Return to Mark/Space
ISBN 1-561-46254-3 (US trade pbk),,, 1-561-46204-7 (US pbk)
fiction, short stories, science fiction, cyberpunk, fantasy, slipstream
Published as Author's Choice Monthly , Issue 4, January 1990...no ISBN listed. Cover drawing of Lewis Shiner by G.Barr, © 1989.
"What I have done is revise all the stories in the book. Mostly this was a matter of details: breaking up jumbled sentences, getting rid of gerunds and qualifiers, losing useless words and phrases. I've made no attempt to change structures, themes, or points of view. Whatever charm the stories may have originally had should still be intact." --Lewis Shiner (from the Introduction, 1990).
"The stories in this book are, by and large, the ones that broke me into SF. They were all written before my first SF novel, which marked a watershed in my career. I haven't included anything which has been reprinted before, even though it meant leaving out a couple of significant stories. I've also left out a number of stories that I'm not particularly thrilled with anymore, including my first sale, 'Tinker's Damn'.
"Snowbirds" by Lewis Shiner
(originally published in Analog , 1982)
"Soldier, Sailor" by Lewis Shiner
(originally published 1990)
"This is obviously an early version of my novel Frontera , which was published in 1984. The characters started off in a mainstream novel called And Then Palestrina , which I dropped out of college to finish in the summer of 1970." --Lewis Shiner.
"Kings of the Afternoon" by Lewis Shiner
(originally published 1980)
"This was the first of what I think of as my 'alternate biography' stories Later attempts included 'Mystery Train' and 'Jeff Beck'... It's also a kind of companion piece to another story, 'Twilight Time'." --Lewis Shiner.
"Tommy and the Talking Dog" by Lewis Shiner
(originally published in Twilight Zone , 1982)
"Omphalos" by Lewis Shiner
(originally published 1990)
"Promises" by Lewis Shiner
(originally published 1982)
"Dancers" by Lewis Shiner
(originally published 1987... cyberpunk)
"Plague" by Lewis Shiner
(originally published 1983)
"Nine Hard Questions About the Nature of the Universe" by Lewis Shiner
(originally published 1983)
"These are early stories, so the writing is not as sophisticated as in Shiner's later work." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , January 1998).
*note: I finally managed to find a copy of Author's Choice Monthly , Issue 4, which was a collection of short fiction by Lewis Shiner subtitled Nine Hard Questions About the Nature of the Universe . I've not seen any subsequent reissues (namely, those from June 1991). Could someone help to clarify this?
Available from:
Pulphouse Publishing
P.O.Box 1227
Eugene, OR 97440
USA
|
|
|
Return to Mark/Space