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A review by nonesensed
Rogues by Gardner Dozois, George R.R. Martin
3.0
This is a very varied collection of short stories that focus on 'rogue' characters, those who do questionable things but supposedly have a heart of gold under all that bluster and backstabbing. How much the rogues in this live up to that varies greatly from story to story.
We get a lot of different genres and a lot of different kinds of rogues in this collection. I must admit half of them weren't for me. Sometimes because the settings and characters got a little too grimdark, sometimes because the genre was 'plain old regular life' instead of fantasy or science fiction, sometimes because it became both. I enjoyed Abercrombie's "Tough Times All Over", Vaughn's "Roaring Twenties", Priest's "Heavy Metal", Abraham's "The Meaning of Love", Nix's "A Cargo of Ivories", Einstein's "The Caravan to Nowhere", Tuttle's "The Curious Affair of the Dead Wives", and Gaiman's "How the Marquis Got His Coat Back".
But I think I would have preferred to read them all as separate stories. As part of a collection, the takes on what counts as a "lovable rogue" were veeeeery different from story to story, to the point where I felt like I was reading mostly completely unrelated works. Far too many of the "lovable rogues" here were just utterly awful people (for example: would-be-rapists and people who blame others for ending up in abusive relationships). That's not a lovable rogue to me, that's a trash person who I was rooting for to lose all through their stories (looking at you "The Inn of the Seven Blessings" and "Bent Twig"). Really felt like a cold shower every time I turned the page and ended up reading about people I wanted to stab with rusty spoons rather than morally ambiguous people I could sympathize with.
We get a lot of different genres and a lot of different kinds of rogues in this collection. I must admit half of them weren't for me. Sometimes because the settings and characters got a little too grimdark, sometimes because the genre was 'plain old regular life' instead of fantasy or science fiction, sometimes because it became both. I enjoyed Abercrombie's "Tough Times All Over", Vaughn's "Roaring Twenties", Priest's "Heavy Metal", Abraham's "The Meaning of Love", Nix's "A Cargo of Ivories", Einstein's "The Caravan to Nowhere", Tuttle's "The Curious Affair of the Dead Wives", and Gaiman's "How the Marquis Got His Coat Back".
But I think I would have preferred to read them all as separate stories. As part of a collection, the takes on what counts as a "lovable rogue" were veeeeery different from story to story, to the point where I felt like I was reading mostly completely unrelated works. Far too many of the "lovable rogues" here were just utterly awful people (for example: would-be-rapists and people who blame others for ending up in abusive relationships). That's not a lovable rogue to me, that's a trash person who I was rooting for to lose all through their stories (looking at you "The Inn of the Seven Blessings" and "Bent Twig"). Really felt like a cold shower every time I turned the page and ended up reading about people I wanted to stab with rusty spoons rather than morally ambiguous people I could sympathize with.