Leban%hp-hulk.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa (05/23/85)
From: Bruce <Leban%hplabs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
/Melancholy Elephants/, "June" 1985, TOR Books, $2.95.
Contains 13 short stories by Spider Robinson. Four of these
stores appeared in his collection /Antinomy/. Eleven appeared
in the Canadian collection of the same title.
/Callahan's Secret/, "collection, in progress".
[Listed in the front of /Melancholy Elephants/.]
Nano-Review: Recommended.
Micro-Review: The stories vary from pretty good to very good.
Macro-Review: First two warnings: 1) This collection contains several
stories with (as they say) "strong sexual content". If you don't like
such stories, you should probably skip this book; 2) Don't read the
inside front cover or back cover blurbs. They both include spoilers.
I can't really write a review of this book except by reviewing each
individual story and I can't really do that very well w/o spoiling them.
Since you're likely to read all the stories anyway if you buy the book,
I don't see much point in telling you which stories /I/ didn't like. So
I'll just quote the beginning of three stories to give you a flavor of
what's going on.
When the upper half of an extremely fat man materialized before
him over the pool table in the living room, Spud nearly
swallowed his Adam's apple. But then he saw that the man was a
stranger and relaxed.
The blind man was watching a videotape when the phone chimed.
I became aware of him five parsecs away. He rode a nickel-iron
asteroid of a hundred metric tonnes as if it were an unruly
steed, and he broke off chunks of it and hurled them at the
stars, and he howled.
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