Mark R. Brand

I was a little disappointed in 'Life After Sleep'. I wanted to be totally blown away by it and I first, I totally was. It's a fascinating exploration into the not-so-far-out premise on what American society would do if technology was developed only requiring us to Sleep for a few hours a night. The technical aspects of the book were spread out enough that I didn't feel overwhelmed by them and there wasn't a whole lot of world building to be done - though the music promoter visiting virtual bars to seek out talent was a stroke of genius in adding depth and differentiation in the world building.

What left me flat was not the characters or the stories or the world building. It was the ending. It just sort of fell away. I love some ambiguous endings but I felt like Life After Sleep almost had a non-ending. Just as the characters and their stories were really starting to gel - nothing. I turned the page and almost thought that the download hadn't completed, the ending was that abrupt.

Side note: the technology in this novel used to induce Sleep is actually being used as an alternative to electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) in psychiatric situations for non-treatable depression. The jury is still out on how well it works - but it's interesting to me that this is actually a real technology that we have. (Though I'm pretty sure it doesn't cause Sleep.)… (more)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

It's true that I don't much care for story collections, although I do have a softer spot in my heart for the related story compilation format; and I just had a chance to read two better-than-average ones, actually, Mark Brand's Thank You, Death Robot and S.T. Joshi's Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror. Both are similar in set-up, a couple of respected genre authors being asked to assemble a collection of stories by other respected genre authors, all on a similar theme, with Brand's (a Chicagoan who I recently had the pleasure of meeting) being all about evil robots, and Joshi's (from our pals at PS Publishing) consisting entirely of tales inspired by either the style or mythos of HP Lovecraft; and that's why in general I tend to like compilations like these more than just random story collections by a single author, because at least these stick to one unified idea, and often try to reach an equilibrium of quality as well. Of course, that doesn't stop the trait from being there that I dislike so much in story collections, that the pieces found within tend to veer all over the place in both tone and length -- some are classical homages to their main subject, some ironic modern twists, some not much more than a short bad joke, others little novellas unto themselves. They're both excellent for what they are, and come highly recommended to existing fans of the subjects, but also deftly illustrate why I tend to do only short, non-committal reviews of such collections, in that I find it hard to say much more about them and have it remain true for the entire book.

Out of 10: 8.4… (more)