Patrick Nielsen HaydenRecensioni

Fair craft, just not for me

Even with a couple of yarns by authors from whom I have liked previous stories, I just can't get into these.
Don't know if it's just changed times, or what.

Normally I'd go with

A four star for this, because for a good price there is almost a thousand pages of fiction, and unlike many, most of it doesn't suffer from obscenely obvious plot errors for the sake of ACTION. On the other hand, most of it is not the sort of fiction I like. I don't know why modern publishing venues refuse to categorize and just lump all fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror & many others under 'Speculative Fiction'!. Those categories were INVENTED to separate subgenres because many of us want one type and not another.

This is an anthology of post-2000 sf written by authors who "came to prominence" after 2000. That is to say, they may have published something prior to 2000, but they didn't break through into wider consciousness until after; see for example Charles Stross, whose first publication is all the way back in 1985, but achieved wider acclaim with his 2001 novel The Atrocity Archive. I got the book as a gift back when it came out in 2013, but as is usual for me, did not get around to reading it for another decade. In a way, this was helpful for evaluating the book's "argument."

It's been my thesis that large anthologies (and this one clocks in at 572 pages, with over thirty stories) are arguments. In this case, the argument seems to be: "These writers are the future of science fiction." In that case, reading it ten years late lets me estimate how right the editors got it. Did these talents pan out?

Overall, I have to say yes, but sort of with reservations. There's no denying that, say, Mary Robinette Kowal has gone on to be a juggernaut of twenty-first century science fiction. But enjoy as I might her "Lady Astronaut" books, the story included here ("Evil Robot Monkey") didn't grab me—this isn't the reason. (Though given the story was a Hugo finalist, it must have grabbed other people.) Similarly, some of the stories feel like stretches, in that they're sf tales from writers much better known for publishing fantasy or even horror, like Jo Walton's "Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction" or Daryl Gregory's "Second Person, Present Tense"; these were two stories I enjoyed a lot, actually, but I wouldn't put either Walton or Gregory in the pantheon of great twenty-first century sf writers, based on what I've read of them at least.

And of course, there are a couple stories I found outright bad... but they're by writers whose work in general I struggled to enjoy yet I cannot deny that those writers are generally popular. I speak here of John Scalzi's "The Tale of the Wicked," which requires all of its main characters to be idiots, and Catherynne M. Valente's "How to Become a Mars Overlord" which at eight pages still had me skimming to get to the end. So I guess the anthology is right to include them: both works read as fairly typical for their writers even if I did not like them. They are a key part of twenty-first century sf. I just wish they weren't.

But of course there are areas where the editors totally get it right. I always like a bit of Vandana Singh, and her story "Infinities" (one of only three rereads for me in the book) is a typically excellent piece of work. I don't think Rachel Swirsky has ever published a novel, but her story "Eros, Philia, Agape" is astounding, a masterful tale of what might it mean for an android to love, and she's an acclaimed writer of short science fiction and fantasy, with two Nebula wins and a number of Hugo and Nebula finalists. Madeleine Ashby is someone I haven't read much of, but I really enjoyed her story "The Education of Junior Number 12" here (another story of androids in love, actually, but very different from the Swirsky) and everything else I have read by her I have enjoyed; she's an incisive writer on the cutting edge of current technology, and now I want to seek our her related novel, vN. Ken Liu is an acclaimed writer of short sf, and though I've personally found his stuff hit or miss, "The Algorithm of Love" is probably the best thing I've read by him, a dark meditation on the implications AI might have for human consciousness.

"A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel" is a pretty typical piece by Yoon Ha Lee: told in the form of a series of encyclopedia entries, so purely exposition, it nonetheless manages to say interesting things about how societies interact, especially with a really strong last line, and it's no wonder he went on to do acclaimed work like Machineries of Empire. Peter Watts is a highly acclaimed writer of hard sf about consciousness, and his story "The Island" here is great on many levels, examining how people think, how machines think, and how something we don't even understand thinks, and how different that might or might not be; dark but highly effective. There's a Cory Doctorow story here, too: "Chicken Little," about a lot of stuff, including immortality, marketing, and rational calculations of risk. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a Doctorow story before, but I thought this was great. So you have a lot of great stuff here by acclaimed writers.

