I figure you only have a week or two to purchase the latest Asimov’s before my story disappears from the shelves, so let’s go over the reviews for my time-travelling terrorism story “‘Run,’ Bakri Says”:
Aaron over at Fantastic Reviews Blog made it his “Story Recommendation of the Week,” saying this:
Authors have been writing stories inspired by video games since I first began reading science fiction in the 1970′s, and for far longer than that they’ve been writing fiction to illustrate the dehumanizing effects of war. Yet in “‘Run,’ Bakri Says,” Ferrett Steinmetz manages to do both in an original and powerful way….
Aaron also very kindly contacted me to ask whether he could read my story at work – he has a cool program where periodically, he reads good stories to his co-workers, and he was kind enough to choose mine. But he won’t be reading it right away. Apparently some hack called “Connie Willis” has agreed to show up in person and read her story.
Hrmph. What does she know about writing? Anyway….
SFRevu erroneously thinks that the time-travelling loop that Irena is caught in is a videogame, a problem my beta readers had at first, too. (I though I’d massaged that out. Damn.) They still kindly say, “Don’t think of this just as a game story, it has a real chiller at the end. Steinmetz puts together a perfect little story.”
(And of course, there’s still my “Recommended” review from Lois Tilton, which I’m still geeked over.)
As for “Sauerkraut Station,” my Little House On The Prairie in space novella (which you can read for free), Lois Tilton at Locus declined to give it a recommended review but said:
There are a lot of cold equations here, and hard choices: a Cautionary Tale about the idiocy of wars. But primarily it’s a coming-of-age story, and a positive one.
The phenomenal C.S.E. Cooney said, “It has that beautiful barbed quality. You like the protagonist so much you want to crawl right into her skin. And then stuff happens. And you can’t get out. And when the story ends, you emerge shaking…. Made my lunch afterward, muttering to myself, ‘Why do I even bother when there are such people writing?’” Which is funny, because I’ve said that about her. So yay for backscratching!
Asakiyume said, kindly, “This story feels so real, it’s hard to believe that Sauerkraut Station isn’t out there, somewhere. It’s a long story, but every moment is wonderful.”
Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.