I love the sense of intimacy that I get when an author gets the chance to select the stories of theirs that they love the most and then introduce each one. As Seanan McGuire puts it:
"This isn't necessarily 'The Best Of,' but it's the pieces that I love most, that I most want to share."
She has picked stories twenty-one stories, all published between 2009 and 2017. They all stand outside the main universes that she normally writes in. This means each on stands or falls on its merits. I like that.
So far, I've read the first story and it was a blast.
The title already had me smiling:
"Laughter at the Academy: A Field Study in the Genesis of Schizotypal Creative Genius Personality Disorder (SCGPD)"
As an introvert who has learnt to pass in an extrovert's world and has often had to repress the urge to tear down the noisy, showy, shallow world that they take for granted and expect everyone else to embrace as normal and a replace it with a place where normal people - people like me - can live, I was enthralled by the premise of this story of a society so afraid of creativity and the creative geniuses /mad scientists who unleash it, that they've classified some kinds of creativity as mental illness and have tried to legislate it out of existence. I think that's a world that deserves to be burnt down. I was cheering for the firestarter all the way through.
I loved the pace of the story, its humour, its lack of remorse and its originality.
I think the quote at the start of the story gives you a good flavour of the mind at work here:
"Upon consideration, we must agree that the greatest danger of the so-called “creative genius” is its flexibility. While the stereotypes of Doctors Frankenstein and Moreau exist for good reason, there is more to the CG-afflicted than mere biology. So much more. The time has come, ladies and gentlemen, for us to redefine what it means to be scientists…and what it means to be afraid."—from the keynote speech delivered to the 10th Annual World Conference on the Prevention of Creative Genius by Professor Elizabeth Midkiff-Cavanaugh (deceased).
I love how the first sentence perfectly captures the pompous condescension of mainstream thinkers talking about non-mainstream thinkers and the threat tucked away in the last parenthetic word.
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