Beyond that, though, you have great stuff from writers I actually had never heard of... but if Hartwell and Nielsen Hayden are making an argument, it's that I should have heard of them, and so I'm prepared to accept that it's not the anthology that's at fault but the universe—or, perhaps, me. I'd never heard of David Moles, but I loved his story "Finisterra" about a gas giant with an Earth-like atmosphere where people build communities on the backs of giant floating life-forms. Similarly, I didn't know Karl Schroeder but found his "To Hie from Far Cilenia" very intriguing, a story about digital communities overlapping with the physical world that we might not even notice unless we learn how to see differently. "The Prophet of Flores" by Ted Kosmatka was fascinating, set in a world where the Earth really was created in 4,000 B.C. but otherwise science is the same, and exploring what implications the discovery of the so-called hobbits of Flores would have. It was expanded into a novel, which I'll have to seek out. These people ought to be the face of twenty-first century sf if they're not.

It's not all great, of course; I've mentioned a couple I didn't like already, and there were some more that I bounced off of, including Stross's "Rogue Farm" (too clever for me, maybe), Marissa Lingen's "The Calculus Plague" (some improbably bad research ethics; where's the IRB?), Paul Cornell's "One of Our Bastards Is Missing" (I love Cornell but have never gotten much out of his Hamilton shorts), Oliver Morton's "The Albian Message" (less a story, more a thought experiment), and Alaya Dawn Johnson's "Third Day Lights" (I just could not be bothered to work out what was actually happening). But most of what was left was usually good, if not great, or among the best short stories I've read in the past year.

One story is a bit tragic: Kage Baker's "Plotters and Shooters" was good fun, a take on Ender's Game where the protagonists are all thirty-year-olds who are stuck in their mothers' basements. But Kage Baker can't be the future of sf, because she unfortunately died at the age of 57 in 2010. It reminded me I really must get around to finishing her Company series, though.

There's a lot of great stuff here; I think this probably has one of the best hit rates for an anthology I've read outside of something like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame volumes. Perhaps the real argument here is that "Twenty-first century science fiction is in rude health." If that's the case, then the editors have assembled evidence that demonstrates their conclusions thirty times over.

This is a YA.
4

The short stories in this anthology are not quite universally terrible but so many of them are that I would suggest you don't waste your time with it.

Dnf, too many horrible people doing horrible things.

Another well-crafted collection from the previous century. Ooh, that makes it sound practically dust-covered. Seriously, quite good, especially Mr. Chiang's "Story of Your Life."

An excellent collection, although for a few of the stories the speculative element is a bit, shall we say, overly subtle. Nevertheless, quite enjoyable.

First, I would like to point out that even if you only read one story in this collection, you should read the last story. It is the story of a K9 dog-soldier named Chip and if it isn't the epitome if a Good Boy story, nothing is. It is likely to make you tear up, though.

The rest of the stories in this collection were similarly fantastic! I am so happy I read these. I will be looking out for more in this particular series, and possibly authors as well.
9.5/10

For me, Ellen Datlow is one of the finest anthologists around, so it should be no surprise that this is a superb collection of fiction. If there is any surprise at all, it is perhaps that she could only pick from short fiction published by tor.com the previous year, but I think that the quality of the volume says a great deal about the quality of the work on Tor.



There's not a single story on here that i would consider poor - the vast majority I scored 4- or 5- stars and, for those I didn't, it was more that they were simply not my type of thing. For instance, there were a couple that I thought more vignettes for sketches, not fleshed out enough to be trues stories, but I know that is something of a personal taste issue.



The real joy of this collection, though, is that it has introduced me to so many authors I may otherwise never have come across but are now no-questions-asked purchases. I can't wait to get to the other tor.com "some of the best" volumes.




I've reviewed the tales individually as I've gone along, so will just give the ratings here.


Clover by Charlie Jane Anders - 5/5

The Art of Space Travel by Nina Allen - 4/5

The Destroyer by Tara Isabella Burton 4/5

Traumphysik by Monica Byrne 2/5

The High Lonesome Frontier by Rebecca Campbell - 4/5

Lullaby for a Lost World by Aliette de Bodard 3/5

A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djeli Clark 5/5

Breaking Water by Indrapramit Das 5/5

Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half Savage by Alix E. Harrow 5/5

