K. D. WentworthReseñas

After the first volume “The Course of Empire”, this second volume is even better I should say. In this second tome we see in full regalia the centre leitmotiv of the book: nature by association/cooperation. Neuroscientist António Damásio a Portuguese countryman of mine, is far from being a despot/tyrant, and he would agree with the basic premise of the novel. In fact, in Damásio’s book on Spinoza (“Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain”, he cites research which actually proves that cooperation floods the brain with dopamine and brings on a high. It's a product of our human evolution and therefore can be said to be much more expressive of human nature than the attribute of selfishness which capitalism forces us to adopt if we are to survive. In Paleolithic times, cooperation was not something imposed by the state, because there was no state. Nor was it imposed by an all powerful leader. It grew naturally from the tasks people had to do together to survive. Early societies had no authoritarian structures, such as fascism (as epithomised by the Narva caste). To put it in the words of Chief Wanadi in John Boorman's film, “The Emerald Forest”, "If I tell a man to do what he does not want to do, I would no longer be chief." This is the all point of the first and second volumes of this wonderful duology (I’m not counting the third volume as belonging to this same universe because the pedigree is not the same). The Apache chose Geronimo as their leader, but that doesn't mean they had to obey him, if they didn't like the orders he gave. The same with Allie Pluthrak. In the Apache they could vote with their feet. Their freedom to do as they pleased in that respect in no way lessened their ability to cooperate. Despot/Tyrant (epithomised by Oppuk), on the other hand, demands absolute obedience.

Humans are cooperative for short periods when individual needs happen to coincide, once the target is met we all start being individuals again. This not down to our individual natures and is not because of capitalism or any other ism. We are the way we are because that is how nearly all of us are wired. Imperfect? Certainly but better than being like an ant colony with no minds of our own.

All of these in a SF novel (*gasp*). Who could have imagined SF could produce something of such quality as this…unheard of to say the least!

In lots of vintage SF, at one time, we thought nothing of referring to "mankind" and "man-made". We defaulted to the masculine pronoun, in unspecific contexts. Mid-, or at least early-20th century male writers routinely talked about what a man might think or do in a hypothetical situation, rather than a person. And of course, everyone knew what they meant. But a lot of people were uncomfortable with the mindset that was reinforced by such defaults. So, eventually, they've become rarer, despite the initial residual weirdness or inconvenience of adopting a different phraseology. Other, more toxic uses of language, also once very familiar, have similarly faded from everyday speech. So language can sometimes change in consciously-directed ways. They may, indeed, seem "unnatural" to start with, but not for long. I would happily put up with the slight inconvenience of not talking about a "war on nature" if it meant we ended up thinking more clearly about the relationship between the world with and without human intervention. This is masterfully executed in Wentworth’s and Flint’s novel. The way the Jao “behave” is truly astonishing SF-wise. I’ve read this one a long time ago and it still holds-up pretty well after all these years. Wentworth and Flint are able to fictionalize a truly SFional setting that we SF readers, even now in contemporary SF, don’t see as being in a truly narrative sense regarding Jao vs. Terran vs. Ekhat: “nature” is not one undifferentiated thing, so it's perfectly possible for one part of nature to fight another part. In fact, since there is no difference between nature and the universe itself, it's impossible for nature to avoid fighting itself as long as living creatures have irreconcilable aims. Nature's one of those words, like 'spirituality', a bit lacking in objective meaning when it comes to SF, and often means only what the writer wants it to mean. It tends to fall into two catagories: 'everything' (not normally very useful), or 'that which functions as part of an evolved ecosystem' (and which therefore excludes modern human culture as it is this context semi-autonomous and therefore ecologically dysfunctional. The distinction is both useful (in the sense that it highlights the damage to the functioning of ecosystems), and part of the problem, as by separating humans from 'nature' it helps normalise the idea that humans can somehow exist alone, that our first encounter with an alien species is merely a question of human sympathy, and not human survival. It feeds our hubristic sense of omnipotence, which is what creates the problem in the first place. Now we're beginning to understand the true nature of self and why it arises. One thing to bear in mind is that, if our ancestors (including those non-human) had no sense of themselves or of self-preservation... well, you get the idea. The singular, conscious mind with a strong sense of self is an evolutionary trick - the physical body utilising the conscious in order to self-perpetuate (tricking us into believing we have to be selfish, fuck other people over, take more than we need etc. - the stuff necessary to survive in a harsh world, basically). What has happened at the same time is the conscious mind utilised the physical bodies to perpetuate, but with the focus of the consciousness still being on the (more or less) purely corporeal. The next stage in the evolution of consciousness will end up being consciousness for its own sake, meaning we will grow out of this form - the end of humanity.

It’s great to read an adult SF novel without the infantilisation bits of contemporary SF (even when said “contemporary SF” is branded as “adult SF” it still read as “YA-SF-for-morons”…Go figure.

On the one hand: interesting aliens with their own culture and morals and ethics, which are very (ha!) alien from the way humans view things, including even a simple thing like 'what is time?'.

On the other hand: the US is of course the best country that fought the alien conquerors the longest and bravest while several European countries and Japan surrendered almost right away, and humans are absolutely superior to the aliens in tech an fighting spirit and ingenuity, as even the aliens come around to seeing. Which, well, I guess maybe I also wouldn't love a book where clearly humans were the inferior species, but it all felt a bit grating and smug.

Throw in a quick passage where the female MC reflects that it's a pity the aliens have no sexual interest in human women, so that her 'friends' might have their (admittedly rather rose-tinted and romanticized) views on the aliens corrected via some rape, and I was uh, less than charmed.

Just not my cup of tea.

This is a fairly interesting and innovative take on the 'Earth controlled by aliens' theme. It is the first part of a series and it jumps right into things. Earth is under control of the alien Jao and has been for some years now. The Jao, a sort of seal/walrus-like mammalian species has slightly better technology and troops specially bred for warfare. They have occupied the Earth and have organized it the way they are used to, the Jao can't contemplate doing things any other way. That means clans and families are the primary organization, so there are some rivalries between them.
The Jao keep saying that a worse alien race, the Ekhat are coming and that humans and Jao must prepare. Unfortunately, they don't explain anything to the humans, so they all they get is rebellion. When a new high ranking Jao is assigned to the planet, can he change anything?
I thought this was well done, even though it jumped right into the middle of things. It is also somewhat self-contained and reads like a single book, I didn't feel it was incomplete at the end. It did remind me quite a bit of the Chanur novels, but not in a bad way.
A good attempt at human-alien relations where humans don't have the upper hand.

First Impression:

The Writers of the Future enters its 28th and perhaps its largest volume to date, boasting 586 pages! I’ve been collecting these paperbacks since 1986 and it never ceased to amaze me the opportunity for new writers to get published, often for the first time.

These volumes also have famous names as judges – a partial list: Mike Resnick, Robert J. Sawyer, Fredrick Pohl, and Robert Silverberg – all giants in the science fiction/fantasy field. And there’s an illustrator’s contest as well, such judges as Robert Castillo and Diane Dillion checking out the illustrations.

