Baxter concludes his XeeLee timeline. What strange forces have been at work so that during a couple of days taken as leave from work, I end up reading Baxter’s ‘Starfall’, which has been sitting on my laptop as a PDF for a year, and this story from Analog, which has been sitting on my ‘to be read’ shelf for about six months, in an afternoon sitting?
A strong issue, with stories from authors well-established and authors on the way up : Aliette de Bodard, Bruce McAllister, Caroline M. Yoachim, Damien Broderick, David Erik Nelson, Stephen Baxter.
I have to own up to much preferring Baxter’s SF to his alternate history – oh for the XeeLee days!
Molly Brown. The Hamlet AI Murders. A rather missed opportunity. A subtle tale of a murdered brother returning from the grave via an uploaded AI could have been wrought, with clever pointers to Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ throughout. Instead Molly Brown simply goes for an updating, complete with character names, plot ‘twists’ and so forth from the [...]
Isabel of the Fall. Ian R. MacLeod. MacLeod has put together ten years’ worth of excellent short SF, many stories of which have rightly been selected to appear in a variety of Years Best collections. Favourites of mine from the past five years include ‘Starship Day’ (Asimovs, and subsequently Dozois’ 13th Annual Collection), ‘Nevermore’ (in [...]
The Nephilim. Richard Calder. Calder takes us once more into the far future Britain of his ‘Lord Soho’ series, as seen through the Pike family, erstwhile claimants to that hereditary title. As with previous stories in this sequence which have appeared over the past 18 months in Interzone, we skip one or two generations. In [...]
Cadre Siblings. Stephen Baxter. Baxter packs a lot into a short space: a post-invasion Earth, with a conquered humanity greatly reduced in numbers and struggling to retain that humanity as the Qax systematically erase human history. Who is best placed to defend humanity – those working within the Qax system, or those outside it? Baxter [...]
Michael Cassutt. The Last Apostle. A story with several elements in it, which work to varying degrees. The Last Apostle of the title is the last man left alive from the select group who walked on the moon. As he approaches his final years, he reflects on his colleagues who were given the collective noun [...]
William Barton. In the Age of the Quiet Sun. Good to see another story from Barton – w-a-y too long since I’ve read one from him. What appeals to me is that he often looks at the costs to the individual of humanity getting out into space, and here he does this in spades. The [...]
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