Scan barcode
A review by imyril
The Apex Book of World SF 4 by Lavie Tidhar, Mahvesh Murad
3.0
I received a review copy from Apex. I saw this as a great opportunity to continue to broaden my horizons and get to know the works of international authors, many of whom I hadn't previously heard of. As ever with short story collections, not everything is for everyone and quality varied. A number of stories were positioned at the horror end of the spectrum, which is not to my taste, and a couple dabbled with concepts that I found squicky. That said, I expect SF to challenge me with difficult ideas, and most stories were firmly challenging those ideas not celebrating them.
I do think the collection would have felt stronger if stories had been collected in themes - as it was, the collection jumped from space opera to horror to apocalypse to mythology and so on with no obvious thread. I found it slightly jarring, not least because it left me uncertain at any stage what I would get next. I was indifferent to about half the collection, finding them unengaging and at times confusing, but there was only one DNF (Like a Coin Entrusted in Faith). The rest were various levels of good to awesome.
Overall, the collection left me entertained and there are stories here I will revisit as well as authors I must now explore, which is rather the idea with this compilation - job done!
More details of particular stories over on my blog.
I do think the collection would have felt stronger if stories had been collected in themes - as it was, the collection jumped from space opera to horror to apocalypse to mythology and so on with no obvious thread. I found it slightly jarring, not least because it left me uncertain at any stage what I would get next. I was indifferent to about half the collection, finding them unengaging and at times confusing, but there was only one DNF (Like a Coin Entrusted in Faith). The rest were various levels of good to awesome.
Overall, the collection left me entertained and there are stories here I will revisit as well as authors I must now explore, which is rather the idea with this compilation - job done!
More details of particular stories over on my blog.