A Blink of the Screen: Collected Short Fiction by Terry Pratchett

A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Pratchett completists should jump on this, but otherwise I think I'd be irritated to pay full hardcover or audio price for a collection with so much juvenilia and so many punchline stories. I mean, his drabbles and short shorts and poems are often quite good – "They don't teach you about death, your mom and dad. They give you pets," – but still. Oh, and the A.S. Byatt introduction is awful, because apparently she can be judgmental and dismissive of genre fiction while she's talking about genre fiction that she likes, but what the fuck ever, A.S. Byatt, you just keep chewing those snotty sour grapes. A few scattered thoughts:

"The Sea and Little Fishes" – A Discworld story of Granny Weatherwax, and what it's like to be very very good but not very nice. I, uh. I might have identified with this a leeeettle bit. One of the standouts.

"The Hades Business" – Apparently written at the age of 13, and my God, it doesn't show. Well, I mean, it does in the prose, and in the ideas when put to scale of his full range of work, but honestly, he was so clearly already himself at that age, it's a little eerie.

"# ifdef DEBUG "+ "world/enough" + "time" – Life and death and virtual reality. Dated, sweet, apparently adored by the masses. But it made me very uncomfortable in some subliminal gender related ways, and that feeling has only worsened with thought.

"The High Meggas" – A 1986 short story that later became The Long Earth. Dimension hopping across alternate earths with bonus survivalist and truth dilemma. It did make me want to read the novel, largely because it's such a fertile concept. Most notable for being maybe the tenth time in this collection Pratchett says something should have been/wanted to be/eventually was a novel, which is apparently his form of choice. If you couldn't tell. And knowing that . . . I honestly wish a few of his books were short stories now.




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Clear Water by Amy Lane

Clear Water by Amy Lane

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Basically I climbed into a psychological hole towards the end of this week and pulled this book in on top of me. For those purposes, it was great. Twenty three year old party boy with ADHD is trying to get his life together when everything goes to hell in one night, and he basically falls into the lap of a biologist studying toxic effects on frogs. There's this half-hearted afterplot about the pollution and an ex and blah blah blah, but honestly 75% of this book is just taking two guys and sticking them in a small space and watching them be ridiculously happy to have found each other, and then watching all their problems get solved. So, you know, aces for my purposes this week.

The thing about Amy Lane, though, is she's so damn committed to her kinks. She takes that whole 'older put together guy' and 'younger flighty struggling guy' thing, and then she brings all the kitten and bunny descriptions for the younger guy, with extra 'fragile' and 'slender' in case you missed the memo on the dynamic here. Which is all well and good for her, and probably for a lot of readers, but personally I like this trope in subversion, not straight-faced. So to speak.

Oh, but I do have to talk about the audiobook. And by "audiobook," let's be clear. I mean podfic. In a good way! This is the sort of production with a fair amount of unfiltered sound in the background, and a narrator who clearly has a lot of feels about this story, and who persistently says "kway" for quay. Basically it made me grin and want to pat them all and call them darlings. And I'm not talking about the characters.




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