What do you think?
Rate this book
Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology
In 1994, some of the brightest stars of science fiction gathered for the Sycamore Hill workshop, putting their stories in the forge of their colleagues' collective critical wisdom. The result is Intersections , an original anthology on the cutting edge of the field.
384 pages, softcover
First published December 1, 1995
29 people want to read
About the author
John Kessel
180 books97 followersJohn (Joseph Vincent) Kessel co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and Tiptree Awards, his books include Good News From Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories. His story collection Meeting in Infinity was a New York Times Notable Book. Most recently, with James Patrick Kelly he has edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange, Rewired, The Secret History of Science Fiction and Kafkaesque. Born in Buffalo, NY, Kessel has a PhD in American Literature, has been an NEA Fellow, and for twenty years has been one of the organizers of the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 22, 2022
I got turned on to this collection by a truly glowing review by Matthew Claxton in his Unsettling Futures newsletter, and I can confirm this book delivers. Sycamore Hill is an invite-only science fiction writer's workshop, the post-graduate version of Clarion and its ilk. Given that Bruce Sterling is my favorite living science-fiction author and I recognized a handful of names on the cover as heavy writers with big ideas and serious chops, I figured I'd give it a look.
I was really too young to experience 90s science-fiction when it happened, but this was actually a golden moment for the genre. Serious futurism was out from under the mushroom cloud binary of the Cold War, and the writers were GenX and Boomers at the peak of their abilities. It was slightly more possible to make a living writing fiction, before a certain Everything Store that owns this website and the maw of Digital Content consumed everything. Science-fiction was still a ghetto, before every Iowa Writer's Workshop literary fic head decided that straight realism wasn't enough and they could write about clones and diseases and digitally altered selves, but it was a ghetto with ambition!
What elevates this collection is that it brings the reader into the magic circle of artistic creation, with short notes of the authors reacting to each other's stories in the Milford Method style (and as S.L. Huang among others have pushed back, Milford is not the only method), and you can see where pros think a story is weak, and how it was improved.
Sterling's "Bicycle Repairman" leads the collection, and is a favorite. I also enjoyed Jonathan Lethem's "The Hardened Criminals" as a prison drama of absent fathers, Maureen F. McHugh’s "Homesick" in it's study of a dedicated dancer, and Alexander Jablokov "The Fury at Colonus", a retelling of the myth of Orestes from the point of view of the Fury as a cop facing down retirement in a setting half mythic Greece and half suburbia.
As Claxton points out, they don't make them like this any more. Even as we've been liberated from the burdens of physical text, we're bound by ever shorter attention spans. Intersections is a fine vintage, and well worth reading!
I was really too young to experience 90s science-fiction when it happened, but this was actually a golden moment for the genre. Serious futurism was out from under the mushroom cloud binary of the Cold War, and the writers were GenX and Boomers at the peak of their abilities. It was slightly more possible to make a living writing fiction, before a certain Everything Store that owns this website and the maw of Digital Content consumed everything. Science-fiction was still a ghetto, before every Iowa Writer's Workshop literary fic head decided that straight realism wasn't enough and they could write about clones and diseases and digitally altered selves, but it was a ghetto with ambition!
What elevates this collection is that it brings the reader into the magic circle of artistic creation, with short notes of the authors reacting to each other's stories in the Milford Method style (and as S.L. Huang among others have pushed back, Milford is not the only method), and you can see where pros think a story is weak, and how it was improved.
Sterling's "Bicycle Repairman" leads the collection, and is a favorite. I also enjoyed Jonathan Lethem's "The Hardened Criminals" as a prison drama of absent fathers, Maureen F. McHugh’s "Homesick" in it's study of a dedicated dancer, and Alexander Jablokov "The Fury at Colonus", a retelling of the myth of Orestes from the point of view of the Fury as a cop facing down retirement in a setting half mythic Greece and half suburbia.
As Claxton points out, they don't make them like this any more. Even as we've been liberated from the burdens of physical text, we're bound by ever shorter attention spans. Intersections is a fine vintage, and well worth reading!
December 24, 2011
An anthology of stories collected from one particular year of fiction workshopped at The Sycamore Hill Writing Workshop. Includes great work by Karen Joy Fowler, Carol Emshwiller, Robert Frazier, Jonathan Lethem, Maureen McHugh, and yours truly. And MORE! Each story includes something of a gloss about its shaping and how the workshop process affected its revision.
November 1, 2012
Bruce Sterling | Bicycle Repairman
("Mr. Rhapsodist"in incelemesini okuduktan sonra notu 1.5*tan 2.5*a cikti)
("Mr. Rhapsodist"in incelemesini okuduktan sonra notu 1.5*tan 2.5*a cikti)
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews