The Ant King: and Other Stories | 
 enlarge | Author: Benjamin Rosenbaum
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $5.55
You Save: $10.45 (65%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 97247
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7
ISBN: 1931520534
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781931520539
ASIN: 1931520534
Publication Date: August 9, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"Featuring outlandish and striking imagery throughout?a woman in love with an elephant, an orange that ruled the world?this collection is a surrealistic wonderland."
?Publishers Weekly “Urbane without being arch, sweet without being maudlin, mysterious without being cryptic.”?Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing "Lively, bizarre, and funny as well as dark, sinister, and sensual."?Boston Phoenix A dazzling, postmodern debut collection of pulp and surreal fictions: a writer of alternate histories defends his patron’s zeppelin against assassins and pirates; a woman transforms into hundreds of gumballs; an emancipated children’s collective goes house hunting. Benjamin Rosenbaum’s stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction and McSweeney’s, been translated into fourteen languages, and listed in The Best American Short Stories 2006. Shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula awards, Rosenbaum’s work has been reprinted in Harper’s and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He lives in Switzerland with his family.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Wow. November 29, 2008
Oh, these stories are delightful! They beg to be read and reread (and I have read them again and again!) Brilliantly inventive, they feel curiously familiar while at the same time showing you things you have never imagined. So many innocent memes of the modern world are roughed up, turned on their heads, tickled a bit, then pushed to their most delightfully absurd, shocking, bizarre-yet-real conclusions.
I've read a lot of requisite major SF, and many characters in those novels and stories are either stiff-and-formulaic or sickly over-humanized...Rosenbaums are not. The most un-human un-familiar situations and characters--a jackal-headed sepulchrist-warrior, a parakeet that "was once the dreaming cloud of plasma in the heliopause of a simulated star", and an apprentice godcarver all of whose memories (as well as those of his forefathers) reside in small fanged symbiotes that crawl around his body--feel both alien and strangely, closely, known.
Even the shortest short stories create rich worlds that are SO different, yet seem so strangely real. He's a master at not telling too much, painting a broad swatch with just the right details. Consider these first lines from two of the shorter pieces: "You're on the 236th-level Kaiserstrasse moving sidewalk when you see her." (from Falling) and "On the plain of Myrkhyr, in the first year of the cycle, a million nomads cross the salt flats." (from Other Cities/Myrkhyr)
In a (probably unimportant-my "editor" hates this paragraph, but I think this stuff is just so cool...) aside, many of these stories refer to other stories, other books, literary tropes, cultural memes, computer games--I think they are great on their own, but it's fun to get the references. If you have ever sat across the table from venture capitalists or were part of the crazy SV dotcom boom, or played very early online games, you MUST read the story "The Ant King", and see yourself as never before. If you have ever held your sleeping infant child just to drink in his or her smell, your heart will alternately pound and scream in "On a Cliff by the River", "A Siege of Cranes" and "The House Beyond Your Sky". If you had the misfortune to spend any amount of time studying literary theory (or better, philosophy) "Bibliographical Notes" and "Sense and Sensibility" are seriously crazy adventures with smart and pointed inner workings. Oh, and did you ever read Babar as a kid? Wait and see :)
I think that every reviewer, professional or otherwise, who is concerned about exactly what genre this book of short stories might fall into (science fiction? fantasy? slipstream? pomo? old-style surrealism? magical realism?) is only trying to find the footing that these stories yank out from underneath you. Which is a bit reverse of the point.
Heartbreaking is the absence of "Droplet", a fantastic far-future almost-novella-length story previously published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, reprinted in Silverberg & Haber's Science Fiction: The Best of 2002, that you should totally seek out at all costs.
Essential short stories August 25, 2008
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
These are excellent short stories -- fantastic, moving, and vivid. Rosenbaum moves easily between genres, from fable to hard sf to epic post-modern historical fantasy to straight fantasy with astonishing ease and deftness.
Some high points:
"Biographical Notes..." is just tremendous. Simultaneously a zeppelin adventure story, a post-modern literary romp, a deep work of historical fiction, and a treatise on the nature of causality, it is one of the most jaw-droppingly audacious stories I've ever read.
I have never had the experience of laughing and crying simultaneously at a short story until I read 'The Orange'.
"The House Beyond Your Sky" is an original and heartbreaking take on the sub-genre of cosmological fiction that Steven Baxter and Greg Egan have popularized.
Anyone interested in contemporary fiction should read this book. Particularly recommended for fans of Borges, Kelly Link, Howard Waldrop, and Michael Swanwick.
 Free SF Reader August 15, 2008
1 out of 8 found this review helpful
A collection of 16 stories, or if you look at it another way, 29, as Other Cities is a collection itself of 14 short-shorts about some odd places.
Small Beer press should again be commended for kindly producing some reader friendly electronic versions of the work in a variety of common and easily usable formats. Nice work.
A dichomotomy here, some strong SF stories, some reasonable fantasy work, and a bunch of really short fantasy/slipstream/surreal pieces that if they never existed - would anyone notice? Hard to do these well, and for a lot of people I think they may drag down the rest - certainly does for me.
However, it finishes with an excellent fantasy story.
Ant King and Other Stories : The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : The Valley of Giants - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : The Orange - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes' - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : Start the Clock - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : The Blow - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : Embracing-the-New - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : Falling - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : Orphans - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : On the Cliff by the River - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : Fig - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : The Book of Jashar - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : The House Beyond Your Sky - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : Red Leather Tassels - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : Other Cities - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : Sense and Sensibility - Benjamin Rosenbaum
Ant King and Other Stories : A Siege of Cranes - Benjamin Rosenbaum
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