SOURCE: O'Shaughnessy, Kathy. Review of Greetings from Earth, by Scott Bradfield. Guardian (London) (6 April 1993): 9.

In the following review, O'Shaughnessy offers high praise for Greetings from Earth, calling it a brilliant collection, and asserting that Bradfield's stories are original, witty, and wide-ranging.

Most of Scott Bradfield's stories [in Greetings from Earth,] are what might be called “whacky”. Characters dream with strange vividness of earthquakes, natural upheavals, or wolves. Others are more than whacky—they're frankly unrealistic: ghosts appear, animals talk. “I mean, my hormones had slipped into overdrive,” confesses Sid, a parakeet. Either way they are alive with quirky observation, going some way towards proving the old adage that the connection between truth and realism is an ambiguous one.

Yet close up, the stories are hard to generalise about—they are so wide-ranging and different. “The Last Man That Time,” for example, is a short, brilliant dissection of a...