by Duane Spurlock
Adventure! Volume 1 edited by Chris Roberson (MonkeyBrain Books (2005)
When Michael Chabon compiled two new anthologies of genre short stories by contemporary writers, I had high hopes. Those two books, even with their outlandish, Rube Goldbergian titles (McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales and McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories) and pulpish cover art, just didn’t quite satisfy me. A little too heavy on the lit’ry side, a little too light on the pulpy side. It all comes down to whether the writer really has the chops for telling a good story. Chabon is pretty good at balancing pulp and literary, but not everyone has the same skill to do that.
But I’m much more delighted with the shorter-titled Adventure Vol. 1, edited by Chris Roberson and featuring stories by real genre writers (who aren’t slumming at all) with real pulp influences: John Edward Ames, Lou Anders, Neal Asher, Kage Baker, Barry Baldwin, O'Neil De Noux, Paul Di Filippo, Mark Finn, Michael Kurland, John Meaney, Michael Moorcock, Chris Nakashima-Brown, Kim Newman, Mike Resnick, Chris Roberson, Matthew Rossi, and Marc Singer. Lou Anders, who’s represented by the first part of an honest-to-gosh serialized novel, already has some retro-pulp chops as the editor of the first two issues of the revived Argosy and editorial director of the SF imprint Pyr. There’s some fun here, and quite a good portion of entertaining and enjoyable reading — all of it meeting the criteria for adventure fiction. Perhaps not everyone will agree, and maybe just Roberson and I have similar tastes in reading, but I recommend this collection to fans of contemporary pulp. I’m looking forward to the next volume. (I hate to say it -- because promises like this come and go -- but Roberson claims Adventure is planned as an annual publication.)
Links:
You can find new and used copies of Adventure! Volume 1 at Amazon.com by clicking here.
You can find McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales available new and used (and boy, are some of those used copies cheap!) at Amazon by clicking here.
You can find McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories at Amazon by clicking here.
Posted by ds at January 30, 2007 07:54 AM
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://pulprack.com/mt3/mt-tb.cgi/28
