There's a reason I used my erging icon instead of a reading one for this post: because I 'read' these stories entirley while on the rowing machine.

Finding out that iTunes was selling the audio-anthology Metatropolis for only $4.95 = just one more reason to appreciate the smart people on LiveJournal. (Um, whoever you were, thanks. I know it was on Scalzi's blog, but I don't think that's where I read about the low price first.)

If you haven't encountered it before, it's an anthology of short stories edited by John Scalzi, with stories by Scalzi, Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, Karl Schroeder. In Scalzi's own words, the stories are about "a future in which economic and environmental declines have changed the very nature of what cities are".

Given the combination of hours to fill on the erg, an interesting premise, a smokin' price, and a bunch of authors I like and a couple new ones, of course I bought it. I finished the last story this morning.

The first story, In the Forests of the Night by Jay Lake, had me worried. This is not a pan of this story, but it is a pan of this story for this strange and particular purpose: it's a horrible story to work out to. I was getting exceedingly worried by the time I got up to 4000 meters and all that happened was that a man was walking up to a city, the whole time I rowed all those meters. (OK, I exaggerate: toward the end, a woman was watching the city, also.) Not great for distraction purposes. I think possibly it might not be a great story to be read aloud, but it's very possible I'm wrong on this and that it would be fine if you were paying full attention. I think, though, that it may have a lot of beautiful word usage in it, and I'd rather savor that on a page, when I can go back to bits I like to see how they work together, or reread the parts I'm not sure of. As it was, I was left at the end with a feeling that I really hadn't understood why anyobe did any of the things they did in this story or why things turned out as they did. One other complaint: this story is first in the anthology, but the stories here are meant to work together, as it's a collaborative world. When the other stories refer back to the city where this one is set, they don't seem to be taking these events into account.

Fortunately, at least for my purposes, the tempo picked up after that. Stochast-city, by Tobias Buckell, has a bt of a Sam Spade deadpan to it, or maybe that was contributed by the narrator. It and Elizabeth Bear's The Red in the Sky is Our Blood are very different stories that share a theme: in each, a reluctant hero is convinced to care, and to work for something bigger than s/he had envisioned. These two also delve farther and in more detail into the idea of self-sustainable cities that I think is at the heart of this anthology. And really, I just like the people.

Scalzi's own story is the funniest of the lot, but thematically I think it's the least adventurous. It was probably the best one for erging, though: fun. Lively. And it's got a pig named Lunch.

I hadn't read anything by or even really heard of Karl Schroeder before, but I think this story was my favorite of the bunch. It's thematically the farthest out there, but it's handled well and with clarity; even on the erg I had no problem in following his ideas. He's taking cities virtual, not in the dispersed sense of Jay Lake's Cascadia but to where people actually conduct their lives several layers deep in an alternate reality. I'm not quite sure how some of his mechanics wold work (mostly the farming), but that's no bar to enjoying the story.

I liked this kind of anthology, with the authors playing off of each other. I'd read others, and I think I would enjoy even more interaction among the different visions; different perspectives of the same event, one used as direct history for another instead of a side reference.