Andy Duncan (1)Reseñas

Enjoyable, character-centered novella revolving around a deep Florida spring steeped in legend and mystery. Not much plot. Not much science fiction. Extra fun for fans of old Tarzan movies and mid-Century sci-fi flicks.

"What a thing to tell people. Am I ashamed? Yeah, probably. But am I sorry? No, I am not sorry. There's a difference."

Good collection of stories of fictional versions of real people, with some occasional unreality thrown in.

Hugo-nominated Novella

I only put this down when forced to. Only 4 stars because it didn't go where I expected it to go.

More of my thoughts on the story here. Contains spoilers:
http://ciaracatscifi.blogspot.com/2014/04/wakulla-springs-by-andy-duncan-and.htm...

I've been trying to figure out how to review this for a while. Some stories were great, some just started and then...ended, with no real idea what the point was. I liked it and disliked it at the same time. I don't think I would recommend it overall, maybe just a couple stories to particular people. The style was a little all over the place, sometimes more fantasy, sometimes more sci-fi, sometimes just plain old fiction, but he never seemed to commit fully to any one style even in a single story. I did finish it, but am confused why I did, lol.

An entertaining collection of short stories of science fiction and magical realism. The standouts for me were “Real Indians,” a story about Native American construction workers in the 1920s; “Slow As A Bullet,” a story written as a folk tale, about a man who bets that he can outrun a bullet; and “Close Encounters,” about a man coming to terms with an alien encounter decades before.

I got this thru ER for an honest review. Honestly, this collection of sci-fi and near sci-fi stories, was a bit of a miss for me. I ended up putting it down about 3/4 of the way thru. Perhaps it was just the mood I was in at the time. There were a couple stories that were exceptional that made the read worthwhile, perhaps I'll go back eventually and pick up the rest. My favorites were; "An Agent of Utopia" - a assassin from Utopia, "The Map to the Homes of the Stars" - life in a small town and the map to the stars in the mind of two young boys, and "Senator Bilbo" - a delightful imaging of Bilbo Baggins as a Senator in the Legislature of the Shire.

OK, I'm not much of a fiction fan, I had high hopes for this collection since I used to like SF more. It disappointed; I could barely get through it, and honestly, gave up about midway through. I see a number of other reviewers are referring to Southern folklore, and maybe that's part of why I just didn't get any immersive interest in any of these stories. Most of the ones I managed to read all the way through were just a dull slog.

Andy Duncan is one of the great unsung writers of fantasy and this collection of his selected short work readily showcases his best characteristics, including his distinctively Southern, unapologetically wry voice. That voice sets his work apart from the typical in the genre, as does the fact that so many of his stories are infused with Southern folklore and place-consciousness, giving them a realer-than-real tone that makes a reader of fantasy want to soak in the writer's world.

While one or two of the older stories here might be read in the current climate as over-soaked in masculine nostalgia, most are smart and culturally conscious. Duncan's penchant for literary reference ranges from the Antebellum-era folktales of enslaved peoples to Thomas More's "Utopia" -- as the title tale makes clear -- providing plenty of food for those who get the nods, as well as for those who don't mind googling as they read. While this isn't necessarily a book to fly through all in one sitting -- its range of moods and references rewards a slower sampling -- it is definitely deserves the proper time to appreciate.

Wow, there's some serious literary range on display here. Stories shifting between Science fiction, fantasy, weird, absurdism, ghost stories, southern folklore, history, biography, and so on...along with loads of humor. Something like reading an entire season of X-Files episodes, but funnier.

In a few of the stories, the title one for example, I found the style somewhat incoherent, similar to free jazz....verbal fireworks which are perhaps an acquired taste. But for the most part, reading these stories was an engrossing and entertaining experience. I especially enjoyed Zora and the Zombie. Highly recommended.

I had a copy of Crossroads ages ago and lent it out. It didn't return... so I finally obtained another copy and am still enamored with this collection. If you want to borrow it, LMK - you'll just need to sign a few dozen contracts and leave me your car keys in return.

I finished my first read through most of The Pottawatomie Giant. I say most because I read "Unique Chicken" three times and "Diorama" and "Dragaman" twice, so 'first read' wouldn't be accurate. Love this collection of short stories. Duncan is masterful.

About halfway in, I thought "I'm going to need more copies..." And I started making lists. People to whom I should send copies, before they steal mine; where the good copy will go in the bookshelves (next to the O'Connors? Vexing the Dubus?). Duncan has poured Appalachia into my science fiction and it's a great mix.

