Clockwork Phoenix 3: New Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

by Mike Allen (Editor), Tanith Lee (Contributor), C.S.E. Cooney (Contributor)

The third volume of this extraordinary annual anthology series of fantastic literature dares to surpass the first two, with works that sidestep expectations in beautiful and unsettling ways, that surprise with their settings and startle with the manner in which they cross genre boundaries, that aren't afraid to experiment with storytelling techniques, and yet seamlessly blend form with meaningful function. The effervescent offerings found within these pages come from some of today's most distinguished contemporary fantasists and brilliant rising newcomers.

Whether it's a touch of literary erudition, playful whimsy, extravagant style, or mind-blowing philosophical speculation and insight, the reader will be led into unfamiliar territory, there to find shock and delight.

Presenting Clockwork Phoenix 3.

Includes stories by Marie Brennan, Tori Truslow, Georgina Bruce, Michael M. Jones, Gemma Files, Shweta Narayan, Cat Rambo, Nicole Kornher-Stace, C.S.E. Cooney, S.J. Hirons, Gregory Frost, Kenneth Schneyer, John C. Wright, John Grant, and Tanith Lee.

Genres: Fantasy, Short Stories, Anthologies, Steampunk, Science Fiction, Horror, Science Fiction Fantasy

314 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2010

About the author

Mike Allen wears many creative hats, at least one of them tailor-made by his wife and partner-in-crime Anita.

An author, editor and publisher of science fiction, fantasy and horror, Mike has written, edited, or co-edited thirty-nine books, among them his forthcoming dark fantasy novel TRAIL OF SHADOWS, his sidearms, sorcery, and zombies sequence THE BLACK FIRE CONCERTO and THE GHOULMAKER’S ARIA, and his newest horror collection, SLOW BURN.

UNSEAMING and AFTERMATH OF AN INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT, his first two volumes of horror tales, were both finalists for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Story Collection, and his dark fable “The Button Bin” was a nominee for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Another collection, THE SPIDER TAPESTRIES, contains experiments in weird science fiction and fantasy.

As an editor and publisher, Mike has been nominated twice for the World Fantasy Award: first, for his anthology CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 5, the culmination of the Clockwork Phoenix series showcasing tales of beauty and strangeness that defy genre classification; and then, for MYTHIC DELIRIUM, the magazine of poetry and fiction he edited for twenty years.

He’s a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award for poetry. His six poetry collections include STRANGE WISDOMS OF THE DEAD, a Philadelphia Inquirer Editor’s Choice selection, and HUNGRY CONSTELLATIONS, a Suzette Haden Elgin Award nominee.

With Anita, he runs Mythic Delirium Books, based in Roanoke, Virginia. Their cat Pandora assists.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of tales of "beauty and strangeness." You can find brief summaries and ratings for each story below, but because that filled up Goodreads' word limit for reviews, go to my first comment for a final verdict on the anthology as a whole.

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The Gospel of Nachash, by Marie Brennan (4 stars)

What Brennan does most successfully here is pull off a work of Biblical fan fiction that actually sounds Biblical. Written like an apocryphal version of the Garden of Eden story, The Gospel of Nachash rarely betrays any "tells" of its origins as modern fiction. At times it does remind one of the World of Darkness, and I was really worried that the punchline would be vampires!, but that's not quite where it goes, though I can't say I was too far off.

In the beginning God made the world, and on the sixth day he made creatures in his image. Male and female he created them, and they were the bekhorim, to whom God gave dominion over every herb bearing seed, and every tree bearing fruit, to be in their care. Mankind he formed from dust, but the bekhorim were made from air, and their spirits were more subtle than that of man.

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Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's Day, by Tori Truslow (2.5 stars)

Although full of imaginative flights of fancy, this story of a parallel world in which mermaids live on the moon (Shakespeare's "moist star") seemed overly laden with excerpts from fictional newspapers and scholarly journals, leaving not much of a story underneath.

After the lecture tour and all the controversy that bubbled in its wake, it was suggested to Wynn by his colleagues that he leave England for a time. Not surprisingly, he embraced this advice and made preparations to visit the Tychonic Institute in Denmark. Before he could leave, however, came the announcement that was to open a new door for him, one that would lead to so many captivating insights and the promise of lasting good relations between humans and merfolk. Had he lived longer, history might have followed a very different course. But whatever did happen to Elijah Willemot Wynn? Previous biographers have latched onto wild conspiracies, but in the light of cutting-edge new research, the facts speak for themselves. We are now entering a darker chapter in his life: the academic alienation and the increasingly bizarre theories leading up to his disappearance—but alongside that, the unorthodox personal life, and at the start of it all, New Year’s Day, 1880.

