Thoreau's Microscope
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- €7.49
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- €7.49
Publisher Description
The politics and terrors of biotech, human engineering, and brain science are given startling fictional form in a selection of short stories with Michael Blumlein's signature mix of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and wicked humour. The title piece, 'Thoreau's Microscope,' is a stunning mix of hypothesis and history, in which the author inhabits Thoreau's last days to explore the politics of impersonal science and personal liberation - a journey as illuminating as it is disturbing. On a lighter note, 'Fidelity' coolly deconstructs adultery with the help of an exuberant tumour, a guinea pig, and a swimsuit. 'Y(ou)r Q(ua)ntifi(e)d S(el)f' will reset your Fitbit and your personal goals as well. 'Paul and Me' is a legendary love story writ extra-large; and in 'Know How, Can Do' a female Frankenstein brings romance to life in the cold light of the lab.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This small, intense collection of "language writer" and physician Blumlein's short fiction focuses on bodies and people's relationships with them. The title piece, original to the collection, creates a delightfully strange atmosphere of simultaneous intimacy and intellectual detachment in an autobiographical first-person narrative of how a doctor deals with the "morbid curiosity" of experiencing his own cancer as both patient and professional. Previously published stories are equally successful in their incongruities: the sweet "Paul and Me" combines mythic masculinity and AIDS, the carefully crafted "Know How, Can Do" addresses dilemmas around experimentation by reframing Frankenstein's monster as a self-aware worm with a human brain, and the quirky and emotional "Fidelity" is as much about infant circumcision as it is about romantic longing. An interview with Blumlein by series editor Terry Bisson feels prefabricated and clunky, checking off discussion of the status of each of Blumlein's old projects, but Blumlein also gets some space to talk explicitly about the elements of medicine and ethics that feature in his work. Blumlein completists will be glad to have this on their shelves.
