Having recently told Gentle Readers all to avoid any John Barnes book other than One for the Morning Glory (New York: Tor Fantasy 1996), Your Humble Blogger of course picked up at the library Apostrophes & Apocalypses, (New York: Tor 1998), a collection of short stories and essays. I've read enough of it to require an entry, if I'm going to do an entry for every book I read.
I stopped ten pages into a 60-page short story that he cheerfully admits nobody would print before. I'm not surprised; it was dreadful, and the dullness was relieved only slightly by the unpleasantness. A 30-page essay was very detailed, and I got and disagreed with the point early on, and only skimmed to make sure that the rest was details, rather than new arguments. The rest of the stories and essays I read, without much enjoying any of them. The funny ones were ponderous, and the spooky ones weren't very spooky. The essays were actually fairly provocative, although they didn't provoke me to agree with him. The one point that I was ready to agree with, about how our culture over-rates originality and under-rates craft, was lost when he said that Red Harvest wasn't as good as Double Indemnity, after which I could barely finish the essay for tooth-grinding.
The most interesting thing about the collection to me was the comment, written in 1998, that the if this goes on ... stories written in the mid-eighties about the religious right taking over the US Government being dated. That is, in 1986, Mr. Barnes wrote a couple of stories set in a repressive theocratic republic, which seemed totally out of date by the time he collected them in 1998. They don't seem remotely dated now.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.