Stepan Chapman

For those of you who have not yet encounterd the bizarre inner workings of Stepan Chapman, prepare for a surrealistic tour de force with this collection of seventeen of his short stories. To say that Chapman exists in another world is the more comforting of the two basic possibilities: could he be one of the very few accurate seers of the world we deludedly think we roam on? In "The Selection of Toothpick" a skinny island boy brazenly celebrates his heroism for killing a giant crab until the local wizard puts the vain lad's status into proper perspective. In "Boots Practice" a recruit is admonished by her drill instructor to not stop walking in her newly-issued boots. Good thing she doesn't because as she traverses changing environments the footgear transforms to skis, then to ice skates...stilts...the ambulatory mechanism of a huge robot...rows of mollusk legs. It all ends normal enough -- sort of. In "The Sister City" an American in a Tokyo bar meets a woman, Nema, at first invisible to him, who shows him her face, and reveals her identity as the spirit of a city self-destructed in grief over what the American's people had done to hers. With Chapman's tales, grip the arms of your chair as you allow your mind to take flight.

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