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Čerpadlo 6 (2010)

by Paolo Bacigalupi(Favorite Author)

4.04 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

Albatros

review 1: With few exceptions, an excellent collection. 'Pocketful of Dharma', 'The Fluted Girl', 'The People of Sand and Slag' offer fresh and curious views on transhumanism, lacking the power fantasies typical of this theme.'The Calorie Man', 'The Tamarisk Hunter', 'Small Offerings', to a degree also 'The Pasho' and 'Yellow Card Man' contain good environmental and political criticism with credible near-future stories.The rest of the stories are either weak, unoriginal or naive ('Pop Squad', 'Pump Six'), or have no place in this collection ('Softer' – it's quite good, it's just not sci-fi, at all).
review 2: I usually hate short story compilations because the stories are too short and usually so depressing. This book was the exception. Although reading the first handf... moreul of stories back to back may make you want to see a therapist, even these stories had delightful moments that lighten the mood a little. The stories are all set in the future, with one possible exception, and the future is a capitalism-gone-awry nightmare where corporations have privatized everything and the gap between rich and poor has reached disastrous proportions. I am not familiar with the rest of Paolo Bacigalupi's work, but one thing that I particularly liked about this collection is that it's not exclusively Western-centric. I've been reading a lot of sci-fi lately, and one downside of the genre is that it presents a future that looks a lot like America or Europe today but with minor tweaks. Many of these stories are set in Asia or among Asian immigrants, and in doing so they also reflect the transnational trends of our real world. The science fiction aspects of the stories are not so unbelievable, either, that bioengineering would destroy biodiversity as we know it, that water contamination becomes a serious problem in the future, that calories become the main currency, and so on.The book is also just a lovely read. I highly recommend it. less

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