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Starlings

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Member Reviews

This is a good collection of short stories and poems. I'll admit that poetry doesn't usually spark my interest much, but the short stories were lovely and the Godzilla sonnets were delightfully funny and unexpected.

Aspiring writers may find this volume informative because it includes a lot of tips that can be taken as writing advice. In the introduction, Walton explains that for a long time, she didn't know how to write short stories. In fact, several of the stories in this collection were originally intended as first chapters of novels, until Walton realized that they worked as stories. (I particularly liked these stories because they sparked my imagination as I considered what would come next.)

All in all, this was lovely. The stories dabble in fascinating concepts and unusual points of view. If you generally enjoy short genre fiction, I encourage you to check this out.

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By the author's own admission, several of the "short stories" in this book are not actually stories. They're exercises in mode, or jokes, or the attempts of someone who knows how novels work but not how short stories work to write a short story.

This doesn't sound promising, but Jo Walton is such a good writer that she mostly gets away with it in any case. In fact, some of the stories have been published in prestigious publications like Strange Horizons and Subterranean. Unfairly, I occasionally thought, "I wish I had the kind of standing in the SFF community that meant I could get published in those publications by writing a story that isn't a story," but that's not the only thing that's going on. Walton is a deep thinker, a close observer, and a master of language, and all these things shine through, even when her "story" is only an exploration of a clever idea with no real beginning, middle, or (especially) end.

"Three Twilight Tales," for example, the first piece, explores a small town that has remarkable magic, but the magic is a means to look at the people and their relationships. "Jane Austen to Cassandra" takes the idea that Jane Austen's letters to her friend and correspondent Cassandra go astray and reach Cassandra's original namesake, the prophetess who nobody believed. And are answered. "Unreliable Witness" is from the POV of an elderly woman with dementia who may or may not have encountered aliens. "On the Wall" is, as the author says, the beginning of a novel, a very different version of Snow White, from the perspective of the mirror, but because we know the original story we don't need the rest. This kind of implied narrative is something I'm interested in, taking advantage of the familiar tales to create resonance and tell a minimal story where the reader fills in what's missing.

"The Panda Coin" is SF, following a coin through a number of hands in a somewhat dystopic space station. "Remember the Allosaur" is a joke, but a beautifully written one. "Sleeper" I think I've read before somewhere (probably Tor.com, since it was published there, or in one of their collections); it's about a Russian sleeper agent in late-20th-century Britain whose consciousness is simulated by a researcher in a dystopian future. Like most of the others, it doesn't have an ending so much as imply a continuation.

"Relentlessly Mundane" is a consideration of the question "what do the kids do after they come back from the portal fantasy world and grow up?" It's an idea that's been tackled at greater length since by Seanan McGuire, but this is a good treatment.

"Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction" is a series of vignettes and pseudo-documents that build up a picture of an American dystopia (there's a bit of a theme going with the SF in this volume), in the old alternate-history-where-the-Nazis-won-WWII genre. Not as original an idea as some of the others, but well done.

"Joyful and Triumphant" is a meditation on the idea that each planet gets an Incarnation, in the "character explains as if to n00bs" mode. It's not a mode I think much of, and this is, for me, one of the weaker stories, though it's an interesting idea. Later in the volume, "What Would Sam Spade Do?" posits a world with multiple clones of Jesus, who have become a kind of ethnicity, and "What Joseph Felt" explores St Joseph's feelings around the Incarnation. "Out of It" is based on the Faust legend, so Christian mythology (if I can use the term) gets thoroughly inspected.

"Turnover" is a what-if-the-later-generations-in-the-generation-ship-don't-want-to-go-to-the-new-planet story. As it happens, I read a very similar story by Ursula Le Guin almost immediately afterwards ("Paradises Lost"), and comparing anyone else's story to a Le Guin is usually unfair to the other writer, but this one stands up reasonably well. The sense of place is well handled, in particular, and though it's another story with an "ending" that's more of an implication of future events to come, so is Le Guin's.

