Second paragraph of third story:
If he likes the tilt of your hat or the colour of your luggage, if the smell of the cologne you’ve splashed on in the washroom reminds him of all those Oldsmobile days hung up with his jacket on the peg by the door, Sam My Man will solicit you with his magic never-ending cup of coffee. He’s a dealer in biography, paid for by the minute, the hour, however long it takes until the driver calls you on into the night. Sam My Man has whole lifetimes racked away under the bar where he keeps the empty bottles. He can tell a good vintage just by looking: given the choice between the kid in tractor hat, knee-high tubes, and cut-off T-shirt, the bus-lagged pair of English Camp-Americas propping their eyelids open with their backpacks and coffee the strength of bromine, and the old man with the old precise half-inch of white beard and the leather bag like no one’s carried since the tornado whisked Professor Marvel off to the Emerald City, Kelly By the Window knows which one he’ll solicit with his little fill-‘er-ups of complimentary coffee.
I got this at the Eastercon where Ian McDonald was a Guest of Honour in 2015, and he kindly signed it for me; though looking at it now, I realised that I cannot read what he had written, and when I sent this picture to him, he said he he couldn’t read it either!
This is a great collection of great stories by a great writer, taking in the first 25 years of his career from 1988 to 2013. A lot of them I already knew, some of them are set in the same world as some of his novels, some were completely new to me. I guess from the earlier stories, the one that stood out for me was “After Kerry”, a tale of dysphoria and dysfunctional families; of the later ones it was the Belfast-set “Tonight We Fly”. Ian McDonald doesn’t set all that many of his stories in either part of Ireland, but that’s still more than most writers. All written in that lush, enviable prose. I’ll come back to this, I think. You can get it here.
This was (shamefully) the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Creation Machine, by my former cohabitee Andrew Bannister.
