Crawling Between Heaven and Earth

by Sarah A. Hoyt

Eleven previously uncollected fictions. Includes reprints from the pages of Absolute Magnitude, Analog, Dark Regions Magazine, Dreams of Decadence, and Weird Tales, three original stories, plus the novelette "Songs."

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Ebooks, Anthologies, Fiction

Paperback

First published September 1, 2002

About the author

Sarah A. Hoyt was born (and raised) in Portugal and now lives in Colorado with her husband, two sons, and a variable number of cats, depending on how many show up to beg on the door step.

In between lays the sort of resume that used to be de-rigueur for writers. She has never actually wrestled alligators, but she did at one point very briefly tie bows on bags of potpourri for a living. She has also washed dishes and ironed clothes for a living. Worst of all she was, for a long time, a multilingual scientific translator.

At some point, though, she got tired of making an honest living and started writing. She has over 30 published novels, in science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical mystery, historical fantasy and historical biography. Her short stories have been published in Analog, Asimov's, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, and a number of anthologies from DAW and Baen. Her space-opera novel Darkship Thieves was the 2011 Prometheus Award Winner, and the third novel in the series, A Few Good Men, was a finalist for the honor. She also won the Dragon Award for Uncharted (with Kevin J. Anderson.)

a.k.a. Sarah D'Almeida
a.k.a. Elise Hyatt
a.k.a. Sarah Marqués

Reviews

[Jon]

On the Baen books website, there has been for quite some time now, an area called the Baen Free Library, where Jim Baen encouraged his stable of authors to post a free electronic version of one or more of their works, so that readers would download them, try it out, and be encouraged to buy more work by that author. I don't know how that all actually worked out for them in the long haul, though early numbers were encouraging, but it doesn't appear since Baen's passing to have been promoted very heavily, and not much new stuff has been appearing. Anyway, after stumbling upon Sarah Hoyt's blog over the Thanksgiving holiday, I checked and found that I had a copy of this book from the Free Library already loaded on my Nook, and decided to "try before I buy".

This book isn't one of Hoyt's novels; it's a collection of short stories with no coherent theme - just a pretty good collage of her writing style and skills.

There's a pretty good fantasy story set in the time of Shakespeare, with the bard and his brother prominently featured, which left me thinking once again to myself that I really should dig into the massive tome of the Compleat Workes gathering dust in my library, as I couldn't tell whether some of the things old Billy had to say were direct quotes from his works, or just good stylistic imitations by Hoyt. She evidently has several novels set in this milieu, which may prove entertaining at a later date.

There's a couple of nominal SF stories about the fate of clones, one of which is wrapped around a mythological core of the story of Ariadne, Theseus and the Minotaur. The other one was an even more tawdry tale about prostituting the clones of famous females, like Marilyn Monroe. Given the way her image and others are already being used in CGI commercials I don't find it all that far-fetched...aside from the whole cloning technology thing actually working, of course.

There's an intriguing ghost story, too, and lots of other tales, to introduce you to Hoyt's works. I found most of them a bit depressing, but still good enough to merit my actually buying and downloading one of her novels. The Free Library concept works.

[YouKneeK · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an anthology containing eleven short stories in a mix of genres including fantasy, science fiction, paranormal, and even alternate history.

Although I’m usually not too crazy for short stories, I actually really enjoyed these. They had plenty of meat and character development, and sometimes there were deeper themes underlying a story that gave it more meaning. I wouldn’t have complained if the stories had been longer and more fleshed out, but I didn’t feel like I was just being fed scraps of a potential story like I often feel when I read short stories.

I would have rated this book with 4 stars if not for the endings. There wasn’t a truly happy ending to be seen in the bunch. They ranged from “rather bizarre” at best to “completely depressing” at worst and everywhere in-between. I much prefer stories with happy or at least hopeful endings, so being hit with eleven unhappy (or, at least, not happy) endings one after the other was a bit much.

I’m not sure if it was just this electronic version I had downloaded from the Baen free library years ago or not, but I found a lot of errors in the book – more than I would expect to see in a formally published book. But, in spite of the errors and the endings, I still enjoyed this book well enough that I read it all in one sitting.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a perfectly acceptable but somewhat forgettable set of stories. They're all reasonably competent and entertaining, but nothing really sings. I read this a week ago, and I'm already having trouble remembering which stories went with a few of the titles.

Some are reasonably clever and appealing. "Ariadne's Skein" features a bio-construct on a vacation that goes awry in a horrifying and poignant fashion. Others, like "Elvis Died for Your Sins", are professionally executed but feel rather like a dozen similar "weird shit happens" stories I've read in a dozen places. The two stories clearly drawn from her novels both revolve around Shakespeare--I found neither one particularly compelling, I'm afraid.

You will not regret reading these, but you also will not feel particularly passionate about them. They're conveniently part of the Baen free library, so they make an excellent fall back to load onto an eReader in case you run out of more enthralling fare.

[Jpbradley]

This is an excellent selection of short stories by an accomplished author that spans most of the genre's for which she is known. If you've never read any of her work it's a good way to get acquainted. We've got ghosts, the bard himself, and other figures historic, futuristic and otherwise, envisioned by this acclaimed writer. Go read it.

[SFReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.a...

[bluetyson]

Crawling Between Heaven And Earth by Sarah Hoyt (2000)

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

These sci-fi short stories were fun to read, even if some of the premises didn't seem very innovative.

[Clyde · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crawling Between Heaven and Earth is a very good collection of speculative fiction short stories by a talented writer.

[Georgina · Rating 3 out of 5]

short stories taking you from past to future and back. some wonderfully divergent pov's.

[Mark Parkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

short stories with a twist a good read, reminded me why I used to like reading Asimov's magazine years ago