Kathryn CramerReseñas

F/SF

F/SF

F/SF

F/SF

Do-over?

This latest Year's Best was a real disappointment. I've read them all, and they're generally pretty good.
This one, somehow collected below average for half, and the good half I already read in other venues...
Though that likely indicates at least partially this year's "style" among those who sit in editor chairs.

Every anthology has stories you like and those that you don't. This good size collection has some real Dodos and some real gems.

Anthologies are a mix... some stories you won't like. This one got a 5 for most stories were great, even rereadable, which for me is a rarity.

A collection of sci-fi stories claiming to portray a "better future." More specifically, according to the forward: no dystopia nor any technology so advanced that the world has little/no relation to our own. I question whether some of the futures presented in these stories are "better," though I generally enjoyed reading all of the tales.

The stories in this collection considered futures with changes in social, environmental, & economic conditions. I found those that tackled the former two to be more compelling than those that focused more on the last, though that is likely due to my own personal interests. Even those tales with concepts I found less interesting, I still found entertaining.

At the end of each story, the editors provide URLs to extra content - e.g., discussions & technical papers on the technology in each story. I sure wish these URLs still worked½

Solid anthology that runs the displays the diversity of the fantasy genre.

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.

The stories (some excerpted from longer works) were not all to my taste, but all were of good to excellent quality. Some were already known to me, but most were not. The editor includes notes for each.
(Imrahill2001's review has a complete list of titles.)

Authors (I give titles only for my particular favorites, X for those I really did not like; the rest were all okay):
LeGuin; Dickens - The Magic Fishbone (a classic, bordering on both reality & fairy-tales); St.Clair; Hawthorne - Feathertop: A Moralized Legend; Guin; deCamp & Pratt; Heinlein - Our Fair City; Russ; Walpole - Hieroglyphic Tales (7 very short stories); Collier; Wolfe; Stockton - The Bee Man of Orn (a true classic); Lynn; Twain-The Canvasser's Tale (an American tall-tale, fantastical & humorous); Sturgeon; Clifford; Boucher - Mr. Lupescu; Benet - The King of the Cats; Bradbury-Uncle Einar; Leiber - Space-Time for Strangers; Davidson; Cranch - The Last of the Huggermuggers: A Giant Story; Saki -Tobermory (very much in his unique style); Dick; Baum - 4 American Fairy Tales (he wrote many non-Oz stories); Delany-X; Sara Coleridge; Kenneth Morris - The Eyeless Dragons: A Chinese Story; Moorcock-X; William Morris-X; Merritt; Lord Dunsany; Poul Anderson.½

At the time, this was the third Hartwell anthology I had read. It presents stories that have a solid foundation in sciences and math, which the editors define as hard scifi. It had creative, interesting, and very readable stories. My impression back then, this was like sipping a fine wine, as opposed to other light scifi books, which would be like sipping a cola or water. You can have them all in the end, and I do read the lighter stuff too. I do recommend this one.

To be honest - I don't like fantasy all that much. This book probably deserves more than three stars, as I'm sure all the stories are excellent.

The only reason I own this book is for the short story "Darkness Box" by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's one of the most perfectly crafted short form stories ever written!

This collection of a large number of stories runs to about 500 pages. It covers a selection of stories from a number of places from the year 2005. I'm thinking that 2005 was not a very good year, if I used this selection as a judge. There are some themes in here, whether a reflection of what the editors thought was current or just random chance I don't know, but religion is a heavily recurring element to these stories. (Religion is an element of many science fiction stories but it seemed a little overdone in this collection.) Artificial intelligence is everywhere and posthuman and transhuman and a few other buzzwords of the day like to get thrown around in many of the stories. Oh, and rats (as in rodents). There is also an odd excessive number of 2 1/2 page stories from the magazine 'Nature'. There were several stories in here that I just could not bother to finish. I had some other problems with this collection, but 'nuff said. I was more than a little disappointed.

