Too Much Dark Matter, Too Little Gray: A Collection of Weird Fiction

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Pub Date Apr 10 2014 | Archive Date May 26 2014

Description

Award-winning speculative fiction author Mike Robinson offers up 19 of his creepily provocative short stories in his new book, Too Much Dark Matter, Too Little Gray: A Collection of Weird Fiction.

A beer run becomes an interdimensional excursion. Two men settle their differences after discovering an extraordinary secret in the wilderness. A woman faces the bureaucratic logistics of a digital afterlife. A grieving man seeks to know where his wife was reincarnated. Strange lights in the sky begin to transform the lives of a small town. God and the Devil play billiards for people’s souls. A teenage deity’s science fair project sprouts a startling discovery.

These and more dream-like detours into the surreal, interstitial and inexplicable await within the pages of Too Much Dark Matter, Too Little Gray: A Collection of Weird Fiction.

Award-winning speculative fiction author Mike Robinson offers up 19 of his creepily provocative short stories in his new book, Too Much Dark Matter, Too Little Gray: A Collection of Weird Fiction.

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Average rating from 2 members


Featured Reviews

The short stories in this book bear a strong resemblance to the "New Wave" science fiction of the 1960s (famous examples of which are in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions and Judith Merrill's England Swings SF). Like all science fiction, they are explorations of invented worlds inspired by scientific speculation, with adventure plots. However the science is soft, not hard, and the speculations are free-form. The adventures are in the minds of the characters (literally in one case) and do not involve explosions, galactic conquest or rocket ship chases; and the protagonists are nerdy introverts, not swashbucklers. Moreover, the stories display a fine literary craftsmanship flavored with subtlety, irony, color, depth, passion, distinctive style and real original feeling.

Despite the historic connection, these are not replicas of vintage works. The science, including modern cosmology, cognitive psychology and cybernetics is up-to-the-decade. The stories tend to the small and personal, usually non-violent, while the New Wave worried a lot about war, political repression and environmental disaster. Several stories explicitly downplay politics either as uninteresting or as creating unproductive conflict, in other stories politics is satirized. The biggest difference is that the New Wave was self-consciously experimental and locked in a battle with traditional science fiction, while fifty years later the same techniques are noncontroversial. Too Much Dark Matter has deliciously off-kilter ideas, but the basic story formats are conventional by modern standards.

These playful stories have crossover appeal as both literature and science fiction. Inventive, stylish and polished, they entertain and stimulate. I recommend them highly.

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