A Clutch of Reviews

Here are a few recent reviews of some Aqueduct Press books.

*Publishers Weekly has reviewed Aqueduct's first Heirloom Book, It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, ed. Josh Lukin:

This scholarly volume, the first maleauthored book from feminist SF press Aqueduct, explores the work of Chandler Davis, who refused to cooperate with 1950s McCarthyism and was dismissed from the University of Michigan faculty, academically blacklisted, and briefly imprisoned. As Lukin writes in his extensive introduction, Davis's writings "remind us that nothing and no one is as immutable as the dominant order would have us believe." Five stories--including "Last Year's Grave Undug" (1953), in which an "atombombed" America is still in the grips of "the Red scare" even though nations no longer exist, and the sublimely powerful "It Walks in Beauty" (1954), which examines a society where women with careers are rendered genderless--are accompanied by numerous essays, a speech, and a lengthy interview, all of significant interest to any fan of political SF. Copyright © Reed Business Information

*Donald D'Ammassa has reviewed Tomb of the Fathers by Eleanor Arnason:

Here’s a clever and quite original planetary adventure. A crew of humans and aliens is conducting research on a planet supposedly abandoned by its intelligent residents when a malfunctioning AI decides to strand them there. In short order they begin to uncover secrets about the decline of the alien civilization, which mixes the serious and the humorous in about equal measure, and yes there’s considerable social commentary mixed in with the laughs and surprises. It’s quite short – not much more than a novella – so the satire doesn’t get too long winded, and there’s an active plot as well. Have a few laughs and look at human behavior from a slightly different viewpoint.

*And Strange Horizons has posted Narrative Realities: A Symphony in Four Books by Matt Cheney, an essay that discusses Narrative Power edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, Reality Hunger by David Shields, and Vanishing Point by Ander Monson. On his own blog, Matt remarks:

All four books are well worth reading, thinking about, arguing with. I especially hope that in the wake of Paul Di Filippo's review of Who Fears Death in the B&N Review that the column will offer an alternative way of evaluating the novel. For the way Di Filippo read the book, I think his assessment is valid, but he read it in the most narrow and silly way possible, the way someone who's only ever read science fiction would read. And I know he hasn't only read science fiction, so I'm perplexed at the assumptions he applies.