Chiang’s “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” gave me an insight into what it is about Philip K. Dick’s style that I like so much. It starts off like one of Dick’s novels and I was immediately interested and wanted to figure out why.
 
Nat is working in a store when a man walks in with an advanced prism he wants to sell. Nat’s coworker is late back from lunch, so she has to deal with it on her own, but she knows the technical specs and is able to value the item.
 
What I like here is: the regular person in a regular everyday urban setting is instantly believable. It’s a neighbourhood store and the colleague getting caught up in traffic or whatever tells you this is the everyday, unremarkable world. The employee is knowledgeable in her field and that professional competence gives further clarity to the situation and a sense of order. But enter the prism, and an almost otherworldly element is introduced: one that is scientifically comprehensible, but challenges one’s sense of the possible. Here is Nat powering the prism on, checking it out and giving the customer a quote, as though a household device that sees into another, divergent, timeline was the most normal thing in the world. After a couple of pages, though, the story itself diverges from its initial Dickian quality and accrues intellectual content that makes it feel top-heavy, if you know what I mean.  
 
Of all these pieces, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” was the only one that worked really well for me, because it reads like a classical Eastern folk tale.
 
Otherwise, what we’ve got here are thought experiments in story form. The challenge is intellectual and abstract. You have to be careful with this sort of writing or your characters, like in “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”, risk ending up as voice boxes for ideas. And present tense narration can be interesting when there’s a good reason for it, but it bombs here. It’s like someone sketching out a speculation ad nauseum.
 
Inorganic life forms are the proposition in “Exhalation”. Expounding it at length as a story didn’t really add anything to the original premise.
 
It’s clever and well-thought-out material, but I want stories that make me care and these just didn’t. So meh!

Nine honest, moving stories about people struggling to negotiate relationships and unprivileged lives.
 
Rebecca Ivory is very good at dissecting and laying bare feelings that often lead her characters nowhere. Young women who see the systemic limits on their ambitions and lack the motivation to work at all, or who expect little in a new relationship with a boy and don’t even get that. The disconnect between people is no more evident than on a first date.
 
Tellingly, being imperfect, neither do her people give much of themselves. In this way, Ivory gives a voice to the voiceless many without making them into victims, neither bitter nor definitively resigned, but certainly lost to insecurities and a general feeling of helplessness in a society that does not know how to support one another.
 
The stories tend to end with situations unresolved, leaving us with a sense of having seen into someone’s life during a brief, real connection.
 
This is Ivory’s first published collection. If the arresting cover attracts attention to her book, it is well deserved.