This is, I'm somewhat ashamed to admit, the first time I've ever read anything by Marquez. The particular story was "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," which I enjoyed greatly. It's the kind of fantasy I like best, the kind where something odd happens but it's treated as normal, everyday--where something else is the special element of the story. (Certain ways of doing this can drive me nuts, i.e. Angela Carter, but that's another story.) Also sort of interesting because I have two different friends writing novels with winged characters. But there, all the characters have wings, or at least a large number; here it is unusual, if not unusual enough that after a time it cannot be taken in stride.

In fact, what I loved about this story was the amount of detail. There are many strange things occurring...infestations of crabs, for example (the sea-going kind). Only the angel (or, possibly, just a very old man with enormous wings) and a sideshow are ever highlighted as weird, and one is not more odd than the other, or so it seems. I'm also fascinated by the parallel of the oddities: a man with wings, a spider with a human face in the sideshow. Both displayed.

The Allende bit didn't thrill me. I have sort of a division in my head, based on the way metaphors are used in speculative fiction vs. mimetic fiction--short version, speculative fiction uses large metaphors, a story about first contact is about how humans interface with the other, while mimetic fiction uses smaller metaphors, aliens are people from another country. Trying to reverse that, to make a story with aliens representing another country apply to all others or to make the aliens of an SF story represent one specific nationality, tends to screw up the way the story's read. Not that one reading is necessarily more valid than another, but I suppose in terms of what makes the richest reading. The problem with the big overarching metaphors of spec fic is that you have to go for an overall feeling to the story, and that tends to be very individual. Marquez works for me--works very well, based upon this one example. Allende, according to this and another short story of hers I read a while back, never quite makes it for me. I can't specifically say why, and that's kind of frustrating for me--she's a fairly impersonal narrator, but I like that in some cases, i.e. Marquez; she seems to write about introverted or taciturn characters, but again, that's not always a problem for me. Somehow the emotional narrative of Allende's stories never quite clicks with my own experience, and I can't get invested in the punch at the end.

This is also the first time I've read "Harrison Bergeron." What an odd story... I loved the dialogue; it was close enough to life to sound like actual people speaking, but not so close that it failed to work in a prose setting. (That's another reason I dislike Hemingway, actually. A little too close to life.) And I enjoyed the arc of the story--right until Harrison appears and is described. He was so clownish, so cartoonish, so unreal that I was thrown out of the story and never got back in. There seemed to be a specific agenda Vonnegut was going for, about compliance and equality, which lost its immediacy for me the minute Harrison became such a larger-than-life figure. The story sort of retreated into pulp SF--not that that's necessarily bad, but I'm not really a pulp fan. On the other hand, though, I wonder if that's what Vonnegut was going for: rejecting the idea that this story was directly applicable to real life. And this goes back to my thoughts on metaphor as well.

Finally, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." One of my favorite short stories, though I find I'm starting to like it a little less--maybe overexposure or, more likely, more reading of Le Guin's later work, which I find too transparently ideological. Still, it's such a fascinating work; there are no characters, and the narrative speaks very directly to the reader. Don't really have much new to say on the story as a whole, except that every time I read this I appreciate Le Guin's use of language just a little bit more. This story is so compact, so perfectly worded in general, that I can go through now and say, "It might have sounded better if this adverb was moved before the verb," or something similar. It's precise enough to support that kind of poetic fine-tuning--and there are only a couple of places I think any changes need to be made. So nice to read.