LA Times – Tolkien and Lewis hardly exhausted the territory: 2007 was a year of epic ingenuity and imaginative realms aplenty.
Is it science fiction? Is it even speculative fiction? Andy Duncan’s odd, mesmerizing short story “Unique Chicken Walks in Reverse” belongs on this list of my favorite 2007 books in this genre mainly because it kicks off “Eclipse One,” a new anthology series edited by Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade). Five-year-old Mary O’Connor has a chicken that does just what Duncan’s title says; it’s a “frizzled” fowl (feathers growing on the inside) that she has named Jesus. Sacrilege or homage? Father Leggett comes to investigate. Mary later went by Flannery, and Duncan’s brisk little fiction develops into a sly variant of O’Connor’s intense modern morality tales.
The late Osamu Tezuka, father of “Astro Boy” and the sprawling, semi-fictional biography “Buddha,” gleefully crams SF tropes into his massive “Apollo’s Song” (Vertical). A sadistic man-child named Shogo is being reprogrammed and undergoes a peculiar form of therapy involving vivid hallucinations, implanted by shock treatment and hypnosis. He loves and loses the same wide-eyed sylph over and over. The paradox is that what’s essentially the same story, filtered through various milieus, not only holds our interest but also sparks a satisfaction deeper than the sum of its episodes.
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