I won't mention all of the stories, just a couple more. "A Burden Shared" is set in a world where people can (through handwaved technology) shoulder one another's pain, featuring the mother of a woman with a chronic illness as the main character. As someone who lives with a person with a chronic illness, it rang true to me, and the theme of how caregivers (especially mothers) can neglect their own needs is an important one.

The other story, which is actually a play, is "Three Shouts on a Hill," an odd mishmash of Irish legend with bits and pieces from other times and places that's as much a meta-meditation on story as it is anything else.

Overall, then, this collection is proof that, if you're a good enough writer, you can write a successful piece of short fiction in a lot of different ways. Not all of the pieces are excellent or weighty, or even original, but those that are lift the average considerably.

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Jo Walton’s Starlings opens with a poem considering baby stars – Star-lings – emerging points of brightness finding their way in the universe. It’s an apt analogy for this collection.

This isn’t really a collection of short fiction or an anthology in the traditional sense. Walton herself discusses her inability to write “proper” short fiction in her introduction. What this is instead is a collection of first chapters of novels that didn’t eventuate, writing exercises experimenting with a particular mood or idea, vignettes, thought pieces, jokes, poetry, a play, and the two aforementioned ‘real’ short stories.

It makes for an odd collection and I found it provoking more of a mixed response than I normally would have with a traditional short story collection. On one hand it’s fascinating to see the different sorts of pieces Walton has played with up to this point. On the other though, I found it was quite uneven with a lot of the stories, by virtue of not really being ‘stories’, failing to capture my interest or coming off as unsatisfying. They often didn’t have a point other than to let Walton explore a feeling or an idea. My favourite pieces were: Three Twilight Tales, Relentlessly Mundane, The Panda Coin and Remember the Allosaur.

Walton’s prose throughout is lovely and the ideas she picks and how she develops them are wonderful. I just found a lot of the pieces either too short – the unrealised novel first chapters such as Relentlessly Mundane – or not long enough to really be anything.

I also found the afterwards to each piece didn’t add much to the pieces themselves. They were often strangely focused on whether Walton had been paid for a piece, where she had sold it to, or how well it had done rather than providing more context or insights into the writing process or the thinking behind the pieces.

Overall this is a collection of ‘Starlings’, emerging bright things in a universe in various states of formation. I found it interesting, but mostly there wasn’t enough for me to grab hold of or fall into to really say I liked it.

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I've been a fan of Jo Walton since my first introduction to her, when I read 'My Real Children.' This collection features short stories, poetry and plays. Walton admits she has a hard time writing short stories and shares her thought process behind every piece. I really enjoyed this collection, and the stories contain Walton's always beautiful language. I think I ended up enjoying the short stories better than the poetry or plays, but overall this is a great collection. I'd recommend it to fans of Walton or people who enjoy fantasy short stories.

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I agonised over how to review and rate this book. To start with the positive points, Starlings contains a selection of tales ranging from true short stories to vignettes, to poems. Not all of them resonated with me, but there were a few standouts. For example, I particularly enjoyed 'Three Twilight Tales' and 'Unreliable Witness'. Considering the range of material, I would say that there will be something here for everyone. However, one thing put me off this book and that was the use of afterwords at the end of each story. I would have had no issue had they added value, but for the most part they seemed pointless and I really didn't like the way the author used some of them to rant about things such as publishers who hadn't paid her. It seemed so unprofessional. And those afterwords that weren't complaints came across a little too self-congratulatory at times, which didn't give me a positive impression of the author and which, therefore, affected my relationship with her work too. I think I would have enjoyed the collection more overall had those afterwords not been there. As it is, I am giving this 3.5 stars as there were some good tales in there and it was an interesting collection of pieces from throughout the author's career.

