The Dog Said Bow-Wow

A collection of short stories, any one of which is better than most of Swanwick's excellent novels. The stories are accessible, and wryly humorous. Swanwick writes SF like fantasy, creating compelling character-driven stories in which the technology is incidental rather than the central focus.

It's so difficult to assign an overall rating to a collection of short stories, as each rates individually. This is a strong collection though, with only one or two stories worthy of skimming or skipping.

The collection starts off with a bang with "'Hello,' Said the Stick," a short, clever Hugo-nominee about a talking stick and the unlucky people who stop to pick it up. Right away, Swanwick's skill and playfulness as a storyteller are on display, as the briefest of stories has enough bite to feel satisfying, and enough depth to feel as though a much larger, fully-realized world lies behind this modest tale.

This volume also includes three Hugo-award winning short stories--"Slow Life," a hard science fiction story of first contact, show more "Legions in Time," a story that begins like a classic Twilight Zone episode and ends like a Post-Modernist war story, and "The Dog Said Bow-Wow," the first of three blissfully fun Darger and Surplus stories that follow the exploits of the two gentlemanly yet roguish con men in a post-apocalyptic renaissance.

Other highlights are the gentle and sentimental "Triceratops Summer" that evokes a bit of Clifford Simak, "The Bordello in Fairie," which puts Swanwick's signature humor and bawdiness to work, and "A Small Room in Koboldtown," a locked-room mystery with a voodoo/fey twist. "Urdumheim," the final story in the collection, is a treat for fans of creation stories, weaving many early human tales into one unified and unique one, with plenty of original Swanwick thrown in for good measure.

The misses in the collection are few, thankfully, but take up a fair bit of real estate. Most notable among the disappointments is the never-before-published novella, "The Skysailor's Tale," which I felt it necessary to abandon before any semblance of plot took over. The piece felt laborious and purposeless--and I have to wonder if that is why it was never published elsewhere first. "The Last Geek" is interesting but feels more like an exercise in prose, and "Dirty Little War," while mixing a 70's dinner party and the Vietnam War in a fashion somehow reminiscent of something by Robert Silverberg, feels more like a "New Weird" piece written a bit too literally.

But despite a few misses (and after all, what collection of this kind *doesn't* have a few misses?) this is a strong collection, and shows off Swanwick's mastery of the form. show less

I must first off state that I am generally not an avid lover of the short story. There are a few writers that I think really excel in the genre and whose stuff I will read without hesitation (Poe, Ashton Smith, Howard, Doyle, Leiber), but in general I am often underwhelmed by the format. Keep that in mind when I say that Swanwick’s collection _The Dog Said Bow-Wow_ was quite good, but didn’t blow me away or make me into a believer.

The various “Darger & Surplus” tales (“The Dog Said Bow-Wow”, “The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Fun”, and “Girls and Boys, Come Out to Play”), relating the adventures of a pair of con-men in a world suffering the effects of a computer apocalypse and subsequent love-affair with show more bio-engineering, were all very enjoyable and entertaining, though perhaps sometimes a bit light on substance. “The Skysailor’s Tale” was an enjoyable reminiscence from the titular sailor that had equal parts melancholy, adventure, romance and fun and seemed to occur in a pan-dimensional steampunk setting. “The Bordello in Faerie” read something like a Neil Gaiman tale, if that author had any real edge to him, and was able to fulfil the majority of the possible male sexual fantasies involved with the fae while managing to invert them at the same time; it also had an ending that I totally did not see coming. “Urdumheim” rounds out my set of favourites with a very well done mythic tale of the rise of humanity and its first confrontation with the chthonic demons and monsters from whom they thought they had escaped. Tied in with this is a consideration of language and its power and an ultimate turning on its head of the story of the Tower of Babel.

The remaining stories more or less struck me as fairly “ho-hum” and didn’t strike my fancy, either as exciting stories in and of themselves, or exemplars of outstanding technique. They filled out the collection, but a few of them could easily have been dropped without the whole suffering much of a loss. Happily, there weren’t any glaring examples of my most hated kind of ‘modern’ short stories, namely literary wanking, where the sole point seems to be for the author to dazzle with his literary technique or twist endings with nothing else to show for it (though the first story “’Hello,’ Said the Stick” came close.) show less

Absolutely fantastic short stories. Swanwick writes with a verve and imagination I have rarely seen in sf, and his fantasy is always fresh and fiesty. The only story I didn't love was "The Skysailor's Tale," which meandered.

Collection of short stories, surprising in content and variety. Here we find a bit of cyberpunk, picaresque, mythology, past, future, all well written and mixed in unexpected combinations. Long time I don't get from a book such a feeling of having read something so original.

Out of 16 stories, I only got bored or uninterested in couple of them, which I think makes a great result for a compilation.

The first story, "'Hello' Said the Stick", was terrific but the remainder were ok and a few were less than ok for me.

Some interested me more than others. what a creative writer...