Heat of Fusion and Other Stories

by John M. Ford

John M. Ford is an astonishingly versatile writer. He has written award-winning fantasy novels ( The Dragon Waiting , winner of the 1984 World Fantasy Award), award-winning fantasy role-playing games ( The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues ), New York Times bestselling Star Trek novels (the classic The Final Reflection and How Much for Just the Planet ), and the only poem to ever win the World Fantasy Award for best short fiction ("Winter Solstice, Camelot Station"). He is as at home writing sonnets as he is writing short stories or novels.
Heat of Fusion and Other Stories collects stories and poems written over the course of two decades. It includes award winners and award nominees, as well as some rarities, amusements, and astonishments.

Here are short stories such as "Chromatic Aberration," "Preflash," "Erase/Record/Play," and the title story, "Heat of Fusion," that take us from the near past to the near future, and on into worlds of wonder. And there are poems---the award-winner "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station," plus the amazing " A User's Manual," the rare "The Man in the Golden Mask," and the moving "110 Stories," which has never been published in book form.
Twenty-two works in all, gifts from the talent that Robert Jordan calls "the best writer in America, bar none."

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Short Stories, Poetry, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

John Milo "Mike" Ford was a science fiction and fantasy writer, game designer and poet.

Ford was regarded (and obituaries, tributes and memories describe him) as an extraordinarily intelligent, erudite and witty man. He was a popular contributor to several online discussions. He composed poems, often improvised, in both complicated forms and blank verse, notably Shakespearean pastiche; he also wrote pastiches and parodies of many other authors and styles.At Minicon and other science fiction conventions he would perform "Ask Dr. Mike", giving humorous answers to scientific and other questions in a lab coat before a whiteboard.

Ford passed away from natural causes in 2006 at his home in Minneapolis.

Biography source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._...

Reviews

[Stewart Tame · Rating 4 out of 5]

What first attracted my attention to this book was the recent death of John M. Ford. Specifically, it was an article I found on Facebook, something along the lines of, “One of the Greatest SF Authors You’ve Never Heard of Has Just Passed Away.” The article made his work sound fascinating, with luminaries such as Neil Gaiman singing his praises. And then I remembered …

See, my wife used to work at Borders corporate headquarters. One of the perks of working there was access to The Room, a repository of free books, music, movies, and more--review copies, comps from publishers, all sorts of goodies. Needless to say, we acquired stacks of books and music and the like over the years. Including, as it so happens, a copy of the present volume. Sorry that I never got to reading it earlier, but at least I was able to satisfy my newly found curiosity about Ford’s work …

Heat of Fusion and Other Stories is, quite obviously, a short story collection. Despite reading many anthologies over the years, I had never read any of these before, but, to be fair, there are A LOT of anthologies out there. There's also a fair amount of poetry in here as well, which is not usually my cup of tea. I am most definitely impressed with Ford’s poetic skills though. “110 Stories” in particular, which is about the events and emotions of 9/11 was deeply moving.

There's a fairly literary sensibility at work throughout. I’m reminded of writers like Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison. One story especially, “Tales from the Original Gothic,” seems like something either of them might have written. Not in terms of style so much, but it's very much thematically their sort of thing.

Random thoughts:

“The Hemstitch Notebooks”--I blush to confess that I’ve read very little Hemingway, but I definitely recognize a parody when I see it.

“The Man In the Golden Mask”--an epic poem dealing with Dumas’ Three Musketeers. Lovely!

“Erase/Record/Play: A Drama for Print” -- I think this was the first story in the book where I was strongly reminded of Harlan Ellison. Again, not in a plagiaristic or derivative sense, just in terms of theme and subtlety of emotion.

“Winter Solstice, Camelot Station” -- more poetry, in this case a somewhat melancholy view of Arthurian legend seen through a steampunk lens.

And so on. It's an extremely well-written, idiosyncratic book. I will definitely have to see about checking out more of Ford’s work in the future. Recommended!