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Crow Voodoo, by Georgina Bruce (3 stars)

This is one of those stories where the author tried very hard to craft her words just so, producing an artisinal effort that one can admire for its beauty and polish and yet, as in the previous tale, fail to find all that much substance underneath. Crow Voodoo is essentially a changeling tale, with a woman who makes a bargain with a crow and pays a price. It has a nice urban-yet-traditional fairy tale feel to it, but the emotional impact was, to me, blunted by the self-conscious prosiness - an experience I have sometimes had with Cathrynne Valente and her lesser imitators.

Mortimer Citytatters is a midnight crow and a sinister spiv, but he knows what people want in wartime is a story. So he tells them: spine-chillers, bone-warmers, knee-tremblers, colly-wobblers, stories that drill your teeth, that perform open-heart surgery, stories that make the blind walk and the lame speak. It’s a good all-weather business, combined with a spot of common or garden begging, that makes ends meet.

No one should trust Mortimer Citytatters, but Jenny is paying him to write letters to her sweetheart in the war. The crow writes scathing love letters, without a lick of sympathy in them.

Dear Robin, he writes in scratchy midnight ink, Now that the nights have turned longer, I barely think of you.

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Your Name is Eve, by Michael M. Jones (3 stars)

Clancy and Eve meet every night in the dreams of other people, dancing, dining, and enjoying the scenery that is generated by sleeping minds, leaving something as a gift for the dreamers whose dreamscapes they borrow. There is little background explaining how these two came to meet, and the development of their relationship is narrated, the actions of Clancy, who turns out to be the central protagonist, is described entirely in exposition; there is no dialog. This read as if we're simply being told what happened, and although I sense it was meant to capture the feel of a fairy tale, I found it too remote. The descriptions of dreamscapes were nice, but overall it felt very derivate of Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

When Eve vanished into the mists, Clancy remained behind, surrounded by the evaporating wisps of the dream, hands buried in his pockets. For several long moments, he stood still, lost in thought, and then he too faded. In the waking world, their host startled awake, and it took several minutes before the pangs of nostalgia and lost youth faded. Her memories of youth, normally hazy and fuddled, were crystal clear for the first time in years. This was Clancy’s gift to her for time well spent.

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Hell Friend, by Gemma Files (4 stars)

A Chinese ghost story with a touch of Twilight — in a self-aware, ironic way. Jin-Li Song is a thirteen-year-old girl, half Korean and half Chinese. Her grandmother does not at all approve of her son's Korean wife, causing family tension and some identity issues for young Jin-Li. So of course she's ripe for seduction by a magical boyfriend living in a paper house who makes her feel like the most special girl in the world...

They want me dead, like them, Jin thought, horrified. Then looked Mingshi straight in the eyes, equally appalled by what she’d finally caught looking back at her, and blurted, out loud—

“You want me dead, too. Don’t you?”

Mingshi shook his head. “No, never. I love you, flower.”

“But…you’re not even real. You’re…”

(His perfect teeth shifting askew in that kissable mouth, even as she watched; perfect hair already fire-touched, sending up sparks. His face, far too gorgeous to be true, a mere compilation of every Clearasil ad, every music video, every doll Jin’d ever owned, or coveted.)

“…made of paper.”

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Braiding the Ghosts, by C.S.E. Cooney (5 stars)

This was the first story in this collection that seemed both truly original and more than an exercise in weird fiction, yet still grounded in recognizable legends. It's about a girl named Nin whose mother died, leaving her in the care of her terrifying grandmother, Reshka. Reshka binds and enslaves ghosts to do her bidding, and she has little use for the living.

Reshka is not a nice woman. Nin's apprenticeship under her grandmother is cold and unloving. When she realizes that she is not willing to follow her grandmother's path, though, she proves that she's very much of the same blood.

Nin played the lure perfectly. But it was very, very hard.

Reshka never told her that it would hurt. Or of the horrors.

Her lips burned. Her tongue burst into blisters, which burst into vile juices that ran down her throat. The sky ripped open and a bleak wind dove down from the stars, beating black wings and shrieking. Reshka never said how a greater darkness would fall over the night like a hand smothering heaven, how every note she played would cost her a heartbeat, how the earth shuddered away from her naked, dancing feet as though it could not bear her touch.

