From Publishers Weekly
The best of the 18 stories in Di Filippo's first nonthemed collection are both fun and unpredictable. Typically they pay homage to other authors, as in "Anselmo Merino," which puts a science-fictional spin on Herman Melville's
Benito Cereno. In the idiosyncratic "Beyond Mao," co-written with Barry Malzberg, Chinese "taikonauts" venture into space. It would be pure Malzberg if it weren't half Di Filippo. In "Observable Things," Cotton Mather teams up with Robert E. Howard's fictional Puritan, Solomon Kane. "A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled" features an even more outlandish pairing—poet Robert Frost starts his career by writing horror fiction for
Weird Tales magazine, edited by H.P. Lovecraft. The poignant title tale underlines the emotional importance of computers to lonely but imaginative individuals, while the amusing alternate world satire, "Shake It to the West," updates J.A. Mitchell's 1889 novel of America in decline,
The Last American. Not every selection is a winner, but the versatile Di Filippo (
The Steampunk Trilogy) remains consistently inventive.
(July 5) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Since the publication of his first single-themed collection,
The Steampunk Trilogy (1995), melding nineteenth-century pseudoscience with faux Victorian prose, Di Filippo has garnered a reputation as one of the genre's most inventive and quirky stylists. Over the last decade, he has followed up with seven other variations-on-a-theme collections, including
Lost Pages (1998), which presented alternate lives of famous authors, and
Strange Trades (2001), which explored unusual professions. Here, as underscored in his brief introduction, Di Filippo takes pains to avoid a uniform motif and present a smorgasbord of diverse ideas and styles. "Anselmo Merino" recasts Melville's "Benito Cereno," the classic story of a slave revolt at sea, with aliens filling in for Africans. In the title story, Gondwanaland appears to be an imaginary micronation existing only on the Internet--until the protagonist falls in love with an all-too-real citizen. "Ailoura," one of the volume's standouts, reenvisions the Puss in Boots fairy tale as a whimsical space opera. A perfect introduction for Di Filippo newcomers and a delight for his fans.
Carl HaysCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