A story about family, tradition, and fulfilling your dreams. It was wonderful, beautifully written, some sections leaving me unbearably sad and the final section uplifting me. My one problem with this story is that it's barely genre. There's no hint of genre at all during the first two sections, and only small hints during the latter two.

Andy Duncan was born in the South, and is intimately familiar with the tropes of Southern folklore as well as the people and their language. He uses these to good effect in his latest collection, which contains some of his most well-known stories, along with two new stories previously uncollected.

Whether he is discussing the meeting between heavyweight champ Jess Willard and Harry Houdini (The Pottawatomie Giant) or Zora Neale Hurston's trip to Haiti to learn about zombies (Zora and the Zombie), Duncan's writing puts you into the story. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award but has not won, but he has been awarded three World Fantasy Awards, and the Nebula for the last story in the collection, Close Encounters, a beautiful story about a man who was among the early claimers of having been visited by extraterrestrials, and how his life has changed, and may be poised to change again.

Duncan's prose is similar to that of Jeffrey Ford, Gene Wolfe, or early Jack Vance; if those three aren't recommendation enough to make you read this book, you'll be missing out on the work of one of the great modern fantasists.

This was an ER book. It's a collection of (i guess) fantasy short stories. I found them all incredibly dull. The only ones I really liked were the last two, and even they weren't really all that great.

I enjoyed Andy Duncan's recent collection of short stories, "An Agent of Utopia" a great deal. The characters - many taken from the real world - were filled with human frailties and strengths. The complexity of his characters propelled the stories along and provided interesting twists and turns as the stories unfolded. I especially enjoyed the title story, Zora and the Zombies and Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse. The Map to the Homes of the Stars was almost an anti-coming of age story. I liked the way the stories teetered on the edge of fantasy. Highly recommended.

I received this book as part of the Early Reviewers Program. This was a great book of short stories. Very enjoyable for someone who likes their tales sprinkled with historical figures, especially southern writers. Duncan is hailed as a fabulist, but these stories just barely bumped up against the fantastic...I'm not convince that moniker is appropriate. I particularly enjoyed the stories about Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Conner. Great stuff here!½

Entertaining book about the peculiarities of the State of my birth is marred by omissions and errors, such as:

Missing: Slapout from the list of interesting place names. Called such because the storekeeper always said he was "slap out" of something.

Error: "The Bottle" in Lee County did not get its name from a sign of a coke bottle. There was a large wooden replica of a Nehi orange soda! See https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/40/The_Bottle%2C_Alabama.....

Error: The Brewton blueberry drop can't take place SIMULTANEOUSLY with the ball drop in Times Square--they are in two different time zones. Unless the folks in Brewton, who don't like to stay up late, hold their New Year's celebration an hour early.

Error: Women certainly were eligible to receive patents in 1901. Women had filed for and received thousands of patents by then and there were also woman patent examiners!

Error: The Carnival of the Waterbugs fountain is outside of the FORMER KinderCare headquarters. KinderCare left Montgomery long before this book was written.

And there were others I didn't bother to verify. I wonder how many others I missed because I was familiar with what the author was writing about? Books like this require a little research and fact checking, and I'm disappointed when the author doesn't do so.½

2.96 average rounds up (just a tiny bit) to 3 stars.
Definitely a higher quality of writing, overall, than found in many genre anthologies.

*** A Place of Mojo - Honoree Fanonne Jeffers. Impressive story, really well-written, and I felt like it accurately captured elements of Southern African-American society, just post-slavery. However, it's really not 'fantastic.'

**** The Wounded - Richard Butner. Shades of H.P. Lovecraft here, in this tale of a Korean War vet turned photography student, who unexpectedly discovers the dark secret of a remote seacoast town.

*** The Map to the Homes of the Stars – Andy Duncan. A couple of teen boys who never get a date are obsessed with driving past the homes of the girls they know from school; too shy to actually talk to them. But after one fateful night, one is left behind… An unsettling allegory of male coming-of-age.

**** Under Construction – James Sallis. A brief story of a future couple renting out a faux dilapidated dump of an apartment – and thinking it’s the most special thing ever. I read it twice in a row – it’s one of those pieces where the important things are off-screen. Effective.

*** Houston, 1943 - Gene Wolfe. A weird tale of a small boy unwittingly caught up in a voodoo ritual that’s somehow gotten out of hand. The treasure-seeking spell-casters are possessed themselves, and spirits from childhood tales are woven through this nightmare.

