Heat of Fusion and Other Stories by John M. Ford. Speaking of brilliant but somewhat inscrutable authors (as I was just a moment ago, namely Gene Wolfe), here's a new collection of John M. Ford's stuff. There's a little overlap with the NESFA collection From the End of the Twentieth Century, which everybody ought to buy right now (read "Scrabble With God" in the store if you aren't convinced), but most of these stories and poems are collected here for the first time.

This is a very difficult book to write up here, because the contents are so weird and varied. There are excellent short stories written in a fairly straightforward manner ("The Persecutor's Tale," "Preflash," "Shelter From the Storm," "Tales From the Original Gothic"), more structurally challenging pieces ("Chromatic Aberration," "Heat of Fusion," and the brilliant "Erase/ Record/ Play: A Drama for Print"), slightly bent takes on Classical themes ("Dateline: Colonnus," and "The Lost Dialogue," but sadly not "Troy: The Movie") and Shakespeare ("Third Thoughts," "Letter From Elsinore"), and poems on everything from the Matter of Britain ("Winter Solstice, Camelot Station") to fannish in-jokes ("SF Cliches: A Sonnet Cycle," "Shared World") to September 11 ("110 Stories"). Plus other, weirder things.

There's an astonishing variety of stuff here, and nearly all of it is excellent. I highly recommend this book, and pretty much anything else of his that you can lay hands on. The only thing the collection lacks is some sort of introduction or conclusion talking about the stories and poems, but maybe it's best to let them speak for themselves.

(Originally posted to The Library of Babel.)