Reviews

Impossible Futures: An Anthology by Jeff Hecht, Duncan Eagelson, James D. Macdonald, Paul Di Filippo, Fran Wilde, Edward M. Lerner, Thomas A. Easton, Mike Resnick, Sara Smith, Justus Perry, Jack McDevitt, James Morrow, Allen M. Steele, Debra Doyle, Rev DiCerto, Shariann Lewitt, Judith K. Dial

tregina's review

3.0

So here's how I came to read this book: I was at a seminar which ended about two hours before I was due to meet a friend for dinner. I was far from home with time to kill, so naturally I went to the library. After a little quick browsing, this was what I came up with which both matched what I was kind of craving, and looked like I could finish it in the hour and a half I had remaining.

Right on both counts, it turned out. (Well, just past the hour and a half, but I think my friend has forgiven me.) I really, really like retrofuturism and I love exploring the futures that might have been. So really, my main disappointment was that it wasn't retrofuturistic enough. Some of the stories sat a little bit distant from straight up science fiction, some of them weren't so much based on debunked technology as things that could still come to be, and some were just really unfocused. It hit the spot topically, but didn't rise above that.