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A Thousand Deaths: Stories Kindle Edition

by George Alec Effinger (Author), Marty Halpern (Editor), Mike Resnick (Introduction) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 8 ratings
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Science fiction stories that offer “a poignant glimpse into the author’s psyche . . . this bittersweet collection [is] one to be cherished” (Publishers Weekly).

When we first meet Courane, he must face down TECT, the self-aware computer that has come to control Earth and its colonial planets. Exiled to Planet D, Courane races to cure the debilitating disease that attacks each of the planet’s residents, even as his own memory begins to fade. Unfortunately, his only source of information about the illness is TECT itself, and the computer’s agenda doesn’t seem to line up with Courane’s.

In the seven other stories contained in A Thousand Deaths, Courane begins to blur reality and fiction as Effinger expertly plays with narrative conventions. However, these are not simply the whims of a science fiction writer; they are the frameworks the Nebula and Hugo Award–nominated author uses to answer questions about existence no one else even thought to ask.    While George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen novel When Gravity Fails is perhaps his most famous work, his lesser-known novel The Wolves of Memory remained his favorite. In it, he introduced readers to Sandor Courane, an everyman and Effinger stand-in who struggles as he swims against the currents of fate. In life and in his multiple deaths, Sandor Courane serves as the unifying force in this collection of Effinger’s stories, starting with The Wolves of Memory and getting ever more clever and off the wall from there.
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  1. Print length
    403 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
  5. Publication date
    April 1, 2014
  6. File size
    4453 KB
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Aheartfelt homage to the late (and largely underappreciated) SF author Effinger (1947–2002), this intimate collection of stories revolving around his literary alter ego, hapless genre writer and editor Sandor Courane, offers a poignant glimpse into the author's psyche. Central to the collection is The Wolves of Memory, a deeply allegorical novel in which Courane, banished from Earth by the computerized overlord TECT after numerous career failures, finds himself exiled on a bleak world where he and other outcasts slowly succumb to an alien neurological disorder. Struggling with increasing memory loss and the deterioration of his body, Courane finally finds what he has been seeking all along: fulfillment. Also included are seven sardonic short stories that pit the ill-fated Courane against, among other things, a bibliophilic time traveler and a witch who lives off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. A touching afterword by Andrew Fox as well as visually stunning cover art by John Picacio make this bittersweet collection one to be cherished. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

George Alec Effinger was the author of Budayeen Nights, The Exile Kiss, A Fire in the Sun, and When Gravity Fails. He was the recipient of the Hugo Award, the Nebula, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00J2IK646
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy (April 1, 2014)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 1, 2014
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4453 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 403 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 8 ratings

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George Alec Effinger

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
8 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Joe Sherry
4.0 out of 5 stars four stars for The Wolves of Memory
Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2007
A Thousand Deaths is the first collection of George Alec Effinger's Sandor Courane stories. Courane is one of Effinger's science fiction alter-egos, though this may be more of an impact in the shorter Courane fiction than in the opening novel The Wolves of Memory.

The Wolves of Memory introduces the reader to Sandor Courane. Courane, in a future where humans have given up control of their lives to computers, is assigned three jobs for which he is entirely unsuited and he subsequently fails at each job: basketball player, science fiction writer, assembly line worker. When he fails at each Courane finds himself in violation of TECTwish (TECT being the overcomputer which everyone must obey) and is exiled to Planet D, an apparently perfect agrarian world. The problem: everyone on Planet D suffers from an illness which slowly robs the citizen of his or her memory, and eventually their lives.

Told in a fragmented style where flashbacks meld with the main storyline of Sandor Courane carrying the body of his love back to the farm, The Wolves of Memory is perhaps the perfect title for this novel because there is a sense that Courane's memory is quite literally being eaten away. This is an extremely effective and moving story, one which hints at something sinister with TECT and shows the nonsense of anyone knowing what a person wants most, including the person in question. The Wolves of Memory is an exciting opening to this collection which continues with seven short stories.

Unfortunately, everything that was exciting about The Wolves of Memory is lost in the other stories. In "Fatal Disk Error" TECT is only a figment of the imagination of Sandor Courane as he writes science fiction stories (and so only ties into The Wolves of Memory in a tangential way). "In the Wings" introduces Sandor as a fictional character waiting to be written into the author's novels or short stories. The other five stories have Sandor Courane as the primary character, but in situations that are simply stories with no tie into TECT or The Wolves of Memory.

