Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vanana Singh
For the Los Angeles Review of Books , I wrote about one of my favorite recent collections of short stories, Vandana Singh's Ambiguity Machines , published by the great Small Beer Press : There is a stately elegance to all the stories collected in Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories , Singh’s second collection after The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories . Both books are rich with models of what science fiction can achieve as well as models of the short story as a form. Even when she is writing about far-future, faster-than-light-traveling aliens, Singh never resorts to the clichés familiar from space opera unless to undo them, never forces fast pacing with staccato sentences and short paragraphs, never plays gotcha! with the reader. Singh is a scientist — a professor of physics — and all of her stories show a scientist’s determination to develop ideas carefully and responsibly. Yet Singh is also an artist, a writer who evokes sensual wonders in musical pr...