As with any anthology, some of the writers fall on their face and that’s really too bad. I can see the potential and hope that they will continue to write. Others do well and will probably move on to bigger and better things. Do we have another Kevin J. Anderson or Kristine Kathryn Rusch here?

Stories:

It would be tedious to review every single story in this big volume. I will say that many of the tales were of androids/robots/artificial intelligences. Some made of woven wood, some even made of intelligent insects!

Mary Croke’s “Of Woven Wood” was a fun read. Lan, an artificial intelligence, keeping track of the laboratory experiments of Haigh, his creator. Except that Haigh is dead! The mystery of his death is secondary to the true nature of Lan, the mysterious past of his creator and the Queen, who has some involvement as she demands what she perceives was “stolen” from her by Haigh. Interesting fantasy.

I really liked William Ledbetter’s “Rings of Mars.” A man discovers intelligent constructs on Mars, except he wants to keep it to himself, afraid that the corporation who hired him will turn it into a Martian Disneyland rather than a valuable treasure of knowledge for Man. It is a story of Malcolm and Jack and how their friendship is strained as they both struggle with what they feel is just, yet their friendship is important too. Great hard science fiction here.

And Harry Lang’s “My Name is Angela,” in a society where clones have been created to take care of the menial tasks so that humans can rise to greater heights. A modern-day slavery tale, actually. And a criticism on our educational system. Angela is supposed to just watch the malcontented fourth graders but she discovers through the “Soul Man” that she has a soul (he reprograms her) and she teaches the kids French and regrets beating her husband with a hot iron! She grows a conscience but the draconian society fears this and handles it. Quite a morality tale!

Bottom Line: Some stories did not do it for me – slow starts, coming into the middle and not building characterization or using unnecessary ten dollar words to describe things. Quite a mess, but that’s to be expected in amateur writing.

Nevertheless, great little collection – also articles from L. Ron Hubbard and Kristin Katherine Rusch on the art of the short story and the importance of researching a story to make it fly, and Roy Hardin’s advice to new artists in “Fast Draw.”

One from the Del Rey Discovery series...
This was a fun book, but I wasn't quite as impressed with it as with others in the series.
It takes place in the future, within a Roman-themed role-playing game. About 3000 wealthy socialites pay good money to physically go live in a recreated Roman town within their modern city, and live out their fantasies or try to acquire points and become emperor. But one of the two head programmers is noticing some disturbing anomalies in the programs that run the holographic Roman gods... and when the latest Emperor turns up dead-for-real, his investigation begins to uncover a web of crime and corruption infiltrating what was meant to be a harmless game.
The story definitely had a lot of potential, but the technical nuts-and-bolts of the setup had a lot of holes. I almost got the impression that the author had initially conceived of the game as being a virtual-reality game, and only later decided to make it a physical role-playing game. The main character doesn't seem as informed about the game and its setup as he would have had to be in his position, and, simply for safety and convenience issues, I didn't buy that it would possibly have been so hard to get *out* of the game area and out into the city. The 'gods' seem to have far more physical power than a 'hologram' would... etc, etc.

This volume is full of timely sci-fi and fantasy writers making their debut. Each story offered something entirely unique either in form of social messages for a more hopeful future containing protests, dreams and hope for change.

This is the first full volume I have read of this anthology and it was truly a fun journey to imagination and adventure, whether want just plain adventure or food for thought of our own futures.

Starting my second read of this book. It was a great read the first time. The intercultural relations is the amazing key to this book.

Talks about body language between people who speak different languages. Talks about big projects require group action by people combining together.

First Impression:

The Writers of the Future enters its 28th and perhaps its largest volume to date, boasting 586 pages! I’ve been collecting these paperbacks since 1986 and it never ceased to amaze me the opportunity for new writers to get published, often for the first time.

These volumes also have famous names as judges – a partial list: Mike Resnick, Robert J. Sawyer, Fredrick Pohl, and Robert Silverberg – all giants in the science fiction/fantasy field. And there’s an illustrator’s contest as well, such judges as Robert Castillo and Diane Dillion checking out the illustrations.

As with any anthology, some of the writers fall on their face and that’s really too bad. I can see the potential and hope that they will continue to write. Others do well and will probably move on to bigger and better things. Do we have another Kevin J. Anderson or Kristine Kathryn Rusch here?

Stories:

It would be tedious to review every single story in this big volume. I will say that many of the tales were of androids/robots/artificial intelligences. Some made of woven wood, some even made of intelligent insects!

Mary Croke’s “Of Woven Wood” was a fun read. Lan, an artificial intelligence, keeping track of the laboratory experiments of Haigh, his creator. Except that Haigh is dead! The mystery of his death is secondary to the true nature of Lan, the mysterious past of his creator and the Queen, who has some involvement as she demands what she perceives was “stolen” from her by Haigh. Interesting fantasy.

I really liked William Ledbetter’s “Rings of Mars.” A man discovers intelligent constructs on Mars, except he wants to keep it to himself, afraid that the corporation who hired him will turn it into a Martian Disneyland rather than a valuable treasure of knowledge for Man. It is a story of Malcolm and Jack and how their friendship is strained as they both struggle with what they feel is just, yet their friendship is important too. Great hard science fiction here.

And Harry Lang’s “My Name is Angela,” in a society where clones have been created to take care of the menial tasks so that humans can rise to greater heights. A modern-day slavery tale, actually. And a criticism on our educational system. Angela is supposed to just watch the malcontented fourth graders but she discovers through the “Soul Man” that she has a soul (he reprograms her) and she teaches the kids French and regrets beating her husband with a hot iron! She grows a conscience but the draconian society fears this and handles it. Quite a morality tale!

Bottom Line: Some stories did not do it for me – slow starts, coming into the middle and not building characterization or using unnecessary ten dollar words to describe things. Quite a mess, but that’s to be expected in amateur writing.

Nevertheless, great little collection – also articles from L. Ron Hubbard and Kristin Katherine Rusch on the art of the short story and the importance of researching a story to make it fly, and Roy Hardin’s advice to new artists in “Fast Draw.”

This book is a sequel to Black on Black, one of the few books I’ve rated with five stars. I think I liked this sequel even more than its predecessor. This book, Stars over Stars, built logically from the events and character growth of the previous book. However, it told an entirely new story on a new planet. There were a few familiar characters, and a lot of new ones. We also meet and learn about a new alien species. Each book stands well on its own, but I wouldn’t recommend reading this book first if you have any intention of reading both of them. It would spoil too much about what happened in the previous book.

As with the previous book, we’re usually reading from the perspective of various alien characters. The new alien species was very different from the now-familiar hrinn, and they were interesting to read about. I really like the way this author writes alien characters. They aren’t just human-like aliens with a few special abilities or physical characteristics to make them “alien”. They have their own unique cultures and belief systems and mannerisms and thought processes, and they’re written consistently. But we don’t learn about the aliens through info dumps. We learn about them by being inside their heads and by seeing how they react to events going on in the story.