The City Born Great by N.K. Jemisin 5/5

Everything that isn't winter by Margaret Killjoy 4/5/

The Weight of Memories by Cixin Liu 3/5

The Maiden Thief by Melissa Marr 4/5

The Caretakers by David Nickle 3/5

Your Orisons May Be Recorded by Laurie Penny 4/5

meat drink by Daniel Polansky 3/5

The Three Lines of Sonata James by Lettie Prell 4/5

The Great Detective by Delia Sherman 3/5

Finnegan's Field by Angela Slatter 4/5

The Weather by Caughlan Smith 3/5

Terminal by Lavie Tidhar 5/5

Her Scales Shine Like Music by Rajnar Vajra 5/5

La beaute sans vertu by Genevieve Valentine 5/5

That Game We Played During the War by Carrie Vaughn 5/5

A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers by Alyssa Wong 5/5

what a surprise.

This is a collection of Science Fiction short stories from the 21st century. The brief preface explains that many of the writers were writing and publishing before the millennium but have come to prominence since. The editors have a broad church view of Science Fiction, which lends itself to great variety in the contents but the usual suspects are here: androids and robots, aliens and AIs. I’ll start with the Earthbound stuff and move outwards into the galaxy and the far future.

The first story, ‘Infinities’, is by Vandana Singh, a physics teacher who, as an Indian living in Boston has some claim to being a stranger in a strange land. Abdul Karim is a little old mathematics teacher with a great love for his subject and a particular interest in infinity. He is a Muslim and his best friend, Gangadhar, is a Hindu in a city often driven by strife between these faiths. Abdul’s life story is described in a telling manner, not shown. This is contrary to all the best advice on writing modern commercial fiction but I like it. Usually, you have to read old stories by the likes of Somerset Maugham to get this straightforward, sedate type of narrative. The tale is interspersed with quotations from poets, philosophers and mathematicians and turns fantastic quite near the end, which is also where the real world, beastly as usual, intrudes on Abdul’s quiet life. Imbued as it is with composed contemplation of God and the infinite, I found this story perfect reading on a quiet Sunday morning. It’s also a nice change from western, materialist, technology orientated Science Fiction and a useful reminder that there are civilisations older than ours to the east.

Back home, country life will be very different later this century if ‘Rogue Farm’ is anything to go by. The establishment in the title is a tank-sized organism which contains six people and wants to go to Jupiter. Blast off will burn a hundred hectares around, including Joe’s farm so he is determined to stop it. The population shrinkage and consequent housing surplus in future Britain would be great but the rest of this vision from Charles Stross does not appeal to me, not even the talking dog who likes to smoke a joint with his master. I like the countryside the way it is, thanks. It’s a good story, though.

In ‘Bread And Bombs’, Mary Rickert starts off with a small-town setting and evokes a bucolic air with long, slow sentences that talk of picnics and crab-apple trees and the little local schoolhouse. Slowly, a darker history is revealed. The first person narration is by an adult remembering stuff that happened when she was a kid, like Scout in ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ and the setting is similar. A well-wrought yarn that should make us appreciate our lives today.

Paolo Bacigalupi writes stories set in the near future. ‘The Gambler’ was first published in 2008 and is almost true already. Ong was born in Laos. He fled when it became a dictatorship and now works on a news outlet in Los Angeles where he writes serious stories about political corruption, government incompetence and global warming. His colleague, Marty Mackley, writes about Double DP, a Russian mafia cowboy rapper who has had an affair with a fourteen-year-old. Live news feeds follow Double as he tries to flee to Mexico. The story goes viral instantly, advertising revenue floods in, the company’s stock goes up and Mackley’s star continues to rise. Ong’s is falling. His content pulls in hardly any readers and he will soon be sacked. He has two hopes: a celebrity from his own country or Henry David Thoreau and the flowers of Walden pond. This is even more depressing than ‘Rogue Farm’ because it seems truer as celebrity pap ‘content’ buries real news every day. Again, it’s a great story but stop the world, please, I want to get off.

Staying with marketing, ‘The Calculus Plague’ has people on a university campus being infected with false memories. The connection with advertising is not obvious at first but is soon made. Author Marissa Lingen was one of my favourite contributors to ‘On Spec’ with her Carter Hall yarns and this short story doesn’t disappoint either.

Gennady Malianov, a private investigator, gets looking for some stolen plutonium in ‘To Hie From Far Cilenia’ by Karl Shroeder. Set in a near future, where virtual reality games and worlds are more developed and developing, it has a good plot that keeps revealing more about the setting as it goes on. Gennady is a sympathetic character and despite the fact that this sort of thing is alien to me – I don’t even Game – it was enjoyable and interesting.

