Gwern's Reviews > The Bridge to Lucy Dunne

The Bridge to Lucy Dunne by Exurb1a
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Sep 25, 2016

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Read on September 25, 2016

18 short stories typically with an ironic SF or fantasy tinge and heavy reliance on twist endings (more like Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives or Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others than The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq). As with most anthologies, the quality is uneven.


Decent:



“The Guests”: self-consistent time travel setting; no one will be surprised by the ending
“Tap”: family drama/horror
“Into That Good Night”
“VASE”: SF thinkpiece; reminds me a great deal of Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See”
“My Brother, My Wife, and the Wheel”: Icelandic supernatural horror; probably too long, though
“Sins: Various”
“The First Living Exhibit”: overwritten but still amusing
“Silicon Nights”: the best story in the collection, an homage to The Arabian Nights in a fast-forward Vingean-like setting (Arabian in the story structure, not the setting itself, so not like Rajaniemi's The Causal Angel if that's what you were thinking) where the twist really does work

Poor:



“A Dance”: cosmological allegory; done before and better (eg “The Goddess of Everything Else”, and of course Star Maker)
“Godspeed and Goodnight”: time-dilation horror, overly long, not nearly as good as Watts’s time-dilation horror
“The Flowers”. “Collision”: absolutely predictable
“Empty Cups”, “The Bridge to Lucy Dunne”: failed attempts at regular literature
“The Bait”: moderately interesting but I was unsure if I understood the twist ending or what it was supposed to be
“A Haunting”
“The Rite”
“The Gift”
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