Gigantic Worlds
edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto
2015
Gigantic Worlds is an anthology of science fiction short stories, specifically short shorts or 'flash fictions.' It was intended to be the first book put out by Gigantic Magazine, but it ended up being the only one, because the publisher folded not long afterward. Which seems like kind of a shame. I learned of its existence years afterwards thanks to a review at Tor.com.
The 51 stories include a couple ringers - reprints of stories by Philip K Dick and JG Ballard. The rest were by contemporary authors, some I recognized, most I didn't. The most famous names include Ted Chiang (whose story about predestination I'd actually read before,) Alissa Nutting, Laird Barron, Johnathan Lethem (whose piece isn't really scifi, just an account of a man unaware he has a bleeding head wound on a video call,) Charles Yu, Brian Evanson. Maybe ⅓ of the stories are by women.
The book is divided into five thematic sections, named for the classical elements, plus Cosmos. The stories in Hydro mostly do involve rain or ocean or some other kind of water, and the ones in Ignis are often more violent, but I would mostly say the themes were quite loose.
My favorite stories were one told from the perspective of a software program, one about an office microwave that accidentally opens a hole in space-time, a parable about sexual morality set among bird people, a time-traveler trying to prevent the creation of a specific painting (without killing the artist,) and several written like fictional encyclopedia entries.
Beyond my favorites, plenty of the others were pretty good. For the ones I didn't like some seemed, in their brevity, to forget to have a point, some tried to allude to ... something? ... but were too vague and distant for me to get what they were trying to signify, and a few played such complex games with language that I couldn't get past the surface to even see if there was anything inside. One annoyed me by claiming to be a found story from 1928 and being utterly unconvincing.
Wow the list of authors in this is stacked, what a shame that it only lasted one volume. These sound really interesting, thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I think I would've loved to see what came next if they'd been able to keep going.
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