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I picked this book put purely based on the beautiful cover and was really captivated by these short stories and poems. This book is actually a collection of fantasy and science fiction stories that cover so many different themes and worlds and premises that at some point I just surrendered the to fact that every few pages I would be thrown into yet another interesting world.

This was a great collection for me as an eclectic reader, and I loved that the many different world and spaces Walton writes about span multiple genres and moods. However, if you are someone who does not typically enjoy either science fiction or fantasy, it might be worth checking out a story or two, or borrowing a copy and skipping around instead of buying it.

The only thing that irritated me was the author's notes after every story. As a reader, I want to be able to have a seamless reading experience, and would rather see notes on each story contained in an appendix. Because it was an early proof, I am not sure how much of this will change, but overall, I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys fantasy and science fiction, and to lovers of short stories, especially odd ones.

Posted on: https://readingdiverselyayearofnotreadingwhitemen.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/week-25

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Equal parts imaginative, charming, inventive, and quaint, Jo Walton's first short story collection reveals a brilliant fantasist dabbling with form, exploring new modes, and unleashing a torrent of new ideas, while walking the reader through the process and backstory behind each piece. Walton is one of those authors I've always meant to read but never quite have, despite staring wistfully at the cover of <em>Among Others</em> for years, so it came as a bit of a surprise (even to me) when I dove into <em>Starlings</em> and finished it in a week.

Oddly enough, I don't think this book—which collects 20 short stories (and they are, generally, quite short), a slightly longer stage play, and 15 or so poems into 288 pages—is a collection of individually brilliant stories or poems so much as an eminently readable compendium of thought experiments. If that makes the book sound slight, that's because it <em>is</em> rather slight, which in this rare case doesn't detract from its success. Walton acknowledges that the collection only contains two of what she considers to be true short stories; the rest are poems in meter, prose poems, exercises in mode or voice, and even extended jokes, all strung together with thoughtful commentary explaining the genesis or meaning of each tale, and those interstitial bits add weight and meaning to the proceedings in the way that they show us some of Walton in more direct form and even double as a loosely structured short-story writer's tutorial.

Walton writes with warmth; I don't know how else to describe it. And she has a gift for drawing an immensity of ideas from a few scarce words, spouting mythological references and hard science ideas with ease, switching between both modes and a thousand shades in between, and always ending her stories before they wear out their welcome. That last feature, the brevity of the tales, is perhaps what made this such a rapid read and it's also what sets it apart from so many tedious collections that burn countless words with scene-setting or extended endings, belaboring the point so that you rarely feel like starting another story after you finally escaped the last one. Here, the longest thing is the script of a (deceptively) simple stage play, and that one has the fastest pace of all since it's entirely dialogue, even as it gradually reveals itself to be something so much more than its initial quest structure would suggest.

Walton does that phenomenally well: she's playful, exploratory, dropping gentle hints we needn't take this all so seriously, that there's fun to be had with genres and stories in general, that slight narratives can be entertaining, enlightening despite their slightness, even beautiful. It's a fine trick, and now I'm duly intrigued enough to dig into the rest of her catalog.

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When I started reading this collection I really was not enjoying it: granted, I'm not big on short fiction, and I was really getting lost in the first short story. Nevertheless, it all soon picked up, and I found myself very into the rest of the pieces. My favourites were probably Unreliable Witness (very interesting glance on dementia, which we don't see very often), The Panda Coin (great worldbuilding is so few words), Relentlessly Mundane (the first chapter to a novel I so wish she would write), What Would Sam Spades Do? (hilarious), Tradition (funny and still thought-provoking), A Burden Shared (it IS hard to watch loved ones suffer and it would be much simpler to suffer in their places) and Turnover (once again: where is the novel?!).
Also, the play was amazing, and, even though I seldom care much for poetry (I rarely do), I was actually quite impressed by Not in This Town, Hades and Persephone and Advice to Loki.

Overall, I liked this work and it is really about time I read more of Walton's work.

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