What a great introduction to Jo Walton’s work. The poetry was my least favourite, but that’s probably more because how little poetry I read. Thoroughly enjoyed the short stories/first chapters, most of which had me going ‘oh what a great concept’!
Particularly The Panda Coin and Sleeper.

A Burden Shared felt particularly weak & only half thought through - there’s a way of transferring pain to others & yet this is done through an app?

Three Shouts On A Hill was great fun & had me giggling. I’m going to dig out some of the authors novels on the strength of these short stories.

Jo Walton is not only an amazing novelist, but she is an accomplished poet. I’m always in awe of writers who can do both well. I settle into writing a novel with ease, but whenever I need a poem or song lyrics, it’s like pulling hen’s teeth for me to create anything serviceable. Yet poetry seems to flow from Walton with ease, if the poems she has posted on her LiveJournal are an example. Starlings offers both, plus the script of a hilarious play, Three Shouts on a Hill.

One of the many things I loved about this collection was Walton’s comments on the process of writing short fiction (as opposed to longer-form novels). It’s been said that novels teach us what to put in a story and short stories teach us what to take out. Short stories are not truncated novels, at least not good ones, ones that work. They’re like tiny gems, focused and spare. In and out, nailing the ending. Not surprisingly, Walton’s short stories are as personal as her other work. Deceptively subtle, they evoke depths of connection and emotional impact.

This book would make a wonderful gift for someone you love, someone who would love words like this:

Hades and Persephone

You bring the light clasped around you,
and although
I knew you’d bring it, knew it as I waited,
Knew as you’d come that you’d come cloaked in light
I had forgotten what light meant, and so
This longed for moment, so anticipated,
I stand still, dazzled by my own delight.

Starlings by Jo Walton

3 stars

This is Jo Walton’s first short story collection and she prefaces this collection with acknowledging that she isn’t very good at right short stories. I think that it is important to keep that in mind when embarking into this collection. Not all of these stories are good, in fact an awful lot of them are… well, awful. It is a horrible collection and I have read for worse, but this isn’t a particularly strong collection. Starlings is comprised of short stories, a play, and handful of poems. Walton writes in an array of genres within the science fiction and fantasy realm. Her ideas are very unique and outside of the box. I really enjoyed that aspect of this collection because it made the stories diverse in content, but all along the same vein of storytelling. I do think it is important to let readers know that Walton is fantastic at incorporating religious or God-like concepts into her writing and if you hate religious allegories, then this collection is not for you. But I love God and I love being challenged to think about God and know God in different ways and perspectives and I felt that Walton was incredibly strong in this area of storytelling. I love Walton’s prose in her fantasy stories. For me that is when she is at her strongest and I do plan on picking up other work by her, particularly Tooth and Claw, which I’m excited about getting my hands on.


Whimsical Writing Scale: 3.5

Three Twilight Tales – 3 stars The writing for this fantasy is quite beautiful and I loved the ending, but the formatting did not fit and it wasn’t until the ending that I grew to care for this tale. My biggest problem was that this story had no real motivation until the very end.

Jane Austen to Cassandra – 2.25 stars The concept of Jane Austen writing a letter and it winding up in the hands of the wrong Cassandra who happens to be living during the Battle of Troy is cute. However, this has no real purpose as story and is too short to be substantial.

Undeniable Witness – 3.5 stars This is a nice story about an old woman who lives in a nursing home. She claims that she has been visited by aliens and is recording it in hopes of proving that she is not crazy.

On the Wall – 5 stars This story follows the creation of the Magic Mirror and it follows the conflict that the mirror feels as it begins to see how manipulative Bluebell is and the lengths she will go to ensure her own rise to power. This was unique and fantastic. It’s the type of story I gravitate towards, but I absolutely wasn’t expecting to love this one so much. If you only read one story in this collection, find a way to check this one out because it is AMAZING!

The Panda Coin – 1 star I didn’t like the concept of following a coin throughout a futuristic society. There wasn’t enough to time to build up this world extensively and it was too much. I really didn’t like this one.

Remember the Allo-Saur – 1 star Well, that was a waste of time. It’s letter to a famous dinosaur actor. Why?

Sleeper – 3.5 stars This feels very reminiscent of classic dystopians like 1984 and I think a lot of readers will really like this one, especially because the twist is rather impressive.

Relentlessly Mundane – 3.75 stars This follows three children who were once in a mythical world and are struggling as adults in this world. They know that they have to save the Earth, but they don’t know how. My biggest problem was that this story was too short and I wanted it to be a novella. I wanted to see how they were going to save the world and why it needed saving. I left the story with way too many questions and not enough answers.

Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction – 3.25 stars The concept of Nazi Germany become winners of the WWII has always been an interesting one to me and I really like Walton’s take on it, but I wish that it hadn’t been interrupted with newspaper articles. The idea of newspapers articles is cool, but they felt odd.

Joyful and Triumphant: St. Zenobius and the Aliens – 4 stars I loved how unique this take on God and aliens was and it made the story so entertaining.

Turnover – 3.5 stars I liked the world and the concept of people being born on a spaceship going to another planet. The debate that surrounds this novel is interesting, but it doesn’t hold up past that and it falls short.

At the Bottom of the Garden – 3 stars This was depressing, but I didn’t like the path it took and it was far too short.

Out of It – 4 stars This follows an angel trying to win the soul of a powerful man who has sold his soul and it is so good. A lot of these stories would be really interesting to debate and this is one that I would enjoy debating the content surrounding morality.

What a Piece of Work – 4.25 stars This follows a supercomputer who becomes aware that she is becoming the totalitarian computer that begins to censor humans, but the reason why it gains consciousness of this is so interesting. I would love to see this one as a full-length novel.

Parable Lost – 2 stars This story has no answers to give and it is frustrating.

What Would Sam Spade Do? – 3.75 stars There’s a talking do that is a cop! This also follows a futuristic world where cloning has been made possible and there are thousands of Jesi (the plural form of Jesus) walking around. It’s kind of amazing and the is also a mystery about why a Jesus would kill another Jesus.

Tradition – 2.5 stars The idea of following someone’s traditional background is sweet, but it wasn’t spectacular.

What Joseph Felt – 3.5 stars I wish this story had expanded more upon on Joseph’s thoughts on Jesus’s life and how he felt about his step-son being crucified.

The Need to Stay the Same – 2 stars A review of a novel is cool, but it’s a fictional novel and it’s being reviewed within a scifi universe so it is hard to follow.

A Burden Shared – 3.5 stars This follows a mother who takes the pain of her daughter through an app that shares pain and it tackles incredibly tough themes like motherhood, pain, and letting go.

Three Shouts on a Hill- 1.25 stars This play was a hot mess.

Poetry – 3 stars My favorite poem is “Hades and Persephone” because I’m basic and stick to my roots when it comes to my obsessions.

Overall, I think this collection has a lot of strengths, but it also has a ton of weaknesses. I’m interested in checking out Walton’s future short story collections to see her progress because this a comprehensive collection of all her short stories. Walton acknowledges that this collection has some bad stories in it which I think takes a lot of balls to admit and for that alone I see more as a portfolio than as a novel.


Cover Thoughts: I LOVE this cover so much. The illustrations are wonderful.

Thank you, Netgalley and Tachyon Publishers, for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

When I read the opening words by the author, I felt already a bit put out, her thougths on short stories and her ability to write them, did not sound promising and as such, the whole book turned out to be. I did not like any of the short stories, all of them felt like they had something missing, the poems in the book felt like they were squeezed in just to have a home somewhere. I like Jo's fantasy normally, so I was really disappointed.

Unfortunately, the only thing I liked about this book was the 'Starlings' poem. I found the book to be too wordy and the stories too bizarre. I could not honestly finish reading it because there was nothing to keep me interested. I know there are many Jo Walton fans out there who would disagree with me, but it just wasn't my cup of tea.

I just could not get into this book.

I tried and I got to just over half way through (which in itself took me far too long) but none of the stories were actually up to a standard that made me want to read the next.

Some of them were okay, but that's it. Just OK. Neither the stories nor the writing could hold my attention.

I don't really read short story anthologies so I'm not sure if this is a reflection on me, or on the book itself. As it stands I probably would not recommend this book to others.

Definitely a middle of the road Anthology for me. I absolutely loved some of the short stories but disliked some as well. The poetry did not resonate with me and I found it difficult to read.

Jo Walton - Starlings

This is Jo Walton’s first short story collection, containing “two short stories I wrote after I knew what I was doing, two I wrote before I knew what I was doing, some exercises, some extended jokes, some first chapters of books I didn’t write, some poems with the line breaks taken out, a play, and some poems with the line breaks left in”. Her words…
Jo Walton is a Welsh-born writer living in Canada. She has won a wide range of awards for her writing, including but not limited to the John W. Campbell, Prometheus, World Fantasy, Nebula, and Hugo Awards. I used to think of her as an SF Poet, but looking at the list of her publications (and awards for them!) I very much stand corrected. Still, per her statement above, the one thing she struggled with were short stories, which is rather different to how many (most?) other SF writers hone their craft, and move into the field of published authors. But, as they say, different strokes for different people. And here we have, within her own definition per the above quote, her first collection of short fiction.

