science #scifi #scienceFiction
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good collection
I think I only skipped one story and abandoned another - otherwise a good collection.
Sex transitions are easy in some stories, and it's made clear that sex and reproduction are separate. This leads to some intergenerational relationships that would make even Gentry Lee blush.
I bought this to see if ParSec magazine could replace Interzone (after 2 lifetime subs then a 6 issue sub, I now find Interzone boring). The stories all seemed to be well written and quality stories, but mostly uninteresting. I finished 4 stories, and particularly enjoyed the Ken MacLeod and Gwyneth Jones contributions, which isn't surprising. The rest were fantasy/horror/adjacent genres which I am not interested in.
An okay collection - varied stories with the author's tongue in cheek style.
The world is awash in civic decay, military coups and revolutionary governments, bands of believers …
Great story. The UK is suffering from Government Austerity and has become dominated by far right Christian groups who will kill anyone who is not white, Christian, heterosexual, and married to the person they are having sex with, whilst demanding tithes from everyone not in their group. The police side with the violent Christians so they act with impunity. Landlords are causing homelessness by evicting residents. WWIII is about to kick off, unusually started by an internal dispute within the EEC (the predecessor to the EU, not the Russia-dominated organisation). A research institute, about to be closed down, creates a biological culture (a virus?) that helps people become more empathetic whilst not letting them forget anything.
It's obvious that I don't get on with modern short SF. I skipped about ⅔rds of the stories because they were so uninteresting. Modern short SF has become so bloated, long, earthbound, and domestic - often just ordinary fiction or fantasy with a minor science sheen. There was very little here that I could lose myself in.
I had read a few stories in other anthologies. Possibly the only stories that stuck in my mind were the ones by Alastair Reynolds and Pat Cardigan, plus the one that felt like a mash up of Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow (neither of whom were present).
The seas are rising. At first global warming is blamed, but as London, then New …
Interesting story - imagine some source of large amounts of water buried under the crust which, fo reasons no one understands, suddenly bursts through to the surface and floods the Earth under about a kilometer of water. People get together, countries break down, oligarchs build special ships, and other people build rafts.
Some parts were too fantastic to be believable. In London, they only worry about sewage pollution when Greenwich flood barrier is overwhelmed, whereas we in the real UK suffer from sewage pollution after light rain due to lack of investment. I also thought the Middle East would be nuked long before it happens in the book, as each religion fights over Jerusalem.
A fun collection - no real stand-out stories but I didn't skip any either.
a good collection (unlike more modern anthologies) - I only skipped a few stories. The film "Arrival" is based on one of the stories in here.