Mitsu is also back in this book. Those who were disappointed by her lower level of involvement in the first book may be happy to see her play a larger and more important role in this book, although she still takes plenty of abuse! As do many of the other characters.

One thing that I suddenly realized as I was finishing up this book was that there really wasn’t any sort of a romance subplot anywhere in the series. There were a couple things that could possibly be interpreted as a potential for romance, but it was very subtle if it was even there at all. I actually find that refreshing. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the occasional romance thread if it’s done well and if it doesn’t detract from the real story. But it seems like authors think nearly every book has to have romance in it. I’ve read too many books where a good story was brought down because there was a romance subplot forced into it and it wasn’t written well. In that case, I’d rather it be left out altogether. A book can be great without romance, and this book absolutely proves that in my eyes. I’m sorry that there weren’t any more books in this series – I definitely would have read them.

This book caught my interest from the first page and I had trouble putting it down. I was up past my bedtime last night because I couldn’t go to sleep until I had finished the book.

The story centers around Heyoka Blackeagle, an alien from the hrinnti species. He was stolen from his people as a child and raised among humans, so he knows next to nothing about his own people. He’s a Sergeant, fighting alongside humans against a destructive alien enemy. During a recent battle, an incident occurred that led him to go back to his home planet to learn more about his origins. The story begins with him landing on his home planet, trying and failing to recognize anything familiar about it.

The hrinnti species is very animal-like in terms of their appearance and many of their mannerisms – probably closest to a dog if I were looking for something to compare it to. But not the cuddly, friendly, eager-to-please sort of dog! The vast majority of the book is spent in the perspective of various hrinnti characters. They have different motives than humans, a different social structure, different mannerisms and behaviors, and just a different way of seeing themselves and their lives. I enjoyed reading about an alien culture from the perspective of the aliens. Fortunately the author was human, so the characters are still pretty easy to understand if you happen to be a human reader.

I read reviews on various sites after finishing the book, and I was surprised it didn’t have higher ratings -- I’m pretty stingy with five-star ratings but I enjoyed this book that much. I read a couple reviews in which people expressed disappointment that Mitsu, the human female traveling with Heyoka, didn’t play a larger role in the story. I can understand those comments to some extent, because I too had the impression at the beginning that she would be a more important character. But I think maybe that was the point. She was the alien – the interloper on a world where she didn’t fit in. This book was about the hrinn, not the humans. Mitsu did in fact play a major role, however unwittingly, in changing the course of at least one hrinn’s life.

The characters were interesting and many of them were very likeable. Heyoka was a particularly interesting character because he knew nothing of his own species’ culture, and many of their ways and attitudes seemed foreign and even barbaric to him. And yet he shared a lot of similarities with them also. The reader learns about his race along with him. There are a lot of character names to keep straight, but I had surprisingly little trouble with keeping track of who was who. In retrospect, I think the author unobtrusively worked in small details to help remind the reader exactly which character they were reading about after a perspective change. The story itself also seemed really interesting to me. I was always anxious to see what would happen next.

This book has a sequel, Stars Over Stars, but it stands completely on its own. Everything was wrapped up without any major loose ends. If there’s any one thing I felt was left unexplained, it would be the motives behind what happened on the Hrinnti homeworld when Heyoka was a child. Since some of the characters still seem to be wondering the same thing, I’m hoping that might be answered in the sequel.

The quarterly Writers of the Future contests have been unearthing a lot of good new science fiction and fantasy writers for three decades now, so they’re obviously doing something right—not the least of which is the impressive cadre of contest alumni and other professionals who lend their talents to the reading and judging. With the 28th annual collection, they’ve produced another exceedingly competent selection of stories from new writers. Those that stood out include William Mitchell’s taut, well-constructed, and satisfying tale leading up to first contact, “Contact Authority,” Marie Croke’s deceptively engaging “Of Woven Wood,” and Gerald Warfield’s intriguing near-future story, “The Poly Islands.”½

I admire the world building and alien creation.
I adore all the books by K.D. Wentworth. Pick them up and read them!

An easy read and competent storytelling so if you like action-filled quests on an alien planet it'll be up your alley; but the aliens are cardboard cliches of the Warrior Race and the Hive Mind respectively, and what insight we get into them just glosses over the cut-out without adding any dimensionality.

Humans are treated little better. Our Hero was rescued and raised by a member of the Oglala nation, which is nice and all but not only does this all occur deep in backstory, but we learn nothing about how this helped shape his personality; other than his name he might as well have been raised in New Zealand or Mongolia or Kenya or France. Because of this gaping hole, I was left wondering why the author did put this in the story and started wondering if she was trying to draw some kind of parallel with the Warrior Race tribes. I don't think so (I hope not; they were so badly portrayed it would be supremely icky) but even if you just thought it'd be cool or even just nice to represent the Oglala, wouldn't you think it'd be cool / nice to... represent them a little more?

Maybe in future books, but I doubt I'll be reading them.

(Also: I know bookcovers are a world unto themselves, but what is even with that pose? I guess it's meant to be Mitsu, but... so many questions, 99% of which begin with "Why the hell?" and the other one being "Would Jim Hines even try?")

While interesting I read this too recently after [a:David Weber|10517|David Weber|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1227584346p2/10517.jpg]'s books in the War God's Own trilogy. It therefore became a dull, dry, desperate excuse for a story. I think I might try the next book, but I'm not sure yet.

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

The twenty-eighth installment of the L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future anthology continues the tradition of showcasing the best science fiction authors whose work has previously not been professionally published. As usual, the stories in this collection are all pretty good, and some reveal authors who one could very easily see writing great stories in the future. The only thing that is a little disturbing about this selection of works is that although some of the writers included are young up and comers, there seem to be far too many older authors represented in their ranks. While the contest rules are clear, and the only requirement an author has to meet is that they do not have any previous professional sales, it seems to defeat the purpose of a contest titled "Writers of the Future" when middle-aged authors who have turned to fiction writing as a second career are featured.

One element that runs through the stories in the volume is that many feel like they should be longer stories, feeling oddly truncated or somehow incomplete. The first story in the book, Of Woven Wood by Marie Croke, displays this characteristic, told from the perspective of a magical construct named Lan made from wood full of internal containers used by the apothecary Haigh to store his supplies. But Haigh is dead, killed by a fire that destroyed most of his laboratory, and Lan is taking refuge with the apothecary's neighbor Jaddi. As the story opens, Lan's head aches, a condition which he attributes to the fact that his head container is empty. But none of his other containers ever hurt when they are empty, which confuses Lan. The story is complicated when visitors from the royal court arrive claiming that Haigh stole something valuable from the queen, although for most of the story they won't say what it is that they are looking for. The queen's emissaries leave for a bit, Lan cleans up Haigh's house, goes through his notes, and begins filling in for Haigh as an apothecary, and the story meanders along for a bit until the queen herself shows up and everything ties up in a little bow in the last few pages. The problem I have with the story is that the transition from the mystery of Lan's confusion to the resolution of the story feels incredibly abrupt, as if there were chunks of plot development left out of the middle. The premise and characters are interesting, and the world that the story takes place in seems interesting, but the plot just doesn't seem to be fully fleshed out. I enjoyed the story, but it needed to be developed more.

