesaurus, with "gaucherie," "puissant," "hoi polloi" and "rachitic" all making an appearance. This over-reliance on multisyllabic words is not only artlessly dense but also makes the characters in most of the stories sound exactly the same and exactly like the author's voice in his introductions to each.

The collection is also undermined by stories that rely on the "Well, Jim . . ." device, a "Star Trek"-inspired nickname in the speculative-fiction field for clunky expository passages designed to catch readers up on, say, quantum physics. In the two shorts that open the collection, extended paragraphs of crucial backstory all but hang neon signs on their "Well, Jim-ness."

Still, Timebroker does have moments of brilliance that almost make up for the slack in the bulk of the stories. Descriptions such as "A rain of golf balls -- Titleists -- fell and bounced down the hilly streets, as if Mr. Moose had finally decided to kill Captain Kangaroo" capture both a mood and moment. But these flashes are too few to sustain the collection as a whole, leaving the reader too much time to ponder the absence of narrative force.

Reviewed by Adrienne Martini
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Running Press (April 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560258179
• ISBN-13: 978-1560258179
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #971,887 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dream-like Science Fiction and Fantasy, October 8, 2006

By	David B Richman (Mesilla Park, NM USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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!

3.0 out of 5 stars Shuteye for the Reader, March 26, 2009

By	doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

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~]