Would you like to get in touch with the versions of you that exist in parallel universes? Such is the ambition of Professor Elsa Hill, a genius physicist and she is ably assisted in the work by Adam Giles – who narrates the story – and a very smart computer. Artificial intelligences may also have twins in the other worlds. ‘Savant Songs’ by Brenda Cooper is a moving, almost frightening exploration of a common SF theme.

In ‘Chicken Little’ by Cory Doctorow, the super-rich are becoming immortal, their failing bodies wired into complex machines, some as big as small towns, that keep them alive. They are quadrillionaires and some are sovereign states. They control the world. Ate is a company that exists to please them or, rather, to attempt to invent some new way to please them as they can have anything they want. Our hero is Leon, a smart man working for Ate and trying to come up with something new for their clients. The story takes unexpected turns and ends up having a pleasing philosophical bent concerning what humans really want and what’s really good for them.

‘Eros, Philia, Agape’ is by Rachel Swirsky. Robots are an old standby of the genre and I think humans may have fallen in love with them before. That’s what the author’s story title is about but, as the couple have an adopted child, it’s more complicated. A fine example to show that ‘adult themes’ doesn’t just mean gratuitous sex and violence but an exploration of the multi-faceted relationships that might result between us and our advanced technologies.

In similar territory is ‘The Nearest Thing’, Genevieve Valentine’s tale about the development of nearly humanoid androids. Inevitably, the experienced SF fan is reminded of ‘Blade Runner’ but it’s a good story on its own merits.

I was mildly put off ‘The Algorithms For Love’ by the title but, as it’s by Ken Liu, decided to give it a go because he’s written some very good short Science Fiction over the last few years. This may be the best of them but it’s downright scary. The protagonist designs humanoid dolls that are very life-like but her work has driven her mad. By the time you get the ideas behind this yarn, near the end, you may decide that it doesn’t bear thinking about too much or you might join her in the asylum.

In Ian Creasey’s ‘Erosion’, Winston is about to set off on a new adventure, just as his Jamaican grandfather did when he came to England. Augmented by technology he and others are to board a starship and colonise a rugged new planet. On his last day on an Earth, imperilled by global warming, he walks along the coastal path near Scarborough. There’s some good writing on the scenery but his actions seem a bit irrational at times. We would probably send more stable people to new planets.

Aliens have featured in science fiction ever since H.G. Wells’ Martians attacked us on Horsell Common. They were not all nasty. Neil Asher’s aliens in ‘Strood’ treat us like a third world country, setting up clinics to treat us for conditions beyond our resources. There are many different species, all of them far in advance of man. Our hero has cancer and his story nicely illustrates the setting, which is really the star. The beginning might have ‘one’s discombobulation requiring pellucidity’ but that’s just a sign of how well it’s written.

I have always disliked them but it is surely awful to actually be a salesman with the soul-destroying fawning and mendacity and the quiet desperation. In the excellent ‘Tk,Tk,Tk’, David E. Levine shows how bad it is to be a salesman on a planet full of alien insects with a strange culture and terrible food. To butter up clients, Walker has to quaff drinks ‘indistinguishable from warm piss’ and then things get worse. This story won the Hugo in 2006. SF fans love a good alien.

Really good ones can be so odd they seem outside the genre. When a strong, handsome man rides a talking deer to a confrontation with a shape-changing demon of the scorched desert who has a two-dimensional child you are led to believe it’s a fantasy. Not so. ‘Third Day Lights’ by Alaya Dawn Johnson is Science Fiction set in a far distant future where anything is possible, somewhat like Michael Moorcock’s ‘Dancers At The End of Time’ stories. The classical fantasy aspect is kept when the hero has to face three challenges but the sensual story is narrated by the demon, not the man. There’s lots of invention and a good array of unusual characters in this far out flight of fancy.

John Scalzi is trending in the last few years so I was glad to get to read something by him at last. ‘The Tale Of The Wicked’ is about a space battle between two enemy ships that goes awry. To describe the plot is to spoil it but suffice to say it was clever, amusing and thought-provoking. I shall keep an eye out for more Scalzi.

