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Rare Unsigned Copy – Book Review

Rare Unsigned Copy – Book Review
  • By Simon Petrie
  • Published By Peggy Bright Books

This here is a strange piece of goods. Mostly when you meet a collection of short stories — particularly from a writer who favours genre fiction, as Petrie does — the book aims to have some kind of a theme, or a cohesive timeline, or somesuch. Maybe it’s a ‘best of’. Or maybe it’s ‘all new work’, or perhaps ‘the collected stories set in the land of Spunt’, or whatever. This particular book is no such thing: two hundred and seventy-five pages (in PDF) carrying no less than forty-one titles in the TOC. Forty-two if you count the humorous introduction, putatively written by an alien professor with a really difficult name.

Forty-one titles is a lot. Half that is a decent sum for an anthology. Forty-one leaves you wondering exactly what set of filters have been used, what stories were chosen, and more importantly, what was left out.

Looks can be deceptive, though. A very significant number of the forty-one pieces in Rare Unsigned Copy are short: one-page, even half-page pieces.  ‘Guy Walks Into A Bar (Theme and Variations)’ is actually four distinct pieces, of no more than a few paragraphs each, all revolving around the old joke standby of the Man Who Walks Into The Bar. They’re not too bad, either: snappy little half-sized ideas, given exactly the space they really need. It’s interesting.

‘Snappy’ is one of the things Petrie does well. If I had to summarise the best elements of his work here, I’d say ‘short, funny, and clever’. All of those are good things in their own way, so my own response to the collection has intrigued me, and sent me back to the drawing board to think about  it, because the book didn’t engage me as much as I’d like to have been engaged, and I didn’t understand why. In the end, I concluded that it was the ‘short’ thing.

I love short stories, and have done all my reading life. Novels are fine, but a well-crafted short is a gem, a thing of beauty. Yet even though this classic form is described as ‘short’, it’s still long enough to draw you in with nifty characters, vivid, economical dialogue, cool settings and sharp plotting. The author is definitely capable of these. His tongue-in-cheek ‘locked room’ mysteries, devolving around the long-suffering Gordon Mamon and his jack-of-all-trades status in a hotel which is actually a space elevator are fine examples of the short story form. Not only do they have the dialogue, the setting, the characters and the plotting firmly in place, they’re also riddled with Petrie’s patent wordplay and sly cultural references. “Captain Kurtz, she’s dead,” says a crewman in ‘Single Handed’. And if I tell you that the crewman works aboard a spacecraft called ‘The Dart Of Harkness’ and you still don’t get the reference or the joke — well, there’s a lot of Petrie’s material which will go right over your head, I’m afraid. (But I laughed aloud.) His stories are peppered with stuff like that; clever little in-jokes that made me smile with every one that I caught.

In fact, Petrie’s stuff is clever enough that for once, I’m going to raise a warning finger and suggest that perhaps the writer is leaving a little too much to the reader. I did, in fact, work out the twist in ‘Horse Of Wood’, but I had to read quite carefully, and that’s saying something. Clever story, clever idea — perhaps just a shade too cleverly executed. Another example: ‘A Mole of Stars’ is the last title in the book. It’s a nice little piece, in the form of a note from a civilisation of a vanished universe, passing knowledge and a philosophy along to the inhabitants of the universe which follows. It has a good tone. It feels good. But… what the heck is ‘A Mole Of Stars’?

The answer is simple, if you remember high school chemistry. A ‘mole’ is a specific number of atoms or molecules, described by Avogadro’s number, which as everyone knows is 6.02 x ten to the 23rd power. You didn’t know that? Shame on you! Petrie certainly did, and he incorporated it into one of the most gently poetic pieces in the book. Which, obviously, can be a little jarring if you aren’t as scientifically fluent and literate as the author — but it’s actually a really cool image, which draws upon the smallest elements of the universe to describe the very largest, and manages to bring a human scope to the vastness of existence. Clever indeed.

Overall, this is a very interesting collection. It’s well worth the money: the scattershot approach ensures that it’s got something for everyone. There’s plenty of science fiction, fantasy, a little horror, even some straight-up non-speculative fiction, and oodles of half-page instant punchline pieces. I won’t give away the joke in ‘Sudoku for Psychics’, for example, but it’s quick and light and easily digested.

But so much of it is so short! As I said before, I found that the pieces I enjoyed most in this book were the longest, and that the quickfire shift from piece to piece, idea to idea to idea, didn’t engage me as much as I hoped. And I find that a little worrying. Not for Mr Petrie, but for myself, because I suspect this book is The Shape Of Things To Come — if not exactly Future Schlock. (Sorry. That’s what happens to me when I read somebody with a distinctive style… it rubs off.)

I note that his table of contents explicitly references Internet culture in at least two places, with ‘Podcast’, and ‘Dragonblog’. I also note that the shortness of many of his pieces means they can be published and distributed by mobile phone, or as the flashiest of flash fiction, for pocket computers and wrist-sized screens, and I think that this anthology may in fact be the precursor of a new thing. Simon Petrie, I think, with all of his crackling wit and clever, referenced humour, his short, punchy tales and his classic idea-as-hero SF approach, may well be the first author I’ve yet seen who has been polished and sharpened into a true creation of the Internet era. ‘Rare, Unsigned Copy’ is an anthology which I read very easily from the tiny screen of a netbook computer, and somehow, it seemed all the more right to be doing so.

In other words, I suspect that this approach — and particularly, the prose, humour and style of Simon Petrie — is very likely the beginning of an avalanche, an uber-meme: the Way Of The Geek In Print.  And if you consider yourself net-savvy; if you enjoy mixing and mashing between video and movie and music and computer-game, you should definitely buy ‘Rare, Unsigned Copy,’ because Simon Petrie is very much One Of Us… and it will be very interesting to see where the author goes next.

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About The Author

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Dirk Flinthart is a mildly notorious writer, raconteur and sometime rakehell bunkered in the forbidding hills of north-east Tasmania. He's probably best known as an occasionally fictitious character in John Birmingham's books, but the reality is both stranger, and far more coherent. Flinthart's recent works include Angel Rising (with Twelfth Planet Press), Canterbury 2100 (as editor, courtesy of Agog! fiction) and he has a story shortlisted to the 2008 Aurealis Awards. Having just completed his black belt in ju-jitsu and begun his studies of Iaido, Flinthart is confident of surviving the coming Zombie Apocalypse in fine fashion, and expects to continue writing speculative fiction long after the undead have eaten your rich, gooey brains...

Article Information

  • Posted: Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
  • Author: Dirk Flinthart
  • Filed Under: Literature,Review
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