Obviously this is the way George Alec Effinger wanted it and in this posthumous collection Marty Halpern, the editor, placed the stories in this particular order for a reason. A Thousand Deaths brings the Sandor Courane stories of Effinger together in one place, but it is only The Wolves of Memory which really connects or leaves any sort of impression. The collection is very much worth reading for the opening novel, but the short stories are mostly miss because of the lack of continuity or tie in with the novel. Had I never read The Wolves of Memory I may very well have felt differently about the stories.

Reading copy provided courtesy of Golden Gryphon Press.

-Joe Sherry
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Wordwizard
5.0 out of 5 stars Experience for yourself the journey of a hero with dementia. This book is unique.
Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2020
Verified Purchase
I am specifically reviewing the novel THE WOLVES OF MEMORY which is contained in the story collection A THOUSAND DEATHS, both by George Alec Effinger. If there were nothing else in the collection, this would be worth the full price.

THE WOLVES OF MEMORY, by George Alex Effinger, is a novel with a hero/protagonist who is fighting progressive dementia at the same time as TECT. Effinger skillfully uses flashbacks as memory time-line disruptions, as well as the calendar of another planet (with 15 months of 35 days each) to induce in the reader the same confusion as Sandor Courane is in, so we can experience for ourselves what it's like to suffer from dementia. Quick, what season is Tectember in? Chuckuary? I've never come across anything else like this.
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Trang Nguyen
5.0 out of 5 stars "A personal posthumous triumph over the forces of decay, forgetfulness, and oblivion"
Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2014
Sandor Courane woke up in a desert, beside the corpse of a woman he didn't recognize. It would take him a while to recall his own name. But he recognized the note pinned on her blouse as his own handwriting. “Her name is Alohilani,” it said. “You and she were very much in love. You must take her back to the house. Keep walking east until you get to the river. Follow the river downstream to the house. East is the direction of the rising sun. They will help you when you get there.”

If we are to believe that memories are the building blocks of identity—wisdom and personality are after all accumulations of experience and selective knowledge, the erosion of memories then strips us of our sense of self. Sometimes it could go so far to steal one's dignity when it makes one forget their own body. A slow execution or a kind of death, some would say. The mind dies before the body does—you're going through death twice.

My apology, I'm musing aloud. This book has put my thoughts and emotions into a blender, I'm afraid I'll never be able to compose a good enough review for it. When I talked about the decay of memories, I didn't mean to paint the natural process of aging in a negative brushstroke. I think we can agree that, given enough time to make peace with the limit of our life, we might be able to accept our closure with fewer grievances, if not total free of them. But what would happen if death were suddenly forced upon us? What if we were to live everyday being acutely aware of an approaching premature oblivion? What if we never got the freedom to live and make peace with dying?

Set against the backdrop of a futuristic isolated planet, Effinger's A Thousand Deaths offers us some insightful speculations on death, dying and one's effort to preserve their humanity through remembrance. By far it's the saddest and most brilliant dystopian science-fiction I've chanced upon, not to mention a refreshing allegory on Artificial intelligence and their humanistic predisposition.

The narrative is slow built and carefully crafted with an eerie quietness—so subtle the shifts in atmosphere that the emotions it distills almost feel like living things in comparison. Furthermore, the nonlinear structure of the narration does not interfere with the clarity of the plot, but effectively brings the story closer to life as it reflects the narrator's treacherous state of mind. The pacing might be a challenge to some reader, it was for me at some points, but there's hardly any extraneous or pretentious details. The world-building isn't explicit, and although I did question how such totalitarian dystopia was erected and upheld, the ambiguity appeals to me like an invitation for rumination rather than a sign of lackluster writing. I was ambivalent about the characters in the beginning, however, when the cruelties of their fate finally came to the light, it was neigh impossible for me to remain detached, even towards the least likeable of them all.

Having known the context this novel emerged, I'm inclined to consider this collection of bizarre stories as the author's attempt to celebrate life although it must have wrought much bitterness in his spirit. As Andrew Fox wrote in the Afterword of the book, this is Effinger's personal posthumous triumph over the forces of decay, forgetfulness, and oblivion. In spite of the invasive bleakness and inhumane nature of this terrifying future,

“You're becoming very human here at the end.”
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