Nerdy ‘plotters’ calculate the trajectories of asteroids that may strike an inhabited planet Mars and the ‘shooters‘, a rough crowd, blast them out of the sky. These incompatible groups share an orbiting gunship and the life of a nerd involves flackeying to the jocks, rather as junior boys used to serve seniors in our English public schools. Then a newbie arrives with a different take on things. ‘Plotters And Shooters’ by Kage Baker is a strong story that would translate well to television in some anthology program.

Far in the future, a human lady and her son crew a ship supervising the building of artificial wormholes for interstellar travel. They are bossed by an AI she calls the Chimp. Earth is long gone and the species that come through the gates have evolved far beyond her but the work continues. Then they encounter a red dwarf star that seems to be signalling them. ‘The Island’ by Peter Watts is hard going at first but presently makes sense, enough that it won the Hugo for best novelette in 2010.

The also-rans here would-be stars in many another collection and only the limitations of a review prevent me from raving about them at length. ‘Ikirhyoh’ by Liz Williams is an original take on genetic specialisation in a future oriental civilisation. ‘The Prophet Of Flores’ by Ted Kosmatka’ is an archaeological dig story set in a world where Darwin was wrong.

‘How To Become A Mars Overlord’ by Catherynne M. Valente didn’t suit my tastes but a lot of lexical dexterity went into this exuberant piece.

Not dissimilar is ‘A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel‘ by Yoon Ha Lee. It also breaks the bounds of traditional storytelling but the plain, almost academic language works better.

‘Escape to Other Worlds With Science Fiction’ by Jo Walton is a frightening look at an alternative history in which Britain didn’t oppose Nazi Germany but it’s set in America. It’s frightening because our much loved USA often seems to be on the brink of going this route.

The main thing that struck me about 21st-century writing is how literary it is compared to the Golden Age stuff. SF was mainly rooted in pulp fiction but slowly it has evolved out of that and is now comfortably grown-up. Reading these stories is like reading a Science Fiction story by Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham. The authors take their time to set the mood and there is no need for melodrama. Character is as important as plot and background. There was a bit of a crisis about this a few decades ago and writers as diverse as Kingsley Amis and Isaac Asimov wondered if Science Fiction could be recognised as literature and still preserve the all-important sense of wonder. I should add that for most of us preserving the sense of wonder was far more important than being recognised by high falutin’ critics. Anyway, the crisis is past and ‘21st Century Science Fiction’ proves beyond doubt that our flexible genre can do both, in spades. This is probably the best and most intelligent anthology of Science Fiction stories I have ever read and I’ve read a few.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SCIENCE FICTION features stories from sci-fi authors that have risen to prominence since 2000. All of these stories are new to me (apparently I don't read enough short stories!) and the collection contained a pretty wide spread of subgenre and length of stories.

One thing that struck me about this collection is that more often than not, humanity is portrayed with such pessimism - apparently in the future, we're going to be more and more cold, power-hungry and selfish. Most of my favourite stories in this collection had robot protagonists. As a huge Star Trek fan, my default view of humanity has always been optimistic, so I found the onslaught of cynicism somewhat disconcerting. I wish the editors had varied the tone a little.

As per my usual anthology review format, I'm not going to talk about all the stories, just the ones I liked most and least. The stories I enjoyed the most:

"INFINITIES" by Vandana Singh

This opening story was set in India (where I'm from), and I was thrilled to read sci-fi written by an Indian writer. I have no idea if this story is objectively good, but it was cozy and familiar and poignant. It involves an old mathematics teacher who dreams of seeing infinity. The sci-fi aspect of the story is pretty subtle.

"EROS, PHILIA, AGAPE" by Rachel Swirsky

Anyone who says science fiction can't pack a deep emotional impact needs to read this story. It offers a fresh new twist on the trope of the robot wanting to be human, but backs it up with the real relationship of a robot, a human and their daughter.

"TIDELINE" by Elizabeth Bear

I've read and loved Elizabeth Bear's fantasy, and now I can't wait to read more of her sci-fi work. A forgotten military robot strikes up a friendship with a feral teenager, but her power is running out. Another moving story.

"EVIL ROBOT MONKEY" by Mary Robinette Kowal

This is a very short story - about two pages long, but it takes as incisive look at genetic manipulation and animal testing, while also managing to be touching.

"THE ALGORITHMS FOR LOVE" by Ken Liu

If pressed, this would probably be my favourite story of the collection. A designer of AI-like dolls is so successful that she starts to lose faith in free will and intelligence itself.

