User Profile

Fun twist on time travel, but also I think this might have worked better as a novella in some places, a play in others, a few short stories, an X-Files episode or something like that, etc. I don't remember why I picked this up, used (in retired-library-book plastic sheathing even) or when. It's been on my "to read" pile for a year or so. I'm probably going to drop my copy in a little free library rather than keep it.

"there's a Cheers story in it" set me up to expect lighter stuff but these are pretty damned serious stories. I particularly liked "Exit Zero", "Can Only Houses Be Haunted", "The Ecstasy of Sam Malone", "Flowers and Their Meanings", and "Viola in Midwinter", which is nearly half the stuff here.

Read along with Hubert Dreyfus's "Philosophy 6" Berkeley lectures (archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_461120619) from 2007, which helped motivate me. Before I started, I wasn't sure I would continue through and finish the comedy. Having read this Inferno, I'm pretty sure I will.

Fun page turner alt-history of an American dropped into a world without the west. Almost YA, and much of it's time, and I'm unsure how it would survive critical analysis today, but I liked it.

My third Waldrop collection, and as a completionist confonting a best-of, I ended up skipping a few stories I've already read in "Howard Who?" and "Going Home Again." Still a must for Waldrop readers. I particularly enjoyed "Night of the Cooters" and "Flying Saucer Rock and Roll."

My first exposure to Waldrop, via a Kelly Link interview and small beer press opens with a bang, "The Ugly Chickens," but I think my favorite was "Man-Mountain Gentian" about the Waldrop-invented world of profeesional zen-sumo wrestling. I immediately started to seek out the rest of his work.

I particularly enjoyed "The Sawing Boys" and "El Castillo de la Perseverancia." Waldrop's unique voice has me working through all of his (often overlapping) story collections, and makes me wonder if I should start going to SF cons to hear the current generation's readings of their own works.

Delightful, ridiculous companion to Pnin,. I'm confident I missed a lot (I only occasionally referred back to the lines of the poem referenced in the commentary) and still enjoyed it.

One of the author quotes on Folk's website (www.katefolk.com/home) blurbs these as "if Kafka and Camus and Bradbury were penning episodes of Black Mirror" and yeah, pretty much. I'm too much of a ninny to watch Black Mirror, and if someone made this book of stories into a show I would be too much of a ninny to watch it, but I enjoyed each of these little tales of mostly single women, mostly in SF, dealing with some pretty strange things. Body horror, as promised.

Franklin's lectures are no less relevant in 2025 than they were when she added the final three chapters in 1999 to texts delivered as lectures in 1989 conceived as early as in the 1970s with respect to a a gem of fascinating sets of dialectics regarding what she calls the real world of technology. Holistic and prescriptive work, planners and planees, environment and nature, liberation and exploitation, time and space.

A fun break, finished in a day, deserving of it's reputation.