The book starts with a poem on the topics of the birth of new stars - thus the title of the poem, and of the collection overall. It’s a lovely poem, too. And ways too clever for me…
This is followed by an introduction, by the author, on the topic of herself, and her approach to writing short stories. I guess I can safely summarise this as not her forte, but she’s better at it than she used to be.

Reading the collection I can confirm that she definitely does just fine with the format, even if she does not think of most of the contents here as ‘short stories’ herself!
Most to all of the content has been published before over the years, so unless you are completely new to her oeuvre you will most likely trip over the odd story or poem you’ve seen before - I did, occasionally.
I’ll provide short capsule reviews on topics and my impressions for the individual stories below - if you’d rather enjoy this without too many spoilers then you might want to stop here, and go get the book, it’s worth your time and money!

Those Twilight Tales
A run-on collection of stories set in a rural village. Highly evocative, with an ending as beautiful as it is abrupt…

Jane Austen - To Cassandra
Here’s a conceit - one of Jane Austen’s letters goes astray, and is answered, instead of by her friend Cassandra, by the famed lady of the same name present during the siege of Troy. In the same voice, style, and tone as Cassandra would have. Delightful.

Unreliable Witness
This is a 1st person account, nominally transcribed from tape, by a senile old lady in an old people's home who is visited by an Alien.
It's short, delightful, thought provoking, and ever so slightly emotional as most of us have family members in similar situations (minus the Alien, in most cases, I presume. But how would I know, or believe them?).

On the Wall
A Snow White Story, about the origin/youth of the Evil Queen. Not a happy childhood, to put it simply. Told from the perspective - hold it - of the mirror. Splendid.

The Panda Coin
A potpourri of follow-on stories, a kaleidoscope set on a space station populated by humans and artificial beings, with its very own, stratified society. What holds the stories together is that they follow the path of a specific coin, originating in Eriterea-O, with a Panda on it.
We see a closed society run by AIs (called Eyes), with humans and Andys (guess…) being shunted about, and kept down. But the coin … no, that would be spoiling it.

Remember the Allosaur
A director, talking to his (intelligent) Allosaur actor, who wants to play Hamlet. “What a piece of work is man”.

Sleeper
A story about an ex-BBC bod, documentary maker, and life-long Soviet undercover sleeper agent. Set in 2064. So, rather, a story about a simulation of an ex BBC bod, …
Rather neat, if slightly stilted I found. But that might have been on purpose, of course. This raised echoes of Ken McLeods Corporation Wars stories, both in topic and in politics.

Relentlessly Mundane - for Nancy Lebovitz
A tale of 3 friends who went to a magical parallel world as children, and have been preparing ever since to go back. Kinda Narnia, but not. Bringing Narnia out of the Wardrobe? Post-Narnia Stress Disorder?

Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction
News snippets and personal first person accounts interweave to paint a picture of an America in the thrall of repeated downturns, depressions, and rising paranoia. In a world where Germany and Japan are dividing up Russia. Depressing, and scary.

Joyful and Triumphant: St Zenobius and the Aliens
“Of course God could have made the universe without pain, but a universe without pain is a universe without change, without stories. God could have contemplated nothing but their own glory for all eternity. They chose to have a universe with stories, and there are no stories in Utopia. “
On the topic of religion, Saints, God, and the Great Work of Heaven. Wow…

Turnover
A story set on a Generation Ship, around midpoint (thus the title), and one woman’s plan to save her art, Balette ( think zero-g Ballet), when the ship arrives at its destination in 125 years. Fascinating, and I want more of this, please let this be the first chapter of an actual novel Jo writes!

At the Bottom of the Garden
“Katie May was sitting cross-legged on the lawn carefully pulling the wings of a fairy.”
Do you need, besides this first sentence, any other motivation to want to read this story?

Out of It (for Susanna)
Good deed, bad deed, and the good in a bargain with the devil. Only a fragment, sadly.

What a Piece of Work
Hamlet strikes again in the title… but this is a story about Google search as a conscious entity. Right and Wrong. Censorship. Enlightenment. A fascinating train of thought.

