While her work sometimes hints at the fantastic, Lydia Millet isn’t strictly speaking a fantasy writer, certainly not in the sense of questing elves or weird alternate universes, and certainly not as evidenced in her new short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys.  Yet Millet’s work  is frequently mentioned in genre venues; indeed, one of the stories collected here, “Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov,” (in which the famed inventor of light bulbs and power generation attains metaphysical illumination by continually re-running…

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For this edition of my irregular review of the latest (more or less) short fiction, I thought I’d try something a little different.  Usually I try to focus on the stories that worked the most for me, with maybe some attention on those that didn’t and why; at the same time, I also try to convey a flavor of everything else, if only just to alert you that an author is in the publication without, for any number of reasons,…

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In his for the most part disdainful observations of science fiction as a cultural phenomenon, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, Thomas Disch characterizes Ray Bradbury, among other notable genre authors of the post- WW II generation, as being in “affluent decline” by the 1980s, suffering from “the literary equivalent of repetition compulsion” (122). He also rues that SF is a young man’s game, not because it is physically exhausting, but because the marketplace focuses on a largely juvenile…

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The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Tall Tales on the Iron Horse Reviewed by David Soyka Well, here we are again with another short fiction collection with a dumb and unoriginal title – The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy is the latest entrant in a long line of insipidly titled collections that have contributed their small part towards the ghettoization of the genre.  Presumably this is not editor Ellen Datlow’s fault, but rather that…

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