A Double Shot of Short Fiction
is best known for his award-winning hard sci-fi novels, and rightly so. Sawyer has won every major prize in the field for his long-form work. However, his short fiction chops should not be ignored. Both Iterations and Other Stories and the just-released Identity Theft and Other Stories bring together a career-spanning collection of stellar short stories.
As with any short story collection, there will be entries that speak to an individual reader more than others, but I defy you to find a bad story in this particular bunch. For myself, personal standouts include "Iterations", "The Hand You're Dealt" and "Just Like Old Times", all from Iterations and Other Stories. From Identity Theft and Other Stories I especially liked the titular novella, the story "Come All Ye Faithful", and what Sawyer says may be his last short story, "Biding Time". If that is the case, then I sure wouldn't mind reading a novel about Alex Lomax, the hard-boiled Martian P.I. who stars in "Identity Theft" and "Biding Time".
You don't read science fiction? Don't worry, Sawyer has also won the Canadian Crime Writer's Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story, and has been nominated for Horror's Bram Stoker Award. Both of his short story collections go beyond tales of aliens and starships. What's more, Sawyer's short fiction -- like his novels -- is both uniquely Canadian and of the world. Among other things, his writing is full of philosophical questions ("sci-phi" as he likes to call it), grapples with the intersection of science and theology, and (best of all) even contains the occasional dinosaur.
See Also:
Robert J. Sawyer, an Interview
Hugo and John W. Campbell Shortlists Announced
Canadian Robert J. Sawyer Wins China's Top SF Honour
| Categories: Staff Pick, SciFi & Fantasy, Mystery & Crime |
|
See:
| |
This first collection of short stories by the man The Ottawa Citizen calls "the dean of Canadian science fiction" includes Hugo Award nominee "The Hand You're Dealt," Bram Stoker Award fi...
| |
This new collection by the man Anne McCaffrey calls "an absolutely marvelous writer" includes Hugo Award nominee "Shed Skin," Nebula Award nominee "Identity Theft," and Aurora Award winne...
| |
2009 Aurora Award nominee"A sense of wonder that hasn't prevailed in American SF since the days of Heinlein."-Books in CanadaThis new collection by the man Anne McCaffrey calls "an absolu...
| |
An alien shuttle craft lands outside the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. A six-legged, two-armed alien emerges, who says, in perfect English, "Take me to a paleontologist." It seems tha...
| |
Archaeologist Brandon Thackery and his rival Miles Klicks Jordan fulfill a dinosaur lovers dream with historys first time-travel jaunt to the late Mesozoic. Hoping to solve the extinction...
| |
In the near future, a signal is detected coming from Alpha Centauri. Unintelligible data streams in for ten years. Heather Davis, a professor at the University of Toronto, has devoted her...
| |
The Face of God is what every young saurian learns to call the immense, glowing object which fills the night sky on the far side of the world. Young Afsan is privileged, called to the dis...
| |
Fossil Hunter is hard SF in the tradition of Larry Niven about a world inhabited by the Quintaglios, a dinosaurian species that has evolved a human level of intelligence and culture. Toro...
| |
A tale of aliens in the tradition of James White-but these aliens are dinosaurs! I nFar-Seer and Fossil Hunter, we met the Quintaglios, a race of intelligent dinosaurs from Earth, and lea...
| |
A scientific experiment begins, and as the button is pressed, the unexpected occurs: everyone in the world goes to sleep for a few moments while everyone's consciousness is catapulted mo...
| |
This is the story of Pierre Tardivel, a scientist, and his complex battle against deadly illness; an ex-Nazi war criminal still hiding in the US; a crooked insurance company; and a plot t...
| |
Aboard Argo, a colonization ship bound for Eta Cephei IV, people are very close--there's no other choice. So when Aaron Rossman's ex-wife dies in what seems to be a bizarre accident, ever...
| |
Winner of the 2003 Hugo Award Hominids is the first book of The Neanderthal Parallax, in which two species that are alien to each other are bound together by the never-ending quest for k...
| |
In this sequel to Homonids, the Neanderthal physicist Ponder Boddit returns to our world, and to his relationship with geneticist Mary Vaughn, as cultural exchanges between the two Earths...
| |
In the Hugo-Award winning Hominids , Robert J. Sawyer introduced a character readers will never forget: Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist from a parallel Earth who was whisked from h...
Loading...
