You’ll find this in the collection, Zima Blue and Other Stories, and the anthology In Dreams.
A rather different take on why the dance music craze spread like wildfire in the 90’s. As someone who was totally into the London acid techno scene in the 90’s this was right up my alley.
A fun little short with a nice touch of nostalgia for some of us.
Next up in the Alastair Reynolds timeline is Byrd Land Six.
You’ll find this in the collection, Zima Blue and Other Stories.
A really enjoyable, short, post-apocalypse story. A bit confusing at first as it jumps back and forth between a human girl and an AI machine, but it all makes total sense at the end.
Next up from Alastair will be Digital to Analogue.
You’ll find this in the anthology, Deep Navigation.
Messages from the future found inside fish falling from the sky landing in front of the person the message was meant for.
Basically, someone from the future is being naughty and messing with the past in an indigenous community in Alaska.
Other than The Big Hello, of which i have no idea when published, this is Alastair’s first published story. So it’s very early Alastair Reynolds, so don’t be expecting Revelation Space or anything like it.
But it’s a reasonable, quirky, little read that’ll keep you happily ensconced in you favourite reading pit for a while.
It’s listed on Wikipedia without a date, but it’s first in the queue of Alastair’s uncollected short fiction, and it is The Big Hello, afterall, so you may as well read it first if you’re reading all of Alastair’s books: me thinks.
You’ll have to hunt around the internet for this, it was originally published in German translation in a convention program. But, like most rare things, it’s well worth a bit of a hunt around.
Basically, it’s a greeting from the rest of the galaxy informing us stupid Homo sapiens of a bit of etiquette, manners and how to go about things outside of out little insular bubble. But, let’s be honest, we all know people like Musk & Co. are going to ignore everything Alastair says and totally fuck it up for the rest of us.
There’s two short stories in this book and i’ll review each of them separately below.
A short while ago i read The Maid, which was my first trip into the writing of Yasutaka, and i thoroughly enjoyed it: so much that i decided to collect every book of his i could find and read them in published order. And so i began with The Girl who Leapt Through Time from 1967.
What doesn’t get a mention when approaching this book is that it’s a children’s book, i would perhaps place it around 11-12 year old level, so that’s something to bear in mind if you do decide to read it.
So it’s very simple writing and a rather simple story about some children having a bit of a crazy time with time travel and teleportation. I felt the best thing about this was it’s simplicity in it’s writing because as an adult you don’t have to think about anything and can just breeze along with the story itself, and it’s quite a good little story.
So yeah, i’m more than happy to have come back to Yasutaka’s earliest book that’s so far been translated into English. Definitely worth a read if you’re a fan of his writing, or if you just want a quick and easy read of some temporal sci-fi.
This is quite a different story to the previous one. Once again, it’s another children’s book, but this time dealing with the theme of repressed trauma manifesting as unexplained fears.
Although it’s a book for children, i do feel that there’s a few things for most adults to learn here as well, especially parents, whose words and actions can create all kinds of unintended consequences for children.
And that’s me done with this book. The Maid was next in the original publishing time line of Yasutaka’s translated books, but i already read that, so next up will be Paprika, which i hope to get around to reading some time soon as i’m really enjoying Yasutaka’s writing.
