Rick Wilber. Scouting Report. (Asimovs September 2014)
A baseball scout has a hot prospect for the Major League, until, over several mojitos, a young woman points out a fatal flaw in the young man’s game.
Reviewing short SF since 2000
A baseball scout has a hot prospect for the Major League, until, over several mojitos, a young woman points out a fatal flaw in the young man’s game.
A look at how peer-envy and pressure to be part of the in-crowd for young girls -might- be mitigated by an electronic helper.
An author new to me. He has a way with words that is rare in SF, with more classier writing in most of his paragraphs than many SF writers manage in a whole story.
Veteran James Gunn (90 and counting!) provides a short story which references Asimov’s Hari Seldon as a precursor to today’s Big Data
The linkages between Venus flytraps, the planet Venus, and The Bodysnatchers are revealed.
Pinsker and O’Connell leave the best of the issue to last.
Sriduangkaew gets the anthology off to a strong start, with a story focussing on two women and the relationship between them during an ‘unwar’ which attacks civilians’ neural networks.
An excellent opening volume of a trilogy with each volume looking at a different stage of the forthcoming apocalypse.
Langan closes an excellent anthology with a strong, albeit dark and bleak (although ultimately human) story.
Socio-economic apocalypse being the order of the day, with borders in the USA closed and states wary of their neighbours.
A story that gets increasingly macabre as it unfolds…
A really strong story from O’Connell that will appear in some Year’s Best volumes next year, and which I’m putting into the pot for consideration for the Best SF Short Story Award 2014
An excellent story that packs a lot into four pages.
Fairly routine story about a young boy and his grandma coming up against an, ahem, Bad Dude who would have got away with it if it wasn’t for the pesky did
A neat story that starts with ‘It was a dark and stormy night’…
Another strong volume in an excellent series.
Watts closes this excellent anthology with another top notch story, a dense, hard SF story..
A second story from Reynolds featuring an intelligent Tyrannosaurus Rex in recent years..
A zombie story that is well, well short of the high standard set by other stories in the anthology.
An excellent, quirky piece from MacLeod, slightly out of kilter with the fairly standard narrative structure of most the anthology.
A lovely story from Goonan, which perfectly captures the theme of the anthology in looking at the long life of woman whose love for space starts in 1954.
A short but chilling look at the Nibiru Cataclysm, and what happens when the debunkers have to reconsider their viewpoint.
A strong story due to the protagonist (her OCD) and her wife, which make her a more rounded and interesting character, as Pandora’s box is well and truly opened.
Another classy Kress story, with getting the voice of the working class single mom protagonist spot on.