Jan Priddy > Recent Status Updates

I've gone back twice to: "This isn't a story about war. It's about ruin."

All war stories are about ruin...

Immediately compelling.

It is an extraordinary imagining, a fantasy world that might use a few familiar terms (like "familiar"] but otherwise follows a completely original set of rules.

Genuinely marvelous world building and characters so far. Wells thanks the cartographer in her acknowledgements, but... I wonder sometimes if the designers of imaginary maps have looked at rivers, actual rivers, where they come from, how they flow and join, and rarely split except over an alluvial plain? Inevitably, there will be a key location that is either not shown or is named something else. Random lakes.

Undeniably, a great story, but not great writing and a lot of missed opportunities.

Yet another example of an inaccurate page count, but it's closer than some.

The introduction where Hornby explains the impact of debilitating autism without access to proper education, from his personal and far less tragic experience.

Awareness that if it isn't digitized, it does not exist for all intents and purposes. American academics have made great discoveries accidentally by asking a library for something that catalogued as unpromising.

note: The Academie francaise – the elite club of 40 'immortals' serves as the official guardian of the French language, protecting France from “brainless Globish” and the “deadly snobbery of Anglo-American”

Guy de Maupassant's science fiction has been mentioned twice—I never knew. It seems a missed opportunity not to include an example in this collection, to take SF back to the nineteenth century.

There are 2 warnings of an "adult-minor relationship" in Fayard's story + Intro note that the "minor" turns out to be an alien intent on tricking the narrator, but not that the 1st person narrator is himself a pedophile. Early mention of the alien seems unfortunate, since it doesn't negate the trigger warning but does spoil the twist. It would have done better to have become an element for discussion. It isn't.

I am troubled by suggestions of the narrator's pedophilia in "The Liberator," though the editors seem to excuse this because the child is actually an alien? The kicked cat. The joke? So clever? Not a story for me.

I am loving this third story... this collection is less than 300 pages so I don't know where the page count came from.

p. 193: "Our country was built on a stolen beam." It refers to the Talmud and to the flooding and taking of Lakota land.