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A review by connorgirvan
Far Out: Recent Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy by Paula Guran
3.0
3.5 / 5 stars
To be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of sci-fi/fantasy writing but I thought this anthology would be a nice way to ease into the genre because if I didn't like one story there would be another shortly after.
At the beginning, I really liked the concept of some of the stories (like major cities being flooded and tourist sites for diving etc) but I wasn't overly vibing with the style. The more I read the book however, the more I got into the right frame of mind and by the end of it I really enjoyed the collection. My favourite stories tended to be ones which were rooted in a more relatable society just with an additional technology that say prolonged death - basically any that were black mirror-esque - or ones which featured death as a prominent theme (like the story about driving the girl home from prom every day). There were some typos/omissions I noticed in the writing that meant the sentence didn't make sense (and I don't usually pick up on those majorly tbh) but other than that there were no complaints.
My favourite stories were: 'Imago' by Tristan Alice Nieto, 'And If The Body Were Not The Soul' by A.C. Wise, 'Das Steingeschöpf' by G.V. Anderson, and 'Calved' by Sam J. Miller (surprisingly, the first three are from the beginning of the book when I was still getting into the stories - but these four are the ones I remember enjoying the most. Particularly, Imago and Calved.)
To be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of sci-fi/fantasy writing but I thought this anthology would be a nice way to ease into the genre because if I didn't like one story there would be another shortly after.
At the beginning, I really liked the concept of some of the stories (like major cities being flooded and tourist sites for diving etc) but I wasn't overly vibing with the style. The more I read the book however, the more I got into the right frame of mind and by the end of it I really enjoyed the collection. My favourite stories tended to be ones which were rooted in a more relatable society just with an additional technology that say prolonged death - basically any that were black mirror-esque - or ones which featured death as a prominent theme (like the story about driving the girl home from prom every day). There were some typos/omissions I noticed in the writing that meant the sentence didn't make sense (and I don't usually pick up on those majorly tbh) but other than that there were no complaints.
My favourite stories were: 'Imago' by Tristan Alice Nieto, 'And If The Body Were Not The Soul' by A.C. Wise, 'Das Steingeschöpf' by G.V. Anderson, and 'Calved' by Sam J. Miller (surprisingly, the first three are from the beginning of the book when I was still getting into the stories - but these four are the ones I remember enjoying the most. Particularly, Imago and Calved.)