Collected Ogoense and Other Stories

by Rebecca Ore

$16 (paperback)
$7.95 (e-book)	EPUB	MOBI (unavailable)

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This volume of stories and novellas collects some of Ore's valuable fiction of the 1990s, work that continues to be of vital interest with a strong focus on persistent issues that remain urgent in our current world. In “Hypocaust & Bathysphere,” time-traveling academics more than meet their match in the medieval inhabitants they assume are naïve and ignorant and easily “studied. The historians exploring America’s past in “Scarey Rose in Deep History” uncover secrets in America’s past that challenge them personally to the core. “Stone Whorl Flint Knife” and “Horse Tracks,” set in Ore’s Bracken County where magic works and logic doesn’t, are tales of love and vengeance that play out amidst that county’s high-stakes power struggles. In “Collected Ogoense,” the volume’s title story, an underpaid biologist toiling over dangerous pathogens seeks refuge from the bleakness of her existence in her passion for African killifish until treachery takes her refuge from her and launches her into the obsession for revenge. “Accelerated Grimace,” on the 1998 Otherwise Award Honor List, explores the effects of a technology on the transactional relationship between an artist and his muse/trophy wife whose great ambition is to be a famous artist’s widow.

Praise for Rebecca Ore's Work

“Centuries Ago and Very Fast…has a kinetic energy and hard-to-define originality that held me captivated from first word to last. Profane—scandalous?—the book wraps stories around stories, combines the surreal with the mundane and everyday.”
 —Jeff VanderMeer, Locus Online, February 2010

“Ah, but a true power chord is infinitely replenishable, given enough talent on the part of the author. And Rebecca Ore proves this to the max with her new ‘novel in stories,’ Centuries Ago and Very Fast.... This novel comes with an endorsement from Samuel Delany, and on sexual and gender issues it exhibits the same polished rawness and sophisticated yet wide-eyed wonderment that Delany’s writing is famous for.”
 —Paul Di Filippo Asimov’s, March 2010

Reviews

[T]hese stories—which do not overlap with Ore’s one previous collection, Alien Bootlegger—are valuable and enjoyable milestones in both Ore’s own career and the field at large. They represent the best of ‘90s SF, and manifest long-term merits as well. Posterity should be pleased to receive this book...

Rebecca Ore blazed a distinctive path through the fantastika forests of the 1990s. Her unique voice consorts easily with that of Kit Reed or Margaret Atwood. Had she been more prolific, we’d be alluding to her work more often when speaking of the newer writers who are working—perhaps knowingly, perhaps unknowingly—in the same veins as she did. As matters stand, this collection will help preserve her undeniable and pleasurable accomplishments.  (Read the whole review)
  —Locus Online, Paul Di Filippo, January 6, 2024

ISBN: 978-1-61976-248-0 (13 digit)
Publication Date: Dec 2023
paperback 222 pages