I remained truly impressed by Small Beer's publication record, but I have to admit that Gunn's work is a little weird for me. She builds absolutely dizzying, riveting stories that have me going, 'Wait. What?' at the close -- even in the fairy-tale stories, which is a subgenre I adore.

This collection will be an utter hit with fans of Gunn; it just wasn't quite one for me. Three stars.

To test if you are a fan of Gunn, visit Tor.com for some of her fiction:

http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/12/the-trains-that-climb-the-winter-tree

Titling a collection “Questionable Practices” is just asking for it.

I, however, am a kind reviewer not given to snarky comments. I will not sacrifice accuracy for cheap sarcasm.

It is a clever title, though. Would that all the stories were clever or funny.

The two original works here, “Chop Wood, Carry Water” and “Phantom Pain”, are good. The first story is a retelling of the story of Rabbi Loew’s golem in Praha (Prague). It has gentle wit and sorrow as the golem relates his story, an account of the centuries since he was created, and how he hasn’t always been able to fulfill his task of protecting the local Jews. There’s no humor in the second story. It’s the sometimes clinical, but moving, account of a wounded American soldier in the Pacific Theater of World War Two. As he crawls to safety, he has visions of his future life. The pain he will experience in that life is not only from an amputated limb but lost loved ones as well.

“Up the Fire Road” is a funny, if ultimately inconsequential, story about a couple that finds a Sasquatch who casts its sexual glamour on them. “Speak, Geek” is a short-short story, one of those science fiction pieces first published in Nature. Its life in the corporate world, but some of the workers are dog-human and cat-human chimeras. It goes past “funnier than you would think” into “funny”.

I even liked “Thought Experiment” even though I generally hate it when any Baby Boomer mentions Woodstock in any way. It’s a time travel farce.

There are a lot of collaborations here, mostly with Michael Swanwick. In “’Shed That Guilt! Double Your Productivity Overnight!’”, Mr. Swanwick offers a unique service to Ms. Gunn. It’s the funniest piece in the book despite swipes at Republicans and Dick Cheney that don’t work even as coherent political satire.

A techno-hippy meets the oncoming of the Singularity in the moderately amusing “Hive Mind Man” written with Rudy Rucker. Amusing … with a creepy, ambiguous ending hiding behind the California mysticism.

But there’s a whole lot of stuff here that isn’t funny, surrealist pieces that go nowhere, weird takeoffs on tv shows that are neither interesting or funny as parodies or in any other way. “No Place to Raise Kids: A Tale of Forbidden Love” is a gender bender with a pregnant Spock – the Vulcan, not the pediatrician. Poem – and I don’t mind poetry – “To the Moon Alice” is about the old tv sitcom The Honeymooners. “Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area, March 2005” is a surrealistic (and fictional) dialogue between the two writers as transcribed by Gunn.

And then there is “The Steampunk Quartet”, parodies subtitled “A Different Engine”, “Day After the Cooters”, “The Perdido Street Project”, and “Internal Devices”. Yes, I recognized all the parodied titles even if I haven’t read them all. But I found none but the parody of K. W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices even a bit funny.

Not being a fan of fairy tales in general, it was to be expected that I wasn’t all that fond of the Swanwick-Gunn collaboration “The Trains That Climb the Winter Tree”. A lot of dead people here, at Christmas time, and the unconvincing claim that “understanding is stronger than truth”. Another fairy tale-like story making a stab at delivering wisdom is “The Armies of Elfland”. Here the same authors deliver an interesting violation of story clichés in a story about some nasty elves who kill off most of the world’s people, leaving only children. One, Agnes, must learn to endure the torments of the Queen of Elfland. I take it as a feminist rejection of fairy tale expectations.

Sort of striding the intersection of the fairy tale stories and the literary parodies is “Zeppelin City” from, again, Gunn and Swanwick. I loathed this story and rushed to finish it. Totally unconvincing as an alternate history despite various early 20th century figures making an appearance, dull and plodding as literary parody despite zeppelins and bottled brains and autogyroists, shaky in its transitions between scenes, and banal in its observation that new technologies don’t lead to utopias.

Gunn fans I’m sure will want this collection. The rest of you … I’m not sure. If you’re curious about the acclaimed Gunn, I’d go for the cheap Kindle edition. ( )

Some of the stories in this collection are quirky and interesting, others give the impression of being not fully developed. "Chop Wood, Carry Water" is told from the point of view of a golem who is limited both by the controls imposed by his master, and by his own nature. It explores concepts of soul or lack thereof, the nature of G_d, and how free will can or cannot be exercised by a being does not have a soul. Other selections, such as "Speak Geek" felt lightweight. "Alice to the Moon" tells about a literal interpretation of the phrase. "Up the Road" is a story based on a Sasquatch-like entity. It was interesting until it the ending which was disappointing ( )

In his afterword to Eileen Gunn's earlier (and sadly, only other) collection of short stories, Stable Strategies and Others (Tachyon, 2004), Howard Waldrop calls her "about the only writer I know who turns out stories even more slowly than I do, which is a rare thing in this damn field." Ain't that the truth. In a field that holds up making your daily word count as a virtue, that often valorizes a pulplike prolificity, writing slowly is practically an act of rebellion. And yet slow writers can produce some of the most distinctive works of fiction we have: writers like Ted Chiang, Howard Waldrop, Peter Watts -- and yes, Eileen Gunn.