The Rings of Mars by William Ledbetter is another story that seems like there should have been more story, or at least there should be a sequel. A somewhat eccentric explorer on Mars named Jack has discovered a pattern of anomalies that lead him to believe that intelligent life left a message for travelers from Earth to find. For reasons that aren't ever really explained, Jack is being prematurely shipped home by the company sponsoring the expedition, and blames his friend Malcom at least partially for this turn of events. After a perfunctory tiff between the two, Jack and Malcolm patch up their differences to thumb their nose at the evil corporation that paid a fortune to transport them to Mars and explore the anomalies themselves. Helped be a cooperative sandstorm, the pair have just enough time to do some destructive archaeology and uncover the secret message left behind by the mysterious alien benefactors. Still intent on foiling the corporation that pays them and makes their explorations even possible, the story ends with Malcolm and Jack splitting up so that they can upload the message publicly to everyone. The story is a fairly standard alien archaeology story, albeit one that is told fairly well. But it seems like the middle of a larger, more complete story. The set-up, explaining why Jack is being ejected from Mars, and exactly why the corporation is supposed to be nefarious, seems to be missing, and the story just seems to end abruptly when things started to get really interesting.

Sometimes a story has an interesting idea, is well-written, has sympathetic characters and a coherent plot, and yet it still adds up to an unsatisfying read. The Paradise Aperture by David Carani is one of those stories. Jon is a photographer with an unusual talent: when he takes pictures of certain doors, those pictures then become doorways to other worlds. He has become rich off of this talent, but it also caused him to lose his wife when she retreated behind such a door picture to escape their burning house. Five years later, Jon searches the world with his daughter Irene looking for just the right door that will lead him into the pocket universe where his wife is trapped. The story meanders along, giving hints that there is a religious backlash against his ability, which eventually results in a government ban on him using his talent. For no apparent reason Jon decides to set up a pair of doors facing one another, and somehow this proves to be the secret to finding his wife, and results in the multiverse of hidden universes behind the door pictures shattering. Every piece of the story works, but somehow it adds up to less than the individual pieces suggest it should. The reason for Jon's power is never explained, nor is how his power works. He just "knows" which doors to photograph. The multiverse of pocket dimensions behind the doors is never explained or described in any way, and as a result when Jon does his "two doors facing one another" trick, it seems to come out of left field, because the reader has no reason to believe it would work, and no clue as to why it works. The story ends up being an example of a man's dedication to keep going in the hope of finding his lost love, but without any real indication as to how she got lost or how he found her again, the search feels almost pointless, and the resolution seems contrived.

The singularity, the concept that at a certain point artificial intelligence will become as capable as human intelligence, and will then rapidly surpass us as succeeding and increasingly sophisticated generations of new artificial intelligences are built, has become a fairly common science fiction trope in recent years. Fast Draw by Roy Hardin draws upon this well, and couples it with a story of love gone wrong as Jack, a relatively old AI that is still far superior to normal humans, is threatened by his human ex-girlfriend Gloria in a bar. Most of the story takes place in the time it takes for Gloria to draw her gun and fire, which is an eternity for the accelerated thought processes of an AI of Jack's capabilities. The story alternates between Jack's flirtation with a pretty bar patron as Gloria draws her weapon, and digressions explaining the development of powerful AIs and the resulting stratified society driven by the fact that AIs separated by more than a handful of generations have such disparate capabilities that they find it hard to interact directly. The story moves along until there is a fairly predictable twist involving the pretty AI that Jack is talking with at the bar, and then another more or less unexpected twist that comes out of left field. The story is decently written and readable but most of it is simply explaining how the singularity would work, and as a result it isn't particularly memorable.

Since the release of the Matrix movies, there seems to have been a modest trend towards Matrix -like science fiction in print. The idea of humans sleeping away their lives while controlled by some outside entity isn't new - I first encountered it when I was a teenager reading Dean Koontz' Wake Up to Thunder - but it does make for some good science fiction. And The Siren by M.O. Muriel, follows this tradition, and the resulting story is pretty good science fiction. Janie is a troubled teenager who wakes up one day in a strange coffin-like bed in a honeycomb of countless sleeping people. Through the course of the story it is revealed that this is the collective human unconscious, and everyone on Earth has essentially had their minds shut off so that an alien race of invaders can occupy our bodies. Janie's mind is "fractured" as a result of her schizophrenia, and as a result, she can dissociate enough to "wake up" in the collective unconscious and move about. She meets several other people with similar abilities, most of whom have various mental illnesses that fracture their minds. What was a disability in the "normal" world becomes a valuable attribute in the collective human unconsciousness that allows humanity to fight back against the alien interlopers. The Siren is told out of order, as one might expect from the somewhat jumbled mind of a schizophrenic teenager, and was yet another story that left me feeling like it was a truncated excerpt drawn from a larger one, leaving me wondering, for example, what happened to the aliens who were lured by Janie and disposed of. Even so, it is an interesting and well-written story, and one of the best in the volume.

Most alien contact stories place humans either as the technologically superior race interacting with a nation of supposedly primitive aliens, or as comparative barbarians faced with advanced and inscrutable denizens from afar. Contact Authority by William Mitchell manages to place humans in both positions at once, sandwiching his characters between the awesome might of the Alliance, and the almost incomprehensible Caronoi. Humanity is the most freshly minted member of the somewhat misnamed "Alliance", a vast interstellar community that evaluates every race when it achieves gravity control technology and either admits them as a member or annihilates them. The Alliance has handed humans the task of investigating the Caronoi, a new race that seems to be on the verge of discovering gravity control technology, but is a strange race that lives what seem to be pre-agricultural lives punctuated by massive singing sessions in which they hatch technologically advanced ideas and then execute them, such as building and sending out robot probes to explore their solar system. The story focuses on Jared, a special agent sent by the human Office of Alliance Liaison to investigate what appear to be premature contacts between the human observers and the Caronoi. His covert sleuthing is exposed and becomes an official inquiry, leading him to Rory Temple, the grandson of the man who had established humanity's contact with the Alliance and supposedly saved us from destruction. Jared discards Rory as suspect, and then comes back to him, and then learns what the Alliance really wants to know about both the Caronoi and us, and everything ends up turning on a couple of mathematical models that economists use to evaluate behavior. The story is an interesting twist on the traditional alien contact story that reminded me a little bit of that found in David Brin's Uplift setting. In the end, I wanted to read more about the Alliance and the aliens that comprised it, which seems to me to be an indication that the story was successful.

