Anne McCaffrey

A collection of fourteen science fiction short stories.

Get Off the Unicorn

Sarah Sammis

In an effort to clear my shelves I am "forcing" myself to read books I've had for just about forever. Take for instance Get off the Unicorn, I think I've had this copy for 20 years! That would have made me 13 or 14 when I bought it — right at the peek of my love for Anne McCaffrey's books. I should have read it back then; I would have enjoyed it more.

This book contains a dozen short stories, many of which exist in the worlds of her various series. Of her series I've mostly read the Pern books so most of the stories in this book didn't grab my attention on familiarity nor did they keep me interested enough to want to seek out their series.

Collectively they seem to center on ideas of gender, age and the burden of power. There are only so many times I can stand to read about how hard it is to be a girl, or how hard it is to make grownups listen, or how hard it is to control one's psychic power, or how hard it is to be the youngest (or smallest), etc. If I were still an angsty teenager this book would probably speak more to me than it does now.

Kirsten Simkiss

This book is terrible. TERRIBLE. You may not think so - maybe nostalgia for her books has clouded your mind - but these stories are boring, offensive, and frankly have characters in them that seem incomplete and wooden. Dear God, save yourself. I got to page 120 and stopped. I don't know what the next story was about, but it was boring me to death.

Allow me to display the thing that I read that bothered me the most. "How could she have blundered around so, looking for a mind that was superior to her, completely overlooking the fact that a woman's most important function in life begins with physical domination?" Page 57. That's a direct quote. There's also another story three stories later about surrogate mothers for gay people and it essentially implies they're all repressing the urge to have a relationship with a woman and have a child with them, since that's their true masculine need.

Other than those two, the stories were not overly terrible. Sure, the characters were a little one dimensional for each, but they could have been worse. (See above.) The story about the little girl from the farming family was decent enough, but it bothered me that she had no female peers aside from her mother, who was repressed and content to quietly pull strings from behind the scenes. And the story about the Rowan, which was changed into a full novel from what I understand, is simply referred to as "The Rowan" the entire story. Why that is is never explained. Why didn't they just call the woman Rowan and leave off the article?

Get Off the Unicorn

Reviews