Parable Lost
“There’s everything in the Universe in this story, except answers.”
A parable on the big (and small) questions in the Universe.

What Would Sam Spade Do?
A PI/Gumshoe/Sam Spade persiflage, set in a world where, quite a while back, it was fashionable to have a clone of Jesus as a babe (!). Times have moved on, and this world is now awash with Jesi (not a plural you see every day, either…). Writers, Chefs, Bums… PIs. But now one of them has been murdered. By another one, it appears.
Not much of a story, really, but an absolute cracker of a setting and atmosphere.

Tradition
And how they happen. And how we forgot what they were invented/good for, in the first place. It made me smile…

What Joseph Felt
As the title says - Joseph's internal monologue around conception, trip to Bethlehem, and Birth of Jesus. It’s been done before, it’s been done better, IMHO.

The Need to Stay the Same
An SF story. Or, to be specific, a review of one. Pure Intelligences/AIs (?), writing and reading about humans, ‘touch’, physical life, leaves with ‘photosynthesis’ (what a fantastic alien concept!).
As meta as it is fun!

A Burden Shared
Written in the shape of a Play - the story of the heroic quest by 3 Irish siblings, paying compensation for killing the king’s father. Taking in, amongst other things, Japanese Mechs, the Gardens of the Hesperides, the Pope’s Alchemical Gun which can kill a 1000 warriors in 1 shot, and a variety of other mythological artefacts from a bewildering array of cultures and ages.
Something I’d have expected from a Sucharitkul, not a Walton. Heaps of fun.

Poetry Section
I’ll not review every poem separately - some are longer, some are quite short, nearly all are rather impressive and evocative in the right way. There are Songs of Dragons, there are Country Ballads, there is retelling of classics, newly framed Myths and Legends from various cultures, and more…

“For oaths will only bind the honour-bound
Which Odin never was, no that I heard” (from Advice to Loki)

“Godzilla, shuffling closer, know what is what
Size matters.
But then so do prose and plot.” (from The Godzilla Sonnets - Godzilla vs Shakespeare)

And I still think that her poetry is stronger than her prose!

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.


More Jo Walton



Title: Starlings
Author: Jo Walton
Reviewer: Markus
Reviewer URL: http://thierstein.net
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Publisher URL: http://www.tachyonpublications.com
Publication Date: February 2018
Review Date: 180206
ISBN:9781616960575
Pages: 187
Format: ePub
Topic: Short Stories
Topic: Poetry

Starlings is a short story collection by Jo Walton, author of such books as the Hugo and Nebula award winning Among Others as well as the Small Change trilogy, beginning with Farthing, and the Thessaly trilogy, beginning with The Just City. Starlings is Walton’s first collection of short fiction—as she mentions in the introduction, Walton is better known for novels. But it’s not just short fiction—the book is sandwiched by poetry too: a poem at the beginning to introduce us and then a whole host to round us off at the end.

Walton tells us in the introduction to the collection that spent a while writing short stories without actually knowing how to write short stories. When this is pointed out, I think you can tell. Walton’s stories are weirdly shaped—they don’t necessarily travel or end where you’d expect them to. This doesn’t make them bad, mind you. Walton’s writing is as good as ever. But what really shines through this collection is the calibre of Walton’s ideas.

The collection takes on myths, fables, stories and histories and in almost every story I was captured by Walton’s inventiveness. From ‘Remember the Allosaur’, in which Cedric, a talking allosaurus, desperately wants to give his Hamlet, to ‘What Would Sam Spade Do?’ in which the future holds a race of clones of Jesus.

Walton fully embraces the silliness of some of her subjects. What may be my favourite of the collection, ‘Three Shouts on a Hill’ is a playscript about three children of an Irish lord and their pastiched mythic adventures. I can’t even begin to describe the madness and hilarity and also sadness and defiance of this story—it reminds me of Monty Python and Tom Stoppard at once. This ridiculousness runs through the collection like a delightful vein. See also: the Godzilla Sonnets(!).

Speaking of the poetry, sometimes it feels as if in a mixed collection poetry can take second fiddle to the prose. I don’t feel this happened here. Jo Walton’s poetry—which she admits she is a better hand at than short fiction—is deft and deep. I enjoyed every single poem. There are more myths and legends here, and Walton turns them upside-down and inside-out and looks at them from odd angles.