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Surrogates, by Cat Rambo (3 stars)

A vaguely cyberpunkish story about a future in which everyone lives in a Building (some sort of arcology, I gather), has an android surrogate to handle menial chores like housework and fucking, and the main character has an Insanity Chip installed which makes the world surrealistic and bizarre to her senses, but which causes friction in her new marriage. While the ideas and imagery were creative, I didn't find myself that interested in the characters or this tale of sci-fi domestic disharmony.

Floor 13: Government Offices

They were married on a Monday in the Matrimony office. A poster on the wall said, “Welcome to your new life!” Belinda signed the forms in her careful penmanship, but Bingo simply spit-signed, letting his DNA testify to his presence. There were three rooms processing couples and triads—larger family structure required even more complicated licenses than the one they had secured. This room was painted blue, and one wall was an enormous fish tank.

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Lucyna's Gaze, by Gregory Frost (3 stars)

This was really a war story with some thin sci-fi trimmings. The narrator, who runs guns and other contraband in an unnamed country dealing with some sort of internal warfare, falls in love with a village woman named Lucyna. Then they are all rounded up by government troops and put in concentration camps. Things go about the way these things do, and while the story is narrated with suitably horrific attention to detail and the behavior of prisoners and guards, it's really not particularly fantastical until the end.

Another woman saw me standing there, unable to make myself approach but unable to back away, and she came up. “Do you know her?” she asked me. I told her that I did, that I knew her from the bakery in her village. The woman asked my name and I gave it. She walked up to Lucyna and said that I was here to see her. The fog seemed to clear a bit from her eyes then. She looked my way but there was little recognition. Maybe none at all. It might have been nothing but my hope of recognition. And so I stepped forward and said, “I wished to buy a loaf of bread from you.” Her eyes welled with tears then, and her chin quivered, and she threw her arms around me. I held her. For minutes, hours, it could have been forever. We all stank like rotting meat, even though we had been allowed showers earlier, but not our clothes of course. I reveled in her closeness, my face to her neck, seeking the smell of her underneath that stink. She cried and cried. She muttered names—again and again she said, “Janek.” She never said mine, not knowing it, nor asked it of me. She started to kiss me, kissed my mouth, my face, all the while saying, “Janek, my darling, my love, Janek.” While she clung to me, the other woman said, “He was executed that day—you remember that escape attempt. Did you know him?”

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Eyes of Carven Emerald, by Shweta Narayan (4.5 stars)

This was a finely spun tale-within-a-tale of an alternate history in which Alexander the Great conquers even more of the world than he did in ours, and humans share the world with clockwork automatons. Despite his invincibility, he finds a foil in a mysterious clockwork bird.

Alexandros’ eyes narrowed with the first glimmerings of interest. What might this mechanism be, if not Persian? Surely not Northern barbarian work; it was too fine, though it wore around its neck a ring of shining gold, as they did. It looked old, but shifted without noise or stiffness. And it spoke Greek like a Persian; badly, but with meaning beneath the words.

And that last mystery implied a challenge worth taking. Alexandros said, “To whom do you belong? A king who is long dead, it would seem, or else one who neglects you.”

The bird rustled its feathers. “The last king who tried to own me died of slow poison while his city burned.”

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Dragons of America, by S. J. Hirons (4 stars)

Another interesting fantasy story mixing magic and technology and alternate history. An alchemy student named Anselm Einarsson lives in the city of Arrowstorm, and dreams of getting past the American soldiers to see the dragon breeding grounds. The worldbuilding is all by inference, doled out a bit here and there with few explanations - where is Arrowstorm? How did the Americans come to guard the entrances and exits from the city? What is the role of the dragons? Interesting, and the story moves along, though it never quite becomes entirely coherent as a setting.

All through winter and spring the dragons of America had flown in Anselm Einarsson’s dreams. When summer finally came, and the first flight of them passed over the city heading for the eastern desert, he was so used to the idea of them that he almost slept through the crossing of that flock, mistaking the sound for low thunder. But they brought with them the odours of the semi-mythical land they came from: hamburgers, hot dogs, buttered popcorn, and beer. Green as dollar bills they would be and just as crinkly. So big they blocked out stars. Swift enough to turn on a dime, and change direction fleetly with the winds.

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Where Shadows Go at Low Midnight, by John Grant (3 stars)

This is one of those stories with a "twist" where you figure out by the end (though enough clues are dropped during the story) that things are not quite as they appear. A couple taking a moonlight stroll discusses the nature of sunlight and moonlight, with references to a lost civilization of "Ghosts" that preceded them.

