“Metamorphoses in Amber”
Abyss & Apex #24
4th Quarter 2007.
Reprinted in The Best of Abyss & Apex, Volume One, Hadley Rille Books, 2009. (fantasy novelette)
“My regenerating flesh forced out fragments of lead, repairing my lung while burst blood vessels and torn muscles stitched back together. But one piece of amber wasn’t enough.”
2008 Prix Aurora Awards Finalist for Best Short Form Work in English
Honorable Mention, Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-fifth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois
Notable Short Story of 2007 as selected by storySouth
Reviews
My favorite stories this year included…from the fourth quarter, Tony Pi’s long novelette “Metamorphoses in Amber”, an exotic story about a group of immortals who use amber to maintain their health and to allow shapechanging, and the rivalry of two of them over time. —Richard Horton, sff.people.richard-horton
A colorful and different adventure. —Richard Horton, Locus (January 2008)
Tony Pi has composed an elegant, multilayered tale…The action in “Metamorphoses in Amber” never lets up, and the plot advances at a fast clip without sacrificing details. But the strongest feature of this work is the themes that Pi has interwoven; he touches upon gender, and what it means to be male or female, and what it means to stay true to yourself and your purpose while staying flexible enough to survive the fluctuations that occur with time…I really loved this story. The characterization and the descriptive language worked especially well… —Nicole McClain, The Fix Online
…Tony Pi seems to have researched everything you could ever want to know about amber, and constructs a complex mythology and a compelling tale. — Chris Butler, The Fix Online
Issue #24 of Abyss & Apex is a thoroughly enjoyable one…issue #24 is a pure delight. All the stories got a Very Good from me…Pi creates an interesting culture here and details the science of the shape-changing to make quite a nice novelette. — Sam Tomaino, SFRevu
Tony Pi, F&SF Writer 