Pat Forde's "In Spirit": A collection of 9/11 stories

This novella sized "story" is actually a collection of a dozen non-genre untitled stories about 9/11 terrorist attacks on twin towers in New York in 2001.

I might have liked it more if the author & publishers had been honest about what they were handing out. Stories themselves are good, often moving; a few reminded me of time immediately after terrorist bomb attacks on Bombay commuter trains during evening rush hour a couple of years ago.

To inject the sf element, the plot involves a device rigged by mating a time machine & a virtual reality device - a variant of "psychophone" in Eric Frank Russel's "Mechanical Mice". A convict of the bombings, after spending 30 years in jail, is sent to the scenes via this device & is effectively the narrator. This sf'ing of the non-genre collection takes up something like a quarter or a third of the text - unnecessarily wasting time.

Unless you were emotionally close to the events, you might want to read it over several sittings - one or two stories at a time.

Full text is available for download.

Fact sheet.

"In Spirit", short story, review
First published: Analog, September 2002.
Rating: B