Rip-Off!
by Gardner Dozois, John Scalzi, Jack Campbell, Mike Resnick, Tad Williams, Elizabeth Bear, Mary Robinette Kowal, Robert Charles Wilson, Allen M. Steele, Daryl Gregory, Lavie Tidhar, Nancy Kress, Paul Di Filippo, James Patrick Kelly, David Marantz, Dina Pearlman, Allyson Johnson, Marc Vietor, Ilyana Kadushin, Nicola Barber
Why You'll Love This
Thirteen sci-fi masters each stole a famous opening line from literary history — then dared to out-write the original.
- Great if you want: clever literary games played by writers who know the rules
- The experience: punchy and varied — each story resets the tone completely
- The writing: every author bends a classic voice into something wholly their own
- Skip if: short story anthologies leave you wanting more depth and continuity
About This Book
Thirteen writers of speculative fiction were handed an irresistible constraint: take a famous opening line from classic literature and build something entirely new from it. The results are wildly unpredictable. "Call me Ishmael" becomes the calling card of a harpoon-carrying private detective. A doctor named Dorothy Gale treats an aging astronaut far from home. Huckleberry Finn's restless spirit finds its way onto the rivers of Hell. The premise sounds like a parlor game, but the emotional stakes are genuine — each story quietly asks what we inherit from the stories that shaped us, and what we make of that inheritance when we're brave enough to twist it.
What makes Rip-Off! genuinely rewarding is watching skilled writers work in creative compression. Short fiction demands precision, and contributors like Nancy Kress, Elizabeth Bear, Robert Charles Wilson, and Tad Williams bring their full craft to spaces where every sentence carries weight. The anthology's structure turns reading into its own game of recognition — spotting the source material and then watching it transform beneath a confident contemporary hand. It's a collection that rewards both the well-read and the curious.