Bret Bertholf. Alfred Bester Is Alive and Well and Living in Winterset, Iowa. A ‘doozy’ according to the editorial intro, and I concur. What is particularly refreshing is that Bertholf adds a variety of graphics (from Virgil Finlay to Dr Seuss) to an already psychedelic text that could come straight fromthe 1960s, as an AI [...]
M. Shayne Bell. Anomalous Structures of My Dreams. When the protagonist finds himself in a Medicare-funded shared hospital room suffering from an AIDS-related bout of pneumonia, things seems pretty low – he is lonely and cut off from friends and family. Things quickly go from bad to worse, as the person he is sharing the [...]
Paul Di Filippo. The Short Ashy Afterlife of Hiram P. Dottle. The bookish Dottle finds his path from quiet middle age to the end of his life takes a rather strange, and shorter, turn when he meets an attractive young woman. His naivety prevents him from seeing that she is a gold-digger, and unfortunately for [...]
Yesterday’s Tomorrows. Kate Wilhelm. Not a Kate Wilhelm Special Issue as it says on the cover, but a Special Kate Wilhelm Section as it says on the contents page, which includes this story, an appreciation by Gordon van Gelder, and a bibliography by William G. Contento. For three quarters of this story I was enthralled. [...]
Have Not Have. Geoff Ryman. Classy stuff. The societal impact of technology is something that Ryman has written on before (‘Everywhere’ from Interzone and Dozois 17th being set in the NE of England). This story takes us to a remote Chinese village, providing an exquisite look at traditional lives of people who by todays/tomorrows standards [...]
Alex Irvine. Shepherded by Galatea. A few pages in, with a lot more information about the chemistry in the upper stratosphere of Neptune than I could ever want to know, I did a quick check of the front cover to see if I was reading Analog. Nope, I was reading Asimovs, and to give Irvine [...]
Stories by : Ted Chiang, Peter S. Beagle, Charles Stross, Greg Egan, Daryl Gregory, Jeffrey Ford, Holly Black, Ted Kosmatka, Alex Irvine, Daniel Abraham, Nancy Kress, Bruce Sterling, Theodore Goss, Neil Gaiman, Stephen Baxter, Ken Macleod, Susan Palwick, Michael Swanwick, M. Rickert, Tony Daniel, Elizabeth Hand, Chris Roberson, Elizabeth Bear, Kelly Link.
Overall, the quality of the stories is high, and a fine collection showcasing primarily British authors, although perhaps just a tad below the quality of last year’s ‘Constellations’.
Stories by : Alastair Reynolds, Alex Irvine, Bruce Sterling, Charles Coleman Finlay, Charles Stross, Chris Beckett, Eleanor Arnason, Geoff Ryman, Greg Egan, Gregory Benford, Ian McDonald, Ian R. Macleod, James Van Pelt, John Kessel, John Meaney, Kage Baker, Maureen F. McHugh, Michael Swanwick, Molly Gloss, Nancy Kress, Paul McAuley, Richard Wadholm, Robert Reed, Steven Popkes, Walter Jon Williams
All in all, an interesting varied collection, and well worth the shelf-space.
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