Tempting the Gods is the only good in print collection i found of her early stories. Apparently they are different types of stories. SF,historical fantasy,darker fantasy like Paradys. I got this collection to sample her other stories, genres i havent read.
Yeah, her short fiction is kind of oddly collected and not all that easy to find. (I mean, much of the Paradys stuff is short fiction, but I mean more her magazine pieces and more independent things.) I have
The Gorgon to read someday.
On my actual current reading, I finished Rudy Rucker's
Spacetime Donuts (1981). This was his first novel, 2/3 of which was published in a magazine (1978-9) which folded before the last third came out, and that didn't come out until after his first book novel,
White Light (1980), which narrowly missed my top ten this year and could just as well have been on it. Since this is still 2011, I also have this one to (almost) add. In ways, this is even better than WL and, had I read it when I was a teenager, I would probably recall it as one of my all-time favorites. As is, I still enjoyed it a lot.
The spacetime donut and the multiverse are core concepts. Even minor asides like the anti-rockets (or "suckers") are fun (however implausible): micro-black-hole-powered T-shaped tubes one can ride on - at least as cool as a jet pack and quieter and virtually-infinitely fueled. The main sociological elements are the usual Great Computer and the revolution against it. Rucker is often lumped with the cyberpunks but isn't quite, really, but this is a very cyberpunky book in this plotline. It's a strength of this book that it's a bit more purposefully plotted than WL, but also a weakness in that it's a sketchily conceived dystopia and revolution. (The blurb describes the
Brave New World-style dystopia thusly: "Free drugs! Easy sex! No job hassles! Some people just don't know when they're being oppressed!") The all-powerful computer (called Phizwhiz, to give an idea) is nowhere near all-powerful and what should be a world-wide (or cosmos-wide) revolution comes across as basically an anarchic city. But it's still consistently hugely entertaining, frequently mind-expanding, frequently funny, and has the occasional bits of wisdom. When contemplating the size of the city laid out before him while hanging on to his sucker, the protagonist thinks how big it is and how hard it will be to organize: "Let it be, a voice in Vernor's mind seemed to say, you don't
have to organize other people's lives. But what if they're a**holes, he asked. And what if
you are, the voice answered."
Be warned, if strong language, sex, and violence put you off, this is not recommended. Otherwise, it's very much so.
