Description:
Each year, the invitation-only Sycamore Hill Writers' Conference brings together some of science fiction's greatest authors in a workshop focused on short SF/fantasy. In 1994, all stories submitted to the workshop were collected for Intersections. These 13 stories and one novel chapter, some rewritten by the authors to incorporate workshop critiques, are accompanied by authors' afterwords and by comments that were made about each story. Unsurprisingly, Intersections is a superior anthology and an excellent resource for new and intermediate SF/F writers. The fiction is so strong that anyone uninterested in the art of crafting prose may skip the commentary without being shortchanged. (Just don't skip Appendix I, the incisive and hilarious "Turkey City Lexicon: A Primer for SF Workshops.") The 1994 participants were Richard Butner, Carol Emshwiller, Karen Joy Fowler, Robert Frazier, Gregory Frost, Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Nancy Kress, Jonathan Lethem, Maureen F. McHugh, Michaela Roessner, Bruce Sterling, and Mark L. Van Name. With a lineup that strong, choosing the best stories has more to do with reader taste than writer ability; the works described here were selected to suggest the anthology's range and diversity. Bruce Sterling's Hugo Award-winning "Bicycle Repairman" displays his trademark brilliant high-tech extrapolation in the clash between an obsessed treadhead and a federal agent. "The Marianas Islands" is prose goddess Karen Joy Fowler's subtle, stunning portrait of a WWII widow and '60s activist grandmother whose father-in-law may have invented the submarine. Alexander Jablokov's "The Fury at Colonus" rewrites Greek myth as a modern, hard-boiled, satirical, and very strange sort of police procedural. In "The Miracle of Ivar Avenue," John Kessel pays tribute to a classic Hollywood director in a painfully sharp time-travel tale. In short, this is one of the best original literary-SF/F anthologies of the '90s. --Cynthia Ward
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