The stories I read (4 of them) were all stories that fitted in a series. Which meant reading them was continuously asking myself "What the fuck is going on?" I don't like reading those kind of stories...

“Star Rebels; stories of space exploration, alien races and adventure” is a fairly good idea, with some imaginative high points that make it memorable. From a project construction point of view, I think the idea here was to give you tasters of a few long chapters from each of a series of middle-ranking sci-fi authors, to introduce their writing style and capacity for original ideas. You might read this and then want to buy the rest of their book or join their online following – or you might move along and be captivated more by the style of the next one. There’s sure to be something that appeals, although obviously you’ll have to dig for it.

Negatives? There were some overly extended sections where not a lot happened, or perhaps I failed to engage with sections of plot, but perhaps the editor didn’t feel confident enough to haul in the slack and upset any authors. After all, it must have been quite enough effort to bring all these writers together.

The best bits for me were:

A Tale of Two Ships, by Audrey Faye, right at the beginning and very unusual. This one did make me guess there’s plenty more good stuff still to come from this author’s universe.

Carl Sagan’s Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe, by C Gockel, a story where the smallest of creatures is not what it seems, as it holds power of which humans are ignorant. This is probably the deepest and most self-questioning short story in the collection, although how the author kept typing Hsissh without accidental variations, I’ll never know.

Passage Out, by Anthea Sharp, where a science fiction steampunk heroine makes good. Steampunk fans, this is for you.

Glome, by Kendra C. Highley, my favourite and placed toward the end, where colony ships travel through ‘glomes’ and emerge immense distances away – but watch out because the temporal context changes unexpectedly too. The character who persuades her to do wrong reminds me of someone.

Falling, by Pippa da Costa, although I had read and reviewed the full novel this was extracted from (Girl from Above) before I opened the anthology and maybe I added it because I received a double dose. The male character turns out to be a dick when you read the whole novel, but the short story is a good introduction to the writer.

In summary then, most collections of this many authors will inevitably have highs and lows. People also have different tastes, for example those that have already decided they love or hate squaddie sci-fi (only one in this set, thank god). There’s always one story which will cause you to read more by that author, then find yourself a month or two later scrabbling for their collected works. Then again, it’s often the case that the best half a dozen delicious stories carry the other people’s, which would struggle to be published if they didn’t have talented friends. As an average of all the contributions though, it’s in the middle – about a three or three and a half out of five – although some of the individual works are better than that and I don’t mean to insult those authors. ( )