A review by drewsof
Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction by Irene Gallo

5.0

Even if some of these stories won't be your cup of tea (and several weren't mine), it's hard to think of this book as anything other than a home-run-out-of-the-park. Tor.com (or now Tor Dot Com in publishing iconography) has been steadily delivering fantastic speculative fiction for more than a decade now, and this look at some of the very best from that first decade is a must-have for any lover of speculative fiction. There are big names like Liu and Jemisin and VanderMeer but also plenty of folks I didn't know, like Kowal and Khaw and Yang. Worlds seen in passing indeed, but now I'm looking into my return trips.

Intriguing side note: the book tilts towards the back half of the 2008-2018 decade, which I'd love to know more about. I assume it has a lot to do with the website getting up and running etc, but it's interesting to see the huge boom in the mid 2010s. Someday, I'm thinking somebody's gonna track all of this and show that that's roughly around when the discourse started to change, popularly, about the powers of speculative fiction to envision our brighter future.