“It’s strange the Ghosts should have organized the days so well and the nights so very poorly,” she sighed as she rose again to her hind legs.

I shook my head, grinning, and looked at her. Her eyes were red from my brand’s glow as she gazed back. She was grinning, too.

“What I mean,” she said as we began to jog across more level ground, “is that the Ghosts created daylight so we could move around safely during the day. Why didn’t they create nightlight so we could do the same at night?”

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Lineage, by Kenneth Schneyer (3 stars)

Framed by the meta-story of a future researcher finding evidence of an improbable historical figure who seems to have appeared in many different times and places, this is a series of vignettes in which some supernatural force intervenes in times of crisis and despair.

Instantiation, substantiation, manifestation, possession? I am no one, if more than nothing; years pass, but not for me. Then I feel, like an embrace, the fear and devotion—the lifeboat overflows, the enemy surprises the patrol, the burning wall begins to collapse, the asteroid approaches the shuttle, the dike bursts.

And I walk the earth again.

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Murder in Metachronopolis, by John C. Wright (5 stars)

It takes a really good writer to put a new spin on time travel. Wright's tale uses a lot of familiar tropes, and his protagonist, a noir detective brought to the city of Metachronopolis by its autocratic, egomaniac Time Masters, hangs a lampshade on quite a few of them. Drafted into solving a murder in a city ruled by time travelers, you can expect paradoxes, loops, and twists galore, and this story has them, yet ultimately it wraps up in a coherent fashion. Especially impressive is the non-linear storytelling, which manages not to be confusing despite the out-of-sequence narrating of events.

“I don’t take cases from Time Masters, see? All you guys are the same. The murderer turns out to be yourself, or you when you were younger. Or me. Or an alternate version of me or you who turns out to be his own father fighting himself because for no reason except that that’s the way it was when the whole thing started. Which it never did, on account of there’s no beginning and no reason for any of it. Oh, brother, you time travelers make me sick.”

He drew himself up, all smiles gone now, all pretense at seeming human. My guess was that that was not even his real body, just some poor sap he murdered to have his personality jacked into the guy’s brain. Perfect disguise. No fingerprints, retina prints, no nothing. Just another flatliner dead for the convenience of the Masters of Eternity.

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To Seek Her Fortune, by Nicole Kornher-Stace (2.5 stars)

Honestly, steampunk does very little for me, and this was a beautifully written steampunk story that did very little for me. We've got your somewhat cliched "strong female character" Lady Explorer who managed to claw her way up to command of an airship, and she's on what seems to be an endless quest around the world to visit every psychic, fortune-teller, medium, and tea-leaf reader to hear each one's version of how she'll die. I found the prose to be working a little too hard, and the mommylove moral almost got it knocked down another full star. Nice writing, but would not read the novel.

In the land of black salt and white honey, the Lady Explorer bartered a polar bear’s pelt, a hand-cranked dynamo, her second-best derringer, and three bolts of peach silk for her death.

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Fold, by Tanith Lee (2 stars)

I know a lot of people love, love, love Tanith Lee. I must confess I've only read one or two of her books, so long ago I barely remember them. She writes gorgeous prose (a common theme in this anthology), but this story about a man who lives in a high apartment complex and writes mysterious love letters to the men and women who pass within his view down at ground level was... not really a story, more like an exercise in poetic imagery. Yes, there is an ending, when he finally leaves his apartment, but that too seemed a nonsensical straining effort at metaphor. Maybe I was just in a grumpy mood reading these last two stories, but word-bling, in the end, sometimes feels like an author's attempt to distract us with shiny objects.

Jintha wrote letters from a tower. They were letters of love.

The tower itself was quite high, probably of thirty storeys, but Jintha had long forgotten. He himself resided on the fifteenth floor. He had forgotten this too.

Beyond his apartment there were always various sounds in the tower, which had made him fantasize that he lived in a sort of golden clock, inside the mechanism of it. All who lived there, accordingly, would have their own particular functions, Jintha’s being, (obviously) to write love letters. This kept the clock accurate, made it work. Sometimes the clock struck. That was the silvery clash of the elevator doors. While the smooth ascending or descending purr of the murmurous elevator was like the movement of an intermittent pendulum. Birds often alighted on the broad sills of windows, or the elegant gargoyles which adorned the building. The clicking of their claws or whirr of their wings provided the clock’s ticking—now loud, now soft, now stilled—and now restarted.

