Subject: Review: "Ghost Seas" by Steven Utley

From: [email-masked] (p-m agapow)
Date: 03 Oct 1998 14:07:38 -0400

"Ghost Seas" by Steven Utley
		A Postview, Copyright 1998 p-m agapow

A short story collection, including: "The Tall Grass" - the dying pilot of
a crashed exploration vehicle reminisces about his life; "Haiti" - as a US
crew reaches Mars, a medico fights a hopeless battle against a plague in
impoverished Haiti; "Dog in the Manger" - a slash-and-burn operation is
conducted in the face of an alien invasion.

This small press edition heralds the return of Utley to SF after an
absence of nearly a decade.  Although he was never particularly famous -
writing short stories is a hard way to get reader recognition - this
publication is one to sit up and pay attention to.

As a reference points for style, you might look to Howard Waldrop or
Harlan Ellison.  Like Waldrop, Utley has a highly developed sense of
place, a talent for drawing the lonely frontier ("A grocery store, a
filling station and precious little else.  And Angelton's about thirty
miles beyond that.  Angleton's a real metropolis.  There are two filling
stations there.")  and filling in history.  "The Electricity of Heaven",
about the fall of the South at the end of the American Civil War, is a
finely crafted picture of a great historical change that could have been
written by Waldrop.  Like Ellison, the author is not interested in
technology.  Gadgetry is just there to make the story work, or as
background detail.  There are a few Ellison-esque stings in the tails of
stories.  My suspicion is that Utley is aware of this crossover with
Ellison: "Slices of Sylvia" is Utley's rendering of the Kitty Genovese
murder, territory that Ellison has covered prominently.

Unfortunately, "Ghost Seas" suffers a problem, one that is more marketing
than writing.  As with James Patrick Kelly's recent "Think Like a
Dinosaur," the mix of stories is broad, perhaps too broad.  Many of the
stories are only marginally SF, and a few of them not at all.  Although
some of the non-SF is written like SF: "Two Women of the Prairie" shows
the encounter of an abandoned wife and a dying Indian woman on the alien
landscapes of the Old West frontier.  As I said with Kelly's book, my
complaint is not an inverted snobbery about non-SF writing.  It's just
recognition of the fact that a package labelled "14 Stories: Assorted" can
be a difficult one to find a place for in the market or in your reading
schedule.  How many times do you settle down with a book, thinking "I feel
like reading a good science fiction, or horror, or love, or western story
now"?

But make the time nonetheless.  Just to quickly mention two other good
stories in this collection, the confronting "Haiti" directly poses the
space program against the needs of the Third World, questioning the
motives for technological progress.  "Race Relations" succeeds with the
bizarre premise of humans being transformed into large echidnas by
visiting aliens.  Hopefully, we'll see a mass-market collection from Utley
before too long.  [****/must-read] and John Sayles on the Sid and Nancy
scale.

%A Steven Utley
%T Ghost Seas
%I Ticonderoga Press
%C Nedlands (Western Australia)
%D 1997
%P 167pp
%G ISBN 0-9586856-1-4
%O paperback, Aus$17.95

Paul-Michael Agapow ([email-masked]), Dept. Biology, Imperial College
"We were too young, lived too fast and had too much technology ..."