capellan's review
4.0
Solid collection of SF short stories. I particularly liked the "EconoWar" tales. And since it's available free on Kindle, you can't really beat the price!
buttonsbeadslace's review
2.0
This is another book I got because it's currently free for Kindle.
Some of the short stories are really fascinating and some of them are really unpleasant. I haven't finished the book but I can tell you this: skip the "The Earth of Nenkunal" section. Just skip it. It would be hard to make it more misogynistic if you tried, and that's before the main character rapes someone. The details make it even worse. Just don't.
Also: Eugenics. And silly eugenics at that. No, dude, being a lazy or clumsy or unmotivated engineer is not genetic! People are too complicated to categorize on a straight line from good to bad and success in business does not necessarily correspond to even what you think you're talking about. "Undesirable strains" "low-survival types" "losers" "freakish types" he says. Not to mention "genetic barbarians".
And then there's the shiny new more advanced subspecies of humans, whose most obvious distinguishing feature is having solid bone in the bridge of the nose instead of just cartilage. Sounds like something picked at random, right? Nope. "One step farther from the primordial flat-faced apeman," says the character who has it. Sure, go ahead, that argument's never been used by racists. /sarcasm
But I still couldn't help but like Gweanvin, until I got to the part where-- even though it's many thousand years in the future and he's just explained how none of the people involved are actually human-- men just inherently have "polygamous instincs" and women are the opposite.
In 19 short stories, we get two female POV characters. Neither is human.
The author has a huge amount of imagination and creativity, clearly, but somehow he can't conceive of women EVER growing beyond what he thinks they are in 1970. The main thing I got out of this book is a greater appreciation of female SF writers.
Some of the short stories are really fascinating and some of them are really unpleasant. I haven't finished the book but I can tell you this: skip the "The Earth of Nenkunal" section. Just skip it. It would be hard to make it more misogynistic if you tried, and that's before the main character rapes someone. The details make it even worse. Just don't.
Also: Eugenics. And silly eugenics at that. No, dude, being a lazy or clumsy or unmotivated engineer is not genetic! People are too complicated to categorize on a straight line from good to bad and success in business does not necessarily correspond to even what you think you're talking about. "Undesirable strains" "low-survival types" "losers" "freakish types" he says. Not to mention "genetic barbarians".
And then there's the shiny new more advanced subspecies of humans, whose most obvious distinguishing feature is having solid bone in the bridge of the nose instead of just cartilage. Sounds like something picked at random, right? Nope. "One step farther from the primordial flat-faced apeman," says the character who has it. Sure, go ahead, that argument's never been used by racists. /sarcasm
But I still couldn't help but like Gweanvin, until I got to the part where-- even though it's many thousand years in the future and he's just explained how none of the people involved are actually human-- men just inherently have "polygamous instincs" and women are the opposite.
In 19 short stories, we get two female POV characters. Neither is human.
The author has a huge amount of imagination and creativity, clearly, but somehow he can't conceive of women EVER growing beyond what he thinks they are in 1970. The main thing I got out of this book is a greater appreciation of female SF writers.
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