- Hardcover: 469 pages
- Publisher: Subterranean Press; Deluxe edition (December 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1596061782
- ISBN-13: 978-1596061781
- Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 16.3 x 4.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 907 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #771,609 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Some of the best Science Fiction out there, July 5 2009
By John J. Coyne - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Best of Michael Swanwick (Hardcover)
It wasn't until I was about a third of the way through this book that I started to believe Michael Swanwick capable of writing a pretty awesome story, and it wasn't until reading "The Very Pulse of the Machine," and everything that comes after it, that Swanwick became a strong contender for my favorite writer ever.
For the first third of this collection I had to struggle to find a way in to these stories: "The feast of Saint Janis" and "Ginungagap" were snappy tales with interesting premises but which felt more like a surrealist writer's take on wacky science fiction. "A midwinter's tale" and "The edge of the world" were decent stories that had their moments but were otherwise unremarkable. And "Griffin's egg," "The changeling's tale," and "Trojan Horse" sailed clear over my head.
Maybe it took Swanwick a while to find his groove, or maybe it just took me a dozen or stories to get the feel of this wonderfully outlandish writer, but either way I'm glad I stuck with it. The flavor of these later stories is somewhat darker - refugees from a future holocaust whose horribly violent nature is only hinted at flee through a time portal in "Radiant Doors"; a woman stumbles into a far future slave earth in "Legions in Time"; scarcity-induced genocide is hard-wired into an alien society in "From Babel's fall'n glory we fled"; and in both "Very Pulse of the Machine" and "Slow Life" doomed women on distant planets in our solar system make incredible discoveries - but what makes these stories sing is the depth of the characters, typically a spunky woman, who, through their actions tell more of the strange worlds they inhabit than the spare and highly caffeinated prose (Swanwick's descriptions feel more like rough charcoal pencil sketches, all smudged and scribbly, than the clean Edward Hopper-esque scene painting I've come to love in the work of Lucius Shepard).
Despite the fact that the first third of the book left me somewhat cold, most of the stories in the final two thirds of this retrospective are so wildly good as to tax my capacity for hyperbole.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very much worth reading. Not quite what you're used to......, Feb 15 2009
By Lisa M. Mims - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Best of Michael Swanwick (Hardcover)
This is an author I hadn't encountered before; I would put him on a short list of people who I would actually recommend. His stories seem to follow a familiar arc: interesting event, trial, revelation, open-ended-universal truth. He says things like, "In any economy, resources and labor cost a certain amount, and then to make a profit, businesses have to charge over the cost of both labor and resources, which inflates prices, which then leads to periodic depressions."
And then you have to think about what he just said.
He's right. Lots of his stories are sort of amazingly right. They're also a bit painful in tone, perhaps, sad, even, which explains why this author isn't more popular. This is very worth reading, though: you'll have moments of sitting above yourself realizing you're reading really, really good writing.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Swanwick really is good, May 6 2009
By Daniel Nelson - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Best of Michael Swanwick (Hardcover)
The others rating the book ahead of me are correct. You aren't going to find a lot of uplifting gee-whiz kind of stuff. Most of the stories are kind of dark and carry some sort of gloomy undercurrent. They are also some of the better and more interesting character-driven SF you will read, and instead of the gee-whiz stuff you'll find a lot of good scientific extrapolations and settings that mesh well with what's happening to the characters. His writing is clear, and very pleasurable for the effortless way he conveys the at times complex environments in which his stories take place, and the reactions of his characters to them. Very pleasing and meaningful.
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