Re: Distant Replay

It’s hard for me to say much about “Distant Replay,” by Mike Resnick. It falls into the vague middle ground of an okay story, but I don’t love it or hate it enough to really get into it. It begins when Walter, an old man marking time until he can join his dead wife, Diedre, […]

Re: All Seated On The Ground

I usually don’t like Christmas stories. Or Christmas. And especially not Christmas carols. But I do like choral music. Which probably goes a long way toward explaining why like “All Seated On The Ground,” by Connie Willis so much. It begins in the middle of the frenzy of the “holiday season,” when six aliens come […]

Re: Recovering Apollo 8

I was just a kid in the 60s, but I remember the uncertainty of the Apollo program, from the terrible reality of Apollo 1, to wacky speculations that Apollo 11 would sink into the lunar dust. The movie “Apollo 13” captured wonderfully the constant fear that something might go wrong. When you look at what […]

Re: Always

Funny how you can always tell a cult by who gets to have sex. In “Always,” by Karen Joy Fowler, the unnamed narrator is warned by her mother: if only the pastor is having sex, it’s a cult. When the narrator and her husband come to Always and discover exactly that about Brother Porter, she […]

Re: Safeguard

Some topics you need to write about with some restraint, like putting kids into danger to get the reader’s sympathy. Toward the end of “Safeguard,” by Nancy Kress, the story hangs a lantern on what a low device this is, and in general, shows restraint in depicting the children, and letting you feel as you […]

Re: Fountain of Age

When I read a story that I don’t like written by someone I admire, it makes feel like there’s something wrong with me. Nancy Kress, for example, is incredibly smart about writing, she gets her science right, she gets her people right–but every now and then I run across a story that rubs me the […]