Witpunk

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Witpunk, an edgy collection of sardonic fiction, was inspired when someone asked on an Internet literary forum, "When did reading SF/fantasy stop being fun?" Claude Lalumière, a popular Canadian author and columnist, took exception to this and, along with editor Marty Halpern, put together an anthology of some of the best works of satirical fiction in the last two decades.

While some of the stories are speculative classics, like Robert Silverberg's "Amanda and the Alien," Pat Cadigan's "Mother's Milk," and Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "Savage Breasts," half the collection is made up of never-before-published works by some of the brightest authors in contemporary science fiction and fantasy, including Paul Di Filippo, Allen M. Steele, Bradley Denton, and Pat Murphy.

Included are stories about a science fiction writer gone temporarily insane, a post–global warming society where infertile infants are killed by priests in the name of God, a boy's friendship with a turkey, demonic light bulbs, and a secretary with lethal weapons under her sweater -- to name but a few.

The back of Witpunk says it all: "When the world is just too stupid, brutal, or annoying to believe -- strike back by laughing at it." This diverse collection of stories, which ranges from witty science fiction to black-humored horror to just plain bizarre fantasy, is a typical Four Walls Eight Windows offering: highly intelligent, brilliantly clever stories with that unique mix of style, irreverence, and attitude. Those afflicted with a twisted sense of humor will cherish this collection for a long, long time. Paul Goat Allen

The Washington Post

Interestingly, the shorter stories in Witpunk work better the shorter they are; all of the ones longer than 20 pages are something of a drag, while those less than five (and there are several) are quite good. Jeffrey Ford offers a series of fast-moving pastiches of old pulp-magazine templates — perhaps an easy target (and hardly transgressive), but they work. Best of the lot is Ray Vukcevich's wonderful "Jumping," which is all of two pages long. Vukcevich is a genuinely remarkable writer disguised as a merely excellent one, and his story — a six-page experience, since you read it three times in rapid succession while trying to figure out what the author just did and how he managed it -- begins strangely ("We stood waist-deep in the muddy green cattle pond"), grows rapidly stranger while seeming to explain things, then ends in a weird burst of almost-sense. You find yourself trying simultaneously to scratch your head and applaud. — Gregory Feeley

Kirkus Reviews

Twenty-six big laughs at the way the world turns, half originals, half reprints, mostly SF and fantasy but also crime fiction, horror, and realism. Lalumière, a Montreal writer, is a former magazine editor and owner of a bookshop devoted to "the fantastic, the imaginative, and the weird." Co-editor Halpern also edits SF's Golden Gryphon Press and was a 2001 World Fantasy Award finalist. In creating an anthology of strongly sardonic fiction, containing not just classics but flavored with contemporary tales by unknowns, they hit upon the facetious rubric "witpunk," which would not be filled with "rote reiterations of tired old tropes [that] bore you to death." Of the 24 writers, some slap you upside the head, others turn to dark irony. Among the standouts are the celebrated Robert Silverberg's wonderful "Amanda and the Alien" (filmed in 1995), in which an adolescent girl spots an alien masquerading as another adolescent girl and takes her home for the weekend to help the alien shape up her act. Two-time Hugo-winner Allen M. Steele's "The Teb Hunter" tells of hunting season opening on hungry little tebs. Tebs, it turns out, are bioengineered teddy bears that have developed vocal abilities and say things like "Come out and play. . . come out and play" and "I wuv you so much!" Loaded for bear, the hunters set traps with a tiny table, four wooden chairs, and kindergarten lawn furniture from Toys "R" Us. (". . . [If] God had meant animals to talk he would'a . . . I dunno. Given 'em a dictionary or sum'pin.") Jeffrey Ford's brief prose poem, "Spicy Detective," is "a shiv in the kidneys, a brass-knuckle sandwich for grandma," while Cory Doctorow and Michael Skeet's "I Love Paree" reports in mockParisian lingo ("normalment") on the night the lights went out in Club Dialtone on Boul' Disney. Ringingly brilliant, far better than its title.