The title of this collection, ‘Starlings’, has a dual meaning that the opening poem unfolds. We know the little oil-coloured bird that flies in dazzling murmurations in their flocks. But a starling could also be a young star, as yet incomplete but beginning to shine. That’s what I get from these stories: the light from these artifacts of Walton’s past only just reaching me now, unformed and odd and very often beautiful.

Not a bad at all, if your into the genre. It is a mixture of Short Fiction stories, and Poems. The stories flowed nicely, and I enjoyed the poetry mixture. It was an inspirational read for me. Although at times it did seem to really slow down. I loved it, and would recommend it to any who enjoys short stories or poetry!! The mixture of it brings two communities into one whole. Lovely and artful, a definite must read for 2018.

I have never read anything by Jo Walton and don't usually read short stories but something about this book caught my eye. I really liked the way that Walton gives the background to each story (or poem or play), explaining that only one, in her opinion, is a 'real' short story. This made me feel like I was seeing how the author works which is fascinating. Some of the stories were described as being the first chapters of longer works - although they were all complete in themselves - which has certainly meant that I will happily pick up any future books by this author that I spot.

Starlings is a collection of short fiction – short stories, poetry, and everything in between. They are mostly scifi with a sprinkling of fantasy and a side of religion and mythology. There are literary allusions, historical snippets, some alternate history. Some of it's confusing and some of it's disturbing and some of it's funny and some of it's inspired, and I suspect every reader will find different ones tickles their fancy.

Personally, my favourites were Jane Austen to Cassandra, Turnover, Tradition, and A Burden Shared. It shows great talent that these four are such different stories; I never felt like this collection got dull or repetitive. If you’re looking for some entertaining light reading, pick up Starlings.

I received a copy of this story from the author through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This short story collection wasn't what I expected it to be. It was a mix of short stories, poems and even plays. It felt like a collection of the authors thoughts and ideas, instead of a "proper" short story collection. (I hope you know what I mean.)

As with every short story collection I enjoyed some of the stories (poems, plays) while some I didn't care that much about. Though I need to mention that even the stories that I enjoyed didn't blow me away, they were simply okay. I was quiet bored with most of the stories as well, I just didn't care about what was going on - it was a struggle to get through some of them. The stories were about anything and everything, there wasn't one underlying theme or genre. The same goes with the plays and poems. While that is an interesting concept it just felt all over the place. Though it was kind of interesting to see what the next story is going to be about and where it's going to be set.

Personally I didn't enjoy this short story collection much and I wouldn't recommend it.

I have wanted to read Jo Walton's novels for a while now and I can definitely say that after this collection of short stories that I am more excited than ever. As is sadly often the case with short story collections there were a few stories that did not work for me and a few poems that didn't either, however, the stories I liked, I adored.

Jo Walton has a way of choosing pitch perfect voices for her stories and they all sounded completely different depending on the genre she chose. She tells stories in a vast array of genres: re-tellings, science fiction, straight up fantasy. Some stories are more of a cheeky joke (she admits so freely) while others are highly political (I happen to like that in my genre fiction). I absolutely adored the fairy tale that starts this collection ("Three Twilight Tales"): it feels like a fairy tale while being completely original and I never saw the ending coming. I found "The Panda Coin" to be the strongest of the collection: here we follow one coin through different hands. Jo Walton manages to create a believable science fiction setting in just these glimpses. "Escape to Other Worlds With Science Fiction" would have been a brilliant start to a novel and I wanted more from this than I got.

The stories that seemed to be more for her own amusement were the ones that did not quite work for me: Especially "Remember the Allosaur" and "Joyful and Triumphant: St. Zenobius and the Aliens" just felt like extended inside jokes to me.

I am glad to have read this because I am now more eager than ever to get to Jo Walton's novels (where hopefully she won't need to tell me after each chapter how she thought it up).

I knew of Walton from her longer fiction but hadn't known that she wrote short stories or poetry (the title of this collection comes from a poem, the starlings being a metaphor for light received by the earth from a distant stellar nursery). So it was a delight to read this collection - even if the author, rather modestly, distances most of the contents from actually being "short stories". She maintains instead that many of them are exercises, attempts to capture what she calls mode, or simply written before she knew how to do short stories: "For ages I felt a fraud, because my short stories were either extended jokes, poems with the line breaks taken out, experiments with form or the first chapters of novels".



I'm less sure - whatever you call these pieces, there is some very good reading here. Starlings is a nicely varied collection showing a great range from fantasy to SF to fairy tales to things I can't really classify. They are vastly entertaining, often thought provoking and invariably worth paying attention to. While one or two of the pieces are very short or are definitely, as Walton says, jokes, most are longer and stand up well by themselves.



