Witpunk »

This anthology of sardonic fiction emphasizes SF/fantasy tales sparkling with wit and edgy attitude. The stories, both originals and reprints, cover a wide range of satire. Writers include James Morrow, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Allen Steele, Paul Di Filippo, Robert Silverberg, and Pat Cadigan. Halpern, a 2001 World Fantasy Award Finalist, is the editor of the legendary Golden Gryphon Press.

The Washington Post

Interestingly, the shorter stories in Witpunk work better the shorter they are; all of the ones longer than 20 pages are something of a drag, while those less than five (and there are several) are quite good. Jeffrey Ford offers a series of fast-moving pastiches of old pulp-magazine templates — perhaps an easy target (and hardly transgressive), but they work. Best of the lot is Ray Vukcevich's wonderful "Jumping," which is all of two pages long. Vukcevich is a genuinely remarkable writer disguised as a merely excellent one, and his story — a six-page experience, since you read it three times in rapid succession while trying to figure out what the author just did and how he managed it -- begins strangely ("We stood waist-deep in the muddy green cattle pond"), grows rapidly stranger while seeming to explain things, then ends in a weird burst of almost-sense. You find yourself trying simultaneously to scratch your head and applaud. — Gregory Feeley