Till Human Voices Wake Us: A Short Story Collection

Remy Pigeon #1 - Til Human Voices Wake Us

by Annie Bellet

In this large collection, author Annie Bellet demonstrates her gift for the short form, offering readers a collection of twenty short stories, novelettes, and novellas that are compelling, beautifully imagined, and entertaining.Till Human Voices Wake Us contains 20 stories that range from hard science fiction to space opera, sword and sorcery to magical realism, some in print for the first time. Included in this collection the Shadow on Broken StoneTill Human Voices Wake UsNo Gift of WordsPele’s BeekeeperCrawliesDelilahNo Spaceships GoAll-Purpose LuckRoping the MotherWinter’s BiteBroken MoonAll is Violent, All is BrightThe Scent of SunlightLight of the Earth As Seen from TartarusNevermind the BollocksDelivering YaehalaOf Bone and Steel and Other Soft MaterialsLa Última EsperanzaA Hunter’s Memory of WinterOn Higher Ground

Genres: Short Stories, Fantasy

313 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 8, 2012

About the author

Annie Bellet is a full-time speculative fiction writer. She holds a BA in English and a BA in Medieval Studies and thus can speak a smattering of useful languages such as Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Welsh.

Her books include Avarice (Pyrrh Considerable Crimes Division: Book 1), The Gryphonpike Chronicles series, and the Twenty-Sided Sorceress series.

Her interests besides writing include rock climbing, reading, horse-back riding, video games, comic books, table-top RPGs, and many other nerdy pursuits.


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Reviews

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing is fine -- if short stories are your thing, this is likely a solid book. But they all felt like excerpts to me, rather than stories that only need a short format to be effective. None of them stayed with me. (Also, I confused this for another book of the same title that was on my to-read list.)

[Trina Talma · Rating 4 out of 5]

The main reason I gave this four stars instead of five? I wanted more. Not more stories necessarily, but more *of* the stories. Many of the stories seemed to want to be more, to become novels rather than short stories. I would definitely have read them in longer forms.

[Heidi Vlach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many human cultures and races appear in this collection, represented by lots of resilient female characters. Always nice to see in speculative fiction! The stories tend to start with numerous small details about the setting and the culture, which is probably helpful if you’re the type of reader who likes a crisp sense of place.

Out of all the stories, I really liked Crawlies (pretty much entirely for the Teutheids, squid-like aliens who are commendably patient with the frustratingly ignorant human POV) and No Gift Of Word (a story of an African woman overcoming a curse, predictable in the good way where the characters got what I was rooting for). I also thought the two stories involving rusalka were particularly well done.

Throughout the collection, I saw some minor niggles — a few homophone and tense errors; an occasional description or detail that didn’t seem to fit no matter how I considered it; endings that fit thematically but seemed abrupt, prose-wise. But these things weren’t numerous or grievous enough to keep me from enjoying all the stories. For the sheer variety of influences, and the presence of things sci-fi/fantasy could use more of, I’d say this short story collection is definitely worth reading.

I received this book for free from LibraryThing's Member Giveaway program, in exchange for an honest review.

[Backcoverpromotions · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review by Tammy

Till Human Voices Wake Us from Annie Bellet is a collection of 20 short stories. There is no better way to describe this than eclectic. No matter what your reading genre preference there will be something that will grab your attention and pull you deeper into the book. Many will take you on a journey that will find you wondering "Why isn't this longer?" But that's the power of the short story.

None of these are the same. They're all unique. I'm not always a reader of anthologies with this many shorts in them, but when you have a small amount of time to read this filled quite a void.

It was great to be able to read a whole story before being interrupted again. Then, I got to go back and pick up the next story.

There were a couple I didn't care for, but that's just me.

[Scott S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

3-3.5 stars

This was an interesting collection of stories. I probably enjoyed the majority of them, but wasn't really blown away by any. It's interesting for an author to create so many worlds only to pull a small tale from each. The range of styles between the short stories was impressive.

I could have done without some of the themes and the only Christians mentioned were the most hateful people ever.

The Samson and Delilah story was weird, really only caused me to wonder why Godless people get so hung up on God.

The narration was great.

Overall enjoyable, but won't listen to again. Probably wouldn't have listened to it the first time if the book hadn't benefited from already being loaded onto my phone when a previous audiobook ended sooner than expected.

[Jai · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of 20 sci-fi/fantasy stories gives you a good short read when you want an escape from the mundane. They are all different, rather than a series and I enjoyed the variety and the imaginative characters.

[Lori Franklin Hopkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was given the opportunity to read this for free in exchange for an honest review from librarything.com.

Some of these stories don't fall under my usual fare, but i have to say that I enjoyed them greatly. Nice change of pace.