John Joseph Adams is kind of all over the place lately. He’s compiled a billion anthologies, edits Lightspeed magazine, and recently took over Fantasy magazine as well. I met Mr. Adams last year at WisCon where chatted with him at one of the parties and he came across as a generally likable fellow. I’ve read a bunch of issues of Lightspeed, which I generally liked. But despite all of that I haven’t read any of his anthologies up until now. The theme behind Seeds of Change is that the authors specifically tackle the pivotal issues facing our society. It’s a fairly short anthology, only nine stories in 200 plus smaller…

Not much to say generally. Another pretty good collection of short fiction. Though I do wonder at the preponderance of fantasy stories, particularly given that St. Martin’s was in the 2nd year of their Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series at the time this was published. They did have that niche covered. Surfacing, Walter Jon Williams This story takes two S.F. plots and mingles them, and I don’t really like the effect too well. In the first plot, Anthony brings whales to another world because they can help him communicate with a species that lives underwater on that world. Anthony was a scientist who helped decode whale speech. After the…

Back in my youth, I used to travel to the Shoreline Public Library on 175th St., north of Seattle. I worked through as much of the children’s section as I cared. The next section over was science fiction. I barely remember much of what I read, but I recall picking out Damon Knight’s Orbit and Terry Carr’s Universe anthologies. Sadly, my memory doesn’t include the actual stories. Back in the day, major publishers like Random House actually published science fiction anthologies under their own main imprint, rather than sidelining them to specialty imprints like Ace or independent S.F. publishers. These days, if you walk through the S.F./Fantasy aisles at your…

This review appeared on my previous blog, Rat’s Reading.This edition of the Year’s Best S.F. seems very heavy with first-contact/gee-wow-there’s-life-where-we-least-expected-it stories. In the list below, I don’t reveal all of them, as in some cases it’s integral to not know about the life ahead of time. But still, be ready for almost any story in this collection to have that as a story element. Oceanic, Greg Egan (1999 Hugo for best novella) Greg Egan’s own description is: The people of Covenant believe they are the descendants of immaterial “Angels” who were brought to the planet by the daughter of God to “repent their theft of immortality” and live and die…

This review appeared on my previous blog, Rat’s Reading.Sorry for the extended time between books. Again, this blog isn’t abandoned. Sometimes it just takes me longer to read my books. Such as this one, which is 697 pages long, not counting Dozois’ year in review summary of 1995 at the beginning. Now, on to the stories: A Woman’s Liberation, Ursula K. Le Guin Ursula Le Guin returns to her Ekumen universe for a story of slaves on the planet Werel. The story meanders through Radosse Rakam’s life as her master dies, and his son frees his slaves. However, other nearby landowners don’t take too kindly to this and simply round…

This review appeared on my previous blog, Rat’s Reading.I apologize for the delay in posting this. I’ve been reading this collection for a couple of weeks and finally finished it on a short cruise this week. However, I wasn’t about to pay the rates that Celebrity wanted to use the internet on their ships, so I waited until I returned to finish the review. As I’ve written before, I think Gardner Dozois puts out great collections of S.F. This is probably the only anthology series I will ever collect. I only have seven of them, but I poke in the used bookstores in Seattle quite regularly to see if any…