"Where or When" - Steven Utley (5/31/15)

[Amy, Queen of Time]

Wow. There's absolutely nothing on the GoodReads author page about Steven Utley. But that doesn't mean there's nothing out there about him. Take this picture, for example:


Now there's something. Granted, it's a picture of him from a con in 1973, but yowzahs.

The sage and ever-trustworthy Wikipedia says that he "wrote poems, humorous essays and other non-fiction, and worked on comic books and cartoons, but was best known for his science fiction stories. Utley was diagnosed with stage four cancer in early December 2012, fell into a coma on January 11, 2013, and died the following night."

Gardner Dozois, an editor of Asimov's Science Fiction, said that he "may be the most under-rated science fiction writer alive." (Obviously, he said that at some point before 2013.) People don't seem to remember story writers as much as novelists it seems.

Lightspeed magazine has a nice little author's spotlight about him from a few months before he was diagnosed with cancer.


He looks decidedly less thrilled in this photo. Some titles on the bookshelf behind him: Origins, The Making of Mankind, The Phantom of the Opera, Up From Conservatism, Ribaldry of Ancient Rome, Rudyard Kipling Selected Works, The Last Celt, The Swordsman of Mars, C'Affaire, Dubliners, Ulysses, Man & His Symbols, The Trial, The World According to Garp, The Dark Man, Red Nails, Conan, The Great Radio Comedians, A Heinlein Trio, The Past Through Tomorrow, Catch-22, Now and Then, The Best Years, Finder, The Female Eunuch, Wonderful Life, Full House

****Story discussion forthcoming****

[Amy, Queen of Time]

Did anyone read this one? We start off with a dislikable character in an interesting setting, and then the story goes nowhere. The only somewhat interesting concept is that we find out that there are people traveling back in time to try to change history. Why didn't the author do something with that part of the storyline instead?


2 stars.

[Glynn]

I read this one this morning. Short stories are hard. You have to make it a complete thing in itself in a short amount of pages. This one started to get interesting at the end, exploring difficult questions, but it probably would have been better as a full length novel where these idea could have been fleshed out. I was bored at first but I think it recovered at the end so I'll give it 3.5 stars.

[Amy, Queen of Time]

Glynn wrote: "I read this one this morning. Short stories are hard. You have to make it a complete thing in itself in a short amount of pages. This one started to get interesting at the end, exploring difficult ..."

Right. Why didn't Utley explore the idea at the end more than the idea of a disagreeable woman in a huge dress running through the mud to escape musket balls? Oh well.

[Cheryl]

Because readers demand page-turning adventure, and sex, and don't find 'exploration of ideas' to be marketable blurb words?

Three stars for the idea.

[Samantha]

I kind of liked this one even though nothing seemed to really happen. It was enjoyable anyway, and I liked the characters in spite of the woman being a little difficult.

One thing that intrigued me was the idea of slippage. Connie Willis uses that a lot in her time travel books, so was Utley piggybacking on what she wrote? Fire Watch was published in 82 and this was published in 91, but Doomsday Book wasn't published until 1992.