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wunder's review
4.0
I skipped some stories, but it was a good read. The Octavia Butler story creeped me out the more I thought about it. The Nancy Kress was good--she might be better in short form than novels. This was the first I'd read by Angélica Gorodischer, clearly a different voice. Always glad to read more Gene Wolfe. What a delight to find a Kage Baker story from The Company that I had not read.
nwhyte's review
http://nhw.livejournal.com/220669.html[return][return]Much the most interesting of the 2003 SF anthologies. The Dozois one remains definitive, and best value for money, and the Haber/Strahan one I found a bit disappointing. But this has a couple of my favourite stories from the Dozois again (none in common with Haber/Strahan, interestingly) and a number of gems. This includes two stories translated from Spanish, one of which I'm afraid I just couldn't get into, but the other one a fascinating riff on altering history (in this case, enduring that the post-Franco transition to democracy is not prevented). Lots of good stuff here which I wouldn't have otherwise been able to read. Recommended.
smartflutist661's review
adventurous
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
3.75
Definitely mixed thoughts about the stories here. Some that I loved: "Amnesty", Octavia E. Butler, though I read it in Bloodchild and Other Stories; "Four Short Novels", Joe Haldeman; "In Fading Suns and Dying Moons", John Varley; "The Hydrogen Wall", Gregory Benford; "The Madwoman of Shuttlefield", Allen M. Steele. Plus "The Albertine Notes", Rick Moody, which was disconnected and poignant and brought back memories of my own, and was clearly grappling with 9/11, just a few years prior; "The Day We Went Through the Transition", Ricard de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero, similarly touching, though looking quite a few years further back; "The Great Game", Stephen Baxter, both extremely critical of the War on Terror and a great military sci-fi short on its own merit. I was a bit bored by a number of the stories in the beginning of this collection, with "Ej-Es" standing out a bit alongside the ones already mentioned; it picked up around "The Violet's Embryos", though, and I might have felt somewhat differently had I actually read the excellent "Amnesty" this time around. Only "Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers" stands out as being not that interesting from the later stories.
sjstuart's review
4.0
This is a good anthology of 2003 sci-fi stories, with several stories that are bound to make an impression.
My favorites were [a:Gregory Benford|22645|Gregory Benford|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1224059011p2/22645.jpg]'s "The Hydrogen Wall", [a:John Varley|27341|John Varley|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1346593830p2/27341.jpg]'s "In Fading Suns and Dying Moons" and especially [a:Ricard de la Casa|4949783|Ricard de la Casa|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]'s and [a:Pedro Jorge Romero|32701|Pedro Jorge Romero|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]'s "The Day We Went Through the Transition", which features a nice twist on the usual time-travel tale.
Several were enjoyable, but didn't feature endings as satisfying as they could have been. (Yes, I know that ambiguity and unresolved tension are a mark of sophisticated writing, and this makes me an unsophisticated reader. But, old-fashioned as it may be, I prefer a decisive ending, if not a good twist, in short-format sci-fi stories.) Others were very well written, but suffered a bit as short stories because they weren't entirely self-contained, relying on plotlines and characters from some larger universe of the author's ("The Madwoman of Shuttlefield" and "A Night on the Barbary Coast").
The few I didn't enjoy wandered a little too far towards "weird" for me. "The Waters of Meribah" and "The Violet's Embryo" featured worlds where people, their bodies, and their surroundings keep changing in bizarre ways that are a little too arbitrary for my taste. (Not violating the laws of physics, perhaps, just counting on those laws having been drastically rewritten at some point.) "The Albertine Notes" is of the same variety, but is written so lyrically that I could enjoy it merely at the level of the wordsmithing for most of the way through.
Even for the stories that didn't quite work, or didn't resonate with me, I can see exactly why they were chosen for this compilation. All were standouts in some way, whether it was their literary style, expressive imagery, thought-provoking ideas, or tight plotting.
You'll probably like an entirely different subset of these stories, of course. But they're all good enough that anyone who enjoys sci-fi is bound to find several that they enjoy.
My favorites were [a:Gregory Benford|22645|Gregory Benford|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1224059011p2/22645.jpg]'s "The Hydrogen Wall", [a:John Varley|27341|John Varley|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1346593830p2/27341.jpg]'s "In Fading Suns and Dying Moons" and especially [a:Ricard de la Casa|4949783|Ricard de la Casa|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]'s and [a:Pedro Jorge Romero|32701|Pedro Jorge Romero|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]'s "The Day We Went Through the Transition", which features a nice twist on the usual time-travel tale.
Several were enjoyable, but didn't feature endings as satisfying as they could have been. (Yes, I know that ambiguity and unresolved tension are a mark of sophisticated writing, and this makes me an unsophisticated reader. But, old-fashioned as it may be, I prefer a decisive ending, if not a good twist, in short-format sci-fi stories.) Others were very well written, but suffered a bit as short stories because they weren't entirely self-contained, relying on plotlines and characters from some larger universe of the author's ("The Madwoman of Shuttlefield" and "A Night on the Barbary Coast").
The few I didn't enjoy wandered a little too far towards "weird" for me. "The Waters of Meribah" and "The Violet's Embryo" featured worlds where people, their bodies, and their surroundings keep changing in bizarre ways that are a little too arbitrary for my taste. (Not violating the laws of physics, perhaps, just counting on those laws having been drastically rewritten at some point.) "The Albertine Notes" is of the same variety, but is written so lyrically that I could enjoy it merely at the level of the wordsmithing for most of the way through.
Even for the stories that didn't quite work, or didn't resonate with me, I can see exactly why they were chosen for this compilation. All were standouts in some way, whether it was their literary style, expressive imagery, thought-provoking ideas, or tight plotting.
You'll probably like an entirely different subset of these stories, of course. But they're all good enough that anyone who enjoys sci-fi is bound to find several that they enjoy.
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