Rubik arrived at just the right time for me, and I've enjoyed the several of Tan's short stories that I've read along the way, most of which have made their way into this glittering collection - "Mounting Sexual Tension Between Two Long-time Friends; Tom Knows that Ant Is a Spy but Ant Doesn't", "Excision in F-Sharp Minor", "Shirt Dresses that Look a Little Too Much Like Shirts so that It Looks Like You Forgot to Put on Pants (Love Will Save the Day)", "Lola Metronome and Calliope St Laurent Having a Picnic at the End of Civilisation as We Know It" (what about those titles), but not the one about people falling asleep in the bed store, which was probably my favourite of those along with "Excision".
And Smart Ovens for Lonely People doesn't disappoint, its stories arriving like dispatches from alternative futures that are also refracted (broken mirror) versions of the present. Most involve one notable element of the fantastic - sometimes an intrusion into a world that otherwise seems like ours, sometimes in a way that more suffuses everything - but all are about the stories they're telling rather than just the high concepts that provide their jumping-off points and much of their verve; these stories hum with implications and contemporaneity.
Their inventiveness is delightful in its own right, displaying the rare ability to render a piquantly distinctive perspective, like the view from a lens jammed sideways between the cracks in our ordinary world. And that creativity is even more impressive in the way it operates as the means through which the stories penetrate rather than being an end in itself; recurring motifs and themes include therapy, trauma, conspiracy, obsolescence, consumerism, 'cute' and loss.
Their inventiveness is delightful in its own right, displaying the rare ability to render a piquantly distinctive perspective, like the view from a lens jammed sideways between the cracks in our ordinary world. And that creativity is even more impressive in the way it operates as the means through which the stories penetrate rather than being an end in itself; recurring motifs and themes include therapy, trauma, conspiracy, obsolescence, consumerism, 'cute' and loss.