[Meredith is a hot mess · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars for Braiding the Ghosts by C.S.E. Cooney. Innovative, unique, terrifyingly beautiful, horrific, touching. Will reread. The prose was gorgeous. This is a new to me author, and if the writing in this story is anything like her other work I look forward to trying more from her.



Quotes (contain spoilers):


Nin played the lure perfectly. But it was very, very hard.
Reshka never told her that it would hurt. Or of the horrors.
Her lips burned. Her tongue burst into blisters, which burst into vile juices that ran down her throat. The sky ripped open and a bleak wind dove down from the stars, beating black wings and shrieking. Reshka never said how a greater darkness would fall over the night like a hand smothering heaven, how every note she played would cost her a heartbeat, how the earth shuddered away from her naked, dancing feet as though it could not bear her touch.

...

Nin did not have to see the ring to recognize it. His ring, his name, his birth and death--his broken and stolen tombstone--the ring she had returned to him, encircled her finger once again. Mason had put it there, he must have done, had bequeathed it to her, making her his resting place.


Fold by Tanith Lee - Hmmm, not my favorite by her. It's very, very short - even for one of her short stories. It's about a man who writes love letters from his apartment; it didn't resonate.

[Zak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Third volume in anthology series of strange and fantastic tales. Overall, an enjoyable read with a few standouts. My favourites, in order of appearance, are as follows:

1. Your Name is Eve by Michael M. Jones
2. Hell Friend by Gemma Files
3. Surrogates by Cat Rambo
4. Murder in Metachronopolis by John C. Wright
5. Fold by Tanith Lee

I would rate all the above between 4-5*. There are five volumes in the Clockwork Phoenix collection. Have not read any of the others but will certainly be doing so in the near future.

[Anastasia · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best volume yet. Over half of the stories I absolutely loved and liked the rest. It's a good balance of familiar and completely unknown names, fantasy and scifi. Almost all of them were easy to get into, and the transitions between stories were smooth.

"Crow Voodoo" by Georgina Bruce is an almost painful, piercing tale.

"Tomorrow Is Saint Valentine's Day" by Tori Truslow is about merpeople who live on the moon, "the moist star," and a researcher who goes to live among them. The ending is a silent thunderclap that changed my perpective on it all, and I immediately had to go back and re-read the story. (Same with "Fold.") It's told in a scholarly voice and dense albeit beautiful prose, and on the first reading I didn't get it.

"Eyes of Carven Emerald" by Shweta Narayan is a retelling of Alexander the Great's story. I was downright mad when it ended and didn't go on much longer. I'd love to see a novel version.

"Lineage" by Kenneth Schneyer was a surprise favorite.

"Braiding the Ghosts" by C.S.E. Cooney is about a girl whose grandmother teaches her how to enslave ghosts.

"To Seek Her Fortune" by Nicole Kornher-Stace reads like a mini-novel.

"Fold" by Tanith Lee - about a man who lives in a tower and spends his days gazing at the people on the street below, falling passionately in love with them and sending them love letters on paper airplanes. This is the last story of the volume and the perfect closing piece.

[Sunny Moraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first in the series that I've read, and I'm very glad that I did. It's sheer joy all the way through, with barely a false step in sight. Even stories that didn't grab me initially (To Seek Her Fortune and Murder in Metachronopolis being two examples) had me enraptured by the end. Others (Braiding the Ghosts, Eyes of Carven Emerald, Crow Voodoo, and Surrogates, to name only a few) are darkly and beautifully haunting, and linger long after they're done. Still others (The Gospel of Nachash, Your Name is Eve, and Tomorrow Is Saint Valentine's Day) put fantastic new spins on recognizable tropes. All in all, it's a winner, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

[Bridgett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love these anthologies. I found the issues of time travel very interesting in the story "Murder in Metachronopolis," especially.

[Andreas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A spoilerless review of the stories. My faourites are marked bold.

Marie Brennan, The Gospel of Nachash (5/5)

Very interesting story with a biblical background, adding another dimension to the creation of men.

Tori Truslow, Tomorrow Is Saint Valentine's Day (1/5)

I couldn't get into the story, the way how it's told made it hard for me to connect to the events and characters.

Georgina Bruce, Crow Voodoo (5/5)

Dark, creepy story about a special kind of magic. Highly recommended, it's strange and beautiful.

Michael M. Jones, Your Name Is Eve (4/5)

Well written mysterious story, dreams of other people are used by a couple to meet each other. The end cannot completely convince me, but it's worth reading.

Gemma Files, Hell Friend (2/5)

Frightening story but not my cup of tea.