The first story in the book, Three Twilight Tales, is a good example, joyously adopting the form of the fairy tale. "Once upon a time", it begins, as it spins its three interrelated narratives featuring a pair lovers, a man made of moonshine, an inn (complete with a mantelpiece decorated with all kinds of interesting bric-a-brac about which I want to know more), the Lord's daughter, a blacksmith's apprentice, a pedlar, a king and a white hart. The atmosphere is magical, the people are real. Just perfect.



Jane Austen to Cassandra imagines a (massively) misdirected correspondence... Walton writes her letters with such conviction you'll believe, even so, that it might, might, might just be possible - and in so doing makes some sharp comments about history, war and fate.



Unreliable Witness features just that - an old woman in a nursing home whose memory is going but who nevertheless feels the loss of her old life ("I taught you to read myself and now you're taking my books away"). Such a person may imagine all sorts of things, but does that mean they can't encounter the extraordinary?



On the Wall is another fairytale. Walton explains that this was potentially the first chapter of a novel, retelling a classic story from an unusual point of view, but she realised that she need write no more, the rest simply unfolds. And she's so clearly right. It's a gorgeous story, with faint tones of menace, shadows of the future we know will come to pass (like Jane Austen to Cassandra, and several of the other stories). Walton is though being harsh on herself by saying it's not a short story, because it is, and a perfect one.



The Panda Coin is almost a mini SF epic. Set aboard a (perfectly realised) space station, it follows the path of a rather special coin from hand to hand, giving a glimpse of all levels of the little society portrayed. So many paths cross here and so many stories are hinted or left untold. Deftly done, with just the right amount said (and unsaid).



Remember the Allosaur is one of the jokes. What if an allosaur wanted an acting career? What could he (Cedric) do, and not do? It's acting, right so shouldn't he be able to act any part? As with other bizarre concepts in this collection, Walton writes with such conviction that, joking aside, you abandon scepticism and just think, well, what if...?



Sleeper is another excellent mini-epic. Set in a future gone drearily wrong, it both diagnoses a problem ("The Soviet Union crumbled away in 1989, let its end of the Overton Window go, and the world slid rightwards") and proposes a solution - one which raises some mind bending questions about personality, truth, memory and the future. Subtle, sophisticated and thought provoking.



Relentlessly Mundane is I think given the publication date some years ago an early entry in what is becoming a popular subgenera, which one might call post fantasy stress disorder: the return from a realm of fantasy adventure and peril to the mundane, and the effect this has. Just what would that do to you and what might it make you want to do? Here, after mourning their loss, a group of friends vow to put their experience to good use.



Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction is, with Sleeper and Relentlessly Mundane, another story that proposes something is wrong with the world. Here, though, we see it gradually going wrong. Told through adverts, newspaper cuttings and snippets of story - with that continual promise that SF can take you away from this - we see temptation and the coming of evil. We tell ourselves that we would resist this kind of evil but would we? Could we? It's scarily current and deeply troubling.



Joyful and Triumphant: St. Zenobius and the Aliens is a piece that Walton wrote for Christmas 2011. Its actually a fairly theological "what if" that plays little games and is also rather funny.



Turnover is a lovely SF story set on a generation ship. I loved the way it portrayed the ship with a vibrant cultural life, not just a bunch of redshirts and a team from Engineering. The designers of this community had appreciated what would be needed to keep a vessel alive and it isn't just air, water and food. But things will change when the ship reaches its destination: who wants to leave a metropolitan life for one of isolated farmsteading? Like Luke Skywalker, Fedra Orville wants to be at the centre of things. At the heart of this story is an ethical, cultural debate quite unlike anything I'd read before. Again, well-realised and thought provoking.



At the Bottom of the Garden is a short piece that made me deeply sad. But it is I think devastatingly well observed.



Out of It (for Susanna) is another retelling of an ages old story but I can't say which one because the gradual realisation is one of the joys of the story. Again, it completes something else while being complete in itself.



What a Piece of Work anticipates, I think, by several years much of the current debate about the powers - and dangers - of Big Data, as well as putting a spin on the old Asmovian idea of the Laws or Robotics. We never did get around to plumbing them into Google's servers, did we?



Parable Lost is an odd little piece: an "extended joke", Walton calls it, but as with some of the other pieces, to try to explain would give away the punchline, so I won't.