There were however a handful of very good stories in this collection. One of the standout pieces for me was 'Bright Red Star' by Bud Sparhawk. A small scene in a future war where humanity has hard choices. I had read this story many years ago when it appeared in Asimov's magazine but it seems to have had a stronger impression this time. Another one is an Alastair Reynolds novelette (almost a novella) titled 'Beyond the Aquila Rift'. I had read this one before in 2011 in a collection of Reynold's stories that I really liked. It is an oddly affecting story, a space opera setting but with a small focal point of characters who have gone far astray, beyond the limits of normal travel. I also liked R Garcia y Robertson's 'Oxygen Rising' that focuses on a peacekeeper in a future war among altered humans. Inventive and comes with a twist.

Some good stories, others are tech bro fantasies. Odd visions of a "better" future....

Three stars is an average; some stories were self-important and tiresome ("Atmosphæra Incognita", "A Hotel in Antarctica," “The Man Who Sold the Stars”, "The Man Who Sold the Moon") but some had ideas I'll be thinking about for a long time ("Girl in Wave: Wave in Girl", "Entanglement", "Degrees of Freedom" and especially "Covenant.")

This is a book of short stories born of Project Hieroglyph:
http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/

This is seriously one of the most exciting things I've heard about in quite awhile. A bunch of sci-fi authors and a bunch of scientists are getting together and saying "We're sick of these dystopias that have become so popular! Let's look for ways the world could be made a better place in the near term!" This is a big part of what sci-fi is all about, to me.

Digging down into the individual stories in the book: some are "meh," a couple left me wondering how the future they're painting is a "better world," but many of them are absolutely mindblowingly amazing. More than once, I had to just put the book down after I'd finished a story, and process it and think about it for a long time before I could even think about picking anything else up. Some of these futures, some of these technologies, I WANT! So! Much!

I'll try to write up some specific thoughts on the individual stories here; it may be a couple of weeks though:
http://ciaracatscifi.blogspot.com/

Quite a few of these stories will be on my Hugo nomination short list.

"The Light of Other Days," by Bob Shaw (1972): 7.75
- It's always nice when authors know when to stop. Here, we have, preeminently, a conceit, a science-fictional conceit, around which the bare essentials of story and character are wrapped, and in which the former makes up 85% of the there-residing interest. [That being, namely: the existence of glass which lets light pass through so slowly that it can used as a sort of window/home away from home (look, it's Rome outside your window), granted it's been sitting in that other place long enough beforehand. The Payoff, nicely, is emotional as well as science-fictional [although it's relayed as slightly creepy in the story, although I read it as anything but]. But most importantly and maybe most uniquely for the genre, Shaw knows this! He therefore trims out the speculative fat, filling in the rest only to the extent that it's necessary for the payoff. For that, not bad then.

"Nine Lives," by Ursula K. Le Guin (1968): 8.5
- Having read little Le Guin, I'm nonetheless familiar with her themes and preoccupations. It's in the aether. And this story did not disappoint in living up to those expectations, either thematically or in terms of setting. Yet, what was surprising was just how well crafted it was otherwise-in terms of pacing, character, and brusque exploration of major themes. We have here a crash course in identity, sex, and gender ambiguity, all transposed through the guise of what is admittedly a fairly conventional sci-fi setup. [to that end, note the intros (very right) claim that this story "inverts trad. Doppelgänger tale, and explores how uncanny it is to NOT meet ourself everywhere we go]. And, maybe actually even worse than conventional, as the planet and mine really only served as a generic means to bring our characters together and damage them later. To that end, the denouement was weak and detracted from the Point/s Being Made on account of its roteness (even she seemed a bit bored with the whole thing by the end). Still, these quick reads of mine only accentuate the jump in quality from other stories to her, as evidenced in her often actual incisive human psychology ('do many individuals ruin potential for individuality’) and halfgood prosey flourishes scattered throughout.