*** See My King All Dressed in Red – James L. Cambias. A seemingly-happy gay couple apparently have adjusted to life after having to move out of a flooded, abandoned New Orleans. But one of these men suffers an increasing obsession with Mardi Gras, the past, and the lost city.

*** My Life is Good – Scott Edelman. Alien ‘Visitors’ force a physicist to use a time machine to monitor and control the life of an inane pop singer. Is there some meaning behind this thankless job?

*** Rose – Brett Lott. Based on “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. I don’t believe I’ve read the Faulkner story; I feel that one probably should, to appreciate this work. It is undoubtedly well written, although not one tiny bit fantastic. I’d classify this as psychological drama.

** Boar Lake – Mark L. Van Name. A group of old friends gather to mourn the imminent loss of the national park where they’ve shared time and memories. And then a mysterious and inexplicable event occurs. I’d probably prefer the story if it weren’t so very inexplicable.

*** The Mission - Jack McDevitt. A post-apocalyptic setting, and a philosophical argument between logic and emotion. Well-presented - I found myself seeing both characters' point of view. I liked this better than the novels I've read from McDevitt.

*** The Moon and the Stars - Marian Carcache. An evil voodoo queen and a romantic tragedy.

*****The Specialist's Hat - Kelly Link. A re-read. I love this: "Claire's eyes are grey, like a cat's fur, he says, but Samantha's are gray, like the ocean when it has been raining." YES! Everyone (but Kelly Link) thinks I'm a lunatic when I tell them that 'grey' and 'gray' are clearly different colors, and Link understands (and agrees with me) on the precise difference. Oh, and the story? It's kick-ass, and spooky as hell. For anyone who likes children-stuck-in-haunted-houses tales.

** Christus Destitutus - Bud Webster. Christ returned to earth, but this time lived unannounced and anonymous. Now, he's dying in a pauper's hospice. Well done, but just not my thing...

** Ool Athag - Don Webb. Begins like a sword-and-sorcery type fantasy, and ends with crossing the line of artsy pretension. Had to roll my eyes.

*** The Yukio Mishima Cultural Association of Kudzu Valley, Georgia - Michael Bishop. A pretentious (and fired) ex-professor retires to a small hick town to lick his wounds - and inadvertently starts an obsessive craze for Yukio Mishima among the townsfolk. Bishop takes the concept past absurdity - and it's pretty funny.

*** The Last Geek – Michael Swanwick. A commentary on the utter weirdness of academic appreciation of ‘low’ culture.

*** Slippered Feet – Daniel Wallace. An older couple are enthusiastically planning a vacation to an exotic location, and enjoying trying to learn a bit of the language in advance. But then, things start to go horribly wrong. Nice use of psychological ambiguity.

** Alabama – Kalamu Ya Salaam. Why is this in this book? It’s not fiction, and not even slightly fantastic. It’s (sort-of) an essay exploring murder, suicide and racism. I was going with it (and felt it had some decent insights) until the end, which abruptly tries to connect fictional media violence with actual violence, and human evil. Sorry Mr. Salaam, but if you’re going to go there, you’re going to have to condemn your own work, as it also contains violence and bloody death.

*** Madeline’s Version – F. Brett Cox. Like ‘Rose,’ this is a retelling-from-a-different-viewpoint, this time of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ The feel of the elements of the story as portrayed here remind me more of Tanith Lee than of Poe: a brother and sister living alone, incestuously, in a once-grand but decaying house. Illness, hints of a curse, maybe some kind of vampirism?

*** Tchoupitoulas Bus Stop – Lynn Pitts. OK, but this felt like every ghost story told late at night at a sleepover party that you’ve ever heard.

*** Water Dog God: A Ghost Story – Brad Watson. Not so much of a ghost story. More of a horror tale of rural hicks, abuse, incest and the tragedy of powerlessness.

** Mankind Journeys through Forests of Symbols – Fred Chappell. In this allegorical tale, a dream or an unfulfilled artistic urge and lead to inconvenient physical manifestations. When one of these manifestations blocks the road in a small town, the only solution is for the Sheriff’s office to hold a poetry contest.

*** The Mikado’s Favorite Song – Marian Moore. Newly promoted, a businesswoman learns that management has some unanticipated drawbacks.

*** The Perfecting of the Chopin Valse No. 14 in E Minor – Sena Jeter Naslund. A woman lives with her aging mother, but cannot emotionally follow her into the eerie yet somehow wonderful realms that the older woman seems to be moving toward. A metaphor for senility? Or something else?

