The Best of Crank!

Gathers stories by Lisa Tuttle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Bishop, R.A. Lafferty, Gene Wolfe, and Brian Aldiss

The 17 stories harvested from the pages of Cholfin's cutting-edge SF zine Crank! provide an excellent survey of today's writers in the field, from the old guard (Ursula K. Le Guin) to the newer and edgier (Jonathan Lethem) and the promising but little known (A.M. Dellamonica). Though the collection is militantly antithematic, there's a noticeable lack of hard science here. Generally, the SF hooks take a back seat to character and plot. In "Moonbender," one of three stories by Lethem, a vendor of disposable ambiatronic puppets and a middlebrow artist drag each other to ruin when they attempt to combine their efforts. "I, Iscariot" by Michael Bishop puts Judas on trial using scripture and a running fictional online commentary. "Nixon in Space" by Rob McCleary posits a world based on the myth of the disgraced president's pathetic efforts to participate in a moonshot. Lisa Tuttle's "Food Man," one of the more inspired stories in the anthology, portrays a teenage girl's eating disorder as an incubus that comes to life out of the food she hides under her bed. Tuttle ingeniously and unexpectedly resolves the tension between food and sex with an ending reminiscent of insect mating ritual. Also notable, not least for its originality and its brilliant playfulness of language, is Eliot Fintushel's "Santacide." Other name authors represented in this fine sampling of the field include A.A. Attanasio and Gene Wolfe (whose entries, not surprisingly, tend more toward fantasy than SF), as well as Brian Aldiss, R.A. Lafferty and David R. Bunch.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Seventeen tales, 198796, collected from the small press magazine Crank!, whose editor Cholfin's mission statement is to dismantle the concept of genre altogethera marketing strategy, not a literary classification, he insists, with some justification. Anyhow, Ursula K. Le Guin contributes one of her fascinating cultural-sexual studies, ``The Matter of Seggri''; Brian Aldiss has robot troubles in ``The Servant Problem''; Gene Wolfe offers a story set in his Book of the New Sun creation. Other well-known authors include Lisa Tuttle, Michael Bishop, R. A. Lafferty, A. A. Attanasio, David R. Bunch, and Gwyneth Jones. Most revealing of all, Jonathan Lethem appears no less than three times, with two solo efforts and a collaboration with Carter Scholz. Unquantifiable, eccentric, eclectic, worth a try. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"Introduction: I'm Having a Dream," the manifesto-cum-foreword to this volume, does not clearly communicate the intent of editor Cholfin's alternative literary sf periodical Crank, source of the stories in it. So leap over it and surmise from the stories that the magazine's goal seems to be to publish stories that, though using sf and fantasy elements, don't necessarily fit marketing-department notions about what qualifies as sf or fantasy. The ruck of fans won't be surprised to find singularly fine stories by Gene Wolfe and Ursula K. LeGuin, as well as good pieces by such other lights of literary sf as Lisa Tuttle, Karen Joy Fowler, Michael Bishop, and R. A. Lafferty. But unless they have been paying attention to Crank itself, they may not yet know Jonathan Lethem, represented three times herein (once, to be sure, in collaboration with Carter Scholz), or A. M. Dellamonica. If developing new authors is essential to a literary genre's survival, Cholfin is doing very valuable work. Roland Green