Reviews for The retrieval artist, and other stories

The average rating for The retrieval artist, and other stories based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-07-17 00:00:00 Richard Ward These are workmanlike detective stories with interesting-but-sketchy world-building. Rusch must have thought so, too, because when I searched her work, I saw that many of these stories had been later spun out into long intricate multi-volume series. Which I now can't read because I know the solutions to all the mysteries. So SPOILER ALERT--don't read these, read the books they spawned!

Review # 2 was written on 2012-01-06 00:00:00 Colin Bruhn I picked up this book at the library because I'd liked the Retrieval Artist series and wanted to read the story that started it all. It was a huge surprise to discover that somehow, the library had deleted the book's record from the system without removing the book from the shelf...which meant it was for sale. Total cost to me for a practically unused and fairly rare book, fifty cents. I have trouble maintaining my sorrow when good books get sold off when I'm the beneficiary of the cutbacks. Story collections, like albums, are usually uneven in...quality isn't exactly the word, I guess. Better to say that I almost never love all the stories in a collection. This one is no exception. Rusch's science fiction has a bleakness I enjoy, probably because it comes out of human nature rather than a dystopian future, and that gives it a different feel than, say, a Philip K. Dick or Richard Matheson story. I expected not to love "The Retrieval Artist" simply because I've read the rest of the series, where the story's concept has been fleshed out, and it was exactly what I expected. "Present" is funny and very naughty, "Dancers Like Children" and "Alien Influences" were sad and creepy, but the rest didn't really do it for me. On the whole, I'm glad to have the book, but I think I preferred her collection Millennium Babies more.