As I said earlier, several of the stories in this volume seem like they are actually novel length stories that have been squashed until they fit into a short fiction format. The Command for Love by Nick T. Chan definitely feels like a novel length story that has been compressed into a shorter work. The story centers on Ligish, an ancient war golem now serving the mostly senile Master Grey as a house servant. Ligish is concerned, because the homunculus that directs his subconscious has been giving him commands to love his master's daughter Anna. The plot is driven by an unwelcome marriage contract arranged by General Maul for Anna's hand, who it is implied took advantage of Master Grey's mental infirmity to force the contract into existence. Because the law in this world only recognizes men as self-aware beings, and thus all women, golems, and homunculi are required to obey them. Ligish sets out to prove Anna is self-aware, and ends up on a quest across the strange golem-shaped landscape to talk to God. The story is so densely packed that the reader is left wanting to know more about the elements that make it up. The story offers only tantalizing glimpses of the strange clockwork golem world,and its strange clockwork golem God, and the strange regimented society that inhabits it. The various characters are interesting, but the story has to rush by them so fast in order to get through the vast scope of the plot that they are given a short shrift. We are told that Master Grey is a beloved but doddering man, but we don't ever get to see him as such. We are told that Anna is a brilliant young woman, but we have only a limited amount of characterization in the story to establish this. The priest Ligish consults seems like an interesting character, but he's never developed. Maul is very villainous, but there really seems to be almost nothing to him other than sneering arrogance. In the middle of the story, Gabriel, the King of the Golems, drops in without any warning, or really even any indication that such a character existed prior to his intrusion into Ligish's story. If The Command for Love were a novel length story, all of these elements could have been explored, and when I was reading the story, I found myself wishing they were. The story as presented gives the framework for the achingly tragic love story that it intends to be, but everything about it felt truncated and incomplete. I liked the short story presented here, but I wanted to read the novel it yearns to be.

Some stories remind you of other stories you read previously, and make you think about those sotires again. My Name Is Angela by Harry Lang is one of those stories, because when I was reading it, I found myself comparing it to the Robot stories of Isaac Asimov. In this story Angela is an elementary school teacher, but she doesn't recognize her students and seems emotionally detached. She goes home to her companion Bruno who watches wrestling on television and doesn't seem to be able to recognize any of the participants. She cooks their food, irons their clothes, grades tests, and has sex with Bruno. And she hits him with an iron when she's mad at him. But even though she's human, she's product and so is her partner, manufactured to serve as a permanent underclass to handle menial tasks. And when one realizes this, one's mind recoils at the idea of creating people in this way for this purpose. Which is where the Robot stories come in. In Asimov's books, robots are given positronic brains that function as well as human brains with built in limitations, and are intended to serve as servants to handle menial and dangerous jobs so humans don't have to. But the moral question that confronts the reader in My Name Is Angela simply doesn't work into the Robot stories at all. Creating a race of self-aware slaves seems perfectly fine if they are made of metal and wires, but morally abhorrent if they are mentally limited constructs of flesh and blood. One wonders why this is. Is it because Angela cooks oatmeal for Bruno? Because she irons clothes and has sex? But this is the central horror of the story: What if a corporation did create human constructs to live among us. Angela isn't a person, but is rather property, and is treated as such. But Angela is human, with human desires and human aspirations, which collides with her manufacturer's goals. My Name is Angela is a sad, terrifying, and ultimately very human tale, and is quite good and truly frightening at the same time.

Featuring children left to fend for themselves after all the adults in the world have been overcome by an alien plague that encases them in hardened amber called "the crud", Lost Pine by Jacob A. Boyd seems to be somewhat reminiscent of a science fiction version of Lord of the Flies, with enigmatic aliens thrown in for good measure. The story features a pair of teens named Gage and Adah living at the Lost Pine Inn, having taken over when they found it abandoned after the encasement of its former owners. The pair are hiding from the mobs of lawless gangs that have taken control of the cities following the collapse of civilization. They are visited by another refugee, a kid using the pseudonym Monk, which raises Gage's suspicions, because he reasons that anyone who uses a pseudonym has something to hide. The three children work out an accommodation that they all can live with, and the story proceeds to unload some exposition on the reader, outlining where the crud came from, how Gage and Adah figured out how to fend for themselves, and Gage's obsession with opening a locked gun safe in the basement of the Lost Pine. After some twists and turns, the aliens themselves show up and the kids figure out their plan, which turns out to be potentially benevolent, but which seems almost insanely cruel by human standards. The story is decent, but with so much left unexplained, it seems like the first act of a story rather than a complete story in itself.

One of the oddest things about Shutdown by Corry L. Lee is that I enjoyed everything about the story except the actual story. The world that Lee imagines is interesting, with humanity threatened by a strange alien invasion of mechanical flora and fauna that the characters aren't even sure is actually an invasion. The character at the center of the story - an aspiring ballet dancer named Adanna who joins the military because she needs prosthetic fingers to realize her dream of being a professional dancer - is unusual, interesting, and fairly well-characterized. And the situation Adanna finds herself in where she is called upon to voluntarily shut her entire body down in order to avoid alien detection, is also interesting. But once Adanna succeeds in penetrating the alien habitat, causes some trouble, and then makes her escape, the what little there is to the plot more or less peters out. The nature of the aliens is never expanded upon. The importance of Adanna's actions is never elucidated. And Adanna, having accomplished enough to realize her dream of being in a professional ballet company decides to throw that dream aside for no particularly apparent reason. This is another story that felt like it should have been part of a larger story, probably serving as the expository prologue for whatever story that it was part of. And while what was delivered was interesting, what was delivered is ultimately a disappointment due to the unfinished feeling provided by the plot.

One recurring theme that crops up in science fiction is the use of high technology to emulate a more primitive time, usually to extol the virtues or wisdom of some particular culture. In While Ireland Holds These Graves by Tom Doyle, nanotechnology and advanced artificial intelligence has been used to transform Ireland into a sort of Irish Disneyland, with quaint pubs, twisty country roads, and the reconstructed personalities of Irish literary giants. Except that the reconstructed version of Ireland seems to have sparked a spate of Irish nationalism in the face of an apparently homogenized world society, to the point where non-Irish individuals want to come to Ireland and pretend to be Irish, and in response, the Irish government gets ready to close itself off from the rest of the world so that anyone who wants to stay in Ireland must commit to staying for an entire year. Dev, one of the architects of the literary AIs, arrives to try to persuade his lost love to give up Ireland, who happens to have been the other architect of the literary AIs. He meets up with James Joyce, wanders about and finds a couple incarnations of Yeats, and is eventually dragged to the girl he is looking for. After some perfunctory back and forth, Dev accomplishes his hitherto unrevealed objective and promptly kills himself, resulting in a boy seeks girl, boy finds girl, boy loses girl and commits suicide story that has a bit of a twist at the end that makes most of what went before seem kind of pointless. Though the idea of reviving literary figures as AIs seems somewhat interesting, the story that results is not particularly interesting, and it doesn't really go anywhere.

