"Buffalo" by John Kessel: (p. 297)

This story is an interesting speculative fiction concept about inserting one's ancestor in the path of H.G. Wells and using that as a morality lesson about choosing life paths and a commentary on the goals in one's life, as well as addressing the ideas of intellectual snobbery, political corruption, etc. Also, I do not mind work that uses parallel and slightly overlapping plots and shifts in POV to address the main theme or plot, but I did not find that it was terribly effective when used here, and the details and bits and pieces of facts (which appeared to be facts about Well's visit) seemed too structured and reeked of artifice at times. Of course, the ending sentiment is a somber one since there is the issue of the never fully lived life and so on, but it failed in the last to deliver any profound wallop. Yes, we get it; it's about a story that never happened because of a life that never happened (his grandfather's wish-dreams never fulfilled, etc.).

Overall, I kept feeling irritated because I did not know what was fact or fiction, and since I was not near a computer when I read it, I wanted to do fact checking, and that ultimately kept pulling me out of the story because I wondered if this or that fact was true or not.

One of the best musings in the story is when the narrator comments on Art and Jazz music, "that art isn't always a means to an end but sometimes an end in itself. That art may not be able to change the world, but can still change the moment" (312). It felt a bit preachy, but the truth in it is compelling. (I might add as a tongue-in-cheek footnote, it reminded me of the R.E.M. song that admonishes, "Don't go back to Rockville.")

"Solitude" by Ursula K. Le Guin: (p. 315)

Once a reader gets past the distracting and cumbersome flim-flam, made-up words, and technobabble and can settle into the story, it is a curious treatise on cultural differences among "people" as well as the age-old gender battle between parent and child when the baby bird is ready to flee the nest. It has an intimate feel to it because of the first-person narrative, but also because of the nuanced details and personal reflections of the protagonist. Although, it is supposed to be an anthropological addendum to the protagonist's mother's report about her family's life among another group of people in a post-apocalyptic world, it reads more like a fictional story rather than a report.

There were a few problems I had with the premise in some places, such as, if the mother is an ethnographer who uses "participant observation" methods (i.e., living among a culture to study them), and she has her children live with her, then why does she not take yearly trips back to the ship orbiting nearby so that the kids are not fully acculturated into the new culture, but instead, they get time to spend among people from their own world? It seems a bit disingenuous on the mother's part to separate her kids like that and then expect them to inherently want to reconnect with their birth culture.

The author also made an odd reference to saints and holy people as living apart from their culture, which makes no sense. Part of what makes a saint a saint (as well as holy people) is not only their elevated religious consciousness and willingness for self-sacrifice for the greater good, but after they have acquired a certain degree of meditative prowess, reflection, and religious abeyance during a period of isolation or social removal, the greatest challenge for them is to go back into the world of humans and live among them; thereby, not living always in solitude, but participating fully.

There were a number of other inconsistencies that kept pulling me out of the story, so overall, I was not that enthralled with it.

"Mother Grasshopper" by Michael Swanwick: (p. 343)

If I could give a one-word entry it would be "yuck," and I'd love to leave it at that. Since that is not helpful, my input is thus, for one, Swanwick writes about sex in a pornographic and not exactly imaginative way. Granted, he is writing in the pedestrian voice of the protagonist, yet, if one is to write a literary story, and one that readers want to read, an author needs to create a character that a reader can engage with in some fashion. This fellow Daniel is not such a character for me.

Also, the concept that the initial Death character brings death by spreading disease conflicts with the standard image of death as the one who does not cause the illness, but who collects the person when their time is nigh. The Grim Reaper. The story came across as forced and an attempt by the author to perform storytelling parlor tricks with his plot, but it fell flat, and in the end, it was a tedious execution. I give it a rating of Four Yawns and a Burp (for lack of solidity).

Work Cited

Van Gelder, Gordon, ed. The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Anthology. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2009. Print.