Usually in an average collection there are flashes of brilliance, a handful of good stories and one or two whose weakness stinks the whole collection up - the long-dead fish under the floorboards of an otherwise lovely home.įrom page one, Asher inducts his reader into fascinating universes. I can’t remember the last time I encountered that in a short story collection. Not even a merely average story, one of the anaemic but still serviceable filler tales of the sort so frequently tacked onto compilation books.Įvery story in this collection is solid. Maybe you, like me, are looking for an epic novel in an awe inspiring setting that also makes you laugh – my personal white whale.Īnyway, I have a couple of unlikely treasures I seek in my reading, and when I finished The Engineer Reconditioned I knew I had found one of my personal grails, that most rare of things - A science fiction short story collection with no duds. Maybe a story that expands your mind so much that you can only mouth a silent ‘wow’ when you turn the last page. Maybe it’s a novel that makes you feel so much, that you tear up. An El Dorado in paper and ink that they seek, usually fruitlessly, across the many books they read, whether they even know it or not.
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