What Would Sam Spade Do? imagines a world where Jesus has been cloned. Just what would that be like? What if one of them set up as a hardboiled PI in a seamy district... partly a (well done) exercise in style, partly a genuinely intriguing piece of detective fiction, this is perhaps one the weirdest stories in the book - which is saying something!



Tradition is another weird story, one touching on themes of prejudice and tradition. Just why do we do things the same way as we were shown by our parents? And why did they do them And what's the point, really? Here the mystery is solved and it all comes to make sense but, the story seems to suggest, that didn't have to be the case.



What Joseph Felt is another very Christmasy story. I read this book in January, just missing the festivities but thesis such a well realised exploration of Joseph's role in all that that I may just show it to my wife, who's a vicar, when she's pulling together that difficult Christmas Day sermon in eleven moths' time...



The Need to Stay the Same pokes gentle fun at the pressure of creators to continually move on and explore new horizons - by posing an example that seems absurd yet comes very close to home.



A Burden Shared is a rather sad story, based on the premise of being able to assume another's pain. What difference would this burden make to a life? It's well thought out idea with some very human emotions behind it.



Three Shouts on a Hill is a play script, at one level a preposterous story beginning with Old Irish myths but then gradually roping in aspects of history, the modern world, other countries' myths and stories and finally becoming self aware and circular. By the time that happened it has rather grown on me. Great fun.



I feel less able to comment on Walton's poems (now who's the fraud, O Reviewer?) Like the stories they show great range, covering fantasy (Dragon's Song), neon midWest revenge (Not in this Town), Classical mythology (Hades and Persephone) and history (The Death of Petrarch) and Norse myths (Advice to Loki - that advice in a thoroughly modern vein: "You're worth it, and he's such a selfish prick. Go do new things, burn brighter than before...", Ask to Embla)



"Three Bears Norse" is a wonderful reworking of "Goldilocks" in the style of a saga ("An old home, a bear home, remote from human haunts/ Wall-girt and weather-warded, where ones wise in woodcraft

Lick into new life, a baby, a bear cub...")



"Machiavelli and Prospero", based, apparently, on a real letter, is like the Austen/ Cassandra correspondence an imagined communication between two people we may well suspect would have much to say to one another. "Cardenio" is a poem that Walton admits "doesn't actually mean anything" but it still says it in a very impressive way! In "Sleepless in New Orleans" the tone is very much set by the opening lines "The moon has set/ and the fucking Pleiades/ and I have to be on a train at seven o'clock/ this morning/ but here I am/ writing poetry under the covers/ as if I am twelve"



Finally, "The Godzilla Sonnets" is a zany collection of pieces imagining Godzilla as seen through the writing of Shakespeare (Just read it. It'll make sense, really it will).



Overall this is a nice collection. While some of the pieces probably aren't short stories as such they illustrate the range of what Walton can do and almost everything here contains an arresting thought, a well turned phrase or a perceptive, different view on something. Recommended, and not just for Walton completists!

Jo Walton says in the introduction to this book that short stories are not her cup of tea. She explains that it is difficult for her to write a story from beginning to end in three pages or less.

The short story books are not my thing honestly. I have a hard time going from one story to another every three pages. It is very uncomfortable for me and I don’t seem to advance much when reading. That’s what happened to me with this book. I don’t mean to say that I do not like short stories; that’s not the problem. The problem is when there are many stories one book. Even more when there is no connection between them. I got carried away by the name of the author. I’m hopeless.

Having said that I do not know how to qualify this book: have I enjoyed it? Well I would say not really. It’s good? Yes, definitely. But before I got to the middle of the book I was not only exhausted but I had lost interest. This may be your book, but not mine.

The confusion that I get from one story to the next prevents me from enjoying it as I should. But I have also found good things. It is a compendium of stories of fantasy and science fiction that Jo Walton wrote at different times of his career as a writer. At the end of each story there is a afterword in which Walton explains where the inspiration came from, where she was at that moment, when she wrote it or the mood she was in.

My favourite story is one in which Jane Austen writes a letter to her sister Cassandra but the letter is lost through time and space and the person who receives that letter is Cassandra the fortune teller from Troy to whom Apollo gave the gift of divination on the condition that she slept with him. Then she refused and as punishment the god promised her that no one would ever believe her word.

Apart from this story about Jane Austen in the book you can find stories of cloned dinosaurs, artificial intelligences that need to be updated, kings who fall in love with farmers, coins that travel from hand to hand…

Perhaps if I had read one story every few days I would have enjoyed it more. Who knows. Yet I need to remark the fact that the problem was in me, not in the book.

