RUMIR

A few folks have actually picked up and used my RUMIR abbreviation, which I first mentioned in my review of Joanna Russ' The Country You Have Never Seen. I thought I would give folks an easier definition to link back to, instead of wading through short story reviews to find it.

RUMIR: Routine, Unoriginal, Mildly Interesting, and Readable.

Excellent short hand for so many stories out there. Derived from a Joanna Russ review:

Harry Harrison’s One Step From Earth is a collection of nine stories bound together loosely (and not altogether truthfully) by the idea of matter transmission. There is another hypertrophied introduction, hypertrophied in this case because it has nothing to do with the stories; in fact the matter transmitter described in the introduction is of the kind used in only one of the nine. Two of the tales don’t really need matter transmission at all. The stories are routine, unoriginal, mildly interesting, and readable.