"IKIRYOH" by Liz Williams

An exiled genetically engineered being takes care of a disturbed little girl sent to her by the current goddess-ruler. The world of this story is what made me fall in love with it; the science fiction ideas are incidental, but seemed a little bit more like fantasy.

"SECOND PERSON, PRESENT TENSE" by Daryl Gregory

The protagonist of this story is a teenager who has overdosed on a drug that completely erased her personality. She's spent years being coached to be who she was before, but she just can't seem to do it. I loved the exploration of identity and consciousness, and it was very believable.

"BALANCING ACCOUNTS" by James Cambias

One of the most fun stories in the collection. In this future, there are so many robots that there's a robot society within human society, and our protagonist rocketship/odd job robot is one of them. His latest cargo seems like a lot of trouble, but he needs to make his human owners money, so he takes it on anyway. I imagined the world described to be kind of like the excellent game Machinarium.

--

Other good stories: THE TALE OF THE WICKED by John Scalzi (Scalzi as a writer is kind of like Hugh Grant as an actor - he does the same thing all the time, but does it excellently), ESCAPE TO OTHER WORLDS WITH SCIENCE FICTION by Jo Walton (I need to read her books!), A VECTOR ALPHABET OF INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL by Yoon Ha Lee (a story in encyclopaedia form!), HOW TO BECOME A MARS OVERLORD by Catherynne M. Valente (a story in guide form!), THE GAMBLER by Paolo Bacigalupi (journalism in the future!), THE CALCULUS PLAGUE by Marisa Lingen (memories transmitted virally!), and HIS MASTER'S VOICE by Hannu Rajaniemi (a dog and a cat set out to rescue their master, armed with very cool technology).

The ones I wasn't as thrilled by:

"ROGUE FARM" by Charles Stross

I'm not going to say this was a bad story... I just didn't get it. I wasn't sure why the farm was called a farm; it seemed to just exist so we could be amused at the idea of a farm trundling towards a farmhouse. I didn't understand why the protagonist was so anti-farm even before he knew what it wanted to do (hillbilly joke?). This story wasn't for me.

"THIRD DAY LIGHTS" by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Another story that I was just plain confused by. A sci-fi story involving pocket universes and the future of humanity, but borrows heavily from fantasy tropes. I didn't get the romance, and I didn't get the pocket-universe creatures.

"THE ISLAND" by Peter Watts

This was a well-written and compelling story, but it just made me depressed to read it. The protagonist is a crewmember on a automated starship designed to make space travel gates, but they've been doing it for millions of years and seen civilisations rise and fall countless times, and the AI controlling the ship won't let them stop. In this story, they encounter something that they've never seen before (and that part is awesome!)

--

Overall, this is definitely worth buying. It's a great introduction to a lot of authors, as well as to the staggering breadth of SF.
Comment

A collection of shorts published on the Tor website. Very much a curate's egg of a book; some stories I liked very much, others I thought not very good (either stylistically or subject matter). Some authors are better at writing short fiction than others or have some short pieces that serve as a good introduction to their work, others, let's say I won't be looking out for them! The stories were mostly science fiction or urban fantasy; there wasn't much in the way of more traditional fantasy (but it's rather difficult to pack a multi-volume epic into a short story).

On the whole enjoyable, and good reading for the daily commute as you can easily fit a story in each way.

Terminal by Lavie Tidhar
Thousands people ridding small cheap one-man space vehicles called "jalopies", waves of them, destine to "Terminal Beach" on Mars. It's an one-way trip, without telling they would arrive there alive. During flight, the swarm communicates, within and relayed back behind.
This story of those crusaders is foremost juggles of strong personal emotions, beautifully felt. They are grandpa-to-be who desires to go in space, lady who faces fatal cancer, nurse whose job gradually kindles her purposeless life. The trick Tidhar plays here? sudden switch of voices and use of poetic language.

Dormanna by Gene Wolfe - a sweet, sweet story about a girl's imaginary friend who may be something more; this is the kind of first contact story I like to read.

Portrait of Lisane de Patagnia by Rachel Swirsky - a story about artists and legacies, what art is and where the tools for it come from and what you can do with them. This one gets better every time I read it.

The Mongolian Wizard by Michael Swanwick - a fairly frothy historical fantasy kind of story, clearly the beginning of a series, murder, betrayal, immanent war, all that good stuff. Fun.

