Unicorn Variations by Roger Zelazny

If an anthology starts as strong as this one did, then there’s no way I would not continue reading it! Consider the human species about to become extinct and our fate hinging on a chess match between a bartender, a unicorn, and a sasquatch.

 

 

 

 

 

Fire Watch by Connie Willis

I had already read this story & liked it. Keep a box of tissues handy when you read it!

 

 

 

 

Hardfought by Greg Bear

I am not ashamed to say that I abandoned this one halfway through into the story. It was too convoluted and complex for me to care about what was happening to the characters.

 

 

 

 

The Peacemaker by Gardner Dozois

Fanaticism can be found in all kinds of worlds and often results in innocents getting hurt and this story was no exception.

 

 

 

 

 

Speech Sounds by Octavia Butler

In a world gone silent due to a viral mutation, chaos and animalistic behavior is the rule of the day.

 

Press Enter by John Varley

Press Enter and find out things, if you dare!

 

I hugged her, and her breath came again, hot on my chest. I wondered how I'd lived so long without such a simple miracle as that.

 

Portraits of His Children by George R. R. Martin

I was surprised to read this story but not when it didn’t turn out to be anything special. The premise was good but the execution was too typical for me to enjoy it.

 

Rachel in Love by Pat Murphy

An ape raised as a human child by a scientist is left to fend for herself when her father dies.

 

Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers by Lawrence Watt-Evans

A hamburger joint that serves customers from all dimensions.

 

Even in the realities where the Europeans never found America and it's the Chinese or somebody building the cities, there just isn't any reason to build anything near Sutton. And there's something that makes it an easy place to travel between worlds, too; I didn't follow the explanation. She said something about the Earth's magnetic field, but I didn't catch whether that was part of the explanation or just a comparison of some kind.

 

Ripples in the Dirac Sea by Geoffrey A. Landis

A time traveler who can’t return to his own time. Because. Consequences.

 

Once I tried to commit suicide by murdering my father, before he met my mother, twenty-three years
before I was born. It changed nothing, of course, and even when I did it, I knew it would change nothing.
But you have to try these things. How else could I know for sure?

 

 

Boobs by Suzy McKee Charnas

A teenager has to deal with teasing and bullying at school because of developing earlier than her classmates and finds an unusual bloody silver lining that just might help her get through!

 

The Manamouki by Mike Resnick

A couple emigrates to a Kenya-esque world and tries their damnedest to fit in and yet…

 

Bears Discover Fire by Terry Bisson

Exactly what the title says and yet you will enjoy it, if you have fun reading weird things.

 

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

Genetic developments allow parents to specify what their offspring should be like down to the last detail. When a couple is about to have a baby, the father chooses to have her be sleepless. Even a world so advanced in genetics isn’t ready for sleepless people taking over it.

 

 

 

Barnacle Bill the Spacer by Lucius Shepard

Barnacle Bill is a simple man whose job is to remove barnacles from the shuttle’s exterior walls. All he wants is to make himself useful, so he won’t be sent back to Earth, which would be a death sentence. Is it ever that easy?

 

The power of the Strange Magnificence, you see, lay in the subversive nihilism of their doctrine, which put forward the idea that it was man's duty to express all his urges, no matter how dark or violent, and that from the universal exorcism of these black secrets would ultimately derive a pure consensus, a vast averaging of all possible behaviors that would in turn reveal the true character of God and the manifest destiny of the race.  Thus the leaders of the Magnificence saw nothing contrary in funding a group in York, say, devoted to the expulsion of Pakistanis from Britain by whatever means necessary while simultaneously supporting a Sufi cult.

 

Fiction or prescience?

 

Danny Goes to Mars by Pamela Sargent

Danny is the next presidential candidate who is advised to join an astronaut team to Mars to increase his chances of winning in the upcoming elections. The results didn’t quite meet his expectations but when do they ever!

 

 

The Nutcracker Coup by Janet Kagan

A human diplomat unwittingly incites a people (I use that term loosely because they are quadrupeds and had quills) to rebel against their ruler. Oh, and nutcrackers play a big role in the rebellion!

 

 

I think this anthology was a really good one even if did take me ages to finish it. I enjoyed reading, Unicorn Variations, The Manamouki, Barnacle Bill the Spacer, Danny Goes to Mars, & The Nutcracker Coup, the most. I purchased this book from Kitabain and am so glad that I did!

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This is a really a good book, stories of life after death, real people telling their stories.

 

Reading Science Stories - Joy Hakim Celebrating nonfiction reading and telling the stories of science is a very good idea, and the short selections in this book are good choices. The stories are biographical -- very little story-telling time is spent on the math and science, but that's understandable and makes sense. I'm a little confused as to what age these are aimed at. Early on, the author explains several basic concepts, like the Pythagorean theorem and some basic history notes with great pains, so I assumed it's aimed at young readers. But later on, the author clearly assumes that the reader knows not only who Columbus was and when he sailed the ocean blue (fair enough), but also that Newton invented calculus, which seems odd to me. The tone of this assumption can sound really condescending and off-putting if the kid who's reading doesn't know that.

