From Amazon.com
Terry Bisson was already an established and acclaimed SF-fantasy novelist when he began publishing short stories in 1990. He immediately demonstrated his promise as one of the short-SF giants of the '90s with "Bears Discover Fire" (1990), which won the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award. Unsurprisingly, this story provided the title of Bisson's first collection,
Bears Discover Fire (1993). His second collection,
In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories, assembles sixteen lean, sharp, literate fictions. A few selections are short-shorts; some of these are slight. A few others describe lingerie in enough detail to make you wonder if you've wandered into a text-only Victoria's Secret catalog, which gets as eye-glazing as a baseball story if you don't share the interest. The stories from
Playboy will also annoy some readers (especially women), since three of the four feature women characters who are software and the fourth story's female narrator is a male fantasy in drag.
Among the collection's many strong stories are "The Edge of the Universe" and "Get Me to the Church on Time," featuring the reality-bending adventures of the brilliant physicist-mathematician-meteorologist Wilson Wu. "There Are No Dead," the collection's lone fantasy, is a thoughtful, Bradbury-esque examination of childhood, change, loss, and the American dream. With a series of terse and increasingly disturbing interviews, "macs" traces the demand for victim's rights to its ironic logical extreme. "First Fire" pays tribute to Arthur C. Clarke and examines the amorality of laissez-faire capitalism in a tale of archaeological discovery, obsession, hubris, and the corruption of science. --Cynthia Ward
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
From Publishers Weekly
Bisson offers up a wide-ranging second story collection (after Bears Discover Fire) of cutting-edge SF. The future of virtual reality comes under his gaze here and there--as in his Orwellian "An Office Romance," in which, for office temp Ken678, even a furtive love affair with co-worker Mary97 is less compelling than the reassuring predictability of Microserf Office 6.9. Or the title piece of the collection, which offers week-long online vacations to the lonely, courtesy of Inward Bound, and for one pair of lovers, virtual eternity together. On an equally sinister note, "Macs" presents the ultimate Swiftian solution for victims of terrorism, with the opportunity to legally murder a cloned copy of the terrorist who killed their loved one ("Mac" for copies of "the real McCoy). In a lighter vein, there's "The Edge of the Universe," a tale delivered with a sugary dose of Southern charm that shows how a lovesick law student reverses universal entropy through one good whack with a big stick--or "an anti-entropic field reversal device." Those who relish presidential embarrassment will savor "Tell them they are full of sh*t and they should f*ck off," in which an obtuse future chief exec somehow manages to overlook a first contact with an annoyed group of aliens. In its promo, the publisher compares Bisson to Vonnegut and Harlan Ellison; that's not too much of a stretch.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
