Speculative Japan 3: "Silver Bullet" and Other Tales

The third book of our well-received Speculative Japan series, this volume brings more outstanding authors from the Japanese archipelago to English, with a selection of never-before published stories covering a broad range of speculative fiction... from gritty SF to dark fiction, enjoy a whole new dimension of the imagination!Nominated for the 2012 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation AwardsContentsIntroduction by Darrell SchweitzerASAMATSU Ken "A White Camellia in a Vase"AYATSUJI Yukito "Heart of Darkness"UEDA Sayuri "Fin and Claw"OGAWA Issui "To the Blue Star"ONDA Riku "The Warning"KAMON Nanami "A Piece of Butterfly's Wing"SUGA Hiroe "Five Sisters"TAKANO Fumio "Lest You Remember"TACHIHARA Toya "Invisible"FUJITA Masaya "Angel French"MATSUZAKI Yuri "The Finish Line"MINAGAWA Hiroko "Sunset"MORI Natsuko "It's All Thanks to Saijō Hideki"YAMADA Masaki "Silver Bullet"Marc SCHULTZ "Green Tea Ice Cream"Reviews…the stories you’ll find collected here will broaden your view of what is possible or imaginable, provoking unusual — and sometimes uncomfortable — thoughts. That is as it should be.”——David Brin...this is a collection of really wonderful stories. None of them were bad, and if a few were a little less elegant or impressive than the others, they are more than balanced by the overall high quality of the selections. I was very happy to see the translators getting such prominent recognition, as all these stories are easily readable and very atmospheric, with none of the awkwardness that sometimes plagues hasty translations.—Karen Burnham, Locus...everything's up for grabs in this cocktail mixer of genres. The mournful and the comic, the abstract and the scientific, the realistic and the caricatured, all can be found in Speculative Japan 3. [...] the Japanese culture's influence on the process of fantasy creation is something made accessible to the international reader in this rich collection.—David Labi, MetropolisIn a collection that contains stories about lovers who are disembodied and digitized, stories where "heart of darkness" is not a figure of speech, stories where Tsugaru shamans intersect with cutting-edge science, and a great deal more, there must be something for everyone. That's only speculation, though. You'll enjoy confirming it for yourself.—David Cozy, Japan TimesSpeculative Japan 3 is finally here, and it's everything I hoped it would be: a diverse collection of intelligent and beautifully translated short stories.As both an anthology of contemporary science fiction and an anthology of contemporary Japanese literature, Speculative Japan 3 succeeds brilliantly in collecting not the newest or the most popular, but rather the most interesting and the best written.—Kathryn Hemmann, Contemporary Japanese Literature blog

Reviews

News