found drama

Eclipse 1 is a good-not-great anthology of speculative (née “science”) fiction and fantasy (rather: “new weird”) short stories edited by Jonathan Strahan. My “good-not-great” may be stemming from my disappointment that there was more “new weird”/fantasy than there was science fiction ¹ but there were still quite a few “big wins” in the pile that is this paperback binding.

As for the computed average of my ratings on the individual stories themselves (out to four decimal places), Eclipse 1 scores: 3.3000

Includes:

• “Unique Chicken Goes In Reverse” by Andy Duncan: ★★★½
  • Cute, weird.
• “Bad Luck, Trouble, Death, and Vampire Sex” by Garth Nix: ★★
• “The Last and Only or, Mr. Moscowitz Becomes French” by Peter S. Beagle: ★★★
• “The Lost Boy: A Reporter At Large” by Maureen F. McHugh: ★★★★★
  • Probably double visceral if you’ve ever lived in the Baltimore/DC area but outstanding regardless of your geographic history.
• “The Drowned Life” by Jeffrey Ford: ★★
• “Toother” by Terry Dowling: ★★★½
  • I couldn’t put my finger on why I wasn’t bowled over by this one. I wanted to like it a lot more but something about it left me wanting a bit…
• “Up the Fire Road” by Eileen Gunn: ★★½
  • *groan*sigh*snort* (reversed)
• “In the Forest of the Queen” by Gwyneth Jones: ★★
• “Quartermaster Returns” by Ysabeau S. Wilce: ★★★★
  • A playful tone and artfully written, toys with the right conventions, too.
• “Electric Rains” by Kathleen Ann Goonan: ★★★★½
  • As with “The Lost Boy…” (v.s.), this one probably hits harder for folks with a little DC time under their belt but hits all the high notes even without that ².
• “She-Creatures” by Margo Lanagan: ★★
  • The prurient overtones didn’t exactly make up for the brogue veneer and otherwise bewildering plot.
• “The Transformation of Targ” by Paul Brandon and Jack Dann: ★★★
  • Maybe ★★★★ and in my heart of hearts a sympathetic ★★★★★ – this was an extremely fun story.
• “Mrs. Zeno’s Paradox” by Ellen Klages: ★★★★
  • The fact that the story is so short (about 3 pages? 4?) was like its own double-entendre. And any light-hearted story that can work in “Ã¥ngström” should get bonus points.
• “The Lustration” by Bruce Sterling: ★★★½
  • I think it’s good? Though maybe a bit too oblique?
• “Larissa Miusov” by Lucius Shepard: ★★★★★
  • Far and away the best story in this collection. If your library has this anthology then you owe it to yourself to at least read this one.

A version of this review originally appeared on Goodreads.com.

1. Call it a personal preference.[↩]
2. Also, for the private few reading this that have also read a certain manuscript of mine, I’d like to share that I had a big (and vocal) “WTF?” the night I was reading this in bed. I felt a little dirty and cheated – but how can someone rip you off when they’ve never heard of you? or read your work? (Besides, it was different enough to not be “the same”.)[↩]

About Rob Friesel