A Tall Tail by Charles Stross - a hard sf story told in the form of an anecdote at a party that leaves me feeling like I'm missing something. I'm not sure if it's the science or the party.

The Ghosts of Christmas by Paul Cornell - a beautiful time-travel story about the ways we mess up our kids and our parents, and also why time travel is probably not a good idea, and also how easy it is to be a terrible person even when you're trying not to be. Weirdly heartwarming, given all that? I loved it.

The Finite Canvas by Brit Mandelo - a story about how contract killers end (it's not pretty).

Am I Free to Go? by Kathryn Cramer - a story about the hacker victim of a police state that's only barely speculative (but I really want wifi fungus, even if I don't have a backyard to scatter it in).

About Fairies by Pat Murphy - a story about family, death, and the kind of fairies an anthropologist could believe in. Moving and excellent.

Our Human by Adam-Troy Castro - two aliens, bounty-hunting, find a human monster living among more aliens. Evil and its uses; greatness divorced from morality. Fascinating, and with very good aliens.

Faster Gun by Elizabeth Bear - a Doc Holliday weird west story that is, basically, everything Cowboys vs. Aliens should have been and never was.

Don't ever mix juju with technology. There is witchcraft in science and a science to witchcraft. Both will conspire against you eventually. I realized that now.

I had heard the first two stories - Six Months, Three Days and The Dala Horse - on podcasts, but the other stories were new to me. I had found The Dala Horse quite confusing whe I listened to it, but I found it much more engaging this time. My other favourite was Hello, Moto.

lots of really interesting short stories in this one

This is a great collection - of so many stories I don't think I could pick out a favorite, and I'm definitely not going to review it item by item like I usually do. This is good stuff, though, with several award-winners and many others that probably should have been.

Alvo inconstante em qualidade desde muito
Bom a muito aborrecido. Descobri John Scalzi e fiquei fã

PNH is talented at shifting the gold from the dross: his collections are always better than the generally crap anthologies usually produced.
A personal favorite is Terry Bisson's "They're Made Out of Meat," in which aliens about to make First Contact with us are horrified by what they find. Sci fi short stories are much more likely to have a surprise one-two punch at the end, one that warps assumptions made during the story. This anthology has some great ones: Spider Robinson's "Serpents' Teeth," Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald's "Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen," and Robert Charles Wilson's "The Great Goodbye." Two other standouts are David Langford's "Different Kinds of Darkness" (I just love this type of school story, which for some reason reminded me of that story where there's only one day every 7 years where you can go outside on Mars, and one little girl is really excited about it but the other kids lock her in a closet so she misses it. It's actually a really dark children's story that always made me angry but thirteen years later, I still remember it.) and Greg van Eekhout's "Will You Be an Astronaut?" which reads like a very creepy children's story. I should mention that Jane Yolen's "Cards of Grief" is a pointless meander of a story that is clearly *supposed* to have a shocking ending but is instead very obvious, Kim Stanley Robinson's "Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars" is a boring sports story with no point at all, and Orson Scott Card's "Salvage" is a story about Mormons post-apocalypse, and though narrated by a non-Mormon it made me uncomfortable.

An anthology of modern fantasy, and an absolutely excellent collection. I loved the Ursula K. Le Guin, Orson Scott Card, and Emma Bull stories, but the dark horse contenders were Andy Duncan's "Liza and the Crazy Water Man," (a love story set during the Depression, with a mild little touch of magic) and Sherwood Smith's "Mom and Dad at the Home Front." The Smith story was a surprising take on the old trope of children who find a way to escape to a magical world and have adventures; the story is told through the point of view of their parents, who are understandably appalled that their children disappear from their beds each night. The story reminded me of the Buffy episode "The Zeppo," in which a magical apocalypse is narrowly avoided by the *background* characters, and the main story is about a normal human on the periphery of that fight. I love that stuff!

I read this book years and years ago and, although the details of the story are rather foggy, I can still remember how much I loved it. Have just tracked in down in the UK so I'll have my own copy soon. Hope I'm not disappointed when I read it again.

A varied and interesting anthology. The stories I read are entered and reviewed separately.

A collection of very nice short stories. Although from about 15 years ago, which is too bad since I've already read the best short story - Mrs. Mabb by Suzanna Clarke. Another strong story is "Death of the Duke".