Amy's bookshelf :: A Soul in a Bottle by Tim Powers

"A Soul in a Bottle" by Tim Powers is a book of novelette length from Subterranean Press, copyright 2006. My copy is the deluxe hardcover edition. It has wonderful black & white illustrations on the dust jacket and in the interior by J.K. Potter. The print is large enough to make it run 82 pages. This is probably not something you'd find shelved in the average book store; it's a specialty item for collectors and Tim Powers fans such as myself.

The story goes like this. I think the cover is a bit misleading. In Hollywood, at the Chinese Theater, book trader George Sydney encounters a striking red-headed woman. They share poetry quotes and then a kiss. George longs to see her again. When he does, before they can go to a bar for a drink, she literally disappears. George has fallen in love with a ghost. She, he learns, is the poet Cheyenne Fleming, who accidentally shot herself back in 1969. Cheyenne was angry with her sister Rebecca. Cheyenne wants George's help so she can go back to the past, so she won't have died.

"A Soul in a Bottle" is colorfully told, and memorable. George apparently drinks and Cheyenne isn't an angel. It's not your typical ghost story or love story. I'd recommend as a good, short read.

Amy's bookshelf :: Asimov's Science Fiction March 2006

The March 2006 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction contains four novelettes and three short stories. My initial plan was to read the January 2006 issue, but I couldn't locate that magazine at first.

The colorful cover of the March issue caught my eye. The artwork is by J.K. Potter for the novelette "The Kewlest Thing of All" by David Ira Cleary. This futuristic story features a girl that has a videophone embedded in her palm and browser windows across her skin. She is guerilla marketing "kewlness" to a chubby woman technician. The setting is San Francisco flooded by melt water (global warming). It reads like updated cyberpunk. The ending confounded me somewhat, but I'd recommend this story.

"The Gabble" by Neal Asher is a standout SF novelette set on another world. Scientists on the alien world of Masada study its unusual lifeforms, including the highly dangerous hooders and the frustratingly untranslatable gabbleducks.

Other novelettes are "Dark Eden" by Chris Beckett which is a somewhat humorous but clichéd space adventure, and "Dead Men Walking" by Paul J. McAuley which is set on Uranus’s moon of Ariel and has a dying man telling of his search for a gory assassin.

Short story "46 Directions, None of Them North" by Deborah Coates is a fun, slangy, story told by a sixteen-year old girl who has to go to Alaska to see aliens land. "Companion to Owls" by Chris Roberson is a odd fantasy of a man's mostly solitary life on the Roof of a Cathedral that covers thousands of square miles. Last, but not least, is the powerful short story "Rwanda" by Robert Reed which deals with a cheap colonization of Earth, the enormousness of such an event, and how inhumanely humans can act to one another.