Ann VanderMeer

The Vandermeers' mission to coin the term "New Weird" set them on this undertaking. It's an excellent anthology, a fine collection of great short stories, and a wonderful reference for obscure authors that deserve to be rediscovered. But it fails in it's stated purpose: to define a new genre. The concept of the "New Weird" is as evasive as it ever was; it remains essentially a shorter way of saying literary fantasy and horror, and that in turn is a nicer way of saying fantasy and horror that isn't derivative crap. The Vandermeers have excellent taste but they need to write their own nonfiction on just what exactly the "New Weird" is in order for the term to stick.… (more)

Whew, this one was a tome! 72 short stories and nearly 950 pages, all on the theme of time travel. You'd think that after spending two weeks working my way through all of that, I'd be thoroughly tired of the subject, but somehow it never got old. Probably this is due to the fact that there's such a wide variety of different styles and different approaches to the subject here (including a few one could argue aren't really time travel stories at all, and yet still do feel as if they belong somehow). Some are pretty straightforward, as time travel stories go, and others are deeply, deeply strange. (And there are a pretty good percentage of the latter, as one might expect from any book with Jeff VanderMeer's name on the cover.) We've got tales that span billions of years and/or staggering numbers of alternate timelines; small, intimate stories about individual human lives; and a whole lot of stuff in-between.

The stories also span a pretty good stretch of ordinary linear time, from the 1880s through the early 2010s, when the anthology was published. Some are well-known, deeply influential works: Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" is here, as is an excerpt from The Time Machine. But there are also stories I'd never read by authors I'd never heard of. I hesitate to call it a definitive collection. Several of the first stories that come to mind when I think of famous time travel tales are notably absent, although perhaps for good reasons, one of which is that there seems to be no room here for stories that only exist to go, "Oooh, look, a paradox!" In any case, there are a lot of time travel stories in the history of SF, and I suspect if you asked 100 people to compile 950-page anthologies of them, you'd get 100 very different books.

As for the one we got in this particular timeline, unsurprisingly not every single story is quite to my taste. I can't really say that any of them made me sit bolt upright and go "wow!", either. But taken as a whole, there is something fascinating and more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts satisfying about it. I do feel rather like I've just been on a big, weird, cool, kaleidoscopic timey-wimey journey.… (more)