Archive for the ‘Nalo Hopkinson’ Category
Falling in Love With Hominids
Posted on: August 8, 2015
Falling In Love With Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson
published Aug 11, 2015
where I got it: received review copy from the publisher (thanks Tachyon!)
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Showcasing fiction from as far back as 2002, Falling in Love With Hominids is a vast and varied collection of Nalo Hopkinson’s short fiction. With a feeling of a retrospective art collection, the stories are everything from straight up science fiction to literary fiction to escapades of pure frolicsome imagination. For an author you’ve never read before, short fiction might be the best way to get a taste of their fiction, to see if this is someone you want to make a 300 page investment in. I also enjoy the reading freedom of single author collections. I can jump around in the table of contents, and guilt-free read the collection cover to cover in any order I please (I do this with all anthologies, actually. Even though I know editors put the TOC in a particular order for particular reasons).
also? Just look at that gorgeous cover art. Just look at it!
Hopkinson opens each story with a few sentences about where the idea for the story came from, and in a few cases a single sentence that acts more as a subtitle. There is a lot of literary fiction in Falling in Love with Hominids, even a Shakespeare homage. But my tastes lean towards the easier to digest, so my favorites included the imaginative flights of fancy, the flirtations with science fiction, the fairy tale retellings. And that’s probably the best thing about this collection: no matter what your particular tastes are, Hopkinson has probably written it.
The flights of fancy I keep mentioning include “Emily Breakfast”, the story of a farmer with a flying cat and three fire-breathing chickens named Lunch, Dinner, and Emily Breakfast; and “Herbal”, in which an elephant suddenly appears in a woman’s high-rise apartment and when an elephant is suddenly thundering through your tiny apartment, what can you do?
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the Little Red Reviewer 
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