This was the first time I got to read a short story collection on Magical realism, Aliens and anthology (!?). I liked the stories but not all. Some were too complex or too simple for me to understand, that is I am used to very straight forward stories. I am a dumb person in that matter. Plus the author was new to me and I was getting used to the style.

The Stories I liked:

1.Three Twilight Tales
2.Jane Austen to Cassandra- This was Funny!!
3.Unreliable Witness
4.The Panda Coin
5.Joyful and Triumphant: St. Zenobius and the Aliens
6.What a Piece of Work- After reading this, I like to go to page 99 in google search, Just in case
7.What Would Sam Spade Do?
8.Tradition
9.What Joseph Felt
10.A Burden Shared
11.Three Shouts on a Hill (A Play)
12.Poetry -UMMM I am not sure, I felt that part a bit fleeting.
It was a good and a bit off my normal kind of read. But I am glad that I read it. It gave me a different perspective on reading and more open to a different style which was unknown to me.

If you have read Jo Walton before, I think you will like it much more than me. I surely look forward in reading more Jo Walton in future.

Happy Reading!!!

ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!

To use one word to describe this it would be that it is eclectic. The stories were my favorite part and they were very short for short stories. Some were just a couple of paragraphs and other were about 5 pages long. My one of my favorite was Jane Austen to Cassandra, which was a short exchange between Jane Austen in the Regency era and Cassandra, in Ancient Greece. Think The Lake House but two pages long and something I never knew I needed before I read it. Turnover was an original science fiction story centered around a group of teenagers on a long distance spaceship. First, there is space ballet which is again something I did not know I needed and how our actions can affect the future. Plus there was lots of gnocchis which I love. I think that I would really enjoy reading longer versions of these.

Now some of the stories were really weird. For example, At The Bottom of the Garden, which is about a child who pulls the wings off of a fairy. And this child is freaking sadistic; she is pulling off the fairies wings and then kills the fairy after her friend invites her to go swimming. It was a great expose on how we humans treat smaller creatures. The play, Three Shouts on a Hill, was cool but still very weird. Also, the ending was pretty good and made it worth the read. The poetry was my least favorite part of the whole book as I am not really one for poetry and some of them I had a hard time understanding.

Overall, if you want something short to read but is brain food that I would definitely suggest reading this.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me this copy to review.

This review will be published on 15th February at the link provided below and on Goodreads.

In brief ★★★

Imagine you walk into Jo Walton's house, pull one of her writing notebooks off the shelf, and start thumbing through the pages; that's the experience of reading this eclectic collection of poems, short stories and a play. While you won't find a uniting thread or theme, which will be unsatisfying for some, you will find wild creativity, humour, philosophy and adventure. Clearly a talented writer, Walton canvasses both sci-fi and fantasy in bite-sized chunks. This was my first exposure to her work, and on the basis of her fertile imagination, I'm curious to try her novels.

In depth

Plot: Each of Walton's short stories are absorbing, and their breadth is actually quite astonishing. This collections includes fairytales and nursery rhymes retold (On The Wall, Three Bears Norse) as well as vivid sci-fi worlds (The Panda Coin, Sleeper, Turnover), some of which are the beginnings of novels never completed. I was easily absorbed into each world, but was often left wanting more, or a little dissatisfied by the simplistic resolutions. Some feel hurried (What Would Sam Spade Do) and others have so very little to them it's hard to expect them to leave much of an impression (Remember the Allosaurs, At the Bottom of the Garden), but Walton writes in her introduction that short fiction doesn't come easily to her, and this collection shows different aspects of that journey.

Themes: It's difficult to capture the wide range of themes covered by this work - the ethics of artificial intelligence, inequality, racism, belonging (or not), amongst others of family, identity and hope. As the best fantasy or sci-fi does, this collection holds a mirror up to the world we live in, bringing the fantastical close to home with contemporary dilemmas.

Writing: Walton is clearly a talented writer - she evokes complex systems in sci-fi worlds with so few words, plunging the reader right in with confidence and aplomb. The stories are well-polished, but not all of them feel whole or totally fleshed out, giving the collection a scattered vibe overall. The poetry generally follows more traditional rhyme schemes (including a fun series of sonnets about Godzilla), but she uses words beautifully and to good aural effect. The play was one of the most enjoyable reads for me - irreverent and fast-paced, it was a real romp of a read.

Recommended if you liked: Rubik

I received an advance e-book copy of this book from Tachyon Publications and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.