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Cities
by China Miéville, Michael
Moorcock, Paul di Filippo, Geoff
Ryman
edited by Peter Crowther
(Gollancz, £12.99, 292 pages, hardback, published 17 April 2003;
individual novellas previously published as separate volumes by PS Publishing.)
Infinities
by Eric Brown, Ken
MacLeod, Alastair Reynolds, Adam
Roberts
edited by Peter Crowther
(Gollancz, £12.99, 358 pages, hardback, published 16 May 2002;
individual novellas previously published as separate volumes by PS Publishing.)
Among my many roles at infinity plus, that
of UK reviews  editor
can be one of the most traumatic. All those review copies arrive in
the post and then ... I have to send them out again to our team of reviewers,
instead of keeping them for myself.
To be frank, while I hesitate to judge books by their covers and publicity
slips, I'm quite happy to pass a lot of them on to others, but sometimes
it's a painful process. Pete Crowther, publisher of PS Publishing, the
originator of the novella series gathered together in the volumes considered
here, has been responsible for much of that pain. Every so often, a
set of review copies arrives from PS, and almost immediately a reviewer
volunteers for them and I have to pass them on. And then I get the reviews
back, more often than not telling me that I've just missed out on yet
another superb piece of writing by an author on top form.
PS has a knack for bringing out the best in their writers. There's
something about the freedom of  writing
for a publisher that trusts writers to do their own thing. And, as has
often been asserted, there is something about the novella length that
has always been suited to speculative fiction. As a reviewer, I don't
buy much genre fiction as I tend to read review copies, but I do
buy PS books. That says a lot (particularly to those of you who know
how tight-fisted I am).
As I said in my round-up review
of the previous volume in this Foursight series, British sf is flourishing
and Peter Crowther has played an important part in this, providing opportunities
for some of our best authors to work at a length that is generally assumed
to be hard to publish successfully.
Gollancz, too, deserve a lot of credit for backing this venture. The
novellas are initially published individually by PS Publishing (with
generally excellent introductions from a variety of high-profile contributors,
sadly lost in the Gollancz editions), and then compiled by Gollancz
into the back-to-back Binaries series of twinned novellas, and
also into these four-packs. The Foursight volumes are, quite simply,
supreme examples of publishing: well-produced hardback volumes with
fine covers, and clever and distinctive design. These books, simply
as objects, are clearly put together by people who really care.
Enough of the book fetishism -- to the contents! Each of the novellas
in these two volumes has been previously reviewed at infinity
plus. Here's what our reviewers had to say.
Cities contains the following four novellas:
- The Tain by China Miéville
"A China Mieville book which feels stripped down to its essentials
... can stand with the best work of another stylist of decaying empires,
Lucius Shepard" (reviewed by Graham Sleight)
- Firing the Cathedral
by Michael Moorcock
"A surreal cut'n'pasted gallop through a blackly comic near future
... a blisteringly satirical look at the times and the state that
we're in" (reviewed by Stuart Carter)
- A Year in the Linear City by
Paul di Filippo
"Fiction of the highest order ... an author who genuinely comes close
to defying all attempts at description" (reviewed by Keith Brooke)
- VAO by Geoff Ryman
"VAO is a smart, funny tale about old age, Alzheimer's disease, and
crime in the near future ... wonderfully engaging" (reviewed by Chris
Butler)
Infinities contains the following four novellas:
- A Writer's Life by Eric Brown
"In favour of A Writer's Life is its authentic texture,
its astute evocations of literary frustration and an author's efforts
to reconcile his aesthetic and emotional worlds" (reviewed by
Nick Gevers)
- The Human Front by Ken MacLeod
"I was disappointed by The Human Front, not deeply and
miserably, but just broadly..." (reviewed by Stuart Carter)
- Diamond Dogs by Alastair
Reynolds
"First-person narrative, fast-moving, with short chapters and
a claustrophobic setting ... the appeal of 'Dogs' is all in the telling,
and a large part of that is characterisation" (reviewed with
Turquoise Days by John Toon)
- Park Polar by Adam Roberts
"I suspect a longer work might develop theme and character more: there's
certainly room for expansion on both counts. But as it is, it's an
only intermittently engaging read" (reviewed by Gary Couzens)
Omnibus review by Keith
Brooke; individual reviews as credited.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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