this is going to be short, because I found myself saying the same thing over and over
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Eating Robots and Other Stories
by Stephen Oram
eARC, 107 pg.
SilverWood Books, 2017
Read: April 27 – 29, 2017
I flipped through my thesaurus to find some decent synonyms for imaginative, because I need a few to talk about this collection. Didn’t find any that I liked, alas — this collection needs me to say something more than imaginative, just to avoid being dull and repetitive.
These stories are short — it’s not fair to call most of these stories, they’re more like scenes. Hints of a story, character studies, maybe hints of a scene — and on the one hand you can see most to of these happening in other parts of the same world — but they don’t have to, there could be a 30 different future realities represented here.
These are almost entirely too short. Some of the character moments are great — but even they don’t satisfy. The longer stories (there are not that many of them) barely seemed long enough to be a decent story — and they were good. There is a strong Twilight Zone feel to almost every plot and circumstance in the book — updated, like Rod Serling for the 21st Century.
I can not say it enough — Oram can write. He’s got a great imagination, and a mind for Science Fiction. But between the length and his approach, I just couldn’t get into any of the stories, I couldn’t care about anyone or anything in this book. I respect these stories, but I didn’t like any of them. I can easily see me being alone in that, though, if someone came along and told me that this was one of the best collections they read this year, I’d understand. I wouldn’t agree, but I could see where they were coming from. I hope Oram finds his audience (or that they find him), sadly, I’m not part of it.
I received a copy of this book from b00k r3vi3w Tours in return for this post. Thanks!
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