Mahvesh Murad

The new volume of The Apex Book of World SF series is another solid and varied anthology. Although I knew around a third of the authors and I had already read six of the stories, I had never heard about half of the authors compiled here and I was looking forward to discovering some new interesting and promising writers.
And although I didn’t really care about a third of the stories, the other two thirds were engaging enough to make this volume worth reading. The title is a bit misleading though, as you’ll find science fiction stories here, but also fantasy, magic realism, weird, horror, surrealism… which is perfectly fine with me as it makes the anthology extremely varied. My standouts among my rereads were the stories by Zen Cho and Vajra Chandrasekera, two authors I know pretty well, as I’ve translated and included some of their stories in the anthologies I’ve edited myself. Among the stories that were new to me, I particularly enjoyed those by Shimon Adaf, Saad Z. Hossain, Sabrina Huang, Julie Novakova, Yukimi Ogawa, Swabir Silayi, and Sathya Stone, and most of all, the strange and surreal “Six Things We Found During The Autopsy”, by Kuzhali Manickavel, and the “The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mecanical Soul”, by Natalia Theodoridou, a beautiful tribute to Theo Jansen.
I don’t think this book (and the rest of the series) is for everyone, as some of the stories are not the usual SF/Fantasy stuff and the overall selection is not as strong as in some more conventional anthologies as I’ve got the feeling that in some cases quality is sacrificed for the sake of diversity, but I’d definitely recommended it to anyone willing to take some risks and to make an effort to try to discover something slightly different. As far as I’m concerned, I’m looking forward to reading the 5th volume.… (más)