Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian (Daw Book Collectors, 1265) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0756401771 ISBN 13: 9780756401771

Publisher: DAW Hardcover, 2003

Synopsis

A brilliant collection of stories, featuring unique contributions from such masters of the science fiction genre as Tad Williams, Joe Haldeman, Mercedes Lackey, Harry Turtledove, and Orson Scott Card, reinterprets the lyrics of a popular music legend.

About this title

About the Author:

Janis Ian is a Grammy Award–winning songwriter, singer, and author. She lives in Nashville with her partner of two decades.

From Publishers Weekly:

This dazzling, highly original anthology, ignited by the meeting of songwriter Ian and a host of SF writers affected by her music at the 2001 Worldcon, showcases 30 mostly superior stories, each based on one of her songs. Some contributors take Ian at her word that science fiction is "the jazz of prose," responding to many of society's sharpest wounds with bittersweet improvisatory descants, like Terry Bisson in "Come Dance with Me," David Gerrold in "Riding Janis" and Orson Scott Card in "Inventing Lovers on the Phone," tales that probe the angst of adolescence. Spider Robinson, in "You Don't Know My Heart," like Gerrold in "Riding Janis," deals with the societal rejection gays and lesbians often face; "Immortality," by Robert J. Sawyer, and "Society's Stepchild," by Susan R. Matthews, respond to Ian's poignant "Society's Child," a plea for genuine racial tolerance; Stephen Baxter's "All in a Blaze" and Nancy Kress's brilliant "EJ-ES" confront the pain of aging; and several alternative-world tales, especially Harry Turtledove's powerful "Joe Steele" and Howard Waldrop's "Calling Your Name," explore the entrapment of the individual by sociopolitical forces engendered by materialism. The entire anthology seems to vibrate with the death throes of one world passing away, while far stranger ones struggle to be born. Their commonality, Ian tells us in her introduction, is that "They have heart. They have life. They have truth." No artist-nor any reader-could ask for more.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: DAW Hardcover
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0756401771
• ISBN 13: 9780756401771
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 544
• Editor: Janis Ian, Mike Resnick