"Pi Man," by Alfred Bester (1959): 8.5
- Although this is, partially, self-evident and par for the course with any specific type of self-consciously constructed “genre”, it’s nonetheless helpful to keep in mind Edward James’ emphasis that much sf — and esp. that of the period and person at issue here — depends, for total comprehension, on a deep reservoir of knowledge on the tropes and self-referential hangups of the genre itself, above and beyond even The Story at hand. That said, what seems here — at first glance, absent any real conscious and sustained reflection — like a typical Is He This Or Is He That tale, might instead actually be something much more—even if that thing is, to one degree or another, dependent upon the type of discernment that genre knowledge would provide. The story: clearly troubled man, clearly suffering some psychotic issues (he’s severely autistic or sincerely in deep with whatever force he thinks is actually controlling his life), wanders around, picking up woman and seducing his secretary until cops stop him on account of his suspiciousness and we learn his feeling that he’s a compensater, meaning he needs to restore Cosmic Balamces wherever he goes, I.e. hitting someone nice and hugging someone mean and killing those he loves, which contributes to the ambiguity of the ending, in which he’s finally with the girl he loves, but at what cost? I guess we’ll see. Regardless What does work here for me is that interesting sf postmodernism carbon copy stuff (clipped language, random succession of images, bluntness, coarseness [both moral and sexual], experimental formatting, etc. ), which we can admit, follows rather than sets trends; but here it’s abt 90% better than all other sf that’s tried to do the same.

"Relativistic Effects," by Gregory Benford (1982): 7.75
- I'll have to table a longer discussion of my burgeoning relationship to Hard SF, but here was a classic jostle between some dense science, some broad characterization -- even from someone supposedly on the literary edge of hard sf -- and some clear sense of wonder knack.

"Making Light," by James P. Hogan (1981): 8.75
- Here’s a thought-experiment: say SFF was a predominantly non-Western genre, what piece, then, would most elicit from SFF’s core readership confusion and counter claims of “this is steeped in indigenous customs and epistemologies, and therefore difficult to understand all the levels at play outside of those indigenous contexts”? This story would make for a strong answer: not only it’s religiosity, but the actual depths of its engagement with a type of Anglophone Christianity—in the specific biblical details (Mark IV), and the specific inbuilt argumentation common to these apologetics circles (animals vs. humans spiritual hierarchy; quasi-conservative anti-regulation anxieties [it's very 80s]; etc.) All that said, however, and this is basically just a toss-off—a well-thought-through toss-off at that, but a little game largely. A fun one often, though! Esp., or maybe exclusively, for those steeped in the stuff.

The 2,5 stories I re-read were well enough done that I had no painful memories of them, but I had no powerful memories either.

I blame my wife. "You've GOT to read this one story," she said, referring to James Stoddard's "The Battle of York". Shell has a pretty good taste in literature (if not in men, she married ME after all) and so I figured it would be a nice change from all of the horror and dark fantasy I've been reading.

Well. I liked that story so much I decided I would read the whole book, by God, and I did, and now I have rediscovered my love for sci-fi. Hartwell and Cramer have always been excellent editors, having done several collections in different genres, and they really have a fine lot of them for this year (2004, I believe.) Terrific stuff! "Sergeant Chip" gets things off and running, a story with a bite, if you'll pardon the bad pun, a tale of a cybernetically modified Army dog who follows his orders and turns in his field report at the end of his mission. An amazing read and one that leaves you wanting more. "Scout's Honor", "Mastermindless", and "Pulp Cover" are all outstanding entries. There are the usual couple of clunkers, but that's opinion and taste. I trust Hartwell and Cramer to put forward a representative collection of the best, and if this is indeed it, then 2004 was a banner year for sci-fi.

The only problem is, now I have a LOT of catching up to do. This was number 10, and it was published in 2004. Shell already has 9; I reckon it'll be up to me to find the rest and get us both up to date. But there is an upside to this: if my wife asks why I didn't rake the lawn or do other chores, I guess I can just say, "It's your fault for turning me back on to sci-fi…"

Recommended.

This is the second of the Hartwell/Cramer anthologies I've read since my "reintroduction" to SciFi, and I continue to be thoroughly impressed by the selection of material. This volume is for 2003, so I would guess they're up to 19 now…I have some catching up to do, obviously.

