Stephen Baxter. Project Hades. (Analog July/August 2010).
A story that could quite easily be presented as a missing Quatermass story from Nigel Kneale.
Andy Remic. Psi.Copath. (Conflicts. ed Ian Whates).
A story which didn’t encourage me to get beyond a couple of pages.
Shine. (Jetse de Vries, Solaris 2010).
The more experienced authors do provide the stronger stories, and there a couple of stories which are quite weak, but Stoddard, Powell and de Bodard, and Sellar provide strong support to Kenyon, who has the story of the volume.
Rich Horton. The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009.
A late arrival on my doorstep, and it’s taken much longer to finish the review than I had hoped. Note to self : faster dude, faster!
Liz Williams. Spiderhorse. (The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009)
Short piece of the type Williams does so well, a strange, very strange world in which a young girl is stillborn, but for whom that it just one of many beginnings and endings.
James Maxey. Silent as Dust. (The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009)
Nicely written ghost story. Not entirely sure why it’s in an SFF anthology.
Kay Kenyon. Castoff World. (Shine).
The strongest story in the volume so far.
Karen Heuler. The Difficulties of Evolution. (The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2009).
One of the weaker stories in the volume
Patrick Rothfuss. The Road to Levinshir. (The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2009)
A wandering bard opens the story, which was not a good start for me, as I have some kind of allergy to fantasy featuring bards, wizards, princesses and so forth.
Eva Maria Chapman. Russian Roulette 2020. (Shine).
Not the most subtle story in the volume, and there’s some creaky dialogue in there.
Erik Admundsen. Blue Vervain Murder Ballad #2 : Jack of Diamonds. (The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009).
Deep South gambling on a riverboat for high stakes. Ah say, Deep South gambling on a riverboat for high stakes.
Robert Reed. A History of Terraforming. (Asimovs July 2010)
Editor Sheila Williams mentions in the editorial that Reed is hard at work on a Young Adult novel, and, truth be told, there’s a touch of the YA about this story.
Asimovs July 2010.
A bit of a curate’s egg of an issue.
Beth Bernobich. The Golden Octopus. (The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009)
A very clever and well wrought tale set in the Royal Court of Eireann.
Brenda Cooper. My Father’s Singularity. (Clarkesworld Magazine #45, June 2010)
Cooper’s tone is just right, not too mawkish, and it leaves the reader/listener to ponder some big questions.
Jay Lake. A Water Matter. (The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009)
As Lake invariably does he puts effort into creating a interesting background to his story, and its visceral in terms of the action and denouement.
Alastair Reynolds. Deep Navigation. (NESFA Press, 2010).
Already with a couple of collections from his two decades’ worth of short stories, NESFA have produced a handsome book which for the Reynolds’ fan is, as the Dutch would say, ‘een must’.
Peter Watts. The Eyes of God. (The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009).
A clever look at how a technological advance could impact on aspects of humanity that have been with us forever.
Aliette de Bodard. The Jaguar House, in Shadow. (Asimov’s, July 2010)
Well constructed and well handled story in the author’s ‘Xuya’ sequence.
D.T. Mitenko. Eddie’s Ants. (Asimov’s July 2010).
Light and slight humour in which a human is pleased to find that revenge on the extra-terrestrial who has pinched his girl is only too happy to put him/itself forward as a target for destruction.
Jason Andrews. Scheherazade Cast in Starlight. (Shine).
A very short story which looks at how web 2.0 technologies could bring about the downfall of progressive regimes, with a 1001 blogs helping to turn the evil tide.
Gord Sellar. Sarging Rasmussen : a Report (by Organic). (Shine).
A clever look at how psychology, NLP and the like could be used for political gain.
Charlie Anders. Suicide Drive. (Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009)
An interesting look at the impact on individuals of big events, and the public persona/family life of key individuals.
Life on Mars
[July 8th 2010] Mmm, liking the cover of Jonathan Strahan’s anthology ‘Life on Mars’, to
The Secret History of Science Fiction. (James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel eds, Tachyon 2009)
A collection with a difference.
Ann Leckie. The God of Au. (The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009)
Fantasy in which the capricious whims of gods, and the impact on those humans who have no option but to worship, is explored, as a very minor God is able to trick a human into giving it power of a group of islands.
Jeffrey Ford. Daltharee. (Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009)
A sort of Horton Hears a Who for smart grownups. Not really, but tenuous enought for a weak pun on the editor’s name.
Non-Zero Probabilities. N.K. Jemisin. (Clarkesworld Magazine #36, September 2009.)
A neat story from an author new to me.
Albedo One #38
The latest issue of the Irish SFFH magazine opens and closes strongly.
Rivka Galchen. The Region of Unlikeness. (Years Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009).
A well-observed and detailed interdependent-troilistic relationship in which the sfnal element relates to the well-established sf time travel trope of the grandfather paradox, but the writing is subtle and clever enough to justify adding to that trope.
Tom Purdom. Haggle Chips. (Asimovs July 2010).
There’s a lot of dialog, and the cardboard characters are moved about to help the plot along, and it is rather a long way short of the quality you normally get in Asimovs.
Alastair Reynolds. At Budokan. (Shine).
Getting Alastair Reynolds’ name on a book cover is of course a Good Thing. However, I’m not so sure though that getting him to write a Near Future Optimistic story is a Good Thing, as his strengths are far future, galactic-spanning stories.
Alice Sola Kim. The Other Graces. (Asimovs July 2010)
A young Asian girl struggles to free herself from her ‘poor yellow trash’ roots, and finds help from a surprising source (there’s a clue in the title) in getting to a good university. But can she really break free from those family ties that bind?
Eclipse 3. (ed Jonathan Strahan).
Nicely complements the Strahan/Dozois New Space Opera anthology series, starting with several stories of the contemporary, speculative type.
Ellen Kushner. Dulce Domum. (Eclipse 3)
A contemporary story set on Christmas Eve we follow a young man who is struggling with a home life that has changed, but who finds solace in the arms of a young woman.
Delia Sherman. Gift from a Spring. (Years Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009)
Snip out a couple of paragraphs and its entirely non-genre.