From rec.arts.sf.reviews Tue Oct 6 14:06:16 1998 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!news.solace.mh.se!news.xinit.se!news.xinit.se!nntp.se.dataphone.net!newsfeed.online.no!news-feed.inet.tele.dk!bofh.vszbr.cz!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!netnews.com!ai-lab!news.media.mit.edu!not-for-mail From: agapow@latcs1.cs.latrobe.edu.au (p-m agapow) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Review: "Ghost Seas" by Steven Utley Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 03 Oct 1998 14:07:38 -0400 Organization: Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Biologists Lines: 63 Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: tinbergen.media.mit.edu X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.3/Emacs 19.34 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:2118 "Ghost Seas" by Steven Utley A Postview, Copyright 1998 p-m agapow A short story collection, including: "The Tall Grass" - the dying pilot of a crashed exploration vehicle reminisces about his life; "Haiti" - as a US crew reaches Mars, a medico fights a hopeless battle against a plague in impoverished Haiti; "Dog in the Manger" - a slash-and-burn operation is conducted in the face of an alien invasion. This small press edition heralds the return of Utley to SF after an absence of nearly a decade. Although he was never particularly famous - writing short stories is a hard way to get reader recognition - this publication is one to sit up and pay attention to. As a reference points for style, you might look to Howard Waldrop or Harlan Ellison. Like Waldrop, Utley has a highly developed sense of place, a talent for drawing the lonely frontier ("A grocery store, a filling station and precious little else. And Angelton's about thirty miles beyond that. Angleton's a real metropolis. There are two filling stations there.") and filling in history. "The Electricity of Heaven", about the fall of the South at the end of the American Civil War, is a finely crafted picture of a great historical change that could have been written by Waldrop. Like Ellison, the author is not interested in technology. Gadgetry is just there to make the story work, or as background detail. There are a few Ellison-esque stings in the tails of stories. My suspicion is that Utley is aware of this crossover with Ellison: "Slices of Sylvia" is Utley's rendering of the Kitty Genovese murder, territory that Ellison has covered prominently. Unfortunately, "Ghost Seas" suffers a problem, one that is more marketing than writing. As with James Patrick Kelly's recent "Think Like a Dinosaur," the mix of stories is broad, perhaps too broad. Many of the stories are only marginally SF, and a few of them not at all. Although some of the non-SF is written like SF: "Two Women of the Prairie" shows the encounter of an abandoned wife and a dying Indian woman on the alien landscapes of the Old West frontier. As I said with Kelly's book, my complaint is not an inverted snobbery about non-SF writing. It's just recognition of the fact that a package labelled "14 Stories: Assorted" can be a difficult one to find a place for in the market or in your reading schedule. How many times do you settle down with a book, thinking "I feel like reading a good science fiction, or horror, or love, or western story now"? But make the time nonetheless. Just to quickly mention two other good stories in this collection, the confronting "Haiti" directly poses the space program against the needs of the Third World, questioning the motives for technological progress. "Race Relations" succeeds with the bizarre premise of humans being transformed into large echidnas by visiting aliens. Hopefully, we'll see a mass-market collection from Utley before too long. [****/must-read] and John Sayles on the Sid and Nancy scale. %A Steven Utley %T Ghost Seas %I Ticonderoga Press %C Nedlands (Western Australia) %D 1997 %P 167pp %G ISBN 0-9586856-1-4 %O paperback, Aus$17.95 Paul-Michael Agapow (p.agapow@ic.ac.uk), Dept. Biology, Imperial College "We were too young, lived too fast and had too much technology ..."