There are a few other things that bothered me about these stories. There seems to be little distinction between myth and history. She speaks of the doings of the god Apollo in the same tone as the real ancient Greeks. And mythical history stories are repeated, such as Archimedes running through the streets naked shouting Eureka and Newton basing his gravity theory on the fall of an apple. Maybe I'm too much of a stickler to be disappointed in these things, but I felt the overall level of history scholarship of the book was basically at this level. Also, many of the stories ended abruptly, and the author did not bother to really point out the inaccuracy of the historical findings she describes -- a tiny statement that E=mv^2 was basically the same as the later E=mc^2 is one example. Ummm... well, sort of. But not really. That's a super loaded comparison, and it's just left there at the end of the story. The really strange 2-sentence summary of the beginning of Islam and its characterization as more business than religion was particularly troubling. Kudos for the inclusion of history other than European. I'm not crazy about the execution.

Some of the recurring ideas are good here, such as the theme that geniuses take ideas that seem unrelated and compare them to come up with something new and useful. Great! Also, she discusses the importance of observation and experimentation without really using either word. I cringed a little when she said about the roundness of the world that it is one thing to have a theory and quite another to have proof... Scientists have been trying to straighten out the general public's idea of what a scientific theory is for a very long time and this won't help.

Also, I have to say that many of the stories had strangely abrupt endings.

So I guess I'd recommend it with some caveats. Teachers in the know will be able to read these stories and supplement them with correct information, finishing the seemingly unfinished stories in this collection. But it could be done better. It can probably be done better by Hakim herself, given a little higher standard for solid truthiness and finishing the story that's been started.

I got a free copy of this ebook from NetGalley.

Published 2012.

 

The Noöpshere as metaphore for SF.

 

Information domains. We have several for all tastes and preferences: Noösphere, infosphere, cyberspace. Generally speaking what differentiates them? They are all about information, and they aim to reflect the different kinds of technological and organizational developments we aim to achieve. Are they just different takes on the same thing? Nope. Cyberspace is the most technological. Noösphere is the most ideal, in the sense that we don’t have it yet. About cyberspace nothing new to be said. I’ve said plenty in my reviews for the past few years. Infosphere is an extension of the Cyberspace, ie, it comprises the latter, plus Information Systems that are not part of the Internet, eg, media, non-electronic libraries, etc.

 

What about the Noösphere (I’m using Broderick’s term with the umlaut)? It’s the most abstract. It comes from the Greek word “noos”, which means “mind”. Vernadsky/De Chardin first coined it in 1925 (I know, I looked it up). In his view, the world first evolved as a geosphere, and next a biosphere. What we now have is a global communication circuit, which is really a global-circling domain of the “mind”, giving rise to a sort of planetary consciousness. If I wanted to use an Huxley term I’d say the Noösphere is some sort of “living thought”. The Noösphere is thus the last stage of the informational domains: Cyberspace -> Infosphere -> Noösphere. The Noösphere can then be interpreted as being the total sum of all human thought, knowledge, and culture, or as Broderick says in his introduction, “Noösphere is today given literal expression in the global skein of billions of messages flung through space, wires, and cables, tying humankind into a kind of emerging hive mind.” This idea is teeming with SF concepts, because it resonates with a lot of things in SF, namely its underlying “sense of wonder”, which Broderick explores to the hilt here. Each and every one of the stories is embedded with this kind of wonder. For me SF is about the endless, ever-evolving search for transcendence: “We’re adrift, like voyagers on a raft, carried into strange seas by currents we can barely identify – adrift, indeed, in the Noösphere!” There’s no better way to define SF, if such a thing is possible.

 

First let me tell that I’m pretty biased towards Broderick’s work, starting with the “The White Abacus”. I love the way he uses allusiveness when creating new things. “The White Abacus” is just one hell of an example of that (a SFional version of Hamlet). It’s always a tight rope working like this: how much can be hinted at, how much can be openly said, how much can the writer assume from the part of the reader to understand the allusions? Broderick’s best work can be seen as having a dual behaviour, ie, both as a successful story on its own terms and at the same time deepening our understanding of past works (be it SF or otherwise).

 

This collection is a prime example of that, albeit in short form. It gives a glimpse of how Broderick has evolved over the years. Almost all of the short-stories are top-notch (even Broderick’s first story “The Sea’s Furthest End” is quite good). The best stories here are “Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone” (written with Barbara Lamar; it’s also where I first encountered the word “teabagging”, which I wasn’t familiar with... The story is beautifully written, with the closing stages shifting underneath the protagonist’s feet. It’s one the best short stories ever written. Period) and “Under the Moons of Jupiter” (the solar system rewritten by Singularity-grade entities…).

 

I’ve read only two short-story collections this year: “After the Apocalypse” by Maureen F. McHugh and now this one. Both are superb works of fiction.

 

SF = Speculative Fiction

War Stories is a group of well written short stories that are all related in some way to War or related activities. There are stories within that should appeal to many fans of this genre, including several that I would love to read additional stories or novels about. As in most collections, you will find some stories that appeal to you more than others and this is the case as I made my way through this. I especially enjoyed Light and Shadow by Linda Nagata, In the Loop by Ken Liu and Suits by James L. Sutter but they were certainly not the only enjoyable material in this collection.

4 Stars for enjoyable reads and perfectly suited for any fan of the military or military SF genres.