Different Waves, Different Depths

by Roy Christopher

Different Waves, Different Depths takes its name from a comment an old crush made once about her feelings for me. It also describes this collection of nine stories, varying in style from the literarily weird to the science fiction and in length from the flash to the novelette. There's even a pilot script in here. There are time loops and time travel, reality television and big data, consultants who can make anyone a winner, a newspaper that's just gone online-only, a band that never existed but is all too real, mistaken identities, roadtrips, drugs, guns, murder, and a love story or three. Dive in deep, ease in the shallows, or just let the tide lap at your toes. Different waves are waiting.

258 pages, Paperback

Published September 12, 2023

About the author

I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan. I’m an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid. That’s where I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. I have since written about music, media, and culture for everything from magazines to blogs and journals to books. I hold a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. As a child, I solved the Rubik’s Cube competitively.

[from http://roychristopher.com]

Reviews

[ROLLAND Florence · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a long time, I looked for a book that would feel like Stranger Things (the Netflix series) but in written form.
This is what these short stories feel to me. Roy Christopher provided me with just the right amount of nostalgia. At the same time, reading these short stories makes me *think*.

Among those stories, Dutch stands out.

Is really, really good. My favorite piece in this book. Part of the charm is that it summons a lot of memories. It really feels like reading a music magazine from the 1990'. It is punchy and to the point, creative and energetic. We can feel that the author is paying a tribute to that period, and it is really well done. Younger readers will probably miss a lot of the references (Bury the butterflies is obviously a nod to Grave of the Fireflies, etc). This story is the key to a lot of popular culture from millenial youth.

Without ruining the surprise, you can find different styles in these stories, which point to the 1990' literature (fanfics, webzines, science fiction from that era, the films and even the music). If you are a millenial, it can be fun to read through the book and note down the references that you found. Actually, this would be a perfect book club activity.

Now I am sad because it is over, and I feel like some of those stories could have become novels, like Not a day goes by that could have benefitted from more character development.

And the book is dedicated to Kelly Lum, a woman I admired for so long that I never summoned the courage to write to her. And now, she is dead.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I feel like the most important thing about my generation (millenials) is that we came of age while Internet was becoming massive. We knew life before social media, and then suddenly it became a thing and it coloured our teenage years. At 13 I suddenly had access to a massive amount of knowledge, and could "talk" to people across the world. But all that was with a rather slow connection, and downloading a song would take a long time. It was mostly an Internet of text. I miss the old times of IRC and the blogosphere - yes, it is still a thing, but the scope is pretty different now. I miss a time when we were writing, writing, and writing some more. Different Waves, Different Depths helped me explore my teenage years and what I liked from that period.

Thank you Roy Christopher for the ARC, and sorry for the belated review.
Please keep writing. I read this book three times.

[Sydney Brammer]

Lubbock cameo, say what?!