Another story that has an interesting premise, but a plot that is oddly unconnected with the background is The Poly Islands by Gerald Warfield. The story takes place on the "Poly Islands", large accretions of plastics floating in the Pacific Ocean than have been drawn together with signaling buoys. But the story itself only tangentially deals with this scenery, involving a young Chinese woman named Liyang fleeing the Hong Kong tongs after making off with large amounts of their money and a pile of advanced computer chips. Once she reaches the Poly Islands, Liyang finds a quirky multi-ethnic community of outcasts apparently led by an Indian guru called Crab. Some of the inhabitants are Chinese, and have organized into a pair of small Chinese tongs which both try to recruit Liyang to their ranks. Liyang sides with neither of the tongs, but more or less on a whim instead aligns herself with a man named Adam who turns out to be a researcher studying the structure of the Poly Islands. The story proceeds along two tracks: one path that is basically an extended piece of exposition in which Liyang learns about the structure of the islands, how they came to be, who Adam and Crab really are, and why her chips are important to their work, and a second, mostly irrelevant path in which the tongs vie with each other and with Crab for authority over the islands. The entire tong plot seems to be included mostly to break up the expository sequences, and turns out to be almost entirely irrelevant to the actual main plot. The resulting story is disjointed, with the reader left feeling like they read a good short story that had been padded out with a mostly pointless conflict to lengthen it.

The final story in the book is Insect Sculptor by Scott T. Barnes, an odd story involving the use of mind-sharing technology to use groups of insects to make sculptures. The technology posited in the story is interesting, essentially allowing a human to mentally direct, and if the humans is skilled enough possibly enter the mind of insects under their control, but the use the technology is put to in the story seems to be about the least interesting use one could come up with. Making termites gather together in a big mass to form the shape of an elephant or a miniature Taj Mahal is cute, but less interesting than all of the industrial or military uses that such technology could be put to. In this story, a man named Adam travels to Abidjan offer himself as an apprentice to the greatest insect sculptor in the world, the Gajah-mada. He is met by the Gajah-mada's assistant Isabella, who tests him and finds his skills wanting. But Adam is persistent and he eventually becomes part of the Gajah-mada's retinue of performers working at his cabaret style show. Adam, of course, has a problem he has to overcome, and he does so with Isabella's help, eventually learning her secret and becoming Gajah-mada's chosen heir. The story is serviceable, but has an interesting almost off-handed remark about how Adam and the Gajah-mada may have created an almost immortal intelligence, and frustratingly, like so much else in the story, the implications of this technology are simply skipped over. Insect Sculptor has so many interesting ideas contained in it that it is disappointing that the story Barnes produced using them was so pedestrian. This could have been a brilliant story, but unfortunately it is merely average.

There is something of a tradition in the Writers of the Future volumes of dusting off an old essay written by L.Ron Hubbard and inserting it into the book. I am not sure if this is a misguided attempt to honor Hubbard, or an easy way to make fun of him, because the essays are almost always hilariously awful. The Hubbard essay in this volume is Story Vitality, in which he pontificates on the importance of doing research for a story to make it have more impact. The story he chooses to highlight is a piece of nautical adventure about the commander of a Coast Guard cutter named The Phantom Patrol. Hubbard talks about how terrible the story was until he went and talked to some actual Coast Guard members, and then tries to illustrate how doing this legwork improved his story. The trouble is, the writing in the essay, and the selected passages from The Phantom Patrol are so poorly written that it is hard to imagine how bad they were before Hubbard "improved" them with his research.

Fortunately, the other two essays included in the volume are far less unintentionally hilarious, and are instead insightful and interesting. The Importance of Short Fiction by Kristine Kathryn Rusch discusses, naturally enough, short fiction in speculative fiction writing, coming out in favor of it as a starting point for new authors. Not because it is easy - Rusch makes clear that she thinks that writing good short fiction is much harder than novel-length fiction, but rather because it is short, and as a result an author can complete projects, get them on the market, and get feedback on a regular basis. There's not much more to Rusch's essay, but advice from one of the most business-savvy authors working today is always useful. The other essay in the volume is Shaun Tan's Advice for a New Illustrator, offering, naturally enough, career advice to young artists. Tan starts off by saying that no two careers are comparable, and so he can't offer any universal advice, but then proceeds to offer some universal advice that more or less boils down to keep improving your skills and finish projects that you get. Tan doesn't offer particularly revelatory advice, but it does seem to be sound, albeit fairly mundane advice.

As one might expect, the stories in this installment of Writers of the Future are all at least serviceable, with a few stand-outs here and there. All of the stories are by writers who clearly have some talent, but are all still clearly honing their craft. All of the stories show flashes of the superior writer each of the authors featured in this volume could become, with interesting ideas, character, and plots cropping up in several of the stories. In almost every case, however, all of the pieces for making the leap from a good story to a great story are not yet all together. Every writer in this volume could have an excellent career ahead of them, and almost all of them could crash and burn as well, or simply fade away. The only things that one can be certain of following reading this book are that Hubbard has a hilariously inflated opinion of the quality of his own writing, and both Rusch and Tan are capable professionals who are willing to offer clear advice to newcomers to the industry. This collection is, in the end, a very readable look into the creative minds of a collection of promising new speculative fiction authors,

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.½

The anthology is a collection of some of the best and brightest in the field of up-and-coming science fiction writers. i wouldn't consider anyone represented hereto be an amateur. The stories are diverse in their premise, and show that the field is going to be in good hands in the future. We'll see many of these authors again in the future. Short stories aen't the easiest thing to write because character development has to be done quickly, with no time to build up to it. Virtually all of these did that well.

I'll be looking for these authors in other works now, and I know some already have other works out there.

I found this book after re-reading Black on Black and Stars over Stars. Those two books impressed me with the worldbuilding of the alien race. I was equally impressed with Crucible of Empire. The story has at least three elements going for it. It has conflict between space faring races, strange but interesting cultural traits and habits of the races, and characters that I was intersted in. Caitlin, Tully, Captain Dannet, Jihan and the Krants are the most interesting. The authors introduce a great deal about the relationships of power and decisionmaking in the four cultures. I could see a school class spending a full semester using this book to explore alternative political power relations. The Ekhat would be the simplest. I really wanted to know what would happen to each character. Even minor characters are introduced with interesting stories.

The relationship between the Jao and the humans of Earth is complicated. Some love and some hate exists in the history and present. Fear, distrust, trust and promise have built the relationship and guide the decisions made by the members of the Jao-human alliance in their exploration of the Nebula where they find the Lleix. This two year alliance has led to the Terra taif which is a new political entity in the Jao culture and is fraught with tension and the potential for misunderstanding. There are many terms to explain the cultural differences the four races have, but I found them easy to follow because of the good writing.

The world building is very impressive. There are four fully sentient races described in the story, the Humans, Jao, Lleix and Ekhat. Each has its strengths, weaknesses, oddities and traditions. I kept thinking that this reminds me of humans. The same 4 points could be made about me and all the people I know. This is a great way to relate the strange alien races to my own life and understanding.

The greatest tension in the book, after the difficulty of the different races communicating successfully across their barriers of difference is the looming threat of the Ekhat battle ships that will destroy anyone they encounter that are not Ekhat. This continues the threat from the previous book, but is a minor dangerous thread throughout the book, while not distracting from the interesting stories being told. I recommend this book to readers who enjoy military sci-fi or cross-cultural fiction.

The Terra taif is defined as a kochan-in-formation.
There is a glossary after the story of Jao and Lleix terms which is great, although perhaps not needed, as a careful reader can build their own glossary from the context given in the story.

The end of the book contains a history of the Ekhat race that is the major villain in the series. Also an explanation of the faster than light technology used in the series. The frame point network is a unique addition to faster-than-light travel in science fiction and might possibly end up having some similarity to an actual technological solution to ftl, if humans ever achieve that.

When I reached the last page I was ready to plunge into the next step in the story. Alas, I learned K. D. Wentworth died in 2012 and the next book in the series was not finished. My best wishes go to her family and friends.½

Don’t think of this as a collection of amateur stories. These stories are as proficient as those you will find in any anthology, more than many I’d say. Many of these stories are not even the first publication of their authors.

And don’t think of this as some sort of talent-spotting exercise, a dutiful survey to see who might be the subject of “buzz” in the future. As with past winners, some of these authors will go on to distinguished careers. Others will fade away.

There is something here for most tastes in the fantastic: fantasy, surrealism, a bit of steampunk, and military and straight science fiction.

Some of that science fiction is conceptually inventive. If it isn’t entirely groundbreaking, it at least looks at some old ideas in a new way. Three stories in this category were my favorites.

Actually, my favorite, Gerald Warfield’s “The Poly Islands”, may do something completely new in its setting – the famed island of floating garbage in the Pacific Ocean. Here, it’s populated by criminal gangs, those on the run from those gangs like protagonist Liyang, and political refugees. Add in the mysterious nature of the Crab, leader of the Poly Island community, some intrigue, and the well-worked out details of living on an unstable platform of plastic garbage, and you have a winning story marred only a tiny bit by a somewhat schmaltzy ending.

You don’t have to be enamored of James Joyce or all things Irish – and I’m not – to appreciate Tom Doyle’s “While Ireland Holds These Graves”. In a second revolution of independence, Ireland has decided to turn its back on the global order, to become a self-consciously ethnic state (though anybody, from anywhere, can join – Gallic speaking enabled by brain implants) apart from the bland global order. New wealth and new possibilities from solar and fusion energy and nanotechnology allow the recreation of an early 20th century Ireland complete with the recreated personalities of its celebrities like W. B. Yeats and James Joyce. The story follows the co-creator of the Joyce personality and his creation in the few remaining days before the borders are sealed. Celtic mythology, Irish nationalism and literature, the effects of globalization, artificial intelligence and personality reconstructions all fuse in a noir plot. It could be argued that the motivations for all its intrigue aren’t entirely clear, but I think Doyle conveys them well enough in an intuitive way.

“Fast Draw” from Roy Hardin takes the transhuman postulate that humanity can be greatly altered by advances in biology and cybernetics. To that starting point, he adds the simple observation that those improvements would, like our current technology, proceed in waves. The description of how humans of successive technological iterations exist – sometimes quite uneasily -- together is quite novel and interesting. Mix in geriatrics prowling a single’s bar and a jilted woman who happens to be quick draw artist, and you a have a winning story – literally since this was the top entry for 2011. The story, for me, had a slight misstep at the end in the revealing of the true identity of one character, but overall an impressive story.

Continuing riffs on familiar notions are William Ledbetter’s “The Rings of Mars” and William Mitchell’s “Contact Authority”. Ledbetter’s story starts with a planetary geologist kidnapping his old friend who has come to Mars to send him back home. He wants a chance to prove that alien ruins exist on Mars – and not give his corporate bosses a chance to exploit them. I’m always up for alien ruins on Mars or Martian stories in general, and this one had a rewarding payoff. Mitchell’s is a first contact story but with a catch. Humanity is on probation with the alien Alliance which has delegated it to make first contact with the Caronoi. The trouble is that somebody is culturally contaminating the Caronoi culture prior to that first contact, and, if the Alliance finds out and decides man has failed its unknown criteria, genocide will result. The nature of that criteria forms the heart of the story, and the answer to the question struck me as innovative.

“My Name Is Angela” from Harry Lang starts out with the old notion of manufactured people to do crappy jobs. Here narrator Angela is an elementary school teacher of violent, warehoused kids. She decides there might be more to life and seeks out the Soul Man to give it to her. Over all, it’s a sad story but leavened with bits of humor in some of the character’s names. “Lost Pine” by Jacob A. Boyd is a post-holocaust story where most of man has succumbed to the “creeping crud” and ended up in yellowish cocoons”. It’s all due to an alien invasion. The question for survivors like Gage and Adah and Monk is the actual condition of their cocooned love ones and each comes up with different answer to that question.

“Shutdown” from Cory L. Lee was a briskly told military science fiction tale. The dancer heroine is recruited to be part of an elite unit that will assault an alien fortress with a new tactic – temporarily dying when needed to avoid detection and thwart weapons from homing in on them. I liked it overall though the change in the dancer’s character at the end seemed a bit clichéd. Scott T. Barnes’ “Insect Sculptor” effectively evokes the experience of unexpectedly becoming romantically obsessed with an odd woman. The story takes place in the world of insect sculpting – psychically willing insects to take desired forms. The narrator is going to study under the greatest sculptor of all, the Great Gaja-mada, but it’s his assistant, Isabella, that fixes his interest.

M.O. Muriel’s “The Siren” was the one story that didn’t work for me, possibly because there was a surrealistic edge to the events, an element I often don’t respond to. The story seems to involve an alien invasion that has imprisoned the consciousness of most humans into the Honeycomb with a few people, like the heroine, able to move about. Overall, I found the story confusing though I appreciated the interesting characters which included the teenaged girl narrator and a veteran of the Afghan War.

A satisfying mix of steampunk (with zeppelins) and medieval magic (golems and homunculi) and science as magic, Nick T. Chan’s “The Command for Love” has adventure, an intriguing religion that believes the world is the body of God and , therefore, worships maps, and a rumination on the nature of true intelligence. Its golem has fallen in love with his master’s daughter. Is he just responding to his programming or does he have a “soul” of his own?

Venturing further into fantasy territory is “The Paradise Aperature” from David Carani. Its narrator has the freakish and singular ability to capture pictures of alternate dimensions and use them to create portals to pocket universes – a quite profitable and controversial business. But what he desperately wants is to find the dimension his wife may have fled to to escape death.

Pure fantasy is well represented by Marie Croke’s rewarding and poignant “On Woven Wood”, the tale of a magical and intelligent cabinet, how he makes his way in the world after his master’s death, and the mysteries of his origin.

