Frost and Fire

It has been a few years since I've read this author's work and even longer since I've read an anthology of his shorter pieces but since I am a big fan of the novels of his I read I started this book with great expectations. The first few pieces, however, kind of left me cold, including the starting novelette which won a number of awards. I could sort of see some of the gimmicks that he was fond of in other pieces peeking out with a lot of other areas I felt were lacking, such as the generation of sufficient empathy for the characters. I thought that some of the stream of consciousness chunks he favored in his later work mainly just left me disoriented. I thought I was going to love the Berserker story "LOKI 7281" but it didn't really work for me in the end.
About halfway through the collection, though, there were pieces I did like, not because they were hugely ambitious but because they accomplished what I think he set out to do. The one I liked the best, which was also the one I was keenest to read, was the last piece, the novella "24 Views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai" which for me lived up to the accolades it received including a Hugo Award for best novella. His command of the framing device of the Japanese prints with the understated introduction of the futuristic aspects was what I liked about his stories in the first place.
Along the way, there is a brief non-fiction piece where he discusses his writing technique, specifically in the context of his novel Eye of Cat. He states that the most important job for a science fiction writer has to do with establishing the setting, in contrast to which the development of characters is relatively easy, which I thought was remarkable because of the fine way he has demonstrated he can draw vivid individuals with a few strokes. I think a lot of authors try to imitate his crisp character-defining dialogue but often fall short, delivering us only banter.