http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2023/02/review-of-prayers-to-broken-stones-by.h... ( )

Prayers to broken stones:

The River Styx Runs Upstream
4 🌟
I thought it was River Lethe. You can bring your dead back to life! I can imagine this happening in the future: crapitalism takes advantage of people's grief and longing for their dead loved ones.

Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams
3 🌟
What would your inner universe be like if you were blind, deaf and mute? The only senses giving you input would be smell and touch. A telepath (yeah, right) working with children with disabilities lowers his mindblock and finds a way into Robby's mind.

Vanni Fuchi is Alive and Well in Hell
4 🌟
Extremely enjoyable story about televangelists' empires and the demon from the eighth circle of hell who takes on one of them.

Vexed to a nightmare by a Rocking Cradle
2 🌟
It's Nuclear spring and a televangelist makes his way to former Bantam books headquarters in New York City, by canoe, bringing his satellite dish and generator. Apparently, the address has him a little crazed.

Remembering Siri
4 🌟
Siri is not the one from apple
apple is the one from Siri
This story was part of the Hyperion cantos, which I have already read. It's about a little island-world called Maui Covenant, where dolphins are called Sea Folk, and the traveling islands are alive. Of course there are crapitalists in the future, and they want to take over this beautiful little world to exploit it. The Separatists have other plans.

Metastasis
5 🌟
This story is about a guy who can see cancer vampires. Everyone he loves is getting sick with cancer, and dying from it. He accidentally happens on the cause of it, after suffering a concussion. What is cancer, and why is there so much of it now? One of my sisters (a beloved one, not the other one) died of cancer, and she was only 46 years old. They won't put you down, like your sick pet, although in California we actually have the euthanasia law, but my sister lived in Texas. I believe that"they" have a cure for cancer, but it's more profitable to make money off sick people. There's a huge profit to be made from everybody being sick, and that's why there is Roundup in kid's cereal. Why do they feed people dead animals who are so sick, they're barely alive before they're slaughtered (murdered)?

Simmons wife died of cancer, but I don't know if she had it when he wrote this story. She might have, but not known it yet.

The Death of a Centaur
5 🌟
This is a story about a good teacher and the difference he made to a classroom of fourth graders in a Missouri backwater. It's also a story-within-a-story about a Centaur, a neocat(?) And a talking gorilla. It's a pilot story for the Hyperion cantos, as far as I can tell.

You know why good teachers are so few and far between, right? Just start your education to be a teacher and see all the obstacles (financial and academic) in your way, and if you manage to finish the 6year minimum education required, then try to get a job. If you're lucky enough to be the type who can easily survive and successfully get through interviews, and actually get hired, now you have to survive being laid off at the end of the school year, and do this one more time, now you have tenure. Oh, I forgot to mention, for all the years of paying tuition and student loans, they don't gaf, you're going to make really low wages, and be looked down on by other professionals, you will be a victim of back-stabbing from your coworkers, favoritism from administration and generally political bullshit up the ying-yang. Hm, wonder why so many give up? Poor students.

Two Minutes Forty-five Seconds
4 🌟
Do you remember the Challenger shuttle? Everyone should remember there was a teacher on-board. Two minutes and forty-five seconds was how much air was used up in the air masks that dropped down for the shuttle members, after they were recovered from the ocean floor. This story is about an executive from the space agency, who decided that the five VPs, including himself, who gave the go-ahead for the Challenger despite some last-minute problems thatshowed up, should get some justice.



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A good collection of Dan Simmons' earlier tales, including quite a few more on the horror side of science-fiction. I enjoyed the introduction, where Harlan Ellison writes of his 'discovery' of Simmons at a writers' workshop. Dan Simmons is one of those writers I trust to take me somewhere...interesting if not necessarily pleasant. ( )

Great read. Simmons has a more novel-as-short-story approach. There is a lot of movement and coloration where others prefer scene-based and quick motion narrative.

"The River Styx Flows Upstream" and "Vexed to Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle" and also "Iverson's Pits" are my favorites. Simmons is probably the greatest storyteller of the last 50 years. I believe he will be remembered as the greatest writer of the century.

I would like to note here though that NONE of these short stories would be published in todays faux-artistic world of short story publishing. These stories take patience and require the reader to move through scenes as one might observe them in real-time, all with a perfect balance of strangeness and true to character voice. Magazine editors currently (I'm hoping it's a fad) are almost exclusively interested in "idea stories" or what I call "What if" stories. There is no room anymore for philosophical subtext, clever description or even a puzzling split metaphor. Everything has to be understood by the common idiot. Everything has to be plain as day and to hell with double meanings or even single meanings, they'll be lost on the modern reader. It's sad that writers are almost forbidden to learn from or mimic the great writers. To do so is a direct path to rejection. Rather, there better not be any loopholes in your story about lawnmowers that come alive at night to feed on rascally garden gnomes. Never mind that you can't write worth a shit, and you couldn't spot a plu-perfect verb if it latched on to your only descended testicle.

Oh my, another one of my rants. Oh well.

It was a good book. ( )

worth it for the Harlan Ellison introduction and the first story -- the one that got Dan Simmons discovered. ( )