[William Leight · Rating 3 out of 5]

John M. Ford is another of those writers whose biggest fans always seem to be other writers. I usually find that I don’t like these writer’s writers as much as I do their fans (I believe it was Neil Gaiman’s rave reviews that persuaded me to read Ford), and although I enjoyed “The Dragon Waiting”, Ford’s magical alternate history of the Wars of the Roses, with “Heat of Fusion” we’re more or less back to the status quo. The book is a slightly strange combination of old-fashioned narrative poetry (Ford was a big fan of sonnets) and often vaguely cyberpunk-esque science fiction. Some of the poetry was fun: “The Man in the Golden Mask”, a Three Musketeers/Cyrano de Bergerac crossover, and “Dark Sea”, in which Homer narrates the first manned mission to Mars, were standouts, and “Cosmology: A User’s Manual” and “SF Cliches: A Sonnet Cycle” were more or less as you would imagine from their titles. The others were mostly less interesting, though: a couple that traded a little too much on Tarot imagery, a couple others from the perspective of characters in Shakespeare plays, possibly the first poem ever written about the experience of writing shared-world fiction, a poem which transfers the Arthurian legends to a train station for some reason. They weren’t bad, to be sure, but they didn’t really grip you. The stories, which make up most of the book, were also a mixed bag. “The Persecutor’s Tale”, set in a world with a family similarity to the one of “The Dragon Waiting”, was probably my favorite. In this one, Ford does everything right, giving just enough world-building detail, sketching out not just the two main characters but even some subsidiary ones, and pulling together a perfectly executed plot. None of the other stories come up to this standard, unfortunately. “The Hemstitch Notebooks” is an amusing, if slight, parody of Hemingway. The title story, about a small handful of scientists working on a Project which is obviously intended to be analogous to the Manhattan Project, is also pretty good, in part because its central character, like that of “The Persecutor’s Tale”, is interesting and sympathetic, something that Ford often fails to accomplish. “Chromatic Aberration”, for instance, has no central character: it’s basically a series of parables which function as a piece of propaganda. As propaganda goes, it’s not bad, but as a story it’s lacking. “Preflash” is just too blatantly cyberpunky (even though it pretty much lacks the “cyber” aspect), and its protagonist isn’t that interesting. “Erase/Record/Play” has a good central idea, but was it really necessary to interpolate basically all of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into the text? By the end, I didn’t really feel that it helped to illuminate things the way the rest of the story suggests that it’s supposed to. “Shelter from the Storm” also suffered from uninteresting, two-dimensional characters, and I’m pretty sure the human weapon thing has been done better elsewhere. “Dateline: Colonus”, in which a reporter travels through a Greek Gods-worshipping Middle America with the old and blind Oedipus and his two daughters, told in a gonzo-journalism style, was so crazy that it almost worked. And “Tales from the Original Gothic” is, well, a gothic story, or rather a succession of episodes from various Gothic stories: if the characters were more interesting, the story would probably be better. On the whole, it seems that the short form is not Ford’s strength.

[Josh Bizeau · Rating 5 out of 5]

John M. Ford was an astoundingly good writer and this collection of quixotic short stories and poetry shows off the diverse array in whit and whimsy of which Ford was capable. One of the best surprise reads I've ever purchased purely on a whim. Highly recommended to all looking for something to shake up their collection of science fiction and especially to those who love endlessly re-readable poetry and short stories which are as entertaining as they are broad and thought-provoking.

[Rachel Ayers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even the stories and poems that didn't resonate as much with me did cause me to want to sit down and write something.

I think my favorite is Erase/Record/Play: A Drama for Print. It's sticking with me in the days since I read it.

And Janus: Sonnet. (Of course.)

[Daniel Polansky]

There's a lot of poetry in here that brought the average down.

[Greg · Rating 1 out of 5]

So awful. Disjointed stories, and all maudlin or outright dystopian. Not at all what I expected from the other book of his I read.

[Res · Rating 1 out of 5]

I probably ought to give this more of a chance than I have; I abandoned it about a third of the way through. The poetry is doggerel, not even worth the effort of reading. Many of the stories are war stories, brutal enough to be unpleasant to read; there's actually an underlying brutality to all the stories, which I don't like. And in many of the stories, I can't figure out what's going on.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with most collections, I loved some stories ("The Hemstitch Notebooks") and found a few others a bit difficult to get into, but all of them worth reading.