The Ant King: and Other Stories (Paperback)

by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Author)
Key Phrases: real estate lady, red leather tassels, guiding intelligence, Miss Dashwood, Ant King, White Witch (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Plausible-fabulist Rosenbaum's debut collection of 17 short stories is inconsistent, but it includes some speculative gems. The thought-provoking Start the Clock takes place in a near future where a virus has stopped the human aging process, forcing millions of people to live forever as preadolescents. The title story is an absurdist masterwork about a man in search of a woman who has been turned into yellow gumballs, abducted and hidden away in a lair guarded by a giant roach. Most notable is World Fantasy Award–finalist A Siege of Cranes, which blends elements of horror, epic fantasy and religious mythology in the tale of a desperate man seeking a nightmarish enemy that has destroyed his village and killed his wife and child. Featuring outlandish and striking imagery throughout—a woman in love with an elephant, an orange that ruled the world—this collection is a surrealistic wonderland. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Description

"Rosenbaum's The Ant King and Other Stories contains invisible cities and playful deconstructions of the form. In "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, With Air-Planes,' by Benjamin Rosenbaum"—yes, his name is part of the title—the author imagines a world whose technologies and philosophies differ wildly from ours. The result is a commentary on the state of the art that is itself the state of the art."
—Los Angeles Times Favorite Books of 2008

* "Give him some prizes, like, perhaps, "best first collection" for this book."
—Booklist (Starred review, Top 10 SF Books of the Year)

"Featuring outlandish and striking imagery throughout—a woman in love with an elephant, an orange that ruled the world—this collection is a surrealistic wonderland."
—Publishers Weekly

"Rosenbaum proves he’s capable of sustained fantasy with "Biographical Notes," a steampunkish alternate history of aerial piracy, and "A Siege of Cranes," a fantasy about a battle between a human insurgent and the White Witch that carries decidedly modern undercurrents.... Perhaps none of the tales is odder than "Orphans," in which girl-meets-elephant, girl-loses-elephant."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Urbane without being arch, sweet without being maudlin, mysterious without being cryptic."—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

"Lively, bizarre, and funny as well as dark, sinister, and sensual."
—Boston Phoenix

A dazzling, postmodern debut collection of pulp and surreal fictions: a writer of alternate histories defends his patron’s zeppelin against assassins and pirates; a woman transforms into hundreds of gumballs; an emancipated children’s collective goes house hunting.

Benjamin Rosenbaum’s stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction and McSweeney’s, been translated into fourteen languages, and listed in The Best American Short Stories 2006. Shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula awards, Rosenbaum’s work has been reprinted in Harper’s and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He lives in Switzerland with his family.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Small Beer Press (August 9, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931520534
• ISBN-13: 978-1931520539
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #814,377 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential short stories, August 25, 2008

By	Zvi Gilbert (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

These are excellent short stories -- fantastic, moving, and vivid. Rosenbaum moves easily between genres, from fable to hard sf to epic post-modern historical fantasy to straight fantasy with astonishing ease and deftness.

Some high points:

"Biographical Notes..." is just tremendous. Simultaneously a zeppelin adventure story, a post-modern literary romp, a deep work of historical fiction, and a treatise on the nature of causality, it is one of the most jaw-droppingly audacious stories I've ever read.

I have never had the experience of laughing and crying simultaneously at a short story until I read 'The Orange'.

"The House Beyond Your Sky" is an original and heartbreaking take on the sub-genre of cosmological fiction that Steven Baxter and Greg Egan have popularized.

Anyone interested in contemporary fiction should read this book. Particularly recommended for fans of Borges, Kelly Link, Howard Waldrop, and Michael Swanwick.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow., November 28, 2008

By	Theresa Van Der Vlugt - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Oh, these stories are delightful! They beg to be read and reread (and I have read them again and again!) Brilliantly inventive, they feel curiously familiar while at the same time showing you things you have never imagined. So many innocent memes of the modern world are roughed up, turned on their heads, tickled a bit, then pushed to their most delightfully absurd, shocking, bizarre-yet-real conclusions.

I've read a lot of requisite major SF, and many characters in those novels and stories are either stiff-and-formulaic or sickly over-humanized...Rosenbaums are not. The most un-human un-familiar situations and characters--a jackal-headed sepulchrist-warrior, a parakeet that "was once the dreaming cloud of plasma in the heliopause of a simulated star", and an apprentice godcarver all of whose memories (as well as those of his forefathers) reside in small fanged symbiotes that crawl around his body--feel both alien and strangely, closely, known.

Even the shortest short stories create rich worlds that are SO different, yet seem so strangely real. He's a master at not telling too much, painting a broad swatch with just the right details. Consider these first lines from two of the shorter pieces: "You're on the 236th-level Kaiserstrasse moving sidewalk when you see her." (from Falling) and "On the plain of Myrkhyr, in the first year of the cycle, a million nomads cross the salt flats." (from Other Cities/Myrkhyr)

In a (probably unimportant-my "editor" hates this paragraph, but I think this stuff is just so cool...) aside, many of these stories refer to other stories, other books, literary tropes, cultural memes, computer games--I think they are great on their own, but it's fun to get the references. If you have ever sat across the table from venture capitalists or were part of the crazy SV dotcom boom, or played very early online games, you MUST read the story "The Ant King", and see yourself as never before. If you have ever held your sleeping infant child just to drink in his or her smell, your heart will alternately pound and scream in "On a Cliff by the River", "A Siege of Cranes" and "The House Beyond Your Sky". If you had the misfortune to spend any amount of time studying literary theory (or better, philosophy) "Bibliographical Notes" and "Sense and Sensibility" are seriously crazy adventures with smart and pointed inner workings. Oh, and did you ever read Babar as a kid? Wait and see :)

I think that every reviewer, professional or otherwise, who is concerned about exactly what genre this book of short stories might fall into (science fiction? fantasy? slipstream? pomo? old-style surrealism? magical realism?) is only trying to find the footing that these stories yank out from underneath you. Which is a bit reverse of the point.

Heartbreaking is the absence of "Droplet", a fantastic far-future almost-novella-length story previously published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, reprinted in Silverberg & Haber's Science Fiction: The Best of 2002, that you should totally seek out at all costs.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Break From the Norm, January 26, 2009

By	Alissa (NJ) - See all my reviews

Rosenbaum's stories are eccentric, weird and wonderful. Anything can happen in one of these stories and often does, like a girlfriend turning into yellow gumballs in the title tale or a virus that traps everyone in exactly the age they were when it hit in "Start the Clock."

My personal favorite (and this might have something to do with having been a college English major) is "Sense and Sensibility" a retelling of the Austen classic that manages to be faithful to the original while being so utterly, utterly different.

Rosenbaum's stories remind me of the underrated Ray Vukcevich and his collection Meet Me in the Moon Room, which not surprisingly is another great book from Small Beer Press.

Rosenbaum's collection will take you to places only he could have dreamed up. It's the perfect prescription for anyone who is tired of predictable, ho-hum stories.