Saturday, April 3, 2010

Tony Daniel's "A Dry, Quiet War" (novelette, time travel, free)

Basically a simple story. Some war deserters are terrorizing a town. A real war hero, originally from the town, returns. He watches their terror quietly, disinterestedly ... till they go after his girl. Of course, the goons stand no chance against the hero.

But the story is told in an utterly contrived way. Enormous amount of meaningless jargon. Town in question is a human colony in some world away from Sol. War in question is the one fought at the end of time billions of years hence, & the actors involved were not only from different galaxies but from different dimensions as well!

Collected in.

  1. Gardner Dozois (Ed)'s "Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction".

Fact sheet.

First published: Asimov's, June 1996.
Download full text from Infinity Plus.
Rating: B.

2 comments:

IndiaSucks said...

Ur a dumbass dude. Apparently my 16 year old brain can better appreciate the complexities and merit of Tony Daniel’s short story better than your own. The fact that you labeled this “Basically a simple story” shows the whole blogosphere that you have failed to grasp even the most elementary aspects of A Dry Quiet War, and just because you don’t understand something doesn’t make it meaningless jargon. Kill yourself.

Tinkoo said...

How about enlightening us on the aspects of the story that you think are worth appreciating?