The Writers of the Future anthologies have always presented advice for writers. Here Hubbard himself speaks of how much “story vitality” research can give a story. Kristine Kathryn Rusch revises Robert A. Heinlein’s rules of writing to emphasize concentrating on satisfying – and not prettily told – stories. She also warns against constant rewriting except at an editor’s request, and speaks of the importance of writing frequently. Her particular emphasis is on short fiction.

This volume also showcases the winners of another contest – L. Ron Hubbard’s Illustrators of the Future. The renowned Shaun Tan offers advice for new illustrators. The winners of the contest were turned lose to illustrate a winning story with black and white drawings, so the book contains some striking art as well as good fiction. I particularly liked John W. Haverty Jr’s work for “The Insect Sculptor” and Fiona Meng’s drawing for “While Ireland Holds These Graves”.

Don’t worry about the future careers of these writers. Just buy this and appreciate the fine work they’ve given us now.

I received this book as an Early Reviewer and have to say it is exactly what you expect a mixture of good and bad short stories. Overall, the good out weighed the bad, and I will look forward to seeing if some of the writers move on to novels.

This book collects the twelve winning stories from the 2011 Writers of the Future competition, and additional story that came close to winning in its quarter, all illustrated by winners of the year's Illustrators of the Future contest, and three essays of advice (two for writers and one for artists).

On the whole, I found most of the stories enjoyable, although showing the writers' inexperience at times. Some of the problems were minor, such as two separate stories referring to characters that hadn't been introduced yet as if they had been (one mentions "the other woman's voice" as the first description of a character, the other uses a name never seen before to refer to a character without making it clear which character it's talking about). Others are more serious; for example, "The Poly Islands", an otherwise good story, has an abrupt time skip at the end that causes one character to make an important decision seemingly off stage and out of the blue. Despite flaws, only two stories struck me as needing significant work: "Fast Draw" was well-written but felt more like an incident taken out of a larger work than a story in its own right, while "My Name Is Angela" had a writing style that I found inexplicably annoying and seemed to have a message of "trying to better yourself will make you miserable and destroy you." My favorite stories would probably be Marie Croke's "Of Woven Wood" and William Mitchell's "Contact Authority", although a few others come pretty close to them.

I have been reading anthologies of short fiction, and particularly science fiction and fantasy, for over 40 years. In today's market, the trend seems to be toward much longer work--massive novels and trilogies clearly sell well but it is the rare science fiction or fantasy work of this length that holds my interest. Short stories and novellas are too often undervalued but a special skill is required to fully develop a story, and flesh out the characters, in a shorter work. It is my belief that short fiction teaches a writer to tighten up his/her work and avoid the excessive wordiness that seems to plague so much contemporary fiction. This collection, which features the work of writers who are all in the earliest stages of their career but who are writing intelligent, even insightful, fiction, is worth reading for anyone who likes the genre. There are some stories in the collection that I liked better than others and some authors whose future work I will watch for. That is to be expected with a collection of this type. The L. Ron Hubbard collection is an opportunity for readers to become acquainted with the names they will be watching develop in the marketplace over the next decade. As a decided plus, the illustrations in the collection are very good and well worth examining on their own merit.½

In "L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume XXVIII" you'll find a balanced blend of sci-fi and fantasy. The authors are writers just beginning on their careers, at least in a longer format, novella or larger. For this reader, their work reflects that. The writing is solid for the most part and the stories are pretty good, but none of the writing was at the level of a Ray Bradbury or even some of the judges, Orson Scott Card or Frederik Pohl for example. And none of the stories made me say "wow," when I finished.

While all of the story ideas are very creative, the best of them were focused more on the characters than the sci-fi stuff or the fantasy world. "The Rings of Mars" was more about the interaction between two men, one who was willing to bend the rules of the company he works for and his friend who didn't, thus a fairly compelling story. "Lost Pine," an end of the world story, focused on a teenaged boy and girl and the different ways they reacted to the situation and to another boy who came along. Another fairly compelling story. Many of the stories were idea stories, like the "Poly Islands," a sort of environmental statement, less compelling.

"My Name is Angela," deserves special notice. I had to force myself to read it, didn't care for it. But, at the end, when I finally knew what was going on, I thought it was a pretty good story and I read it again.

I cut and pasted part of the review by cissa because I agree completely with it and it says it well: "This MMPB is also ungainly- it is too big to even open comfortably without cracking the spine, and a number of the pages had printing so close to the binding that it was difficult to read. If one really must make such a huge MMPB, being careful to have sufficient margins toward the spine is vital to keep it readable."



So, should you pay $7.99 for this paperback? Well, it is 577 pages long and your tastes may differ from mine, so, yeah, give it a shot.

This is the first time I've read one of these anthologies- I can see I've been missing out!

No bad stories here, though some were more polished than others. To mention a few:

"The Siren" by M.O. Muriel was truly weird and surreal; nicely paced, though, as our understanding of what was going on tracked the events quite tightly.

"Contact Authority" by William Mitchell was a good first-contact story with a twist. Nicely done in the first-contact aspects, and the galactic ramifications were interesting and well-thought-out.

I'm not sure what to think about "My Name is Angela" (Harry Lang), except that it will stay with me for quite a while. it was an intense and compelling read.

These stories were the high points for me, though I did enjoy several of the others. A few of them, though, were pretty predictable- "The Command for Love" by Nick T. Chan, for example, and the first 2 stories. And "While Ireland Holds These graves" by Tom Doyle just never really came together; I think there was too much world background needed, and not enough was included.

Unfortunately, we only get to see small grayscale versions of the winning illustrator's work, and that's really not enough to make any informed opinions on it- color would make such a difference!

This MMPB is also ungainly- it is too big to even open comfortably without cracking the spine, and a number of the pages had printing so close to the binding that it was difficult to read. If one really must make such a huge MMPB, being careful to have sufficient margins toward the spine is vital to keep it readable.

I appreciate all the effort that went into writing and collecting these stories and illustrations, and for the most part I enjoyed this collection more than most anthologies i read.

Ignoring the misleading cover blurb of “The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year” (which it most obviously isn’t, and isn’t intended to be), this is an entertaining collection of stories from mostly unknown writers, many of whom show enough promise to continue selling to professional markets. The stories range from near misses marred by uneven writing or predictable stories and characters to a few that feature accomplished, intriguing, better-than-average storytelling and characterization. The best of the bunch were Patrick O’Sullivan’s “Maddy Dune’s First and Only Spelling Bee,” turning what could have been a predictable premise into a tale that made me genuinely care about the pair of, respectively, barely alien and very alien main characters; Van Aaron Hughes’s “The Dualist,” in which a provocatively complicated diplomatic relationship between human and alien had me curiously wondering what would happen next; “Sailing the Sky Sea” by Geir Lanesskog, featuring a well-drawn cast of characters playing out a convincing mystery in a very brief amount of time; and “An Acolyte of Black Spires” by Ryan Harvey, with a well-imagined alien society that successfully drew me into the story and ultimately provided a satisfying resolution. The common denominator of the best stories in the collection seemed to be unique, believable, and very “alien” alien characters.½