![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kareilaIt just clicked for me that the likely reason I don't usually care for short stories is that they generally provide too little payoff for the initial effort of decoding the characters and the parameters of the worlds in which they exist.
So with that in mind (as well as the fact that I borrowed the book from the library and won't be able to renew it), I skipped all of the unaffiliated stories in this collection except for the longest two, both of which are very good. I also enjoyed the three stories set in the Imperial Radch universe, despite not finding any obvious callbacks to the novels. The back half of the collection is devoted to the universe of The Raven Tower, which was not my jam, so I felt no desire to linger on these.
In other words, I liked the only 5 stories I took the time to read: "Lake of Souls", "Another Word for World", "Night's Slow Poison", "She Commands Me and I Obey", and "The Creation and Destruction of the World" - although that last one is a fable, and it isn't clear to me what the Imperial Radch connection is.
So with that in mind (as well as the fact that I borrowed the book from the library and won't be able to renew it), I skipped all of the unaffiliated stories in this collection except for the longest two, both of which are very good. I also enjoyed the three stories set in the Imperial Radch universe, despite not finding any obvious callbacks to the novels. The back half of the collection is devoted to the universe of The Raven Tower, which was not my jam, so I felt no desire to linger on these.
In other words, I liked the only 5 stories I took the time to read: "Lake of Souls", "Another Word for World", "Night's Slow Poison", "She Commands Me and I Obey", and "The Creation and Destruction of the World" - although that last one is a fable, and it isn't clear to me what the Imperial Radch connection is.