As with most such collections, it's inevitable that the reader may find some of the stories just aren't palatable, but from my point of view there's nothing here anyone would consider "filler". There's no accounting for taste, true, but quality is quality, and it runs amazingly consistent throughout…if the first 150 pages don't convince you, well, nothing I could say would change your mind. It's just one amazing story after another and could easily be a "Best of the Best" in itself…I won't point to one story in particular, except to say that Nancy Kress's "Ej-Es" left me in tears, and Joe Haldeman packed an amazing wallop in four very short "do-overs" of famous novels. Wish I'd have thought of that one! And "The Violet Embryos"…wow! I can't successfully describe that one in the limited space I am allotting myself here.

I was impressed with Cory Doctorow's effort, also that of Kage Baker. Great stuff from new names, for me at least. Add to those Nigel Brown's "Annuity Clinic", which shows the downside of "assisted living" in the future (yikes!) and Allen Steele's introduction to his world of Coyote (the planet, not the Native American trickster…though that Coyote DOES put in a surprise appearance earlier in this collection) and you've got just shy of 500 pages of great SF entertainment.

And then finally there is Rick Moody's "The Albertine Notes". Now, the editors' notes preceding this suggest it was the best short story of the year. Well, maybe. It's lengthy and wordy, but you'd have to read it to understand why it is thus, and I hope you do. I will confess it was at times a chore to wade through it all but ultimately it paid off. Best short story of the year? I might disagree, but then again what do I know? Either way, it definitely belongs in this collection, which we have now managed to find 11 of the 19 volumes, and if the quality stays this high I expect we'll keep getting them once we get caught up.

I always find anthologies tiring, especially sci-fi ones, and this was no exception. It was, as other reviewers said, hit-or-miss. Doctorow's was really great, especially when I had already heard it on Doctorow's podcast (it's really great to hear the author read it himself) and the others were all okay.

Karl Schroeder's Degrees of Freedom was also really good with some interesting ideas on how to solve the 'meta-problem' of working together.

Overall, I found the conceit of ASU's end-notes get really old by the third or fourth book. I felt like they just had the writers talk to professors, write something tangentially related, and then have the scientists write something which latched onto some small part of the story. I'm okay with the idea of science fiction informing science but going about it this directly doesn't seem to work together well.½

Great anthology of fantasy stories. Some standouts were "Sunbird" by Neil Gaiman, "Walpurgis Afternoon" by Delia Sherman, "The Imago Sequence" by Laird Barron, "Read It in the Headlines!" by Garth Nix, and "Inside Job" by Connie Willis.

Come capita spesso nella collana Millemondi, questa raccolta è la traduzione dell'anglofona Year's Best SF che, come dice il nome stesso, contiene una selezione di racconti pubblicati nel 2011.
La fantascienza contemporanea è molto diversa da quella a cui sono abituato: non solo nei temi, ma anche perché molti racconti non vengono pubblicati nelle riviste ma nei siti. Inoltre la componente femminile è molto cresciuta; non ho verificato se raggiunge o addirittura supera la metà del testo (mica sono interessato alle quote rosa) ma credo siamo lì.
Tra i racconti che mi sono piaciuti di più ce ne sono un paio per così dire classici su robot e IA: Dolly di Elizabeth Bear e La cosa più simile di Genevieve Valentine. Vincoli, di Mercurio D. Rivera, è sulle razze aliene. Neil Gaiman scrive uno scherzetto, Obediah il disinventore; Il nostro candidato di Robert Reed è fin troppo realista; Casa dolce biocasa di Pat MacEwen è infine davvero contemporaneo - e carino.

A thousand-page anthology devoted to a subgenre feels like an argument to me. A shorter book would claim to be nothing more than a sampling, while even a thousand-page book devoted to whole genre of science fiction couldn't rightly claim comprehensiveness. But with one thousand pages and over sixty stories from a single subgenre, The Ascent of Wonder can claim to be defining that subgenre's entire form and purpose. Unfortunately, it gets off to a rough start: I found the introductions (there are three!) by Gregory Benford and Kathryn Cramer more befuddling than illuminating, but I keyed in on a passage from David Hartwell's introduction: "Hard sf is about the beauty of truth. It is a metaphorical or symbolic representation of the wonder at the perception of truth that is experienced at the moment of scientific discovery" (30). I don't know that I entirely agree, but it's an intriguing formulation that explains why Hartwell and Cramer picked the stories they did for this anthology.