*** Making Faces – Ian McDowell. An alterna-teen and her younger brother deal with emotional fallout and their father’s newly-found lunatic religiosity, after their mother’s death. When an ancient artifact enters the picture, a gory finale is in the works… pretty much straight-up horror.

*** John Kessel – Every Angel is Terrifying. A murderer on the lam acquires a cat that he seems to think grants wishes. Will he be able to turn his life around, or is hope an illusion? Another one for the horror fans.

I'm not usually a fan of UFO-type stories, but this is a nicely done, wistful tale of an elderly man who's put his former fame as an alleged contactee behind him. But when a lovely woman knocks on his door asking for an interview, the past gets stirred up unexpectedly.

Fine, but no real plot. Fortunately, I read this long after acquiring so forgot the book description. If I read it with the description of monsters and mystery in mind I'd have been quite disappointed.

This is a nice narrative with interesting character development, particularly in first 2 parts. Recommend for a light summer read.

Not What I Expected!

It’s said that the Wakulla Springs wilderness – including the fifteen miles of caves which cuts through the water’s depths - is home to a menagerie of creatures, both real and mythical: black panthers, rhesus macaques, the Clearwater Monster, the Skunk Ape, and a thousand-pound hammerhead known as Old Hitler. Yet “Wakulla Springs” is less a tale about monsters than it is the journey of one family (and, by extension, the evolution of social mores and attitudes). Beginning with matriarch Mayola, the story of the Williamses is inexorably linked to the Springs: by culture, tradition, and superstition – and a series of cheesy Tarzan movies shot on location in Wakulla County, Florida.

The plot’s surprisingly sparse, especially given the story’s length and description. (“Wakulla Springs” reads more like a novella than a short story.) Each of the four parts or chapters focuses on a different member of the Williams clan, and his or her experiences with Wakulla Springs and the exclusive, “whites only” resort situated on its banks. Cultural signposts indicate each segment’s particular timeline; while African-American Mayola tries to pursue her education in the Jim Crow south, by story’s end we meet her granddaughter, Dr. Anna Williams – a multiracial woman of African-American, white, and Cuban descent – visiting Wakulla Springs during sabbatical to study the encroachment of invasive species into the area.

It makes for an enjoyable and engaging read, even if most of the “monsters” we meet are of the human and institutional variety.

P.S.: Free Cheetah!

http://www.easyvegan.info/2014/10/16/wakulla-springs-by-andy-duncan-and-ellen-kl...

氛圍營造得非常好, 時代感強烈

Wakulla Springs is one of those places I've always dreamed of visiting. It's the largest and deepest freshwater springs (some say in the world). It's been the home of manatees and monsters, and, once upon a time, movie-stars, too. Wakulla Springs is also a 2014 Hugo nominated original fiction (novella) and I was able to read it as a free download, courtesy of the publisher, Tor.

I read a huge variety of fiction, so something that carries a bit of speculation, magical realism, and history is a treat to read. To me, the best kind of science fiction is that which can actually dip into our daily lives and swirl around in the undercurrents of our world. Sure, big, scary monsters, or sleek metal warriors are science fiction fun, too, but give me the stuff that lurks in the shadows and I'm happy. This novella took a place that has captured my imaginings since childhood, wrapped them up in a historical context and tied them with a pretty ribbon of surrealism. The story is really a multigenerational one, beginning with Mayola, a young black girl who works at the Lodge at the Springs, when Hollywood came to call. It's a wonderful glimpse into the filming of one of the Tarzan movies, with Johnny Weissmuller. The first part of the novella, Mayola's story, captures not only the days before segregation, but also the last days of Roosevelt's reign. I was not alive then, but the world of my childhood arose from that era, so there were many, many everyday things that caused me to reminisce: buffalo head nickels and mercury dimes, pulling a bottle of RC out of an ice cooler at the store and adding salted peanuts, even the feeling of cotton absorbing perspiration on your back on a sunny summer day. When the author wrote "the air felt thick and close, like it was considering changing it's name to steam.", I knew I'd felt that.

The story moves on, often with abrupt endings between sections, which allows the reader to fill in the blanks. I'm sure it bothered some, but I was okay with it. Mayola's son and her granddaughter take the focus of the next three sections, but always Wakulla Springs weaves through the tale. If you look closely, you can catch a glimpse of something strange and sinister lurking in the waters and forest.