The Visible Man

by Gardner Dozois, Robert Silverberg (Introduction)

A collection of 12 short stories:

The Visible Man
Flash Point
Horse of Air
The Last Day of July
Machines of Loving Grace
A Dream at Noonday
A Kingdom by the Sea
The Man Who Waved Hello
The Storm
Where No Sun Shines
A Special Kind of Morning
Chains of the Sea

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories

312 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1977

About the author

Gardner Raymond Dozois was an American science fiction author and editor. He was editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine from 1984 to 2004. He won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, both as an editor and a writer of short fiction.
Wikipedia entry: Gardner Dozois

http://us.macmillan.com/author/gardne...

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had enough of Orwell's perpetual optimism?
Fed up with Dostoevsky's joie de vivre?
Tired of Kafka's inspirational blatherings?
Ready to puke over Malzberg's maundering sentimentality?
Then THIS is the book for you!

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This early collection of Dozois's stories shows what a good writer he was (and different from his colleagues) before he became the extremely influential editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in the 1980s, shaping the careers of many iconic authors in the field like Connie Willis and Michael Swanwick.

As Bob Silverberg points out in the introduction, some of these stories aren't even science fictional. They're just good stories, often about people trapping in/breaking out of a rather dull daily existence. I can imagine a young man dreaming of science fiction but facing a routine life might develop various story lines about a brighter future than a 1970s style middle class existence.

Once he became an editor of Asimov's his writing dropped off dramatically. It's interesting to see the craftsman and wordsmith that he was, and how he looked for authors to publish who had writing chops that could live up to his standards.

[Benjamin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Years ago, I loved the collections of short stories that Dozois organized and edited. I never really sought them out, but I would snap them up whenever one came across my path. This collection, if nothing else, provided context as to why he was so good in that role. Namely, he was better at a taxonomic identification of the elements that made a good sci-fi short story than at producing it himself.

Minor spoiler ahead.

The works in this collection mostly fall into the mold of a main character engaging in excruciating amounts of navel gazing against some traditional sci-fi backdrop. There are a couple examples of the silly twists one expects from the era (like the titular story), but mostly you have a character whose internal, self-centered monologue is the main point, and this recipe is not really my cup of tea.

The one exception is "A Special Kind of Morning", which definitely follows this mold, but there's also fantastic world-building and the naval gazing serves a purpose larger than angst for its own sake. This story is maybe even good enough to have made it worth slogging through the other stories.

Minor note, the favorite quote below is the second time I have come across that particular phrase. The other is, of course, The Correspondents' fantastic 2013 song of the same name.

my favorite quote: "The boy lay trembling with fear and delight."