By Any Other Name

This book of short stories and articles was compiled by Spider Robinson in 2000. Some of the stories were written in the 1970s and were set twenty or thirty years from when they were written. So the time of these stories had come and gone and Spider freely admits he got a lot of his guesses about the future wrong. As he says in his forward he wasn't surprised that they were wrong but he was "somewhat surprised at just how my speculations were wrong;over and over, it seems, I was too optimistic...I find I'm proud of that." Now two decades later from when the book came out those speculations still haven't come to pass. For some of the futures I am glad they have not; the story Antimony speculates a second Civil War in the US that wiped show more out almost all African-Americans. I'm glad he got that wrong.

Spider included a few of the columns he wrote for the Globe and Mail. I can remember reading some of those which ran from 1996 to 1999. However I don't think I read the first one which was triggered by the downing of TWA Flight 800. There was a lot of speculation at the time that terrorists had brought down the plane or that a missile launched from a U.S. Navy destroyer was responsible. Spider pontificated to a friend why either scenario was ridiculous and she told him to write it down. He did and submitted it to the Globe and Mail and then he was hired to produce more columns. It makes interesting reading given that 5 years after he wrote that column many airliners were taken over by terrorists and crashed into buildings on September 11, 2001.

The title story is probably the best in the collection but I personally really liked Rubber Soul an homage to a band that had an album of that name. show less

Really well executed shorts.

Sample Chapters: http://webscriptions.net/chapters/0671319744/0671319744.htm

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