C.S.E. Cooney, Braiding the Ghosts (2/5)

Another ghost story, again not my cup of tea. My main complain, and this is my fault as reader, is that it's just a fairy tale without a special moral and not enjoyable enough.

Cat Rambo, Surrogates (5/5)

What a fantastic story. A girl uses a special device to change how she experiences the world around her. It's easy to spoil such an idea but Cat Rambo hits the spot. Recommended!

Gregory Frost, Lucyna's Gaze (1/5)

Disgusting story, I was upset after reading it. It adds nothing new, it just uses snippets from here and there without exploring the emotional depth of the characters.

Shweta Narayan, Eyes of Carven Emerald (2/5)

Two interwoven stories, I didn't like the frame story much but the inner narrative, taken from an Aremenian folklore tale, was new and interesting.

S.J. Hirons, Dragons of America (5/5)

Next to Surrogates my favourite story. The author takes the time to describe a future where dragons exist. They are the source for magic. A rather desperate student needs to steal the egg of such a beast to improve his social status. What I like is that the author not just comes up with an adventure story but that he has something to say about the humans living in a rough world and harsh society. The picture completely convinced me.

John Grant, Where Shadows Go at Low Midnight (3/5)

Well written but rather short and lightweight.

Kenneth Schneyer, Lineage" (5/5)

Experiences from different times are linked together. Hard to describe without telling too much. Nice idea and well told.

John C. Wright, "Murder in Metachronopolis" (1/5)

A complete mess. I liked the structure and the idea but the story is very flat and in the end it's just a thought experiment. And not a convincing one.

Nicole Kornher-Stace, To Seek Her Fortune (2/5)

Very weird story that I haven't completely understood. The end was a big letdown and not worth struggling through this piece.

Tanith Lee, Fold (2/5)

Tanith Lee is one of the authors I can't connect to. I didn't like her story in the first part of the anthology, and this one neither. Very well told, no doubt, but the message is so flat. A beautiful bubble that you like to watch, and when it bursts it's immediately forgotten.

Summary: 6 stories I liked, 1 okay and 8 that I didn't like. The two strongest stories come highly recommended while the other 4 are stretching your mind and get you out of the comfort zone. The weak stories were partly not my cup of tea (the ghost stories mainly), while others made me upset or annoyed me greatly. Such strong negative reactions are quite rare for me and makes it clear that the editor has a different taste.

3 stars out of 5 for the anthology, and I recommend it with reservations.

[Francesca Forrest · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed these stories tremendously. My top two favorites remain "Braiding the Ghosts," by C.S.E. Cooney (which wins for most imaginative spells, most appealing heroine, and an unusual and satisfying story) and "Murder in Metachronopolis," by John C. Wright (which wins for its great use of nonlinear storytelling, which manages to be both complex and perfectly comprehensible), and the one that made me ache because I wish I had written it--wish I was capable of writing like that--was "Crow Voodoo," by Georgina Bruce. Full disclosure: I did copyedit one story in this anthology--but it's not one of the three I mentioned here.

[Rivqa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird and gorgeous as always.

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok. I got this book mainly for JC Wright's story "Murder in Metachronopolis," which, consistent with expectations, was very good. The other stories tended to be mediocre in the way the Matrix movie sequels were i.e., there was a lot of clever stuff and wide-ranging cultural references (e.g. Plato's cave), but not much meaning, apart from that intrinsic to the references themselves. Some of the writers shouldn't be, others couldn't write and a couple were decent.

[Shauna]

I considered this anthology a mixed bag of stories I liked and things I didn't. Given that its purpose was to offer the reader cutting-edge fantasy, new tales of beauty and strangeness, my mixed reaction is likely an indication that it succeeded. Worth reading to see how authors are pushing the boundaries.

[Bryan Thomas Schmidt · Rating 3 out of 5]

7 of 15 stories I really enjoyed, 3 were okay, and 5 were just not to my taste. Definitely unique stories and ideas. Some talented writers. I have not read the two previous books in the series and have no basis for comparison. See my detailed review at www.tangentonline.com

[DW Rowlands · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another of Shweta Narayan's stories of sapient automatons from ancient India. I particularly liked this one, perhaps only because the history was more familiar to me (my knowledge of Indian history is embarrassingly sketchy), but also because the ending was beautiful.

[Michal · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really loved the story by C.S.E. Cooney, but the rest just wasn't my sort o' thing.

[Kris]

Dropped. Lost interest somewhere along the way.