Slow writers tend to get my attention. I have an affinity for slow writers, partly because I am one myself, partly because of what they produce. A quality vs. quantity argument can sometimes be made.

And I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't paid close enough attention to Eileen Gunn. Rectifying that now.

Questionable Practices is Eileen Gunn's second short story collection, her first in a decade. The stories it collects are motley and idiosyncratic, and toe an impossible line between the tragic and the screwball. They're lively, funny stories with a bitter core, or maybe it's the other way around.

The collection opens with "Up the Fire Road," the tale of an encounter with a sasquatch who presents a different gender to each protagonist that ends in a surreal fashion (on Maury, with paternity tests). Some of the included stories riff on popular culture and science fiction culture in particular: "No Place to Raise Kids" evokes Kirk/Spock slashfic; the poem "To the Moon Alice" is an sfnal (and feminist) take on The Honeymooners; the four short pieces of The Steampunk Quartet have fun with four well-known classics of the field; there are funny pieces on writers and writing. These are very short pieces. More substantive are the longer pieces, but only the darkest lose the sense of fun and mischief. Those dark stories -- "Chop Wood, Carry Water," a golem story from the golem's perspective, and "Phantom Pain," which associates the persistence of phantom limb with that of memory -- are original to this book, and possibly the strongest. Also included are one collaboration with Rudy Rucker ("Hive Mind Man," a satire on marketing in the Internet age) and four with Michael Swanwick, three of which couple that dark/comedic duality with serious, funhouse-mirror worldbuilding. ( )

Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book in return for a review.
Second full disclosure: I gave up on this book about halfway through.

This collection contains stories (and one poem) authored or co-authored by Eileen Gunn. Gunn's co-author for 7 of the pieces is Michael Swanwick, and for 2 others it is Rudy Rucker. Four stories are by Gunn alone.

For me this collection ultimately died of anemia; there was too little blood in its veins. Despite some fine writing on a sentence-by-sentence basis, I found the stories to be neither energetic plot-driven entertainment nor complex and thoughtful literary works. And neither did any of them (that I read) present any interesting or original speculative-fiction ideas.

Some notes on selected stories, starting with the ones written by Gunn alone:

"Up the Fire Road" is a rather hippy-ish story; one that I might have considered a charming example of its historical period if I'd read it in an anthology from the early 70s. There's some pot-smoking, some casual sex, a lot of "going with the flow," and a talking Sasquatch with some rather hallucinatory attributes. It's typical of the collection in being mildly entertaining, but nothing more than that.

"Chop Wood, Carry Water" is the collection's closest approach to a story of some substance. It's told from the point of view of the 16th century Golem of Prague, and effectively written in a melancholy tone. But the story never goes anywhere. The protagonist ponders the meaning of his life without ever having any interesting thoughts, and has some mild adventures in which nothing much is at stake.

"No Place to Raise Kids: A Tale of Forbidden Love" is a short-short in which Captain Kirk has eloped with a pregnant Mr. Spock. This sort of cutesy attempt at clever science fiction in-joking is unfortunately a repeating theme in several stories of this collection. To me, the cuteness is too self-conscious, the attempt at cleverness ends up being conspicuously shallow, and the humor is simply absent.

"The Trains that Climb the Winter Tree" has the feel of Japanese manga and anime, the delightful film Spirited Away coming particularly to my mind. Like that film, it combines a whimsical Alice-in-Wonderland tone with darker, more adult elements. But a great part of the joy of manga/anime is their visuals -- something that's missing from a text-only story, and something that the writing of this story in particular does little to capture.

Interestingly, I felt that the collaborative stories in this collection were pretty uniformly worse than the ones by Gunn alone. "Thought Experiment" and "Think Geek" were little more than gag-stories, further weakened by the fact that their punchlines were fuzzy and unclear. "Shed That Guilt! Double Your Productivity Overnight!" continued the trend of attempted humor, being tedious, obvious, and unfunny.

And that's about where I gave up. I skimmed some more of the stories and found one, "Phantom Pain," compelling enough to read through to the end, but nothing that gave me hope for a significant turnaround in quality. This isn't a bad book, but I just wasn't getting enough from it -- I didn't find it engaging either as entertainment or for literary substance. Reluctantly, I decided my reading time would be better spent elsewhere. ( )