This book offers a collection of short stories where each presents a typical trope used in science fiction or fantasy such as Gendercide in “Real Women Are Dangerous”; The Villain Had a Crappy Childhood in “The Origin of Terror”; The Super Soldier in “Can You Tell Me How to Get to Paprika Place?” and The Pro’s Last Job in “No Saint”. To add to the fun, the authors inverted the accepted theme for the trope. In other words, instead of The Villain Had a Crappy Childhood this particular story was ab...

A short story written by pretentious kids acting as if they're the first to look at tropes and supposedly change them. In SF & Fantasy, that's been happening at least since the late 1950s and the 1960s. Worse, the stories are mediocre at best. Worst, avoid the darling lil' essays that follow them.Go read many of the New Wave authors for some real classics, or read many of the current authors who take the old tropes from fairy tales and the Golden Age of SF and either ignore them or have fun with...

A better than average collection of shorts aimed at trope busting, also includes essays on tropes and cliches as well as author's notes on the tropes they roasted. The articles also have a decent bibliography. A combination of very funny and sad, it also has the obligatory Lovecraft pastiche and an Asimov err... homage. This apparently was a Kickstarter book, awesome.

I've said before that anthologies are notoriously hard to review. This one is no exception. In a way the difficulty is doubled because I'm not just rating the stories on their own merit but also by how well they subverted the tropes they're trying to flip. I'm going to try not to reveal the trope they're trying to flip but sometimes it's not easy.As I usually do, I'll rate each story and then wrap it up at the end. So, let's get started!On Loving Bad Boys: A Villainelle - Valya Dudycz-Lupescu 3

A cool idea for a collection of short stories....take a bunch of tired fictional tropes and have different authors write stories that turn them on their ear. I became aware of this book after finishing (and loving) John Horner Jacob's book A Lush and Seething Hell, and seeing that he was one of the contributing authors. His story for the book, Single/Singularity was really good IMO. The end of the book also contains a handful of essays that do a deeper dive into tropes (and the often all too rea...

I have a funny relationship with short stories. If they're bad stories, I'm happy with them because at least they were short. If they're good stories I get mad at them because they should have been longer. I mostly was angry with this book because I wanted all the stories to be longer. Which means it was good I guess.

There are a bunch of fun stories in this book. Reading some of them, it was clear which trope was being inverted or subverted (sometimes more than one trope in a single story). In other stories, it wasn't so clear to me. In that case, the appendix was very handy: it listed, for each story, a description of the trope, and the author's comments about it.There were also a few essays about tropes, evoking various degrees of interest. Those that described how certain tropes are harmful to some people...

Upside Down is a collection of short stories intended to subvert common tropes in storytelling and essays discussing trope usage. The vast majority of the collection is short stories, and wow are there a lot of stories. Like in any collection, there were stories that impressed me and stories that didn’t. However, on the whole I found the collection to be on the weaker side.Going into the collection, I wasn’t aware of most of the contributing authors. I picked it up mainly for Delilah S. Dawson,

Mixed bag of short stories. I love short stories, and can even tolerate blah ones, as they are short. They are perfect for the commuter, or just a quick read in the bath or at bedtime. Anytime time is short is time for a quick tale! There are a lot of them in this book, so I am sure everyone is going to find something to their liking!I received a Kindle ARC from Netgalley in exchange for a fair review.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.I'm a bit of a sucker for turning tropes on their ears. I have soft spots for movies that throw them out the window OR turn them up to eleven to the point to where they're ridiculous. Some do both at the same time.The issue with collections of short stories is that you are probably going to love a few, dislike a few, and the rest are going to be somewhere

The trick with this book is that you don't have to be an expert to understand the trope exploration and reversals, where applicable. The short story book comes with companion information that explains each story from both the author's and tropes perspectives. Some of the stories have sexual content, so it would be wise to screen these if you are giving it to pre teen or early teen aged readers. The prose itself has its good moments and I really didn't find enough faults or flaws to complain abou...

I almost didn't read this book because I've had such horrible luck with the last few anthologies I've tried, but I don't think there was a single bad story in here. There were a few that I thought were just a okay, but they were generally the ones that were more sci-fi based and I don't like sci-fi nearly as much as I like fantasy. I think what made this book so good is that obviously all the authors were very aware of the tropes they were using and also actively worked to subvert them and make

This book is about challenging what we think of cliches. It is a book of short stories, essays and poetry. It entertained and educated me. Though I must admit, that at first I had trouble getting into reading it. I kept at it as I knew many of the authors. I recommend this book for those who want something different to read.Disclaimer: I received an arc of this book free from the author/publisher from Net-galley. I was not obliged to write a favorable review, or even any review at all. The opini...

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley.]3.5/4 stars; I liked quite a few of these short stories, none of them made me roll my eyes, and to be fair, the essays at the end of the book were also quite interesting.My favourites:* “Single, Singularity”: While it doesn’t really invert the trope it’s based on, I’m a sucker for AI stories, and this one was both thrilling, and chilling in its ending.* “Seeking Truth”: The ‘blind psychic’ trope, subverted in that here, the blind person is extre...

I’ll start by saying this. Every last one of these stories hooked me. Every last one of them made me care about the protagonist and the protagonist’s success.I’m just not sure all of them met the premise. They’re all supposed to upend tropes, but I saw a lot of rehashed ideas. The corporations that go to war - even though real corporations don’t war each other - has been done to death, and we see it again in one of these stories. I’ve also seen the ancient love goddess as a modern prostitute bef...

This is a collection of unmemorable short stories. It would be more accurate to say that some are mere sketches, not actual stories. They have no entertainment value, no 'moral', no purpose except as an attempt to illustrate a trope. I had textbooks in high school literature class that contained more interesting stories than this anthology. The last hundred pages or so, aren't even stories, but lectures and diatribes - mostly from people who feel that their particular subset of humanity has been...

A short story collection of science-fiction and fantasy topics, twisting some kind of tropes. Like most short story collections, it's hit or miss. My favorite stories were: Can You Tell Me How to Get to Paprika Place; The Refrigerator in the Girlfriend; Nouns of Nouns a Mini Epic; and The Tangled Web. The essays analyzing the tropes were also great.

I picked this up because it sounded really cool, based on one of the blogs I read. The stories were a mixed bag, and unfortunately quite a few of them took "invert a trope" to mean "make it a horror story," which I'm not particularly fond of. The stories got better as the book went on, and I really enjoyed the last few and wish they'd been longer. There's also a large discussion section in the back about the tropes themselves and how they were twisted or flipped, if that sort of analysis is your...

A great Anthology. I enjoyed all off it.