Judging by the stories included here, Hartwell and Cramer's definition of hard sf is a lot more capacious than my own. I love Cordwainer Smith, and "No, No, Not Rogov!" is indeed about the "perception of truth that is experienced at the moment of scientific discovery," but the inclusion of stories like this make me think that definition isn't specific enough-- I don't think Smith cares about science except as a source of beautiful imagery and fantastic ideas, and if sf is to be "hard" I feel like it needs something more than that. It's not that Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" or Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" or Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" are bad stories, or even stories uninterested in science, but it's that they're not invested in following the implications of actual science in a way that, say, Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" is-- a story that despite its flaws (or maybe because of them) epitomized the hard sf ethos of logic over all else. There are times I found myself wishing Hartwell and Cramer had included some kind of counterpoint story: if "Nine Lives" by Ursula K. Le Guin (a story that has clones in it, but no science behind them) or "The Very Slow Time Machine" by Ian Watson (which has a neat concept at its heart, but not as far as I can tell, one from actual science) or "The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told" by Arthur C. Clarke (which is an unfunny joke about unfunny jokes) are all hard sf, then what isn't? Show me the other side of the subgenre so I can see its edges more clearly.

That said, with over 150 years of stories to pick from, Cramer and Hartwell assembled an excellent collection of stories, and despite some dubious enclosures, I do feel I understand the parameters and possibilities of hard sf more than I did before reading. Some were by authors I knew and loved already: James Blish's "Beep" has a clever and interesting conceit that would make Steven Moffat's head spin. Donald Kingsbury's "To Bring in the Steel" was a surprising tale of a Paris Hilton-esque media floozy discovering a new side of herself on an asteroid mine; after enjoying Psychohistorical Crisis so much, I ought to seek out more of his work. "Waterclap" was an interesting Isaac Asimov story I hadn't read before, but let down by the fact that Asimov can imagine a moon colony and an underwater colony, but can't imagine a woman having any role in either outside of childbearing... in 1970! Le Guin's "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" wasn't a story, but had neat enough ideas (about ant language!) to succeed regardless. And I'm always happy to reread James Blish's "Surface Tension," which is in my sci-fi top five. David Brin's "What Continues, What Fails..." shows science fiction at its best as well, combining future reproduction with black hole physics to deliver a testimony for the human need to reproduce and leave a mark on the universe. (I did appreciate that unlike most anthologists, they included the contextual material with Rudyard Kipling's "With the Night Mail," though I wish they hadn't dumped it all at the end, after the actual story.)

There was the occasional outright bad one: Rudy Rucker's "Message Found in a Copy of Flatland" was sort of a non-story, not doing anything that Flatland itself didn't do; I got the feeling that it was in the book because being a novel, Flatland itself couldn't be. And James P. Hogan's "Making Light" is an unfunny joke stretched out way too long with dubious claims to be science fiction, much less hard sf. I think it's only in here because Hogan didn't write much short fiction, so Cramer and Hartwell had limited options (his novel Inherit the Stars is probably one of the best examples of the subgenre).

I was kind of a sucker for stories involving academia, I guess for obvious reasons. "Davy Jones' Ambassador" by Raymond Z. Gallun was surprisingly interesting, a tale of a professor (who's married to a dean) chasing a giant leviathan. I particularly loved Katherine Maclean's "The Snowball Effect," a rare sociological hard sf tale about a sociology department head defending his program against budget cuts by an overeager administrator by accidentally transforming a local knitting club into a global power. Michael F. Flynn's "Mammy Morgan Played the Organ; Her Daddy Beat the Drum" was surprisingly moving tale of a physics professor hunting ghosts as he destroys his academic career.

This review just scratches the surface of the good stuff contained within. (I want to read more Bob Shaw and Gordon R. Dickson now, for example, and I was very glad to see H. G. Wells's "The Land Ironclads" in this context.) Presumably no anthology is perfect, but I suspect this one comes closer than most: it's probably a better sf anthology than any I've read outside of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame series. I discovered a lot of new stories, developed a new appreciation for a subgenre I've thought little about, and have some new authors to look up.