Springtime for shoggoths
Aug. 13th, 2024 02:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileIn my “short story collections acquired at Readercon” selection that I have a copy of Elizabeth Bear’s Shoggoths in Bloom. I like the Elizabeth Bear novels that I’ve read, although I also have a couple more novels of hers that are still on the TBR shelf through no fault of their own.
Shoggoths in Bloom has a mix of fantasy and sci-fi, and overall they’re all pretty good–some I liked better than others, obviously, but I don’t think I’d call any of them duds. We got a few stories set in larger worlds from her novels–there’s an Eternal Sky story, and a story from the POV of One-Eyed Jack, the genius of Las Vegas–and of course the titular “Shoggoths in Bloom” dips into the Lovecraftian mythos. There are twenty stories in this collection, which is challenging for me to review. The stories tend toward the serious; when there is humor, which is with reasonable frequency, it tends toward the dry. A few of the protagonists are cops/investigators/otherwise law-enforcement-adjacent of some kind; one is a sort of magical detective that has to work around the regular kind. This seems to be more for the ease of facilitation for mystery-solving plots than any particular ideological affiliation with cops on Bear’s part; even some of her cops are kind of down on cops. The more important thing is that the mysteries are good, solid short story mysteries with satisfying little twists at the end.
Overall, this is a good collection that might provide me with some extra impetus to also read one of the three unread novels by the author that are still on my shelf.
Shoggoths in Bloom has a mix of fantasy and sci-fi, and overall they’re all pretty good–some I liked better than others, obviously, but I don’t think I’d call any of them duds. We got a few stories set in larger worlds from her novels–there’s an Eternal Sky story, and a story from the POV of One-Eyed Jack, the genius of Las Vegas–and of course the titular “Shoggoths in Bloom” dips into the Lovecraftian mythos. There are twenty stories in this collection, which is challenging for me to review. The stories tend toward the serious; when there is humor, which is with reasonable frequency, it tends toward the dry. A few of the protagonists are cops/investigators/otherwise law-enforcement-adjacent of some kind; one is a sort of magical detective that has to work around the regular kind. This seems to be more for the ease of facilitation for mystery-solving plots than any particular ideological affiliation with cops on Bear’s part; even some of her cops are kind of down on cops. The more important thing is that the mysteries are good, solid short story mysteries with satisfying little twists at the end.
Overall, this is a good collection that might provide me with some extra impetus to also read one of the three unread novels by the author that are still on my shelf.