Book review: City Beyond Time by John C. Wright

The thirty-eighth book I read in 2015 was City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis by John C. Wright.  I read it on my Kindle, drawn in by a free preview of a non-linear story which jumped forward and backward in time in the telling.  "Murder in Metachronopolis" begins

16.

Third beginning:
I woke up when my gun jumped into my hand.

If you can resist trying to unravel a noir detective story told out of order, you're a better man than I.

"Murder in Metachronopolis" is by far the best story of the six, but it was worth the price of the e-book, particularly since I paid most of the $4.99 with promotional credits I'd accumulated from various other Amazon purchases.  The protagonist of "Murder," Jacob Frontino, returns in the last story, "The Plural of Helen of Troy," which is the second best of the collection.  The stories that don't feature him are standard "Twilight Zone"/"The Outer Limits" fare.

At the time I read the book, I was unaware of the Hugo Award kerfuffle.  I can verify that Wright's female characters are underwritten and antithetical to the Bechdel test, as they're defined entirely by their relationships with men.  The Jacob Frontino stories suffer least, as -- hello!  they're in the noir detective genre, where women are femme fatales, hookers with hearts of gold, girls-next-door, or gals Friday.  

I don't take a side in the actual controversy.  I liked this book a lot, but I also loved Redshirts by John Scalzi, who is on the opposite side of the argument; and both the dinosaur stories are execrable, but the Sad Puppy one at least has the distinction of actually being science fiction.