
Syndromes
Science Fiction Stories
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Narrated by:
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Catherine Ho
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Jonathan Todd Ross
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By:
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Alec Nevala-Lee
About this listen
A finalist for both the Hugo and Locus awards, Alec Nevala-Lee has seen his short fiction and essays featured in Salon, the New York Times, and Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Now Nevala-Lee delivers a gripping meditation on the human experience with his powerful collection Syndromes: Science Fiction Stories.
These stories contain a cross section of narratives, people, and places: an unusual couple requests to be flown to a remote island near Alaska; a series of beached whales vex a US military officer in Vietnam and cause unrest in a local village; an ecoterrorist’s bomb at an upscale ski resort has unintended consequences; and mysterious killings thought to be the work of a monster in Japan turn out to be something much more real.
©2020 Alec Nevala-Lee (P)2020 Recorded BooksBecause I hadn’t realised until I was a fair way in that these stories, progressing in time from the 1930s to the 2030s and on, were tracing the history of a shared world.
And a weird one.
The collective picture is interesting: sort of a Johnny Quest/X-Files/Fringe world full of strange anomalies; all with Scooby-Doo endings grounded in the weirdest bits of actual scientific articles.
There are a few moments where guessing the gimmick starts to overtake the story itself, but on the whole this was a very pleasant surprise from an author I hadn’t heard enough about. And I genuinely appreciate the range of genre experiments, as well as the time span. Nevala-Lee has variations on frontier adventure, war stories, police procedural, whodunnit (with octopodes), cryptid encounter, eco-thriller, horror, a little fantasy, and sci-fi. It’s comfortably holistic way to build the picture of a world.
This was nowhere near being on my radar, but was a real treat to discover.
Short story tapestry of a weird, interesting world.
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